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N’Exist Pas

We tend to think that ‘not existing’ is (or would be) an extraordinarily bad thing and be very averse to the prospect on this account but this is only because of our limited way of seeing things! Actually, not existing is not such a bad thing at all – it has far more far more possibilities in it than we think it is does (and, contrariwise, ‘existing’ is a state that is far more impoverished in possibilities than we think it is). It could actually be said that we ‘have everything backwards’ in this regard, therefore.

 

 

Nothing exists really – or as we could also say, no-thing exists. It just so happens that, for purely practical reasons, we are tuned in to seeing the World of Things as the primary reality, whereas all tangible, measurable phenomena are merely ‘an offshoot’ of that primary reality, so to speak. ‘From the very beginning not a thing was’, says Bodhidharma, the father of Zen Buddhism, and this isn’t some sort of vague airy-fairy metaphysics – it’s a very blunt, no nonsense, and completely straightforward statement. There’s nothing fancy or highfalutin about it at all. ‘No thing exists’ – what’s fluffy about that?

 

 

We enter the World of Things (or the ‘Reified World’) by looking at everything in a particular ‘blinkered’ type of way. It’s as if we’re looking down a long cardboard tube so that all we can see is one circumscribed little spot bang-centre in in the foreground – everything else is invisible to us. We’re focusing exclusively on the foreground, which means that we don’t pay attention to the background at all. We’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. This is of course a very well-known (if not totally ubiquitous) trick – we can only see a defined figure as being a defined figure (or ‘a thing’) by attending to the region which lies within the boundary line that has been drawn on the page. We focus on what lies within on the inside of the boundary at the expense of what lies on the outside – our way of looking at things is uneven in other words, and it is this unevenness that creates the illusion of the figure having its own independent existence, the illusion of it ‘standing on its own two feet’.

 

 

This is a trick because in reality there is no difference between ‘what lies on the inside’ and ‘what lies on the outside’ of the boundary. As Alan watts says, ‘Your outline is the universe’s in-line’. We can arbitrarily create a division if we want to and we are also free to say that what lies to one side of the dividing line is not the same as what lies on the other, but that’s just our own way of looking at things. This lack of symmetry was created by ourselves as a result of what Carl Jung calls our ‘one-sidedness’. Reality itself is always symmetrical and saying that ‘reality is symmetrical’ is the same as saying that ‘nothing in particular stands out’. There is no positive emphasis on anything.

 

 

Saying that ‘nothing stands out in reality’ is in turn just another way of saying that ‘no thing exists in reality’ because when we talk about something existing what we mean is that this something is ‘standing out at the expensive of everything else’. It is because it is ‘standing out’ in this way that we know it to exist. If it didn’t show itself in a positively emphasized way then we would simply have no way of knowing about it. We’d have no way of knowing about it but that wouldn’t actually prove or disprove anything. Reality doesn’t have to prove itself. It doesn’t have to show itself to us in order to be real, after all – that would be ridiculous. We need to get over ourselves if that’s what we think!

 

 

When we say or assume that some aspect or other of reality has to ‘show itself to us’ (or ‘prove itself to us’) in order for us to see it as existing what we’re doing here is that we are making ourselves (or our own POV) central – we’re making our own way of looking at things (whatever that might happen to be) into ‘the only valid yardstick or standard’, which is of course a deeply suspect thing to do. That’s always going to give us the result we want, after all. This is – not to put too fine a point on it – what we call ‘being subjective’. When we don’t see ‘taking our own POV as being unquestionably valid’ as being ‘a suspicious action’ then we don’t see the dubiousness of what we’re doing and when we don’t see the dubiousness of what we’re doing our subjective perceptions become real to us. They’re not real of course; these subjective impressions of ours are merely the reflection of the viewpoint which we have arbitrarily assumed – assumed and then forgotten about.

 

 

It is the act by which we have to forget that our viewpoint is arbitrarily chosen that creates the World of Positive or Reified Existence. Forgetting can’t create anything real however – forgetting can only create ‘the false appearance of something’ and it is these false appearances that we see as possessing ‘genuine existence’. ‘Only definite things exist,’ we say, and yet defined things are only defined things because we impose our arbitrary definitions on them. They aren’t defined of their own accord, after all! The Defined World is ‘a reflection of our own assumed position’ (and nothing more) and our own assumed position isn’t real. Assumptions aren’t real – they’re just assumptions, which is something we need to remind ourselves about.

 

 

If we were interested in seeing things clearly then we would of course drop our assumptions – we would drop the blinkers which are hemming our vision in. What we’d see then is that there are no things, just as Bodhidharma has said – there are no defined things that are standing out by themselves but this doesn’t mean that there is no reality – it just means that there is no positively-defined reality. Positive Reality is – as we have just said – only a reflection of our ‘unreal vantage point’. This is – needless to say – why we are so very keen to see the World of Defined Things as being the only reality there is – because we want (or need) to see our viewpoint as being the only VP there is. Even though we don’t recognise it as such, this is always going to be our ultimate agenda – to validate our chosen viewpoint as being the only true one, the only one that is worthy of being given any credence. We’re dedicated to our one-sidedness, in other words.

 

 

The ‘asymmetrical situation’ of ‘this is the only true viewpoint’ is very important to us (and that’s putting it mildly) because it’s the same thing as the asymmetrical situation of the ego-identity – which is ‘the-bias-that-is-me’. The thing about ‘the-bias-that-is-me’ (or ‘the-one-sidedness-that-is-me’) is that it is only a bias, obviously enough, and biases aren’t real. There’s no such thing as ‘a true bias’ because all biases are arbitrary; there isn’t any such thing as ‘a true bias’ any more than they can be such a thing as ‘a true prejudice’. For a bias to seem real to us we have to forget that – actually – it isn’t. For one-sidedness to seem real to us we have to pretend that one side of the <self / other boundary> is actually different to the other side. What lies on the outside of the boundary is exactly the same as what lies on the inside (as we have said) but we are obliged to ignore this fact if we are to continue to play this game, which is ‘the Game of Duality’.

 

 

What we call ‘existing’ is therefore not at all what we think it is. The things we are relating to only exist in relation to a viewpoint which is arbitrary, a viewpoint which is in itself not real. There is such a thing as ‘the Reified World’, we might therefore say, but it only exists in relation to this arbitrary or unreal viewpoint. For this viewpoint (or rather for us when we are identified with the VP) the ‘universe of definitely existing things’ is there one true reality and there isn’t any other. There is only the world that is made up of ‘definitely existing things’ and the one who is relating to (or interacting with) this world (and who – when it comes down to it – also a definite thing since there aren’t any other possibilities in this type of a world) is also a definite thing. I am ‘a thing lost in a world of things’, as Colin Wilson says, and so my true nature has been lost.

 

 

‘This is reality’, we unanimously say – ‘this is all that there is’. There is just ‘things’ and nothing else but things, and that is all there ever could be. There is only the state of reified existence and this is what’s real. Anything else is ‘airy-fairy’ and we won’t give it the time of day. And yet there is nothing so very great about existence, as we started off by saying. It’s an impoverished state, it’s a type of reality (or apparent reality) that has zero information in it, zero ‘surprise factor’, as we might also say. This apparent reality (however sure and certain it might come across as being) has nothing in it, no actual content. It has no actual content because there is no difference between ‘what we see’ and ‘the assumptions that we have made in order to be able to see it’! The Definite World is a straight reflection of our assumptions (or our ‘presuppositions’) in other words, and this means that there is no space or no gap for reality itself to get in. ‘Reality itself’ isn’t made up of definite things, after all…

 

 

 

 

 

Art – wall.alphacoders.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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