Life isn’t to be found within the drab and dreary confines of our crappy mental categories. It does not comply with our regulations; it can’t be prevailed upon to even recognise them. Thought builds a pen or enclosure for life to take place within, but life doesn’t play ball. The idea that it would -under any circumstances at all – ‘play ball’ with us in our cock-eyed, half-baked schemes is a complete non-starter. In our ridiculous, blind arrogance, we keep forgetting that we’re not the boss…

 

 

The idea that life can be prevailed upon to play by our rules might be a complete non-starter, but that doesn’t put us off in the least. We carry on just the same, we don’t let this small inconvenience stand in our way. What we do to get around this little inconvenience is to create a simulation of life to take the place of the original and then gloss over the fact that this is what we have done. We gloss over the fact that there ever was anything else anything else apart from ‘the ubiquitous simulation’ in the first place. ‘What are you talking about?’ we say. ‘This is the way things are and you’d better get used to it…’ We gaslight anyone who might have the temerity to suggest that there is something beyond what we have been given, beyond the tired old simulation.

 

 

The ‘forgetting of everything else apart from the banal simulation’ is of course an essential step because otherwise – if we still have the memory of what is being substituted for – the degraded substitute won’t do for us. The ‘degraded substitute’ only works when we forget what was there first. Without the necessary first step of ‘forgetting’ the whole thing is clearly a joke, an absurd ‘send-up’ of life, a parody or mockery of it. We’d spot it as a piss-take straightaway. Once the forgetting has happened however then it’s a different story, once the forgetting has taken place then we’re ‘anybody’s’, when we can’t remember the original then anything at all can be put in front of us and we’ll fall under its sway. Amnesia causes us to be infinitely gullible, capable of believing any story at all, no matter how ridiculous. This is the basic human situation (as Chogyam Trungpa says in his commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead) – we are blobs of ‘gullible energy’ just waiting to be swayed, just waiting to be sold ‘any story at all’. We’ll sign up to anything, go along with anything. We are ‘the ultimate consumers’, therefore.

 

 

In a trivial way, it may be said that the thinking mind does have something relevant to say about the world; in a superficial sense of the term, we can indeed be said to actually ‘know’ stuff. I might know where I put my car keys, I might know what the capital of Paraguay is, or that my national insurance number is, and so on. None of this amounts to very much however, and the only way it can seem to is when – under the pernicious influence of the thinking mind, we drift gradually and imperceptibly into ‘the empty world of trivial considerations.’ When we’re talking about this supposed business of ‘knowing’ about the world, the business of being able to ‘model’, ‘predict’ and ‘catalogue’ the world, then there is a significant degree of correspondence here – we are able to come up with a formula and equations and cosmological constants that very closely correlate seems to be going on. This is the ‘organisational level’, we might say – it’s all about how we organise stuff and not at all about what that stuff is (or what lies beneath it). When we talk about ‘knowing how stuff works’ or ‘having objective knowledge of the world around us’ this is what we’re talking about; we’re talking about the type of knowledge that is all about ‘how stuff is organised’. We’re talking about rules, in other words; we say that we know what’s going on because we know the rules that govern it but rules – when it comes down to it – are only rules…

 

For us to jump from this superficial level of knowing to claiming that we know what’s going on a deeper level (i.e., to claim that we know what stuff actually IS) would be entirely unwarranted, therefore – to leap to this conclusion is nothing more than pure undiluted hubris, and this is a hubris that we all suffer from. Every single last one of us – without exception’ suffers from ‘the hubris of thinking that we know what stuff is’ (this is the ubiquitous state of psychological unconsciousness). ‘Of course we know what stuff is!’ we say (only we don’t have to say it, or even think it, because we never got to the point of ever examining the matter). Thought is a ‘Master Magician’ and it has us completely under its power (which is – we might say – the power of hypnotic suggestion). The idea that ‘we know what stuff is’ is taken for granted in absolutely everything we do and – inasmuch as we are all playing a game without paying attention to the fact that we are – we are perfectly correct (on this level) in saying that we ‘know what we are doing’ (or that ‘we know what it’s all about’, etc). On the level of ‘understanding how to play the game’ we know what we’re doing but this ‘so-called ‘knowledge’ doesn’t translate into anything else, it isn’t ‘transferable’ (as we might say). Not only is it the case that knowledge we have in relation to the game ‘isn’t transferable’, it is actually false knowledge (or ignorance in disguise) since the only way we get to have it is by not knowing that there is a game being played. Knowing thus requires ignorance, just as Stuart Kauffman says.

 

 

Games are knowable – that’s the whole point right there. The whole point is that we absolutely know what’s going on, that we know what the consequence of ‘making a good move’ will be, just as we know what the consequences of making a bad one will be. Most of all, we know what the point of the game is – we’re very clear as to why we’re playing it. There’s never a point a moment in which we don’t ‘know what we’re trying to do’ – we’re trying to succeed within the terms that have been given to us.  When we’re playing a game we never ‘don’t know what we’re doing’. This is all very well but the problem is – as we’ve been saying – that in our hubris we conflate ‘success in the game’ with ‘actually living life’. Our competency within this artificial situation (which contains no ontological challenge) goes to our heads and we start getting cocky. We make life into a game; with a perfectly straight face, we talk about ‘succeeding at life’ (which is baffling bullshit that we somehow contrive to take seriously). We confuse two things – ‘life’ (which doesn’t come with rules, which doesn’t come with guidelines) and ‘the formal exercise of what we are arbitrarily saying life is’ and the result of this confusion is pride, is hubris, is addiction to illusion. We become deluded in the most dangerous of ways, in the most outrageous of ways…

 

 

We become deluded in the most extreme way possible – it’s simply not possible for us to be more horrendously ‘mistaken’ than this. We have an idea about life, a theory or notion about it, we have some kind of fantasy about it, and then the next thing is that we drift comfortably into thinking that this idea, this notion, this fantasy, isn’t fantasy at all but is – in fact – the actual objective truth regarding ‘the way things are’. We’re going around our daily business, in a a perfectly ‘matter of fact’ way, doing this and doing that, saying this and saying that, having this thought and that, 100% sure we know what the point of everything is (100% convinced that we know ‘what it’s all about’), and yet the whole time we are fundamentally disconnected from reality, fundamentally alienated from reality.

 

 

It doesn’t what we think it is, we’re going to get it wrong. We’ll get it wrong every time. It’s not as if we were ever in with a chance of getting it right – no matter what we call it, thinking, theorising, analysing, extrapolating, and so on, is always guaranteed to put us wrong. Any movement of thought will always put us wrong when it’s our relationship (or otherwise) with reality we’re talking about. ‘The more we live by the intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.’ says Leo Tolstoy. Mind is the slayer of the real’, says Madame Blavatsky. The problem – that we absolutely don’t get – ‘is’ that nothing ‘is’ anything. ‘Is’ doesn’t mean anything. The problem ‘is’ what Robert Anton Wilson calls ‘the is of identity’ –

 

“Is,” “is,” “is”—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don’t know what anything “is”; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

 

The thinking mind works in terms of ‘is’ and ‘isn’t’. It works by asking closed questions of the universe (and thereby eliciting only two types of answer). The only two types of answer that are allowed are either <YES IT IS> or <NO IT ISN’T>. The essential question being asked (in all possible cases) is – ‘Is the required criterion being met?’ (which is to say, ‘Does the profile of what we’re investigating fit one of our preexisting mental categories or not? The fact that <IS> and <IS NOT> are the only two possible answers we’re interested in means assuming our question to of core relevance, and if it’s of core relevance then don’t ever have to question it, we don’t ever have to come back to it. If an answer were to come back to us that is ‘neither one nor the other’ then we would immediately disregard it as being some kind of error, some kind of mistake. We simply wouldn’t take it on board – the answer has to be of either the Affirming or Denying sort, we say, so if it is neither then it doesn’t constitute information. In effect, therefore, we’ve redefined reality in terms of the assumption we have made (regarding what reality ‘is’) so that if something doesn’t match our assumption then it doesn’t get to exist…

 

 

What’s happening here therefore is that we have assumed Thought’s terms of reference to be perfectly congruent with the way reality is ‘all by itself’’.  We’re confusing our way of looking at things with what we’re looking at, such that all we ever see are our own notions (regarding what there is to see) reflected faithfully back at us. We are confusing what is necessarily a ‘Formal System’ (a way of organizing stuff) with the actual territory. This – we might say – is called ‘being too clever for our own good’. We have jumping the gun (in relation to whether the assumption that we’ve just made is true or not) and collapsed the Open-Ended situation into a situation where <expected> equals <actual>, (which is the logical situation where ‘every cause has an effect, and every effect has a cause’. Instead of saying that the closed situation is where <Expected> is automatically converted into <Actual> we could say that it is ‘the situation where the description immediately becomes the environment that is being described’. ‘CLOSED’ is thus where we cannot ever escape (or move beyond) the way we have initially said things to be (or agreed for them to be).

 

 

If we were to be naive about it, we would say that this is marvellously empowering. We are ‘creating our own reality’, we would say, and everyone knows that’s a good thing. Whatever we think straightaway gets to be true and so when we look at things in a superficial way we will see this as being the best thing ever; we see it as being ‘the best thing ever’ because we have the naive view that our theory or idea of the world contains genuine possibilities that can be acted upon, that can be ‘brought out’ or ‘realised’. Being able to ‘make anything we think be real’ (or ‘have any wish we might have come true’) is therefore a very great thing. Things don’t get any better. This is only ‘true’ when we’re in the deluded state however, and what seems true to us when we’re a state of delusion is of course itself simply more of that very same delusion. The System of Thought has no ‘point of contact’ with reality; it is a ‘self-referential phenomenon’ (which means precisely that it has ‘zero connection with anything that is not itself’). Thus, when we live life on the basis of thought (which is to say, when we live life on the basis of rules or precedence) we’re not so much ‘living life’ as to defying it. Like fools, we fly in the face of the Great Dao (or – as we could also say – we act out of hubris rather than wisdom and this of course is a guaranteed ‘ticket to nowhere’). We get to be ‘King for the day’ in our own imaginations. The SOT operates by providing us with what we might call ‘the inverted analogue of freedom’, which basically means that we are ‘totally free to act out whatever deterministic ‘scripts’ are put into our head and are at the same time free believe that they are true, at the same time free believe that we’re free when we’re not…

 

 

 

 

Image credit – Illustration: Elena Lacey; Getty Images, wired.com