When we think we are playing a game with boundaries – we are saying that one thought is different to another. This is ‘a game’ because it simply isn’t true – the boundaries are only made-up things, they’re only there because we ourselves drew them. We can do this – we’re allowed to do this – but then we have to take on a debt, a debt that sooner or later will have to be made good. When we pretend that one side of the boundary is different to the other – which is the act by which the boundary is created – and we are able to believe in our own pretending, believe that what we’re pretending to be true is true, then this constitutes what we could call Extrinsic Meaning. It’s meaning that we ourselves have assigned, which means that it doesn’t exist independently of us (even though we relate to is as if it does).
This ‘meaning’ functions as a kind of force that pushes us in a particular direction – it’s coercive meaning, in other words, it’s meaning that controls. It’s meaning that we are obliged to adapt ourselves to as best we can (because we simply aren’t given any other option). Extrinsic Meaning (we might say) can either ‘attract’ or ‘repel’, just like a magnetic field does – our awareness is shaped by EM just as iron filings on a sheet of paper held over a bar-magnet are given shape by the lines of force that make up the magnetic field. All we’ve really done when we ‘impose a boundary’ is that we have ‘put a subjective dent in the underlying symmetry of our situation’ (the ‘dent’ in question being comprised of plus and minus in equal amounts). The ‘dent’ or ‘concavity’ has (needless to say) two sides, the positive side and the complementary negative one, such that ‘the one added to the other equals nothing at all’. Whether we’re on the one side of the dent or the other makes no difference – we’re being coerced or pushed by the same external force in each case. The psychological ‘trick’ that is operating here (the trick that controls us so completely) is that the external force which is EM substitutes itself for our will, for our volition, such that we actually ‘do all the work ourselves’. The control occurs via the power of suggestion, as we might say, as opposed to force in the way that we usually think of it. The external pressure gets converted neatly into internal pressure, which we can refer to as extrinsic motivation – motivation from the outside that we mistakenly attribute to ‘the inside’.
When we’re able to comply with the positive pressure (i.e., ‘attraction’) we get rewarded with euphoria and when we’re not able then it’s dysphoria we get instead; euphoria arises because we experience our ‘will’ as being fulfilled, whilst dysphoria comes about because we feel that it isn’t (the proviso here being that it isn’t really our will at all, as we’ve just said). Attraction and aversion aren’t two different things, despite this being the way that we perceive it; we’re talking about the designation of TOP versus that of BOTTOM in a circle – a circle is composed of TOP and BOTTOM (or UP and DOWN) such that there isn’t anything else in it. UP is DOWN however (the road up is the same as the road down) and so when we ‘obey’ extrinsic / mechanical motivation we’re unwittingly enacting a paradox. We’re unknowingly contradicting ourselves. Circular movement isn’t movement, therefore. We are thus ‘involuntarily spinning in a circle’ where half of the circle is composed of pleasure and the other half of pain; we can enjoy ‘what we want’ (or ‘what we like’) only to the extent that we endure what we don’t want, what we don’t like. We can only win to the extent that we lose. Because we have ‘identified with the rule’ in this way (because we have been magnetized by an extrinsic source of order) we don’t perceive ourselves to be ‘purely heteronomous creatures’; we don’t see that we’re being completely determined by an external authority. We don’t experience ourselves as being merely ‘the output of some machine’; if we did go around talking about perceptions (or ideas) of this nature we’d be diagnosed as suffering from psychosis (e.g., thought insertion, thought blocking). Instead, our conditioned perception is that it’s all ‘perfectly volitional’ on our part. We’re doing and thinking what we want to be doing and thinking and so where’s the problem? We say that we are ‘the actor’, not ‘the acted upon’.
The perceptual inversion that we’re looking at here is a function of the ‘subjective dent’ that we have made in symmetry; the dent that we have created doesn’t exist in reality (since symmetry can’t be broken) but – rather – it exists as a sort of idea, a kind of abstract theoretical proposition that could never actually be true. The dent (as we have said) can also be regarded as a scam, as a kind of a gimmick for creating ‘an impression that isn’t true’; when we put a kink in space like this then we create a ‘self-negating loop of coercive logic’, so to speak. Logic is always coercive – its nature is to tell us ‘what must be’ and ‘what cannot be’; Extrinsic Order doesn’t give us hints or make suggestions but rather it tells us, megaphone-style, ‘HOW IT IS’, and it tells us this in the narrowest possible terms. Logic gives us no leeway of interpretation at all; on the contrary, it lays down the law. Logic doesn’t just lay down the law, it IS the law (and the implicit implication is that the law is universal, that there can be nothing ‘outside’ of its remit).
We can say two things about logic and the logical world that it creates (which is itself in disguise): [1] is that it is coercive or deterministic in its influence and [2] is that it always creates an ‘oversimplified version’ (or ‘degraded analogue’) of what it claims to be describing. When we put a kink in space then we create a kind of copy or duplicate of it, but this duplication has the nature of a caricature rather than an authentic representation – it is an inverted picture, a self-enclosed virtual bubble of reality that ‘mocks’ what lies outside of it. The principle of ‘inclusivity’ is being analogised by that of ‘exclusivity’, but the world that is produced by the former is a very different kind of a thing to that of the latter – when inclusivity is the law then Wholeness comes about (we might say), whilst when <either/or> is the guiding principle (as opposed to <both/and> then what we end up with is a fraction that represents itself as the integer, a fragment that deceptively promotes itself as ‘all that there is’. The ‘rub’ here is that there are no subdivisions of Wholeness – the Holographic Paradigm shows us that even a skinny slice of the pie is still ‘the pie’ and so the idea that the pie actually can be subdivided is a fantasy, a theoretical idea that could never be true. So on the one hand we have what we might call the generous principle – which ‘allows all’, without prejudice, without any bias whatsoever, and on the other hand we have the mean or stingy one, which begrudges everything that it gives (with the result that it doesn’t actually give anything at all). The True (generous) Principle gives without any strings attached, without any conditions, whilst the Copycat (exploitative) Principle only gives what it knows it will eventually get back (like a money-lender lending money at a punishing rate of interest).
The counterfeit principle gives us what we want, what we need, but it gives it us on the end of an elastic band so that’s what we think we’ve gained, we haven’t. This is what circular movement DOES – it gives and it takes away at the same time! It’s all the one movement – ‘giving’ equals ‘taking’, ‘yes’ equals ‘no’. This sounds like meaningless nonsense when expressed in words, but when we see it in the form of a spinning circle then we don’t have any problems grasping the point – what could be easier to comprehend than this? Circular motion comes and goes at one and the same time.
A circle is the collapsed form of ‘open-ended space’ (which is to say, space which no limits to it, space which is not subject to aany conditions). Voltaire (following Hermes Trismegistos) speaks of God as being ‘a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere’, which is clearly a way of talking about non-locality – if the centre is everywhere then there is no centre) (i.e., it is a statement that contradicts itself). What collapses openness (or ‘centre-lessness’) is the rule, the criterion, the bias, etc. A rule acts as a sorting mechanism – it sorts the universe out into ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’, ‘allowed’ and ‘disallowed’, ‘signal’ and ‘noise’. Everything that isn’t allowed (anything that doesn’t meet the criterion, everything that doesn’t fit into the framework) is discarded and disregarded, which subjectively shrinks the universe so that what’s left is a fragment or fraction of what it originally was; only the stated or emphasised portion gets to be there – just like the proverbial ‘tip of the iceberg’. Here is the trick, here is the deception, therefore – we only see the emphasised or highlighted portion of the world because of the de-emphasised or ignored portion (which means that knowing requires not knowing or entropy, just as Stuart Kauffman has said. If the word we tacitly regard as having a fully independent existence of its own only gets to be there because of what we’re ignoring, because of what we don’t know however, then this means that we are what we are taking to be real and substantial is ‘only illusory so’. The part which implicitly claims to be the Whole, the fraction which brazenly passes itself off as an Integer, is therefore a phantasmagorical appearance, a ‘samsaric production’. There’s no truth in it whatsoever; conditioned reality is a lie through and through – it’s a lie we can’t see as such.
This reversal from the unconditional to the conditional takes place the moment we apply the criterion, the moment we put the rule in place. We are creating a world that is predicated upon an arbitrary black and white division; what we’re essentially doing here is that we’re ‘asking a closed question’ and when we do this an information collapse takes place. Space that doesn’t have a centre (which is to say, space that is based exemplifies the principle of non-locality) is collapsed into space that does have a centre, space that is made up of ‘mapped-out possibilities’, All of these ‘possibilities’ exist in relation to the assumed centre, they are extensions of it; anything that isn’t an extension of the centre doesn’t get to be there. The centre of the circle is the selection criterion therefore, and it this that collapses the whole shebang. As we have said, the selection criterion is – when it comes down to it – the mechanism by which we ask the universe a closed question, which then turns our perception of what we imagine to be ‘the objective reality’ into a reflection of our own question. The question isn’t a question at all however – it’s a ‘concrete statement’, a statement which is ‘opaque to itself’, a statement which ‘cannot reflect on itself’. It’s a statement that demands to be taken on its own terms (no matter how absurd these terms might be).
There’s nothing more concrete than the criterion, nothing less ‘relativistic’ then a rule. There’s no relation between the rule and the Wider Reality (which gets to be ‘the Wider Reality’ because of the way in which nothing is excluded, because of the way in which no conditions are imposed). Exclusion criteria produce a homogenised version of reality, we might say, so that all we’re left with is a faithful copy of whatever it is we started off with; a statement is being reflected back at itself so that it never has to confront anything that isn’t itself. This means that we’re talking about self-reference, which is to say, that we’re talking about a self-devouring loop of logic which ‘gives at the same time as it takes’. Or as we could also say, we’re talking about samsara, which promises all sorts of things, but which never ever delivers…
This then is the mechanism by which the ‘oversimplified version of space’ is produced and this oversimplified version serves the same function as space despite being nothing like it (despite being completely and utterly unrepresentative of it). To speak of ‘space’ is to speak of freedom – space is the absence of constraint or limitation (we might say) the ‘world’ (in inverted commas) which is created by logic contains no freedom at all (as we have just observed). The ‘world’ that is created by logic IS logic (nothing comes out of rules but more rules) and logic only gets to be logic because there is no freedom in it. On the face of it, logic violates the law that tells us that Original Symmetry must be conserved; when we look more closely however we see that it doesn’t. It doesn’t violate this Supreme Principle because ‘no freedom at all’ always gives rise to self-contradiction, always gives rise to paradox. We might say – we do say – that a paradox is ‘fundamentally illogical’, that it ‘flies in the face of common sense’, that it’s ‘out and out nonsense’, and so on and so forth, but notwithstanding our strident complaints of fragrant illogicality, a paradox does not violate the law regarding the Conservation of Symmetry. It is logic that appears to violate this law, not paradox. logic violates it is very clear that. Logic says ‘this not that’, it says ‘later but not now’, it says ‘here but not there’, it says that ‘X is allowed but Y isn’t’; and these are of course all expressions of dissymmetry. Logic works on the basis that ‘one thing doesn’t equal the other’ (it works ‘on the basis of boundaries’) and because of this it seems to be getting away with completely ignoring the ‘fundamental impossibility of breaking Original Symmetry’. It seems to be getting away with it but it isn’t…
Paradox is how we get a glimpse into the way in which logic seems to get away with something that is a flagrant contravention of the cosmic principle of freedom – freedom meaning no ‘rules’, no ‘coercion’, no ‘here but not there’, no ‘exclusion versus inclusion’, etc. – but doesn’t really. Paradox makes the dodge (or the gimmick) visible, we might say; when we bend space (in apparent violation of the law regarding the conservation of symmetry) we create thereby a degraded analogue of the open (or ‘free’) situation. This analogue – as we keep saying – can’t really exist but entropy gives us a way around this absolute prohibition. Entropy provides us with a ‘workaround’ – the workaround being that we don’t see the dent as it actually is (which is the plus side and the minus side), but only as ‘one side at a time’. If we saw the whole picture (if we took the ‘wide view’ instead of the narrow one) then we’d see that there isn’t actually a dent or an unevenness there at all; taking the wide (i.e., unrestricted) view would show us that there is a step forward taking place at the same time as there is a step backwards, which means of course that there’s no step. Something appears be happening but then the next thing is that it immediately unhappens again, with the net result that there isn’t any event. It’s not ‘an event’, but a ‘non-event’…
The paradoxicality that we are complaining about so vociferously is the truth unveiled, therefore. ‘A paradox is the truth standing on its head to attract attention’, says G.K. Chesterton. What we’re objecting to when we are brought face to face with the inherent self-contradictoriness of all the definite statements of all straight lines is nothing other than reality itself, therefore. We have a problem with reality and that’s why we’re determined to ignore it at every corner. We have a problem with Original Symmetry since there are no concepts in it and who he understands ourselves to be is exactly this a concept. The ego identity cannot ever be more than ‘an over-valent concept’, a concept or notion that we’re way too committed to. We don’t have to confront the redundancy (or emptiness, as a Buddhist might say) of the I-Concept. When operating on the basis of the rational mind we only ever see one side of the bend, one half of the ‘kink’, at any one particular time, and because of this we were able to remain sublimely unaware of the paradoxicality inherent in logic, inherent in our logical statements. As a result of our ‘uneven vision’ we get to live our lives without ever having to deal with paradox; we might come across it every now and again, but we’re able to put it in a nice safe intellectual box and only take it out when we want to. We’re able to dismiss it as a type of mathematical curiosity – intriguing maybe – but hardly relevant to the pragmatic necessities of everyday life. The ‘phenomenon of paradoxicality’ is not something we should be wasting our time with, we say. The important thing is to get stuck into our (allegedly) non-paradoxical tasks – that’s what the whole system is always trying to get us to do.
Subjectively, the opposites are seen as ‘two separate things’, which means that the ‘dent’ that we have created (in our imaginations) becomes a world that we can inhabit, a place we can spend our lives in. We see it as a situation within which we can progress, within which we can make meaningful steps forward and – ultimately – obtain some sort of very real benefit. This is the story that thought is always pushing! In short, what we see ahead of us is a highway stretching off into the far horizon, a highway that is going to take us somewhere amazing, somewhere incredible. If however, we were to broaden our view, if we were to take off the blinkers that are being imposed on us by the logical mind, then we’d see that there is no gap, no distance, no differentiation, no separation between ‘the road up and the road down’, and if there’s no separation or differentiation between the road up and the road down then this means that there just isn’t ‘a road’.
When there is no ‘interstitial zone’ between the two opposites, no area that isn’t ‘these two opposites’ (when there’s no space between the one and the other) then that means that there isn’t that isn’t paradoxical, nowhere where we won’t ‘go back on ourselves’ the whole time. Instead of what we might call Negative Space (which is symmetrical in all respects and doesn’t on this account loop back on itself) what we have is Positive Space (which does loop back on itself since it can’t ever depart from the logical criterion which informs it). Positive Space is an abstract ‘logical chequerboard’ that stretches magnificently in all direction, but which doesn’t actually ‘go’ anywhere. It is its own limitation. The illusion that the system gives rise to is the illusion not only that there ARE lots of places to go, but also that one direction of travel is vastly, incalculably, infinitely more desirable than the other. One direction leads to <winning>, the other to <losing>, and there simply couldn’t be a starker choice than this. The chequerboard of logic facilitates the illusion that we call linear progression (or ‘cause-and -effect’); cause and effect is where everything is (apparently) ‘separated out by an interval of time’, so that we get to deal with stuff sequentially, first the one thing and then the other, first ‘TICK’ and then ‘TOCK’ (as Wei Wu Wei puts it). There is movement or change going on but it is trapped movement, trapped change – it’s ‘movement that keeps getting batted right back at us’, it’s ‘change that takes place between two alternatives which are really the very same thing’. It’s ‘the back-and-forth movement of polarity’.
What gives rise to this movement – what gives ‘life’ to it – is essentially our blindness as to what’s going on. We can’t see that TICK equals TOCK. We can’t see that the effect is inherent in the cause and it is the lack of this awareness that creates the virtual domain that we spend our lives in. This virtual domain (which is ‘the chequerboard of logic’) gives us the promise of progress, the promise of improving our situation, and when we believe this promise – as we automatically do believe it – the Mind-Created Virtual Reality swims into existence. The MCVR is another way of talking about the ‘dent’ or kink’ in symmetry that we have made, only saying this (explaining it in this way) obscures the fact that the one who causes the dent is themselves an effect of that cause – cause and effect loop endlessly around each other, pretending to be different from each other when they aren’t. The creation of a Null World is itself a null act, therefore. If the action of creating the Null World is null, then so too is the one who creates it. The ‘kink’ in Symmetry is an overall null situation, therefore – the game creates the player, and the game player creates the game, as we have said. Within the game nothing can go any other way than the way in which it does go, which comes down to the strict observance of the ‘self-negating rule’; self-negation (or self-contradiction) is the only thing that’s allowed to happen – it’s ‘allowed’ because it doesn’t violate the cosmic principle which says Original Symmetry must always be conserved.
Image credit – Rostislav Zhumara, on artstation
