If our private worlds are to make sense to us – if they are to exist for us at all – then we must be blind to the bigger picture; this is the only way the endeavour is ever going to work. Blindness – which is to say ignorance – is our ‘passport to success’ in this regard. As Heraclitus observes (Fragment B89), most of us live permanently in our own private worlds, cut off from everything but our own stale thoughts, our own futile imaginings –
For those awake there is one common world; but for those sleeping each deserts into a private world.
We don’t see this to be the case however – we don’t see ourselves as being isolated within our own private worlds because of the way we all band together to ensure that our private worlds are ‘uniform’, that our PWs will be ‘be the same as everyone else’s’, so that we get to live in the same generic private world, and yet at the same time still feel that we are ‘original’ rather than merely ‘conforming to a pattern’. We all travel on the very same old omnibus; we have no other alternative because – as Mr Gurdjieff says – we don’t have our own private transport. The ‘omnibus’ in question is of course what we might call ‘societal groupthink’, which imposes its suffocatingly narrow viewpoint on all of us. If we don’t take up this narrow view, and exemplify it in our lives, then society vilifies and rejects us. Such was always the way.
Whether we live in our own incongruent (or ‘eccentric’) private world that other people laugh at, or whether we live in the collective one that we all take seriously and get validated for, it’s the same story either way. A private world is exactly that – it is ‘a private world’ (which is to say, it’s something that is real only for us). It’s real ‘only because we want it to be’ – in the case of the collective reality tunnel we put on a kind of show or production and then we all agree to pretend that the show is real and not just ‘a performance that we are putting on’. And then – to top it all off – we pretend to ourselves that we never agreed to anything, and that this is just the way things are. That’s how we create a private world for ourselves – by hoodwinking ourselves, by entering into full-scale, no-holds-barred denial. There’s no such thing as ‘a PW’ but we don’t know this because we have tricked ourselves so well, so professionally, so smoothly. We’ve done a very good job – we have entered into a full-blown collusion, but no one ever points this out. We’ve stitched ourselves up and we won’t allow ourselves to see this.
We have tricked ourselves so perfectly that we have created a null situation, a situation in which nothing we do or think actually means anything outside of the private bubble of ersatz reality that we have all implicitly agreed to accept as real. Nothing we do in the PW that we have made up for ourselves is ever going to impact the real world in the way we imagine (or hope) it will; nothing good or helpful ever comes about as a result of our efforts. If the origin of the action is a fantasy then so too is the projected outcome that we are looking for. Anything that is done or thought in a null world is going to be an extension of that null world – the extension or development of a null world is still going to be null. When we copy or repeat or multiply or otherwise develop a null statement then the result our action isn’t anything different from where we started off from. When we dream of waking up this doesn’t mean that we’re not still asleep and if we ‘pretend to be not pretending’ then this is still an act of pretence. From the point of view of the dreamer the dream might be real – it is of course 100% real as far as they are concerned – but since the dreamers themselves are not real (but only a feature of the dream, as Greg Tucker says) this still doesn’t add up to anything. We’re trying to create a water feature in the Sahara desert, blithely pumping our entire store of precious water onto the scorching bone-dry sands hoping that our ridiculously wasteful and unrealistic efforts will eventually get us somewhere.
Another take on this would be to say but if it’s the null world of our dreams is to seem not null then we must never look at the bigger picture of what’s going on. ‘Blindness’ (or ignorance) in this regard is an absolute prerequisite, to see the world in any other way then a totally superficial one would be to have everything we believe in and rely on shown to be false. The Conditioned World (which is the projection of the System of Thought) may be considered to be a kind of ‘device’ or ‘apparatus’ that – in conjunction with a specially modified analogue of awareness – produces the required illusion, the required illusion of there being an actual concrete world for us to live in when there isn’t. The modified (or ‘truncated’) type of consciousness that we have been provided with is therefore the blindness that we started off by talking about. This isn’t consciousness at all but a straightjacket.
Conditioned consciousness cannot register reality as it actually is, it can only register the version of reality that thought has invented for us. It can only see things when the ‘things’ in question matches the criteria that we use to ‘determine whether stuff is real or not’. We never receive raw information – we only ever encounter the filtered version that corresponds to the biases (or distortions) that organise our consciousness. One way to put this is to say that the two necessary ingredients are: [1] Polarity (which is to say, ‘a rotating pair of self-cancelling opposites’, or ‘one step forward and then one step back’, and [2] What Jung calls ‘the one-sided way of looking at the world. The result of this combination is that we don’t have any inkling that the self-cancelling opposites are self-cancelling opposites, is that we don’t have any insight into the fact that our one-sided view is one-sided, and thus we see a projected world, we see a whole ‘self-consistent world’ that doesn’t exist anywhere outside of our thoughts.
When we can’t see that there’s no such thing as ‘a swing without a counter-swing’ (when we can’t see that ‘one step forward equals one step back’) then what happens is that the opposite we can’t see (the opposite we have assumed to have independent existence of its own) gets overextended, gets stretched, thus producing an absurd situation, a situation which exists only in our own overheated imaginations, in our burgeoning unreal mental projections. The opposite we’re identified with (the opposite we can’t see beyond) has been given indefinite duration, indefinite legitimacy (which is not at all the case) and – as we have just said – we live in a world that simply doesn’t exist and never could do. The sheer craziness (or insanity) of what’s going on here is off the chart.
If I throw a stone and I am somewhat naïve as regards the laws of physics then – seeing the stone leave my hand in what appears to be a straight line trajectory – I will take it for granted that this is indeed the case and I will therefore extrapolate the future of the stone as a movement along a straight line. In my head, that’s how it is, and because I implicitly trust my head I never get to check up on this hypothesis to see if to see what if it tallies with what’s really happening. It goes further than this though and that’s where our analogue with a guy throwing a stone breaks down: if I’m throwing a rock the chances are good that I’m actually going to look up and see where the stone is going and I’m going to see that it’s moving in a parabola and not a straight line at all. That doesn’t happen when it comes to the mental pictures we make of the world – we could very easily go our whole life without bothering to testing our core assumptions. It would in fact be true to say that this is precisely what is required of us by the overwhelming majority of our peers – we are required to abstain from testing our shared assumptions in the strictest possible way. There is zero tolerance for messing around here; our ‘shared assumptions’ (however inane they might be) are what holds the group together, after all.
When we look at the world we look at it with the ‘eyes of thought’, as it were, and so we will never come across anything that will contradict our core assumptions (and thus the view of ‘YES’ being essentially unconnected to ‘NO’, as been utterly distinct from it) is exactly this – a core assumption. No matter where we look, no matter what we do come we’re never going to see anything that is going to jolt us into changing our worldview. That worldview is locked down better than anything ever was. For this reason therefore we can say that our one sidedness which is a defect in our way of seeing the world contains us entirely we never get beyond it. ‘If you deny the existence of your fault or error’, says R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, ‘it will strengthen its hold over you’. When we’re in the rational (1-sided mode) then everything we do is an implicit denial of the fault or error which is our basic way of looking at things. The more we act out of polarity or one-sidedness the greater its hold over us will become therefore and this is a positive feedback loop that can never do anything but increase the deadly crushing grip that it has on us.
When we tune into ‘the World of the Particular’ (which we could also call ‘Relative Reality’) then this means tuning out of awareness of the Universal therefore, just as JG Bennett says. The experience of the former precludes any awareness of the latter. These two worlds – the private and the common – don’t have any equivalence, however. They don’t have any equivalence because the ‘private world’ spoken of by Heraclitus is a dream, a fantasy, a world inhabited by sleepers, while what Heraclitus refers to as ‘the common world’ is the world we find ourselves in when we wake up – ‘The lower self is imagination. The higher self is consciousness’, says Richard Burton. The bug in the ointment here therefore is that ‘the lower self’ isn’t particularly keen to allow the ‘higher self’ to supersede it – the lower or conditioned self has only the one agenda after all and that agenda is to promote itself and so – when it comes down to it – creating conditions that support awareness is absolutely the last thing it is ever going to be interested in. It is going to fight against ‘the truth’ with everything it’s got, and it’s never going to admit that this is what it is doing, either…
Image credit – Herakut, in streetartutopia.com
