In the Equilibrium Realm reality is always what the Authorities say it is. The ER is the will (or intention) of the Authorities. If there isn’t an authoritative (or ‘magisterial’, as Carse says) voice defining the rules – which we are required to take absolutely seriously – then there couldn’t be an Equilibrium. Equilibrium values don’t come about by themselves after all. Rules don’t pop out of thin air.
Rules don’t come out of thin air and authority does not grow on trees – they both have to be produced, they both have to be caused. Authority is a contrived situation, in other words – it doesn’t happen naturally. This is a conundrum, however – in order to cause something to happen I first have to have authority (which is to say ‘the means’) to do so (or as we might also say, in order to possess authority I have to be in a position that that gives me the power to make things happen in accordance with my will). Just because I want things to be a particular way isn’t enough. Power, says James Carse, is the ability to move others without ourselves being moved in return. We get to influence what happens in the world without ourselves being susceptible to any influence coming the other way. Power in this (societal) sense is where we do stuff to people without them being able to do anything back to us in return. We decide for them, and whatever they might think about it doesn’t count at all…
Our job in the Equilibrium Realm is to be forever stating and restating the core dogma, the core ideology, the ‘equilibrium values’ that the system has provided us with. This is the simplest thing in the world to understand – we are to ‘do the thing’ (whatever ‘the thing’ might be) and that’s all there is to it. The thing could be anything at all – our job is not to examine or question the task but simply to carry it out (whatever the hell it might be). We’re not paid to think, merely to follow orders. If we can do this – if we can copy and reproduce the template correctly – then that is all that is expected of us. This is all we need to do in order to receive maximum validation, maximal approval, maximum support and empowerment from the system.
What life comes down to in the equilibrium Realm is ‘obedience to the relevant authorities’, therefore. First, we receive training to enable us to correctly carry out the task (which is what we call ‘education’), and then we are left off to do whatever it is that we’ve been trained to do. That’s the long and the short of it – it’s hardly rocket science, as the saying goes. Framed in this way, life is reduced to the level of utter and complete and utter banality. It is reduced to a level of pure redundancy (if we are to express this in terms of information content, or rather the complete lack of it). When we frame life in terms of a standardised task that needs to be completed to the required standard in accordance with the given criteria, then all that’s happening is here is that we are playing a perfectly empty game. We’re playing ‘the Shell Game’.
The thing about playing ‘a perfectly empty game’ is of course that there is no benefit to be had out of it. This in itself isn’t a problem of course, the problem is that we all believe that there absolutely is some benefit to come out of it; the problem is that we’re sold the false idea that there is a point to it all; the problem is that the official story (which we are all continuously beaten over the head with) tells us that we’re going to get something as a reward as a result of playing the game correctly, as a reward for our unthinking obedience. This is a fundamentally deceptive situation, therefore – there is a fundamental contradiction here that we don’t see. On one level there is the Determinate (i.e., ‘Unchanging’) World about which we can say things, about which we can make verifiable factual statements, whilst on another – more profound level (which we might call the level of non-manipulated truth) – it can be seen perfectly clearly that the first level doesn’t exist at all. When we go more deeply into it we can see with great clarity that both ‘the player’ and ‘the prize that the player plays for’ are fictions, are arbitrary constructs.
Our attention – when we’re playing the game – is entirely caught up with this first level (which is the literal-descriptive level, the level that is composed of logical categories) and not at all on the primary (or mother) reality, not at all on the level of the unbroken reality (with regard to which all literal descriptions or categories are perfectly irrelevant). We contrive (or rather thought contrives) to be wholly unaware of ‘the Unbroken Reality’ and it is this contrivance that allows us to live life on the basis of a determinate (or ‘unchanging’) world that has no reality outside of our own premature presuppositions. This super-effective avoidance of what is ‘true in itself’ in favour of ‘what appears to be true because we blithely presume it to be so’ is what gives rise to what we might call the utter absurdity of everyday life (which is of necessity something that we have to remain sublimely unaware of just as long as we are participating in the theatre which we ourselves are unconsciously making up in our heads).
This situation – the situation in which we play a game without knowing that we are – is one that is characterized by its unqualified absurdity, therefore. It comes about quite naturally as a result of the rational mind overlaying the unconditioned world with its black and white formal descriptions. When we go along automatically with this proffered reality – when we ‘fall in’ with it – then we quite naturally enter into this absurd world that we cannot see to be absurd. This is the default mode, this is the ubiquitous state of identification where we automatically take the thinking mind’s ten-a-penny ‘manufactured equilibrium values’ to be the absolute bedrock nature of reality itself. Thought enslaves us, in other words – it both enslaves us and makes utter fools of us. We ourselves become features on the very map that we are using to orientate ourselves with. By accepting the unqualified authority of the categorising / comparing / contextualising mind we get ‘transformed into fictionalized versions of who we really are’ (we might say).
As ‘prisoners of thought’ (which is to say, as ‘slave modules that are being remotely operated by the External Authority’) everything we do is in service of the equilibrium values that underpin the Mind-Created Virtual Reality. Everything we do and think is ultimately for the sake of validating these values or rules, for the sake of proving them right, no matter what else we might imagine we are doing. What we imagine we are doing (i.e., our so-called ‘lives’!) is nothing more than a ‘second order fantasy’, a ‘fantasy within a fantasy’, a ‘box within a box’. As we said earlier – right at the beginning of this discussion – everything we do in the Equilibrium Realm comes down to a matter of forever stating and restating these unchanging core values. We are ‘mechanical repeaters’, forever reiterating something that was never true in the first place. This is how we validate the E-values – by continually repeating them, by unremittingly asserting and reasserting them, by extending them indefinitely in linear time, and yet no matter how many times we repeat or reinstate these values they will of course always remain perfectly unreal (samsara is ‘an endlessly repetitious attempt to solve a false problem’, says Alan Watts). Despite all our dumb mechanical persistence our ‘positive assertions’, our cast-iron ‘statements of fact’, remain as hollow as ever. Mere mechanical persistence can’t transform the untrue into the true (obviously enough) but because we can’t see this (because we won’t see it) we are kept busy ‘constructing our own prisons’, ‘forging our own chains’, and so on. ‘All’ (in inverted commas) we have to do in order to be free is to stop automatically obeying our mechanical master, but disobeying the authority that rules our lives turns out to be the hardest thing there ever could be. Far easier is just to ‘go along with it’ and turn a blind eye to what’s really happening…
Image credit – Getty images
