Our firm beliefs about the world are compensatory in nature – they are a compensatory device whose function is to make up for the irreducible uncertainty of reality as it actually is. We make up for not being able to get a handle on what’s really going on with us (or with the world) by adhering religiously to a solid and reassuringly unambiguous system of belief. This brings us exemption from the demand that ‘not knowing’ makes upon us and this exemption is extremely important to us. Our lives revolve around the need to escape ‘awareness of radical uncertainty’ and we never depart from this agenda.
This is what we pray for every day (so to speak) – we pray daily for relief from ‘the challenge of not knowing’, we pray daily for exemption from the unanswerable challenge of not knowing what’s going on, not knowing who we are, not knowing ‘what it’s all about’… This is an ‘unanswerable challenge’ because there just aren’t any answers to be had, and that’s all there is to say on the matter! The state of being in which we can’t know what the world is (or who we are) is something we want to run away from as fast as we possibly can and our lives ‘as they are’ are the outcome of this running away, the inevitable result or consequence of it. We live in ‘the world that fear has made’.
Shortly after we are born (‘trailing clouds of glory’, as Wordsworth puts it) we are given a whole lot of answers and we’re not just ‘given’ these answers – they are forced upon us. We are compelled to accept them, we are coerced to believe them. We are given absolutely no choice in the matter. It doesn’t make any difference if these so-called answers that are supplied with are completely stupid, completely ridiculous, or even downright harmful, we are obliged to buy into them all the same. We’re saddled with them for life (unless we can somehow get it together to free ourselves from the ‘matrix of lies’, which is very far from being an easy task). We ourselves are part of the lie, after all, and we certainly don’t want to see that. When we are part of the lie then we have to protect that lie; when we’re dependent upon the system then we belong to it body, soul and mind. We are its creatures.
It’s not an easy task to rid ourselves of all of this useless / harmful / invasive conceptual baggage, from all of these erroneous ideas regarding ‘who we are’ and ‘what it’s all about’ is is actually the hardest task we will ever face (if we ever actually do face it that is, which is extremely unlikely). The problem is that all this stuff, all of this baggage, all of this misleading nonsense, actually – as we have indicated – actually takes root in us; it invades us and then – having found purchase within us, it consolidates this position and elbows everything else out of the way – cuckoo fashion. To put this another way, the belief system that we have so deliberately been infected with takes hold of us and in time it gets to possess us. In time ‘the lie’ (which is to say, the belief system) is all there is.
‘Possession’ isn’t a word that goes down particularly well these days, but it is nevertheless exactly the phenomenon that we are looking at here. We are exposed when we’re at our most vulnerable to the concentrated soup of highly virulent, highly invasive software which – when installed – will proceed to regulate almost every aspect of our lives, with particular emphasis on how we understand who we are and what our lives are supposed to be about. This happens in every case, this happens across the board, and very few of us ever manage to free ourselves from this extraordinarily efficient cultural software, so if this doesn’t fit the bill as ‘possession’, what does? We have is presented with this idea of enculturation as a kind of benign phenomenon, whereas if we were to actually see it for ourselves, as it actually is, we would take a very different view. The process of enculturation is a sinister, not a benign one. It is not a nice thing. The enactment of the arbitrary and pointless denial of our potential is not a pleasant process to behold.
Society is made up of mechanical perceptions, mechanical thoughts and mechanical actions. To say that an action is ‘mechanical’ simply means that it will always happen in the same way under the same circumstances. We could think of a piston engine, for example – we rely on aa piston engine to act the same way under the same circumstances (if it didn’t then we’d be in trouble, if it didn’t then we’d have to get either have to get it fixed or throw it away). If it were a person that we were talking about however, and this person invariably did (or said the same thing or thought the same thing) under the same circumstances then we’d see something amiss with this, wed say that the person in question has some kind of problem in that they’re exhibiting stereotypical behaviour. What’s right for a machine is wrong for a human being, in other words.
An extreme case of mechanical or stereotypical behaviour is obvious to us -it stands out as something odd, something peculiar – but when we’re talking about prescribed social behaviour (or views) then it doesn’t stand out at all. Far from causing us to stand out, articulating a prescribed viewpoint (or enacting a prescribed behaviour under the appropriate circumstances) will result in us fitting in. We will gain approval! When the world we exist in is entirely made up of standardized responses or standardized behaviours then these behaviours, these responses, cannot be spotted for what they are. In a mechanical world – which is to say, a world in which everything is prefigured or preprogrammed, a world in which nothing unique exists – stereotypical behaviour is not seen for what it is. There is in other words ‘the false appearance of spontaneity’. Genuinely spontaneous – which is to say, unscripted – behaviour, on the other hand, will come across as being odd, will come across this being something to be concerned about. Too much of it will make people think that there’s something wrong with us, something that can’t be trusted. Spontaneity is worrying thing from the POV of a mechanical system.
What we’re saying here therefore is that when we are adapted to the precedence-based system that is society then – to everyone who is adapted to this setup – we will seem perfectly natural, perfectly unscripted, even though this absolutely isn’t the case. This can’t be the case – nothing that isn’t prefigured in the blueprint, in the official set of rules, can ever be accepted as being ‘part of the system’. If the system were to accept any old thing without first checking it out against its ‘inclusion criteria’ then it wouldn’t be a system – instead of being ‘a system’ it would be ‘the Totality of Everything’. Systems (or simulations) operate by excluding automatically (which is to say, they work by ‘excluding without acknowledging what it is that is being excluded’), whilst reality (which is to say, the ‘natural’ situation) excludes nothing. This then is the difference between a simulation and what is being simulated, and a bigger difference than this doesn’t exist. And yet – according to the simulation – there is no difference; according to the simulation there is no discrepancy between ‘the representation’ and ‘the thing itself’. According to the simulation the representation is the thing itself.
When we’re existing within the simulation then there what’s happening here is that we’re living as though this discrepancy doesn’t exist (or is negligible) when it does (and it isn’t). The automatic assumption is that the difference between the thought and the thing is inconsequential, when the truth is that it couldn’t be more so – instead of living we merely think that we are, instead of ‘being’ we have ‘our imagination of what being is’ (which couldn’t be further from the truth). The other way of putting this is to say that instead of existing in a world that is infinitely deep (and therefore unknowable to us) we find ourselves immersed in a reality that is known from top to bottom, a ‘version’ of reality that exactly matches our understanding of it. This is the Collapsed State of Being where what we think about the world (or what we imagine about the world) becomes for us the very same thing as the world. It has effectively become the world. Everything has ‘collapsed down into the baseline’ – which is to say, into the defined equilibrium value – and the baseline (or the defined equilibrium value) doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist in the real world any more than ‘the statistical average’ does.
‘Collapsing’ – in quantum mechanics terms – is when a plurality of potential different states of a system (where no one state is any more probable than any other) degrades (informationally speaking) into ‘just the one defined state’; this idea is also applicable – we might say – to the ‘psychological sphere’ and in this case the Collapsed State is where we have put all our money on one single description of the world (and thus thrown away all others). To quote Robert Anton Wilson,
Long before quantum mechanics, the German philosopher Husserl said that all perception is gamble.
And to further quote RAW, ‘There is no vantage point from which real reality can be seen’. ‘No special viewpoint’ means ‘no special view’, which in turn means ‘no view’, and ‘no view’ means that we can’t have any knowledge about what’s going on. ‘No view’ means that no descriptions are possible and if no descriptions are possible then we can’t have any knowledge about the situation in question.
If one particular viewpoint did happen to be ‘the right and proper viewpoint’, did happen to be ‘the one right and proper way to see things’ then the world that this viewpoint would show us wouldn’t be a null domain; it would – on the contrary – be a world that we can have legitimate knowledge about. It would be the sort of world in which we can ‘know stuff for sure’. In this case, everything would be good, everything would be ‘the way we take it to be’, (which is also ‘the way we want it to be’) but the point is that reality is symmetrical (rather than asymmetrical) in nature and that there is therefore no special viewpoint. There is no ‘birds eye view’, as Ilya Prigogine says. No matter what way of looking at the world we put our money on we’re always going to lose, therefore – we’re always going to come unstuck. Despite all our enthusiasm, this simply isn’t a game we can win, in other words.
If it happened to be the case that there is only one viewpoint that is special, that is the right one, then we could have knowledge of ourselves and the world, but there simply isn’t and that’s the end of the matter. All else is fantasy, all else is merely ‘our own projection’, ‘our own private game’. There is no knowledge of anything and there never could be and that’s the bottom line, but it’s a bottom line that we feel we have to push back against as hard as we can. We push back against the Symmetrical World (which is the world in which there are no things to believe in, in which there is no self to believe in) and with this pushing back we create the world as we commonly know it, the world as we see it every day, the world which is ‘the Collapsed Version of Reality’.
Image credit – wallpapercave.com
