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Enacting The Paradox

The finite will always negate itself, time and time again it will negate itself. This is because the finite is not real. The only way it can get to seem real is if we look at it in a blinkered kind of away kind, the kind of a way that only ever sees one half of the picture at any one moment in time. This state of affairs is what Carl Jung calls ‘one sidedness’ and what John Godolphin Bennett refers to in terms of ‘opposite blindness’ (which is to say, the inability to see both the opposites that we’re under the influence of at one and the same time). When we’re one-sided in our mental attitude then we’re heading for disaster (because our theory of the world is deceiving us), when we’re suffering from opposite blindness then this means that everything we’ve worked so hard to attain is going to be lost again in the reverse swing of the pendulum, which we never saw coming. ‘Opposite blindness’ thus enables us to engage in activity that is utterly without meaning without ever being able to see this.

 

 

One-sidedness (or OB) facilitates us in repeatedly engaging in actions that we imagine are going to get us somewhere when actually they’re not. Or as we could also say, it facilitates us in entering into a state of permanent non-learning – we are facilitated in becoming a mere ‘thing’, a dumb mechanical thing that is permanently nullifying itself (or ‘cancelling itself out’) without ever being any wiser as to the truth of what’s going on. We never give up on our futile mechanical behaviour because we can’t see the behaviour for what it is. We can’t see our behaviour for what it is, and neither can we see ourselves for we – our view of things is 100% fantasy, therefore. It is fantasy from beginning to end, it has no bearing whatsoever with reality. In this fantasy we are motivated by the false perception that we stand to make significant gains if we try hard enough, if we play a smart enough game, whilst in reality we are caught in a ‘revolving door’ scenario that keeps returning us to where we started off from. In reality, we never actually left this spot. We’re rocking frantically on a creaky old rocking chair and we’re going nowhere as a result. We’re going nowhere fast.

 

 

This is the only way things are ever going to work out for us when we’re operating on the basis of thought (which cannot see that YES equals NO, that’s STOP equals GO). We’re in that dumb mechanical state in which there is no such thing as paradox, no such thing as irony. Everything is seen literally and a literal statement – by its very nature – will always contradict itself; literal statements always ‘imply the opposite’ – we can’t have good without bad, winning without losing. We don’t see the forward swing of the pendulum as being the same movement as the reverse swing, we don’t see that ‘the way up’ is the same as ‘the way down’. OB means that if we are identified with the positive pole then we can’t see that the negative pole is the necessary complemented to the positive one. We can’t see that we can’t have a road that travels due North without also having a road that is travelling due South! The conditioned identity always has to have something that it is aiming at; like an ocean-going shark, it has to have a direction to be moving in, it can’t ever relax or go ‘off duty’. Either the conditioned identity moves in the direction of acquiring something that it likes, or it moves in the reverse direction, the direction that takes it away from something it doesn’t like. Either it hopes or it fears, either it is rejoicing or it is lamenting. It’s always moving away from one pole and towards the other, it’s always ‘trapped in polarity‘.

 

 

The conditioned identity is always constrained to operating out of the fixed point that is itself (it can’t see the world in any other way than its own way, in other words) and for this reason we can say that it is completely unfree. It’s totally trapped. In a universe that is made up of freedom, the fixed point which is the conditioned self has no freedom at all, not even a tiny smidgen of it, and the consequences of this unfreeness is that it can only ever see one half of the picture at a time. Because the CS has zero freedom, it can only see things in the way that logic tells it to, and logic – as we have said – is blind to paradoxicality. Logic is as dumb as dumb can be in this respect. Logic – as Aristotle has told us – operates on the Principle of the Excluded Middle – either you paid the rent or you didn’t, there no other possibilities here. Either you did the thing or you didn’t do it; you can’t have it both ways – the question can’t be both YES and NO. Whatever aims we have are necessarily going to be extensions of the viewpoint that we are trapped in – they can’t be anything else, obviously – and because of this limitation we can’t see the paradox which is inherent in all purposeful behaviour. We can’t see the utter futility of acting out of a fixed centre in the hope of bringing about something different, something new. We can’t see the futility of waiting for something different to happen (something other than the turning of the same old wheel, the cyclical swinging of the same old pendulum). We’re repeating the same old stereotypical behaviour whilst hoping for a different outcome. We can look at this situation as a game and say that from the limited viewpoint of the conditioned identity there are only two possibilities on the table – either we can gain or we can lose, either we can bring about the sort of change we want to see, or we can’t. No change (of whatever sort) can ever come from a fixed position, however – we bring that position (our ‘basis’) with us wherever we go, we’re in orbit around it, we’re wedded to it. We’re in orbit around a set of assumptions that we have arbitrarily made, assumptions that we are only able to take as seriously as we do because we have never looked any deeper into them. We have no intention of ever looking deeper into them; if we did then that would be the end of the game…

 

 

In order for the game to work we absolutely mustn’t see the whole picture – we mustn’t see that the forward movement of the turning wheel is the very same thing as the reverse movement, we mustn’t see that the ‘northwards movement’ and the ‘southwards movement’ are happening at one at the same time. We can’t be able to see that ‘chasing the euphoria that comes with moving closer to our goal’ is the same thing as ‘chasing the dysphoria that comes when we see that we’re moving away from it’. As long as we’re engaged in purposeful behaviour however this is exactly what we’re doing; as long as we’re ‘being purposeful’ we’re involving ourselves in never-ending paradox. And the thing about this is that purposeful striving is all the conditioned self can ever do – it can’t ever stop ‘striving for the advantage’, it can’t have stop trying to obtain one opposite but not the other. If the self that we think we are stopped trying to ‘achieve’, stopped trying to ‘win’, then it would simply no longer exist (as it is born of this futile striving). The ‘self or ego we imagine ourselves to be’ can only exist within the context of the turning wheel of samsara, which means that however miserable and frustrating this ‘cyclical existence’ might be, we still don’t really want to escape from it. We’ll say that we do, but this just plain isn’t true….

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit – DALL E/OpenAi

 

 

 

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