We all have this sure and certain idea regarding ‘who we are’, and ‘what life is all about’, and this notion that we have – no matter how ridiculously unsupported it might be – is so sure and certain that we never give it another thought. We never ‘revisit the original decision’. The notion is contained in a super-secure underground vault, gathering dust; we’re not in the least bit interested in picking it up and examining it – we have no curiosity about it, none at all. We don’t see it as a notion, as an idea, it’s simply ‘the way things’ are and because of this we have precisely zero interest in questioning it. In the normal run of things, we will never question it.
We might be 100% sure and certain about this view of reality that we have somehow latched onto (or which has latched onto us) and which we are therefore basing our entire lives on, but this doesn’t mean that there’s any truth in it. It just means that we’re desperate to believe in something – we’re like heedless limpets clinging to an ontological rock. The truth of the matter is that our view of reality is completely arbitrary – it has absolutely nothing to do with the thing itself, for all our ridiculous trust in it. Our trust in the value of our chosen viewpoint (in ‘the fixed way we have of making sense of the world’) isn’t there because we’ve carefully examined the proposition and found it sound, it’s there because we haven’t examined it at all, it’s there because we’re stubbornly only looking in the one direction. Our deep and abiding conviction comes out of our ignorance; it comes out of our pathologically profound lack of interest in life, not anywhere else. It’s a function of our one-sidedness, nothing else. It’s a function of our resolutely ‘non-philosophical’ approach to life. If there was a prize for adopting the most non-philosophical approach to life then we Westerners would win it. We would win it every time…
Our sure and certain idea regarding ‘what life is’ (or ‘what the world is’) is always like this, regardless of what that idea might be. Any sure and certain idea about our situation is like a soap bubble floating precariously through the air, just waiting to be fatally punctured. As soon as our mental picture of the world comes in contact with anything real it will vanish just as if it were never there; we can have as many sure and certain views of the world as we like (there are an infinitely many of them to choose from) but – notwithstanding this profusion of definite views – there IS no definite reality! A definite reality is a contradiction in terms. What’s definite are our thoughts, our judgments, and our thoughts and judgments are ‘beside the point’; they are our own private business and have nothing whatsoever to do with anything else. They are our own ‘conceit’, as it used to be said.
Our modality of existing in the world is to have ‘a fixed viewpoint’ and ‘the fixed view that belongs to this viewpoint’. Viewpoint and view are the two sides of the same stick. When we take up a particular viewpoint then the consequence of this is that nothing we see is ever going to surprise us, that nothing we see is ever going to rock our boat. Nothing we see is ever going come as a surprise because nothing we see can ever contradict the viewpoint it comes out of. We don’t want to have our boat rocked because ‘having our boat rocked’ means that we might end up being capsized and we certainly don’t want that. We’d lose all our precious insulation and the thing we’re afraid of will start to leak in. Reality will start to leak in then…
The correspondence between our ideas about the world and what we actually perceive regarding that world was never a real correspondence in the first place since our ‘ideas’ and ‘what the ideas cause us to see’ are the very same thing, as we have just said. Our obsession in life is (as is well known) to try hard to get things to work out in accordance with our plans – when we can pull this off then this is absolutely ‘the best thing in the world’. This is cause for jubilation, this is cause for celebration. There’s no greater cause for celebration that this. What we’re talking about here is pure undiluted super-sparkly euphoria – we get ‘the best feeling in the world’ and yet all we’re doing here (with our tedious obsession with goal-orientated behaviour) is continually – and stupidly – reaffirming / recycling the same old assumptions over and over again. All our energy goes into ‘repeating’ and none at all into ‘examining’. Repeating is good, questioning or disobeying (as is well known) is bad. Questioning or disobeying will be punished.
There IS no exclusively true viewpoint and all we’re doing when we assume that there is one is creating an Imaginary World to get trapped in. We engineer a tautology for ourselves since the view we relate to was already contained in the viewpoint. It’s like trying to say there is one point on the circumference of a circle that is somehow special, somehow ‘quite different’ to all the others, which is clearly nonsensical. It is the fact that all points on the circumference of a circle are the same (and cannot in any way be differentiated from one another) that makes a circle be a circle (and not something else). To be actually conscious (i.e. to be in touch with reality rather than being in touch with the false substitute for it) is – we might therefore say – to be not arbitrarily limited to any one viewpoint on things. The ‘tautological reality’ is therefore the situation where we can’t see that ‘subject and object’ (‘viewer and viewed’, ‘doer and done’) aren’t the same thing even though they are. The illusion is that there is a divide. This ‘dualistic divide’ is the crucial illusion – the illusion we can’t do without, the illusion that keeps the whole show on the road.
When we talk about ‘the actor’ and ‘the act’ (or ‘the thinker’ and ‘the thought’) being one; this isn’t an inspirational kind of thing. This isn’t Cosmic Oneness (which the All-Inclusive, All-Accepting state), it’s merely a blank redundancy, it’s a ‘blank redundancy’ because it excludes everything that isn’t itself. It’s a statement that agrees with its own premises (because it wouldn’t get to be there otherwise). As long as we continue to copy from the template without knowing that we are copying from the template (just as long as we continue to be inauthentic without realising that we are) then we can stay ‘safe’, ontologically speaking; as long as we remain in the Dual (or ‘Split’) World we can stay insulated from any sense of ungroundedness, any sense of things not being what we are so convinced they are. In this situation we have what might be called false consciousness – we have awareness of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ as been two different things when they aren’t. This is ‘conditioned consciousness’ – consciousness that has been modified by certain arbitrary conditions (or rules). These conditions aren’t real any more than the notion that ‘one particular point on the circumference of a circle is different to all the others’ (or is ‘special’) is a true notion, but we act as if they were. They’re real as far as we’re concerned, and we won’t be told otherwise.
Our conditioning may not be real (with no more substance to it than a spider’s web), but we nevertheless live our entire lives (excepting childhood) as if it were. We live our lives as if there were no such thing as Intrinsic Freedom, but only ‘the freedom that we have been given by the External Authority’ (which is of course the inverted form of freedom). It could be said therefore that we exist within a ‘virtual cage’, a ‘mental cage’ that is made up of rules, but that would still be an inadequate metaphor for our situation. We aren’t in a cage because a cage has some space in it, and conditioned reality (i.e., the continuum of thought doesn’t. All that’s in the conditioned realm (or the continuum of logic) is rules, rules, rules (rules all the way) and to obey rules – as we automatically do – to perform ‘an act of self-nullification’.
By unreflectively obeying the rule we unfailingly annul ourselves, we make zilch of ourselves. We make tools of ourselves. This isn’t how we see it however – we feel good about what we’re doing, we’re getting a great buzz out of it. We are being rewarded for betraying ourselves (at least in the first instance) – as Philip K Dick says in DADOES, we will be ‘required to do wrong no matter where we go‘. This requirement to betray ourselves is the only way things can work in the ‘Conditioned Realm’, in the ‘World of Rules’, in the ‘World of Unquestioning Obedience’ – which is the world in which everything (including ourselves) is determined by the External Authority. In this world there is no awareness, only False Awareness – the False Awareness that suits our Rulers (but not us)…
Image credit – mirror.xyz
