The essential difference between ‘consciousness’ and ‘thought’ is that the former doesn’t work on the basis of comparison-making, whilst the latter does. It may not seem to tell us very much about consciousness to say that the key thing about it is that it ‘doesn’t involve comparison-making’, but actually it tells us a lot. It tells us everything we need to know.

 

 

If we start with thought, the first point we can make is that there is nothing thought can say that that hasn’t first being ‘passed’ via a comparison-making mechanism, and that there is – on this account – no way that we can ever come across anything new in the world. We’ll never encounter anything new just so long as we’re using the instrument of thought to tell us what’s going on. If the account we receive regarding the world has to be validated in advance by reference to thought’s standards then this means that what we’re dealing with here is a closed rather than an open system.

 

 

Any system that is based on comparison-making is closed – it’s ‘closed’ because no matter what breadth of information is coming in, that info can only be validated as being real when it has been granted this status via an  act of comparison with the fixed set of evaluative criteria that thought is running on, and so the picture we receive will be limited or narrow in the very same way that our ‘rules for interpretation’ are. A finite viewpoint produces a finite world. I can only see the view that the narrowness of the window I’m looking out of permits me to see and because all my attention is on the outside, on the view that I am being shown, I can’t help assuming that what I can see is all that there is to see, when this is not at all the case.

 

 

This is what is meant by ‘the conditioned view’ – limitations that exist only in our way of looking at the world are projected upon the external world so that they appear to belong there, so that it looks as if they were there all along (as Bohm says). Because we never wonder about our way of viewing the world we become – as it is said – the ‘prisoners of our device’ – ‘our own device’ in this case meaning the everyday categorical mind.  We become ‘a respectable prisoner of received images’, just as Meister Eckhart says. No matter what we do – no matter how we strain ourselves – we can never go beyond the limitations that are inherent in our viewpoint, far from going beyond them our activities actually embody these limitations – our purposeful activity is the lawful enactment of the limitations or rules that are inherent in our arbitrary way of seeing things. The world as we understand it is nothing more exotic than the projection of our taken-for-granted viewpoint, in other words.

 

 

We can say that the view which we are being presented with is the result of the incoming information being compared to the rules which constitute our viewpoint – it is in other words a reflection of this viewpoint. When we take this view seriously – as we do – then this – as we have said – creates a perfectly closed system. Once we know this, then it is straightaway clear that the world which thought creates for us is a world in which nothing can ever happen. The whole point of a closed system is that nothing ‘new’ can ever happen in it – for new stuff to happen we need an open system. If the world we live in is a tautological development of the viewpoint that we are opting to look out of then of course nothing can ever happen in that world – in order for something to actually happen then there would have to be a discontinuity, a non-tautology, and this is the one thing that we can rely one never to happen in this situation.

 

 

If we are to perceive something that is real, and not our own construct, then we’re going to have to give up this practise that we have of always comparing the incoming information with our ‘baseline’, with our own highly questionable assumptions regarding ‘what reality is all about’. If it’s reality we want then we’re going to have to give up editing (or vetting) our perceptions of the world in order to make it fit in with our thinking; we’re going to have to give up our controlling, in other words. We’re going to have to ‘let go’. Very obviously, the only way we’re ever going to stand a chance of catching a glimpse of what’s really out there is when we stop controlling what we are seeing. We’ve got to stop projecting our assumptions! This isn’t to say that the way thought works has no legitimacy because – up to a point – it does. It’s just that we have to be mindful of this point, and before we can be mindful of knowing ‘at what point cognitive comparison-making ceases to be legitimately useful’ (and becomes something else instead) we have to have the awareness that there actually is such a point, and we don’t! We have no such awareness…

 

 

In the absence of this vital awareness we are thought’s puppets, and nothing more. Culturally speaking, we have no awareness whatsoever that there is a limit to thought’s legitimacy, a limit to its applicability. Thought is King to us and that means that there are no such limits. Thought (or logic) is supreme; it is implicitly understood to be ‘the final authority on all things’. Just so long that we can see that there is a point at which thought ceases to be a helpful guide (and becomes a dangerous deceiver instead) all is well; to be unaware of the rational mind’s capacity to act as a ‘Fools Lantern’, on the other hand, means that we are under the influence of this this deceptive guide, it means that we are under the spell that is cast by the ‘Ignis fatuus’. To be blissfully unaware of thought’s capacity to deceive us is to be under its spell forever, and this is exactly our situation in our day-to-day lives – like an army of sleepwalkers, we’re following this Jack-o-Lantern blindly wherever it leads, and it is leading us deeper and deeper into a very great swamp…

 

 

The thing about comparison-making is that it is only as trustworthy, as a process, as the template that it is running on. ‘Rubbish in, rubbish out,’ as computer programmers used to say. All of the productions of thought – without fail – follow the inviolable code which it runs on such that all there is in this manufactured world (this standardized world that has been created by thought) are ratios based on this code, which are tirelessly reproduced over and over again. If ‘fidelity to the rules which the system is running on’ were the only criterion we had to worry about then there would be no issues whatsoever – everything would be fine and dandy, everything would be great, but that just isn’t the case. This isn’t the case because, as we have just said, if everything is based on an error then everything that follows on is an extension of that error, a prolongation of that error. If the standard that we are operating on is garbage then the only world we’re ever going to create (and the only one we’re going to know about) via this process is the Garbage World.

 

 

Thought can be useful up to a point, useful within a certain remit, but where this usefulness turns into the opposite of usefulness is the point where we forget that our literal signifiers of the world are only ‘signifiers’. Just as soon as we lose sight of this we create the Garbage World – we create the ‘Garbage World’ because the signifiers are only signifiers, because they aren’t anything ‘of themselves’. When this happens then reality itself has been bypassed; instead of ‘reality’ there are only ‘the signifiers’ and the signifiers aren’t real things. Our literal descriptors are constantly shouting at us, so to speak; they are telling us what they are mechanically obliged to tell us, but what they’re telling us is nonsense. It’s forceful nonsense, to be sure, but it’s nonsense all the same! It’s aggressive nonsense that is being rammed down our throats on a daily basis whether we like it or not, it’s aggressive nonsense that we were forced to adapt ourselves to, seeing as how we don’t have anything else to go on, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is pure nonsense, all the same. The truth doesn’t need to shout…

 

 

Thought is what defines the world for us – definitions are thought, we could say. We define things in terms of what we need out of them, in terms of the uses we wish to put them to; there is always this ‘personalization of reality’ going on, in other words. This is how thought works, after all – thought is a pragmatic type of thing and it is interested only in what can serve its agenda in some way. ‘What can you do for me?’ asks thought, and if the answer is ‘Nothing!’ then that’s where its interest ends. It might seem unfair to speak in this way but – as we have just said – that’s simply how thought works – thought works by comparing everything to its inviolable yard-stick (which is where the ‘personalization’ comes in) and if there is no comparison (if what we are investigating has nothing in common with our means of conducting the investigation) then as far as we’re concerned there’s nothing of any interest there. Thought defines the world in terms of itself, in other words, and so because ‘comparison-making’ is its only way of functioning if it comes across something that can’t be defined in this way then as far as it’s concerned there isn’t anything there. There’s no ‘other’ in the world that thought makes, only the prolific (or ‘viral’) redundancy of non-stop self-reference.

 

 

Thought’s practical utility comes about as a result of the way in which the physical / tangible aspect of the universe does reflect the same laws that thinking mind is based on – thought has evolved to be our guide in this regard, after all. This therefore is the proper domain of its functionality; this is where it ‘comes into its own’. The physical / tangible aspect of reality is only the tip of the iceberg however, it’s very far from being the whole story; it’s very far from being ‘the whole story’ but it is all the same the only story we know about. As we have said, the TM has a strictly limited domain of applicability and yet – crucially – it itself has no way of knowing this. A mechanism cannot recognise anything that is non-mechanical, this being the essential limitation of all machines, and so as a result the mechanism which is the thinking mind can never allow us to know that there is anything beyond it and its maps, beyond it and its models and theories of reality. The TM will never tell us anything about the Intangible Realm, not out of spite or malice but simply because it can’t and so – as a result of us identifying with thought (like a captive identifying with his or her captor) – we get trapped in Hyperreality.

 

 

A machine doesn’t have any way of relating to a non-mechanical reality – it relates via its mechanical sensors and mechanical sensors can’t get any purchase on a non-mechanical world. In no way can it sense the non-mechanical, in no way can it detect its existence. Generally speaking – as rational creatures – we don’t believe in a non-mechanical reality either. No sensible person believes in a non-mechanical reality (which is to say, a reality that isn’t based on rules). We would laugh long and loud at the very mention of it. If we can’t detect it with our senses or with our instruments, if we can’t measure it and convert it into hard quantitative data that everyone can agree with, then how can we claim that it exists? If we can’t prove that ‘unconditioned space’ exists then we can’t go around saying that it does, since proof is everything. Evidence is everything – our view is that if there’s no scientific evidence for something then we shouldn’t give it any consideration. We shouldn’t be so woolly-headed and irrational as to believe in anything without proof, we say, and yet nothing can be proved really. What is ‘proof’ except the outcome of a flagrant act of comparison-making? What is there to compare reality with? With what can we compare the Whole of Everything to conclusively demonstrate that it really is ‘true’? All this talk of ‘proof’ is foolishness and all of our so-called ‘proofs’ are tautologies.

 

 

When we’re under thought’s power then the only way to see the world is its way; we are utterly convinced that the reality it shows us is the only reality there is and we are deeply scornful of any speculation that would suggest otherwise. To be under thought’s power is to see the world in its way and its way of seeing things is inherently perverse – under the influence of thought we celebrate the branch at the expense of the trunk from which it stems, we celebrate the wheel but deny the hub upon which it turns (even though the wheel can only act as a wheel because of its hub). ‘The hub on which everything turns’ is intrinsic space, which is space without gradations, space without the polarity of ‘here versus there’, space with no ‘nearer’ and no ‘further’, no ‘up’ and no ‘down’. This is Jung’s watery realm – the limitless inner realm in which the fixed ego-identity isn’t the centre of everything, isn’t the ‘subject’ (as we normally take it to be) but just another construct, just another ‘thing’, as we read in Jung, CW Vol 9(1) pars. 45, 46 –

 

For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is the realm of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me.

 

No, the collective unconscious is anything but an encapsulated personal system; it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am the object of every subject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am. “Lost in oneself” is a good way of describing this state. But this self is the world, if only a consciousness could see it.

 

 

The watery realm is nothing but consciousness, and consciousness isn’t a fixed viewpoint; consciousness isn’t a particular or fixed viewpoint for the simple reason that it has no location. There aren’t any fixed points in reality – the only place we will find any fixed points, any specific locations, is in the Positive Reality (or ‘Mind-Created Virtual Reality’) that we ourselves make up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image – wallhere.com