When we take two steps forward in virtual space (which is to say, in the Mind-Created Virtual Reality) this equals two steps backwards. It’s not that we take two steps in one direction and then two steps in the opposite direction – that’s not it at all. A paradox doesn’t happen in two stages — it’s instantaneous! It’s all at once… ‘The way up is the same as the way down’, says Heraclitus, and the reason we don’t see this is precisely because we bring time into it, which separates the two complementary clockwise and anticlockwise movements and allows us to consider them as two entirely distinct events. The only reason we see ‘two steps forwards’ as a different thing from ‘two steps backwards’ is this little thing called time, therefore. Time – we might say – ‘separates stuff which isn’t really different’. Time is a straight line (a linear axis) that we can arrange events on so that they can be considered separately (even though this isn’t the case). To quote Wei Wu Wei –
All our actions are serial, all our thoughts are serial, all our functions function in seriality; we neither know nor do anything that is not subject to the sequence of time. Even God, although called ‘Eternal’, is seen as everlasting.
Time isn’t an actual thing, therefore – it is, as Alan Watts argues somewhere – a kind of linear simplification of the actual situation (which is where ‘everything happens at once’). This is the Pleroma, regarding which Jung says,
Everything is present, altogether and all at once, in the constant presence of the Pleroma.
On the one hand this is necessarily incomprehensible to us – we can’t in any way work with it and so we have to do is turn it into a linear sequence of events. We turn it into ‘cause and effect’, we turn it into ‘the mechanical working out of inviolate rules’. We stretch it out indefinitely so as to create the endless null chequerboard which is the Continuum of Logic. Wei Wu Wei speaks in terms of ‘horizontal versus vertical vision’, where the former is an abstract logical construct and the latter is the actual non-abstract reality. We could say that the ‘horizontal’ view is linear time (which has no actual content) whilst the ‘vertical’ is timelessness (which has, we might say, infinite content). On similar lines, Aldous Huxley refers to the apparent dichotomy of ‘Mind at Large’ (or ‘how things really are’) and ‘the Reducing Valve of the Mind’ (aka ‘the Filter’). This is a process of decomplexification, therefore. The information content of reality has been collapsed to produce a ‘virtual shell’, so to speak – an appearance and nothing more.
We could also think in terms of toothpaste being forced out of the tube, or in terms of a body of water being shunted down a narrow artificial channel. The reason this isn’t a real thing but only an abstraction is because narrowness (which is to say, compartmentalization) isn’t something that can be found in nature. Narrowness (or compartmentalization) isn’t a thing – that’s not how nature works at all. Nature doesn’t work the way the rational mind thinks it does – their is no aperture anywhere to squeeze the toothpaste out of, there’s no narrow channel for us to compel the water to flow down. Narrow apertures (or narrow channels) exist only in our rule-based way of understanding – we force reality to pretend to be something it isn’t, in other words. We put constraints upon that which can never be constrained. We divide what can never be divided…
‘Narrowness’ means rules – or as we might also say, it means boundaries – and there aren’t any rules for unconditioned / unformatted space. We can’t divide it up into mice, neat categories; we can’t wrap it up into standardized parcels with our arbitrary definitions or classifications. That’s what the word ‘unconditioned’ means, after all. Putting this the other way round, rules means that there is no space. Rules are the very antithesis of space – where there are rules then everything has to be exactly where the rules indicate, everything has to obey what they say, everything has to conform to the order that is randomly being imposed (and everything is random when it comes right down to it). Everything has been fixed, everything has been written down in stone, everything has been pinned down, and the result of this is ‘the world as we (falsely) understand it to be’. In the world as it is in itself however (before we impose our own ideas on it) there are no handles for us to conveniently grab hold of and for this reason we want nothing to do with it. We can’t process it, we can’t get our heads around it. We want everything on our own terms (even if our ‘own terms’ are complete and utter nonsense, even if our own terms are patently absurd).
What we’re talking about here is the situation where what is unconditioned becomes conditioned (or where what is unformatted becomes formatted) and the key point to note here is that the conditions which are being imposed are always propositional rather than actual. we could say that it is ‘artificial’ in nature – any form of partitioning has to be artificial. ‘Truth is whole, and cannot be broken into parts’, says Parmenides. We are in other words playing a game of ‘What if…?’ We’re asking the question – which can never be more than purely theoretical – “What would happen if certain conditions were introduced into the picture?” (‘IF’ of course being the key word here). The unmanipulated reality isn’t this way at all but that’s not the point. ‘How things really are’ isn’t the point because we’re concerning ourselves with the theoretical case rather than the actual. We’re being propositional, we’re conducting a thought experiment. This is what all games are all about of course – we put the game rules in place and then sit back to see what happens next. We set the conditions and then sit back to observe how it all goes. Basically, we ‘run the simulation’, but there’s more to it than this because once it starts up it’s not that we ‘run the simulation’ but that the simulation runs us. We don’t play the game, the game plays us…
Once we have been subsumed within the simulation that thought runs then we have no way of ever knowing what is true – truth becomes a ‘non-thing’ at this point. ‘Truth is that which lies in a dimension beyond the reach of thought,’ says Wei Wu Wei. Once we are ensconced within the framework of thought then we can only know what is conditionally true (which is to say, we can only find out what is ‘true in relation to the conditions that have been assumed’. The only way we can say anything at all is by comparing our observations with these conditions, with these fixed rules. The events that unfold for us have no meaning outside of the logical context that we have just assumed and this is just another way of saying that the logical context (the conditions) are the same thing as whatever happens in relation to these conditions. Whatever happens within the remit of that specific context is that context (whatever happens in the game is the game).
This comes across as a flatly incomprehensible statement to us however – it just doesn’t compute. The way it looks to us is that the game rules give rise to a bunch of possibilities that aren’t ‘merely meaningful within the game’, that aren’t ‘only relatively true’, but which stand up on their own two legs. We see it that the act of putting certain conditions in place and ‘what happens as a result of those conditions’ are two different things. Nothing makes any sense if this is the case size will be totally pointless. It’s not merely that the whole exercise is totally pointless but that the (‘so-called’) exercise is itself merely a hallucination. Nothing happened, but to itself (i.e., to ‘the thing that didn’t happen’) it absolutely did. What we’re dealing with here is a brand of virtual reality therefore – it functions (on one level) as reality but there’s nothing behind it. Thought creates a hollow world and this Hollow World is all we know…
Image credit – mrpilgrim.co.uk
