to top

Creating Environments That Deny Us

The whole thing about the Designed World (which we may also call ‘the Machine World‘ or simply ‘the Simulation’) is that as soon as we adapt to it – so it becomes real to us – we immediately become profoundly unconscious, profoundly asleep. The two things that we talking about here are the same thing therefore – adapting ourselves to the Designed World means ‘losing consciousness’.



Now it goes without saying that we are all adapted to the Designed World – that can hardly be questioned. This is our ‘common bond’– the fact that we are all perfectly adapted to the Designed World so that it seems real to us. If we weren’t adapted then we would immediately become aware of the most tremendous – indeed insurmountable – gulf between us and everyone we meet. The ‘gulf’ that we talking about here can be best explained by saying that it is what happen when we no longer share a common world. The ‘gulf’ equals our perfect inability to speak of unique world that we see all around us, and say how it ‘differs’ from the Designed (or ‘Formulaic’) World which we all agree on. We realize that we are actually alone.



Put another way, the gulf in question consists of the impossibility of speaking of the Designed World in a way that anyone can even remotely understand or relate to. When we are adapted to the DW we simply can’t understand that there is anything which isn’t the DW and so if anyone were to talk about ‘the designed world’ or ‘the simulation’ this simply doesn’t make any sense to us. A kind of trick has been perpetrated on us here, something very big indeed has been ‘cut out of existence’ (as if someone editing the reality-supply before it gets to us) and all traces of this editing operation have also been edited out. As a result we are fundamentally incapable of seeing that something very big has been taken out of the picture. We’ve been robbed and we don’t know it; we’ve been taken to the cleaners and we’re the last to realize this fact. This event therefore becomes ‘an impossible thing to talk about’, an impossible thing to bring up in conversation. It is – by a long shot – the biggest and most pertinent fact of our situation, and yet we still can’t talk about it. This is exactly our situation therefore – something tremendous has been taken away from is and so too has our ability to see that it has. The idea that such a thing as happened has become an impossible idea to broach, an impossible idea to convey and you are guaranteed to get precisely nowhere if you try! This is really the same thing as a ‘Big Lie principle‘ therefore, which we are more likely to have heard of, and which the Wikipedia entry states as follows (the origin of quote is said to be unknown, although often erroneously ascribed to Joseph Goebbles):



If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.




The thing about the Big Lie principle there is that it’s just too big to spot! We ourselves are not audacious enough to tell such a tremendous whopper and so – the logic goes – we will never be able to bring ourselves to suspect that someone else (moreover, someone in a position of great authority) has done so. Our very sanity would be at stake, as far as we’re concerned. We have after all adapted to the reality that we have been presented with; we are dependent upon it being true for the simple reason that we have defined ourselves in terms of it. It is therefore because we have adapted to the Designed World that we are depended upon it – it has become everything to us and so life without it is naturally quite unthinkable. We are flatly incapable of questioning the world that we have adapted to – it’s as if there is a physical mechanism at work that prevents this from happening. It might as well be a physical mechanism. Given no capacity to ask big questions’ like this – we just can’t. We can however address little questions, we can sort out the details (or the ‘technicalities’) but we can’t address the Bigger Picture. The ‘Big Picture’ remains an entirely meaningless proposition to us just as long as we remain adapted to the Designed World.



This is remarkable enough in itself but what makes the whole thing even more remarkable is that the artificial reality to which we have become adapted (and which we are fundamentally committed to protecting) has the function of denying us completely. Our very being is denied by the particular type of relationship that we have with the Designed World. This is after all what the DW does to us – by believing in it we lose all connection with ourselves, by believing in it we lose ourselves. When the DW becomes real to us – which it does as a result of us never questioning it – we become unreal to ourselves. It could therefore be said that this relationship that we have with the DW is the ultimately disempowering one. This isn’t just a ‘disempowering relationship’, it’s an abusive one. It’s an abusive relationship that we think is normal.



Once we reflect on this it becomes extraordinarily clear; isn’t this what we are always doing – designing and constructing environments that deny us? We need only look around us – we have worked so hard to create this environment, this world, and having created it we are then obliged to maintain and protect it. This in itself doesn’t sound too bad, but we never see the price that we pay to maintain the designed environment; we never see what it costs us, and what it costs us (as we have just said) is ourselves. By adapting to the mechanical environment we turn our backs on who we truly are and we have to spend our lives being what the environment requires us to be. It denies us, it prevents us from being ourselves, as if that didn’t really matter in the greater scheme of things.



The Designed World that we have created for ourselves absolutely cannot not deny us. It can’t be real if we are, as we have already said. This is then a very strict trade-off and there is no way that we can get to have our cake and eat it – if the DW is to exist (as a ‘complete’ or ‘final’ world) then we cannot know who we are. If the DW is to be real then we cannot ever wake up. It’s not that the environment which we have created is plotting against us to keep ignorant and powerless and subservient – although on one level this is of course exactly the case – but rather that us being ignorant, deluded, powerless and subservient Is a prerequisite if we are to avail of what we want to avail of – which is to say that special ‘wrap-around’ feeling of security that is so effectively provided for us by the DW.



We get what we want in this respect but that doesn’t mean that we don’t also suffer from getting what we want. The world that we have ploughed all our energy into creating and maintaining is a world that is hostile to actual human beings. Naturally enough, we do not want to address this drawback but the evidence is all around us. We can see this very clearly anytime we want simply by looking critically at any institution – institutions have this curious characteristic whereby they make out that they are there for our own good and that all we have to do is obey the rules and procedure like responsible human beings so that the institution (or organization) is not impeded from doing what it has to do if it is to do its job correctly. The truth of the matter is of course that the institution (any institution) couldn’t give a damn about the human beings it supposedly exists for and this is something pretty much everyone knows – we’ve all had dealings with institutions, after all. We’ve all been institutionalized, whether we realize it or not. Institutions are machines and machines exist for the sole purpose of following rules, not helping people. Even the most benevolently-conceived organization there ever was exists solely for the purpose of following rules, after all! How could this be any different when it’s machines that we’re talking about? There’s no such thing as a benign machine…



Humans that are adapted to the institution (or adapted to the machine) will always make out that the two things – ‘working for the good of people’ and ‘following the rules’ – are one and the same thing. Thus, as we all know, if you don’t adhere to the policies and procedures then that is the very same thing as sabotaging the cause that we are all (supposedly) working towards. The system’s moral power over us is absolute – questioning the authority of the system is not a possibility because we’re placing ourselves ‘beyond the pale’ just as soon as we do this. We haven’t a leg to stand on! The central thesis is that the institution a benign entity that is working towards our good, and that following its rules and procedures is the one and only way to bring about this good. This is how the system validates itself and thereby makes itself well-nigh impregnable. The ‘flaw’ in this premise is that obeying rules and regulations never leads to the good of anyone. Up to a point, a framework of agreement does work to our benefit of course but just as soon as this FOA because synonymous with ‘the higher good’ (so that it becomes a transgression against the higher good to defy it) then the framework has now become actively malign, even though we can’t for the life of us see it. Provisionally speaking, in limited and specific situations, following guidelines can be helpful; when obeying rules becomes a ‘good thing’ in itself (which is what happens when the tool and the task become conflated) then the rules are now denying us rather than supporting us. Following rules is good for machines (for machines this is the highest and only good) but not for human beings. We can no longer thrive and grow when rules and conventions determine everything about us. We can no longer anything. Following rules isn’t good for human beings because that turns us into machines and to turn into a machine is to exist in denial of who we really are. It’s an act of violence against our true nature, in other words.



The designed environment is a machine – it cannot be anything else other than a machine because it is made up of rules and nothing else but rules. Go searching for anything else and you won’t find it! Only what has been permitted can exist; only what has been officially sanctioned can have a place. For consciousness, this is the most inimical situation there is – consciousness is actually disallowed. Consciousness is told what it has to be by something that doesn’t understand it and doesn’t care. The machine – most emphatically – does not understand the true nature of who are and it does not care about that true nature. We can’t state things any more clearly than this! The designed environment denies us completely whilst claiming to exist for our own good. We work away ceaselessly at creating and maintaining this environment and what we have created and maintained works against us. This is a very urgent and practical consideration that we are addressing here – despite the fact that it is an urgent and practical consideration that we are, for the most part, incapable of appreciating! The bottom line is that the world which we have created for ourselves is not our friend at all but a hostile power, just as the Gnostics have been saying all along. All institutions are evil, as the Cathars observed about six hundred years ago.  Needless to say, this viewpoint did not go down well with the dominant institution of the day, which was the Church, and a crusade was mounted against them (the Albigensian Crusade) which ended in the complete annihilation of Catharism as a living culture. This is a particularly striking and horrific example of the evil of the institution which was the Medieval Church, and it demonstrates in a very singular way the inevitable response of the institution (of any institution) to consciousness…









Leave a Comment