The way we know confirmation isn’t the same as information (but only the superficial appearance of it) is by observing that no change ever occurs as a result of it. Information, on the other hand, means change – that’s what it’s all about. It is – as Gregory Bateson says – ‘the difference that makes a difference‘. Information – when received – always results in change. That’s the ‘litmus test’ – that’s how we know that it’s information we’re dealing with. Ultimately, ‘information is all there is’ (since ‘non-information’ isn’t real) and this is – therefore – another way of saying that ‘change is all there is’. What we’re calling ‘information’ is the unfolding of the new, not the repetition of the old – ‘the repetition of the old’ is another thing altogether, the repetition of the old is a kind of hallucination that we suffer from when we get stuck in the frozen tautology of the thinking mind.
Information is all there is, but we – as a rule – never come across it. We’re so well protected from information – wrapped up tight as we are in our cocoons of confirmation – that, as far as we’re concerned, there might as well be no such thing as ‘information’. It might as well not exist. Instead of information we have something else, something that can ‘fill in for it’ without actually being it. What we have instead of information is a substitute for the real thing which superficially looks the same but which doesn’t actually result in change. Instead of resulting in ‘change’ confirmation invariably results in a state of stasis. Everything comes to a stop.
Confirmation, C is – as we’ve just said – the superficial substitute for information, W – it’s what we have to ‘make do with’ in place of the real thing. Confirmation is therefore what our subjective world or subjective reality is made of. Instead of living in a universe where information is all there is, we live in a world where confirmation is ‘all there is’. We live in the Universe of Confirmation. Just as W brings about change, so too (apparently) does C, the only thing being that with C the type of change that we’re talking about is change of the ‘superficial’ variety, change that isn’t really change at all. The type of change that is brought about by confirmation is optimization, which is where we get closer and closer to a defined value. We don’t ever move on from the game we’re playing, we just get better and better at playing it forever…
‘Optimization’ is where we move ever closer to a state of equilibrium, and a state of equilibrium is a state of non-change, a state of ‘staying the same regardless’. As we optimize our performance we are getting closer and closer to the state of non-change and so to call what’s going on here ‘change’ is distinctly ironic. All the same, when we’re caught up in optimization-type activity we really do perceive it to be the case that we are involved in change of the most meaningful nature. We perceive ourselves to be engaged in proper change, real change, important change… What we’re talking about here is -when it comes down to it – goal-orientated behaviour and the big thing about goal-orientated behaviour is that for us obtaining the goal represents a change of the most dramatic sort. Our perception is that we’re ‘hitting the jackpot’ and that – as a result – nothing will ever be the same again…
Our perception – as we approach the goal, as we approach the ideal – is that this will constitute a total transformation. The degree to which I am excited and thrilled by the prospect of achieving the goal is the degree to which I believe that what I’m doing is going to make a crucial difference to my life; the goal (or the attaining of the goal) represents a radically new possibility of existence to me. Believing that ‘attaining the goal equals change’ is a remarkable delusion, however – the reality is that ‘attaining the goal’ means staying the same, it means making sure that we never change. Optimization doesn’t mean that we’re getting closer to something unknown, something mysterious; it means on the contrary that we’re getting we are ‘consolidating’ (or ‘reifying’) the known. Being goal-orientated means that we’re actually rejecting the unknown out of hand; we want nothing to do with it, nothing at all. The radical unknown actually has the effect of falsifying our goals so we have good reason for wanting to keep away from it. The RU will bring all our games (which is where we pretend that ‘the known is all there is’) to an abrupt and unceremonious end.
The way we’re figuring it – obviously enough – is that the answer to all our problems lies in the known, not the unknown. We’re searching for our lost car keys where the streetlight is shining, since that’s where the illumination is. The known is where we’re going to look. The idea would seem to be that the answer we seek is to be found in ‘staying the same’, not in some drastic – which is to say, unpredictable – change in our situation. If this wasn’t the case then why would we be so totally absorbed in this business of trying to actualize our goals the whole time? Why else would we be interested in control if we didn’t believe that’s what we’re searching for necessarily corresponds to some sort of ‘known or defined outcome’? If it were ‘the radical unknown’ we were interested in then the very last thing we would be doing is ‘trying to obtain known outcomes’ the whole time. It’s not sufficient just to say this however because at the same time that we’re tying ourselves up in tight knots with our obsession with ‘staying in control’ we’re yearning on a very deep level for the release that comes with unconditionally letting go. We’re majorly conflicted here, in other words, even if it very rarely happens that we actually see it.
There is – we might say – some serious confusion going on here in that we imagine that the Great Release (or Great Transformation) which we are yearning for so intensely has something to do with the business of ‘optimization’, the business of ‘being efficient’, the business of ‘hitting the target with 100% accuracy’. Our unexamined belief is that once we ‘get it right’ (once we ‘obey the rule correctly’) then the thing we want so much to happen will at last come to pass. This is perfectly exemplified by our attitude towards what we call winning – we all know that winning is ‘the greatest thing ever’, we all know very well that ‘there’s nothing to compare with it’, and yet at the same time we don’t really know what winning is, or why it should be so very good, why it should be such a tremendously beneficial thing… We never feel the need to go into it at all, we just know that it’s going to be ‘super-good’ when it happens and this unexamined (or ‘half-baked’) conviction has the effect of causing us to focus entirely on whatever it is we need to do (or whatever it is we believe we need to do) in order to get there. All of our attention goes into the how, into the ‘technical details’, into ‘following the rules correctly’, into the ‘optimization procedures’, and there’s none leftover for anything else. We assume that what we’re doing will ultimately bear fruit, even though what we’re so busy assuming here is actually absurd.
Another way of talking about the state of consciousness that is associated with optimization activity would simply be to say that we have been hypnotised by polarity and that when we’re in this hypnotic state then all we know about, all we care about, is securing the one opposite and avoiding the other. That’s not just ‘the name of the game’, it IS the game… This is now the only way we have available to us to see the world – we see everything in terms of one opposite versus the other and because this is how we saying things our ‘bottom line’ motivation is what is called in Buddhism ‘attraction versus aversion’ (which translates into ‘chasing pleasure and fleeing pain’). Straightaway therefore we can see that our motivational system has nothing to do with reality. It has nothing to do with reality because reality isn’t polar. Reality doesn’t come with a ‘plus face’ and a ‘minus face’ – if you toss it in the air it doesn’t come down as either <heads> or <tails>. Reality has no UP and no DOWN. Our ‘pushme/pullyou-type motivational system’ has nothing to do with reality but everything to do with our way of seeing things, everything to do with our mental construct of the world, everything to do with our theory of the world. When we work with our construct or theory of the world then we have something to ‘work off’, we have something that we can mechanically engage with; reality itself however – being non-polar in nature – doesn’t give us any handles. It’s an enigma and the thing about enigmas is that they don’t give us anything to either like or dislike – they simply don’t play ball with us in this way. An enigma is an enigma because it’s discontinuous with the System of Thought.
The world we encounter on a day-to-day basis isn’t an enigma of course – it isn’t an enigma because it’s been chopped up and categorised so as to render it cognizable, so as to make it intelligible. In one way we could say that this is ‘the supreme victory of the rational intellect’ but the victory in question isn’t quite so ‘supreme’ as all that however; we might even say that the whole thing is a bit of a cheat (since – as we’ve just said – in order to make the world non-enigmatic or cognizable to us we have had to get rid of reality entirely and replace it with a whole bunch of ten-a-penny rational constructs. To a certain extent, we can get away with this since though there is a ‘legitimate overlap’ between our constructs and the way nature works and it is this ‘legitimate overlap’ that gives rise to the domain of empirical science. The aspect of nature which correlates with our thinking – which is to say, the aspect which we could rationally understand – is only ‘skin deep’ however – there are hard and fast limits to what we’re able to understand when we venture beyond these limits we find ourselves once again face to face with the great enigma. Which was there all along, buried under our facts and figures, so to speak. Whenever we dig we will find it, and if we don’t dig – if we show an aversion to digging – then this is because we don’t want to find it.
The Great Enigma is as enigmatic as it is because there’s no possibility of us ever ‘orientating ourselves towards it’ – in order for us to be able to orientate ourselves to it we would first need for it to be describable in terms of pairs of opposites such as ‘up and down’, or ‘near and far, ‘positive and negative’, ‘left-handed and right-handed’, and so on, and this is precisely what we can’t do when we it comes to reality itself (as opposed to its productions in space and time). We can comprehend the abstractions that come out of the uncollapsed state, the symmetrical state, but not the Source, not where all the abstractions (or forms) come from. To comprehend the uncollapsed state we would have to collapse it first. When symmetry is collapsed then what we end up with is the state of polarity and whilst polarity is quintessentially cognizable, it also suffers from the drawback of ‘being unreal’, the drawback of being ‘merely an abstraction’. If we go back now to what we were saying about ‘the deluded perception that optimization or control can result in a total transformation of our situation’ then we can see where this delusion comes from – it comes out of polarity, nowhere else.
From the point of view of any given opposite the complementary opposite will always appear radically different to where we are. As Emily Dickinson puts it.
Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed.
To switch from being a loser to being a winner (to go from ‘vanquished’ to ‘triumphant’) is – as far as we are concerned – the greatest transformation ever – no change could possibly be more dramatic or more significant than this. Within terms of the polar representation of our situation, the transition from one opposite to the other is indeed the most significant transition there ever could be, no question about it. In reality however, it’s a different story; in reality, there is no difference at all between one pole and the other, complementary, pole – the one is simply the mirror image of the other. If we take the example of a circle to illustrate this, we can pick any point on the circumference and say that this point represents the ‘North Pole’ and this would be perfectly true – we can put the ‘North Pole’ wherever we want because all points on the circumference of a circle are equivalent. There is one proviso that goes with this however and that proviso is that we must also designate the corresponding South Pole at the opposite end on the circle. Picking a point to be the North Pole is a dual action therefore – it’s a dual action because at the same time as doing this we’re picking the South Pole (since the one can’t exist without the other). To select one opposite is also to select the other – opposites always come in pairs. This leads therefore to what we might call a ‘fundamentally conflicted situation’ – by selecting one defined value we also select the equal and opposite value. Our action – whatever it is – is always paired with the equal and opposite action; as Michel de Montaigne puts it,
We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe, we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.
Circles are perfectly symmetrical, as we need hardly point out, and because of this symmetry we can say that the way to make a circle is to take a semicircle and then perform reflection-type transformation in the X-axis. This isn’t just an academic exercise in basic maths, it’s a revelation, it’s hugely, colossally consequential. If any number I pick automatically comes with its equal and opposite number, then what exactly am I doing here? If I can’t select X without also selecting – X at the very same time then what exactly does this amount to? From a mathematical point of view, what we’re looking at here is clearly a ‘null operation’ (which is to say, it’s an operation that negates itself in the process of being carried out). It’s a self-erasing event and so it’s not an event at all. We could draw a parallel here with ‘virtual particles’ – a virtual particle being a particle which seems to come into existence for a very short period of time but which does not – all the same – fully qualify as ‘existing’. It doesn’t quite make it into the ‘existing’ category. It falls short…
The psychological implications of what we’re talking about are nothing short of devastating – if we were to take this on board then all our assumptions would get overturned in less than the time it takes to snap our fingers. Our general understanding is that ‘the ability to choose’ is essential for continued good mental health – as we see it the integrity of the ego depends upon its perception that it can choose between alternative courses of action, that it can determine what happens to it by its actions. Our ability to choose those outcomes which suit us and reject those that don’t is everything to us; this is what life is all about, we will say – life is all about making the right choices and not the wrong ones… We see ourselves being creative with our choices (as if we are – by what we’re doing – actually creating a future that wouldn’t be there without our creative input, our creative genius, but there is nothing even remotely ‘creative’ about it. That’s the wrong word entirely. ‘Choosing’ just means that there is there is a duplication (or reproduction) of our present position going on – we’re doubling down on our current way of looking at things, we’re putting all our money on it being right, on it being meaningful, on it actually being ‘a real thing’. Choosing means ‘trying to stay in control’.
Choosing is just the repetition of the same old pattern; it’s ‘the repetition of what has come before’, just as Krishnamurti says. When I select one outcome rather than another (i.e., when I select one possibility out of a selection of them) then all that I’m doing here is replicating my current mental state – I am extending this state of mind indefinitely into the future. I am replicating my established viewpoint and to extend (or replicate) my established viewpoint is to replicate or extend the self. Optimization is how we maintain the self, staying in control is how we maintain the self, chasing goals is how we maintain the self. Blocking out genuine information (and concerning ourselves exclusively with the fake imitation of W instead) is how we maintain our idea of ourselves. The ‘genuine article’ is something we need to prohibit if we are to be able to carry on extending our established viewpoint into the future; honest to goodness actual information, the ‘real thing’, would ruin the whole endeavour and that’s why it’s treated as ‘random error’. The thing about treating information as random error is that this way we don’t take any notice of it (except to get rid of it, if we can). If we did take notice of genuine information then that would change us and that is precisely what we don’t want. We don’t want to change, we want to ‘stay the same’…
This gives us another way of looking at confirmation (or ‘phoney information’) – confirmation – we might say – is how the self sees the world. When we look at things from the point of view of the conditioned identity then confirmation is all will ever see, confirmation is the beginning and the end, it is the universe itself. There is no freedom in confirmation however – there is only ‘right and wrong’, there is only ‘this way and not that way’. We were saying that the type of change that is brought about by confirmation is ‘the inverted analogue of change’, otherwise known as optimization. Optimization – we went on to say – is where we keep on getting closer and closer to a defined value; the C-type info that we are tuned into tells us whether we’re getting closer or further away, it tells us whether we’re getting hotter or colder, it tells us whether we’re ‘doing it right’ or whether we’re ‘doing it wrong’. Confirmation is telling us ‘how to build an identity for ourselves’, in another words. This isn’t a volitional type of thing either, it’s ‘forced upon us’. As we’ve just said, there’s no freedom in confirmation, and this is where ‘the reversal of our awareness’ comes in – we don’t just ‘do what we’re told’, we identify with the authority that’s telling us ‘what to do’ so that we believe it’s us who wants to do this and who doesn’t want to do that. When we throw ourselves into obeying the authority then we imagine that we are that authority and so – as far as we’re concerned – there is no ‘rule’ and no ‘obeying’. When I as a slave throw myself into obeying my instructions (when I throw myself into the task of ‘being the perfect slave’) then I perceive myself to be free, and this is the situation of ‘being the self’, this is the situation of ‘being the conditioned identity’.
This is what it means to be ‘myself’, this is what it means to be the conditioned identity it means that we have become perfectly deluded, sublimely deluded. Our ignorance of what’s going on with us is total and because of this they convinced that we’re not ignorant – you couldn’t point out my ignorance to me no matter how diligently you tried! The force of the delusion that has a hold on us is such that the chances are now virtually zero that we will ever see through it, and all of this comes about as a result of us ‘getting pulled into the trap of optimization’. Optimization – by itself – is of course completely impersonal, perfectly neutral – we’re getting better and better at performing some particular action, at approaching some abstract ideal, and that’s all there is to it. There’s nothing more to it than this. As a result of us identifying with the rule that we’re so busy obeying (the game-rule which says <Get as close as you can to the specified value>) it all becomes very personal however – via this optimization-mechanism the self or ego comes into (apparent) being and from this point onwards it’s all personal. Absolutely everything will now be seen from the super-narrow perspective of ‘myself’ (even though there’s actually no such thing). This is the game that we’re playing – the only thing here being that we don’t actually know that it’s a game…
Image credit – wallpapers.com
