The rational identity assumes a framework (a context) and then it makes tautologically true statements within this framework. It conceives, and then enacts, tautological actions. Any action that the rational identity takes within this defined context is always going to be tautological, it can’t not be since it is operating within a domain which it itself has chosen to be true. And not only this but it is also the case that the RI cannot operate anywhere else but from within ‘a context of the framework of meaning that it itself has assumed’. There is no other way for it to come into being.
There is no rational identity outside of the closed context of meaning that it itself has assumed. It’s not hard to see why this is so once we understand or gain insight into the fact that the sense of concrete identity which we either enjoy (or suffer from) on a daily basis is a secondary phenomenon, the product of the thinking process and not the source of it. ‘There is no thinker outside the thought’, says Krishnamurti. If we weren’t able to objectify the self in this way – which is to say, if we weren’t able to make ‘who we supposedly are’ into the circumscribed object of our own cognition – then there simply wouldn’t be a conditioned self or identity. ‘Who we are’ would prove to be infinitely elusive and we would no longer be able to glibly say who we are, and trade upon this secure (if deeply superficial) basis.
Instead of saying that there is an identity outside of the framework of meaning that we are acting out of, we could just say that our identity is the assumed framework and that this is a very interesting observation because it violates the conditions that are needed in order for the self to genuinely ‘be the self’. The absolutist statement ‘I am this specified identity’ is very different from the relativistic statement ‘I can feel that I am this self, this identity, if I choose to look at things in the type of a way that gives rise to this conditioned perception’. If I can choose to perceive that I am this self, then clearly I am not this self and so this awareness – the awareness that an act of choice was involved – gives the lie to the whole proposition, If such and such a situation can be true only if I choose for it to be so means that it isn’t true at all.
Everything the conditioned self does is redundant, without exception. Everything the conditioned self does, and takes meaning from, is false – it’s false because the viewpoint that we’re orientating ourselves around implicitly claims to be the only true or legitimate basis when it isn’t. It has no special status whatsoever and this is why all statements it makes, without exception, are always going to be empty. This is a lot to take on board – it’s a lot to take on board given that when we are in the identified state of being then the viewpoint of the CS is the only one we can know about, and that when we’re operating out of this viewpoint then we are necessarily incapable of seeing that what is being done (or said) is at all times entirely redundant. Our seeing is all done on the basis of one-sidedness, which means that whilst whatever it is that’s going on in relation to our chosen viewpoint is always going to be ‘a play in two acts’, all we can ever know is the first act, the first half of the show. The second act of this show is the ‘reset’ (or ‘return’), which is where everything gets set back to zero again, and because of our one-sided outlook on things we have no awareness of there being a ‘second act’, and so instead of a circle we see a straight line.
When we’re seeing our trajectory as a straight line then what this means is that the only thing that matters is ‘going in the right direction rather than going in the wrong one’. What direction we’re moving in is of absolutely crucial importance; the only other significant consideration is how fast we’re moving – the faster the better, obviously, since the faster we are the less waiting around we’re going to have to do. If – on the other hand – we were able to see that all we’re doing is looping then the concept of ‘making the right choice’ (or ‘heading in the right direction’) the concept would have to be dropped (it would have to be dropped on account of it being entirely meaningless). If whatever we’re doing always leads to the very same result (no matter whether it’s the right choice or the wrong choice) then obviously there is no such thing as ‘the right direction’, no such thing as ‘the right choice’. In the formal realm that has been created by thought we are tormented by the idea that there is such a thing as ‘the right choice to make’, if only we were smart enough to know what it is (hence our perennial dread of making a ‘poor life-decision’ and having to live with the result of it for the rest of our lives).
This is what anxiety comes down to – ‘the fear of making the wrong decision’ (or as we could also say, ‘the fear of not knowing what the right decision is but being sure that there is one’). Anxiety is a feature of the Formal Realm of Thought, therefore – it comes about because: [1] We are convinced that there is such a thing as ‘the right choice to make’ and [2] We are convinced that it is critically important that we make the right not the wrong choice. This is perfectly true in relation to the ‘formal realm’ or ‘game’ in question, but the important thing to remember here is that the formal realm is only a made-up kind of a thing, which is to say, it only seems real to us because we have agreed for it to. Even though we are in this highly pressurised – which is to say, coercive – situation, there is no coercion outside of our up-tight thinking on the subject; the ‘pressure’ is only there because of our unconsciousness, it’s only there because we have bought into a very narrow way of seeing the world without knowing that we have. We have happily handed ourselves over to this all-consuming field of coerciveness as if to say (gimp-fashion) – “Do with me what you will – I am your plaything, your slave, your grovelling servant…”
This is a type of situation that we rarely if ever give any thought to – we are generally able to spot and identify controlling behaviour in another person when we come across it and we have no problem realizing that this is psychological/emotional abuse, but the idea of being 100% controlled, controlled in every possible way, isn’t an idea we have any familiarity with. What this means is that we’re not just being controlled ‘by’ the system, we are that system! We’re not merely the ‘slaves’ of the machine, we are the machine’s output. We are in this case (when we’re in ‘the passively identified state of being’) constructs of the machine. When we get subsumed within the all-consuming Continuum of Thought (which is the danger very few of us are smart enough to be afraid of) then this is our grim fate – every single thing about us gets to be under external control (and this means that there is nothing left that is actually ‘us’, there’s nothing left of us since our nature is inseparable from freedom). The System of Thought is pretending to be us, and it’s pretending so cleverly, so effectively, that we are all totally taken in by it. We fall for thought’s clever ruse ‘hook, line and sinker,’ and we fall for it every time…
This situation – the situation where we unreflectively identify with the image or concept that is being pushed upon us by the machinery of thought is – we might say – the photographic reverse of who (or what) we would otherwise be. Just as the devil is said to ape God by putting forward grotesquely degraded representations of what He (God) has created, in order to mock or taunt the Creator, so too does the thinking mind mock us by getting us to identify with its tawdry productions, and when we fall for this trick – believing ourselves to be every bit as petty as it tells us we are – then we become the joke. The joke is us, in this case, as we parade ourselves around thinking that we are the ‘bee’s knees’, thinking that we are ‘proud autonomous beings’, thinking that we’re ‘bosses’, thinking that ‘we are what is all about’. By spending all our time protecting and promoting who thought tells us we are (which society assures us is the right and healthy thing to do) we neglect and deny who we really are. It’s the very same action – to worship the false is to deny the truth.
In order to be able to continue believing what thought is telling us (i.e., in order for us to be able to not just to be content with who thought tells us we are but be proud of it, and viciously critical of anyone who might not be as loyal to the image as we are) all we have to do is one simple thing, and this one simple thing is to ‘never question ourselves’, to ‘never question our ideas either about who we are, or about the world around us’. Just as long as we observe this very straightforward principle, there’s nothing to stop us playing our game for ever. We can continue to unquestioningly believe that ‘we are what we’re not and never could be’. The lights have gone green – we’ve been given the official ‘go-ahead’ and this means that we are absolved from all our angst, absolved from all our existential anguish, absolved from having to bother our heads with ‘the bigger picture’. A ‘man of bronze’ has told us who we are. This is a rather extraordinary situation however – we’ve been given the green light (the ‘licence’) to run with the narrative as if it wasn’t a narrative, as if it were true but what will come of this? What’s the outcome going to be? We have been given official permission to live our lives on the extremely limited basis that we started off from as if it were both ‘not limited’, and ‘perfectly legitimate in its own right’, but this ‘permission’ – official as it might be – doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s merely a ‘licence to pretend’.
The fiction is therefore allowed to run freely, without any abstractions, without any mention ever being of it being only a fiction. We are being humoured, in other words; we are humouring ourselves by telling ourselves what we want to hear, we’re humouring ourselves via the very simple and straightforward device of ‘making sure that we never question our thoughts, opinions and beliefs’. Or to put this another way, the game in question is facilitated by replacing novelty (N-Type information) with a regime of pure undiluted confirmation, the only information we’re ever going to come in contact with therefore is C-Type information (which isn’t information at all but our own expectations reflected back at us, as if it were an ‘independent output’, as if it were ‘honest feedback from the universe’ (rather than our own biases sneakily reflected back at us). By replacing novelty with confirmation what we want to be true gets to seem as if it really were true and – not only this – what we (unconsciously) assume to be true gets represented to us in a way that we are flatly incapable of questioning.
This is the Virtual Compulsive Environment – what isn’t real not only gets to seem real but it’s also the case that we are obliged to take it as being so, whether we want to or not. What we assume to be true (without knowing that we have assumed anything) straightaway becomes true for us – it becomes true without the slightest effort being needed on our part. Nothing could be easier than self-validation! This is the Mechanism of Unconsciousness – this is ‘the mechanism of automatic self-validation’, which the mechanism by which we get to perceive our ideas as being real. This isn’t the ‘good news’ that it might initially seem to be, however; the ‘automatic-validation trick’ isn’t as great as it might – on the face of it – sound because (as it is said) if anything can be true then nothing is…
Image credit – katholisches.info
