There is only one way for things to be in the Artificial World and that is the way that they have been specified as being, the way that they have been officially stated as being. This couldn’t be any other way, needless to say, seeing as how the only reason an artificial structure or situation gets to be there in the first place is because some agency deliberately or purposefully makes it be there. If we don’t state that it is there then it won’t be.
This is the way it is with artificial worlds, therefore – things have no flexibility, no ‘give’ in them. There is absolutely zero leeway for the system to be any other way than the way it is specified as being – a logical statement has no leeway in it whatsoever and that’s how come it gets to be a ‘logical statement’! This is an extremely significant point, even though it may not be immediately apparent why it should be; this ‘absolute rigidity’ (or ‘inflexibility’) is significant because that’s not the way things are in reality, and reality just happens to be a fact that we can’t afford to overlook. Reality isn’t ‘rigid’ in the way logic is. Reality can’t be defined in the way logic likes to define things.
The Artificial World – which is to say, the logical system that we have created with our thinking – makes a very particular demand upon us, it demands that we adapt ourselves to it 100% (with no errors at all) and this is actually an impossible demand. We will never be able to achieve this since it’s not possible for us to ‘perfectly accommodate ourselves to an abstraction’; notwithstanding this impossibility however, this is what we are continually being pressurised by the system to do. Not adapting ourselves correctly means error and all of our efforts have to go to minimising error, minimising failure, minimising ‘mistakes’. The logical mind doesn’t like mistakes, after all! All we know is ‘the heedless rush to optimise our performance within the system’, and we are continually being ‘led on’ by our euphoric thoughts about how great our reward will be when (or if) we do achieve the goal of ‘100% optimization’. This is so maddeningly exciting for us that we lose all critical capacity.
Perfect adaptation to the system means complete alienation from the real world however, and this is the point that we never seem to understand, caught up as we are in the ‘mad rush for the finishing post’. Systems are all about either/or – they’re founded upon the principle of either/or and what this means is that no grey area, no fuzziness, no indeterminacy, can be tolerated. Were all indeterminacy to be eliminated however then – although this is ‘winning’, this is ‘the big payoff’, this is ‘the jackpot moment’ as far as the system is concerned – in reality what we’re looking at here is 100% alienation from anything natural, 100% alienation from ‘the way things actually are’. Thus, what is great news – the very best news, in fact from the POV of the game – spells complete and utter disaster from an unbiased (i.e., undistorted) point of view.
Being in a state of profound alienation from all that is real (or all that is natural) has got to be the worst of all possible disasters – what could top this, after all? The dynamic that’s going on here is nothing if not dramatic therefore. In adapting to the system we are making its viewpoint our own and the VP of the system is all about optimization, as we have said. It’s not about anything else, it doesn’t acknowledge anything else as being important; to the system nothing else matters apart from optimization, nothing else matters apart from ‘attaining the sacred (but unreal) goal’. Our entire lives become an exercise in ‘trying to do right by the system’; the system determines everything about us, after all, and so to rebel against the system would be to rebel against ourselves and who’s ever going to do that? Why would anyone go against their own beliefs, their own thoughts, their own ideas? That simply doesn’t make any sense.
We can’t emphasise too much that when we are adapted to the artificial world that’s been created by thought then this state of adaptation is total – ‘The Lord thy God is a jealous God’, as we read in Exodus. As far as we’re concerned there is nothing else but the AW (and if there were something else then that something else would be bad, that something else would be the devil himself). This is what the word ‘world’ means; it means Everything – it may not really be there; it may be a fiction that has got lodged somehow in our heads, but it’s still the world for us. The illusion is real. As David Bohm says, the system of thought isn’t just our thoughts, it’s everything that thought has gone to make, it’s everything that is deliberate and purposeful and calculated, it’s everything that has been designed or constructed, and our attitude – whether expressed explicitly or not – is that anything we haven’t put there ourselves, anything that hasn’t got a place in the system, anything that doesn’t fit, is an imperfection or accident that we have to get rid of.
“Well, this is all just so much fancy intellectual talk”, we might retort dismissively (if we were in that sort of mood), “what difference does it make anyway?” And even if we don’t come right out and say this, it is our ‘default attitude’ when presented with a radically different viewpoint; there is an incalculable amount of inertia associated with the established way of looking at the world, however inadequate, however counterproductive that way may be. What we’re looking at here is a fundamental mismatch between ‘the way things are’ and ‘the way we fixedly take them to be’ and a mismatch like this doesn’t fail to have an impact and when it does impact us then we will have no problem in knowing all about it! We will know about it big time. This is suffering that goes deeper than we know how to express, suffering that we simply aren’t able to communicate.
It’s not just that we aren’t able to express what we’re going through, the people around us aren’t able to hear or understand it either. How can we when the only reality we know is the artificial one that has been created by our black and white (or ‘categorical’) thinking, which stresses the two ends of the stick but fails to acknowledge the stick itself? We have constructed a word that is made up of ‘positives’ and ‘negatives’ (which we experience either attraction or aversion to) and which contains nothing else but these abstractions. Or to put this another way, we have created a world out of nothing but conclusions, and conclusions aren’t real. There are no conclusions to anything and if we say that there are then we’re lying – the only way in which we can arrive at a conclusion is by obstinately refusing to look any further, the only way we can construct a world like this (which is to say, a world that is based on entirely arbitrary limitations) is by ignorance, pure and simple. The Positive (or ‘Artificial’) World is a production of entropy.
There is no easy way for us to learn that our fundamental way of understanding things is 100% wrong – we’ve invested everything we’ve got in our framework being right and as a result of this investment we no longer have the capacity of seeing that it isn’t. When we can’t help seeing that it isn’t right then we ‘reject our own seeing’ – we reject our own seeing and so does everyone around us! The mental health establishment itself rejects our way of seeing things in this case; it rejects the insight that our ordinary conditioned way of understanding the world is ‘100% wrong’. We demonise this radical seeing, this insight, this ‘natural spontaneous understanding’, we demonise it and so we act so as to get rid of it (or at the very least totally repress it). Consciousness itself is the enemy when the System of Thought is all that we know; consciousness itself becomes the error (or the ‘illness’) that we strive, with all the technological might at our disposal, to eliminate.
When the only life we know is ‘life as it is lived within the Artificial World’ then we too will become artificial. What we adapt to we become, after all. To pledge our allegiance to this formal or simulated world is to deny the true one and it is also to deny ourselves, and by accepting this deal we put ourselves in line for a whole shit-storm of anguish and misery the like of which we are wholly incapable of imagining. This is the suffering that comes our way as a result of ‘selling our birthright for a mess of pottage’; this is what we get for the mistake of ‘selling our soul to the devil’. We stick with the deal because once we have agreed to it then we have also agreed to lose the capacity to see things in any other way. We have taken on ‘the logical mind’ as our own. This is the deal that we’ve made and so – as a result – the only way in which we can learn is a way that is ‘totally against our own wishes’, a way that is ‘totally involuntary’. We are dragged towards awareness unwillingly, with infinite reluctance, kicking and screaming all the way…
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