The movement towards equilibrium is not movement at all – it is ‘movement towards non-movement’. The movement towards the equilibrium state is a ‘hastening towards the state of staying still’. Equilibrium-seeking activity is activity that appears to be meaningful inasmuch as the state that is being aimed at is falsely represented as being something other than it is. We could therefore say that E-seeking activity is meaningless, but that its lack of meaning is disguised or covered up so effectively by the system of thought that it seems to be the most meaningful thing ever – so compellingly meaningful in fact that nothing else matters, nothing else comes into it. Every time we take a concrete goal seriously, every time we take a literal signifier (i.e. a thought) at face value, we are falling for the ‘cover-story’ that is being perpetrated by the system of thought. No matter what we imagine we might be doing, in reality we are falling into an equilibrium state. In reality we are falling down a hole.
The whole thing about the movement towards an equilibrium state is that it doesn’t matter where you came from, but only where you’re going. The goal is what is important, not where you’re starting out from, as Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers say in Order Out of Chaos. Information regarding where you started out from can be discarded because it’s irrelevant, because it is nothing more than ‘error’ – the only thing that isn’t ‘error’ is information relating to the final all-important goal, and how to get there. That’s what we concerned about – anything is just doesn’t matter, anything else is just rubbish to be discarded. Everything is about the final goal; from the point of view of equilibrium thinking the ‘importance’ of data is decided purely on the basis of whether whatever it is we are looking at in relation to the task of achieving the goal. This is what makes it – in our eyes – ‘information’. If what we come across has nothing to contribute in this regard (if it has no bearing on the task) then as far as we are concerned it isn’t information – it isn’t anything at all and so we don’t even notice it. So actually we could say that from the POV of E-thinking the goal is information, and all else (anything not connected one way or another with the final goal) is non-information destined to be jettisoned or dumped.
This however represents a complete inversion of the truth – in simpler language, it’s a lie! The reason we can say that the statement ‘the goal equals information’ is an inversion of the truth’ (or lie) is because a goal can never be information, by virtue of its inherent redundancy. A goal – because it is an equilibrium state – is the very antithesis of information. Information is what we don’t know, it is what we don’t expect whilst a goal (by definition) is what we do know and what we do expect. What sort of thing would ‘an unexpected goal’ be, after all? The whole point of a goal is that it is an outcome that doesn’t surprise us – if we were surprised then this of course means that the outcome that we have ended up with isn’t what we has planned it to be. In goal-orientated language, this type of thing is called failing – it’s what we don’t want to happen. To the goal-orientated mind ‘being surprised’ (of course) equals failing to obtain the goal…
If something comes as a surprise then this means that it is information, and if I am surprised then this means that I haven’t achieved my goal. A goal – therefore – equals ‘non-information’ rather than information. It equals the confirmation of my starting-off point, which equals my desire to obtain the goal, my intention to obtain the goal, my plan to achieve the goal. So when we say (as we do when we are utilizing E-thinking) that the goal is information, and everything else is non-information, then we have turned everything on its head. We have perpetrated an inversion and then we have got caught up in this inversion, just as a man digging a deep hole in the dark could very easily lose his footing and fall into that hole. Falling into a deep hole is as everyone knows an ‘irreversible’ kind of thing in that it is very easy indeed to fall down but (when the sides are sheer) but impossible to climb out of again. In the same way getting caught up in an inversion of the truth is irreversible since because the inverted way of seeing things now seems like ‘the right way’ (or ‘the only way’) all our efforts to escape (or do anything, in fact) are only going to embroil us deeper in the illusion!
When we say that the goal is what matters and everything else is ‘non-information’ (or ‘error’) then we are caught in our own inverted way of seeing things. ‘Error’ means that we are not interested. If the information we have is ‘error’ then it actually isn’t information – its rubbish, its nonsense, it’s something to be thrown away like mouldy potato peelings or used tea-bags. ‘Error’ tells us nothing – it’s not worth giving any time to. So the way it works when we are fixated upon the goal is that everything that has nothing to do with our destination is error. We’re not only ‘uninterested’, we’re oblivious. We can’t discard it quickly enough and we discard it without giving it any attention at all. Our starting-off point (which random, unplanned and therefore ‘unique’) is regarded as being of no interest at all – only where we’re going is interesting, only where we’re going is worth giving attention to. ‘Where we are’ is of value only in that it represents a stepping stone to ‘where we want to be’. It’s a means to an end. The present is therefore seen in terms of the projected future, which means as we have been saying that anything about the present (where we are) that is not connected to this projected value is invisible to us, inaccessible to us. All real information is lost, in other words…
The process that we are looking at here is thus the process in which the unique is converted into the regular. All uniqueness (all unpredictable or unaccountable variation) is ironed out – uniqueness only exists in order to be converted into regularity, it has no other value. Uniqueness is of course another way of talking about information, which means that information is everything that is not connected with the projected goal state. We could also say therefore that ‘the present moment’ is information – ‘where we actually are’ is information – and this means that when the present is seen in terms of the projected future then information is lost; because of our fixation on goals information is converted into redundancy, which is ‘the absence of information that we can’t see to be such’. So when we are pulled hypnotically towards the equilibrium state everything gets turned on its head – information appears like non-information and non-information appears like information. The real appears unreal and the unreal appears real. As a result of this inversion the present moment (the way things actually are) is written off as ‘error’ (as being ‘valueless’) and the projected future – which is the E-state which we celebrate so much – doesn’t even exist. It’s an absence disguised as a presence that has drawn us into its dark spell. It’s a greedy all-devouring super-hollow abstraction that demands our worship…
Moving towards equilibrium means shedding information therefore – we shed information as we would shed something that is of no value whatsoever. We hasten towards the ‘glory of successfully obtaining the goal’ and as we do so we are shedding information, shedding information, shedding information… We are like a comet losing its substance in its fiery tail as it enters the dense atmosphere of a heavy planet. By the time the comet actually reaches the surface of the planet, there’s nothing left of it! The equilibrium state is then when all information is lost. It is the death of information, the graveyard of information. We could say that the E-state towards which we hasten to so heedlessly, so fervently, is a Great Forgetting since the price we pay for getting there is that we throw away all this information about who we are and what we are, in return for some phantasmagorical prize, a prize which is no more than a maddening mirage. We forget everything, and we get nothing in return, only the ‘samsaric gift’ of being able to believe – at the drop of a hat, as it were – that any sort of an old half-baked illusion at all is real and substantial and can, on this account, be a source of genuine and lasting comfort to us…
The movement towards equilibrium is as we keep on emphasizing an irreversible process. As Virgil says in the often quoted lines from the Aeneid:
Easy is the descent to Avernus, for the door to the underworld lies open both day and night. But to retrace your steps and return to the breezes above– that’s the task, that’s the toil.
There is no problem finding our way to the Equilibrium state. We can get there alright but once we do get there we lose all sight of the way back. We forget that there is a way back. We forget everything apart from the hollow illusion realm that we inhabit. The E-state is the state that we get to by giving away all our possibilities, and at the same time ‘giving away any possibility of knowing that we have given away all our possibilities’. We give away all our possibilities and at the same time that we do this we instantly forget that we have given anything away. Remembering is no longer a possibility for us when we are in the E-state. The E-state consists of only one possibility – the designated possibility, the officially authorized possibility, and the ‘designated or authorized possibility’ gets to be so only by denying anything that isn’t it. The ‘one possibility’ does not acknowledge itself to be ‘one possibility amongst others’ but rather it asserts itself to be ‘all that there is’ – it implicitly asserts itself to be the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. It promotes itself as the supreme measure of all things. And yet the E-state isn’t anything really – it is neither the beginning nor the end. It is devoid of all reality – it is ‘all appearance and no content’, it is ‘all outside and no inside’. It’s an advert, it’s a photo-shopped image in a glossy brochure!
So on the outside the E-state looks great (like the photo-shopped image looks great) but also like the photo-shopped image it doesn’t actually relate to anything in the real world. It has an outside alright but it doesn’t have an inside – it’s ‘all surfaces’, as Chogyam Trungpa says somewhere in his description of samsara. It’s all sign-posts. So we can run at the glossy image as fast as we can, as greedily as we can, but we’ll pass straight through it – it’s not actually a genuine destination, although it very persuasively portrays itself as such. You can’t actually get there because there’s nowhere to go; you can head towards it alright but that’s it – there’s no genuine arriving. The image is a two-dimensional surface that we can never actually get to since it represents no more than our own desire (or fear) reflected back at us. We’re caught in a loop because we’re reacting to our own projections as if they were something outside of ourselves. As Alan Watts says, we’re like a puppy frantically chasing its own tail (only we’re not having as much fun….
The E-state itself is not the image however – the image is simply what the E-state looks like when we are approaching it, when we are hypnotized by it, when we are being drawn into its gravitational field. There are lots of examples we could use to illustrate this idea. A particularly good one is when what happens if we are unlucky enough (or lucky enough, depending on how much we learn from it!) to get trapped in an abusive relationship. Being sucked into an equilibrium state is exactly as if we are being tricked or seduced into a relationship with a person who has a great persona, a great way of portraying or projecting themselves, but who actually is – when we get to know them – entirely cold and exploitative and as such entirely devoid of any redeeming characteristic whatsoever! Such a person will come across very well (superlatively well, in fact) just so long as we aren’t in an intimate relationship with them. Once we are however then we discover very quickly that they aren’t at all the person we thought they were. Actually – not to put too fine a point on it – we discover that they aren’t ‘a person’ at all (at least not in the generally accepted sense of the word)! That was just their disguise, that was just a clever act they put on – a clever fabrication on their part. Actually – we could say – they are just a sort of psychic ‘black hole’. They take and take but can never give. They only give to get something back, which isn’t giving at all! They are only ever ‘reeling us in’. In an exactly analogous fashion, the E-State to which we are drawn looks like something it isn’t and it promises us something it will never give us. Once we end up in its power (having fallen for the bait) it will crush the life of us – it will control us entirely (which comes down to the same thing as ‘crushing the life out of us’). Equilibrium states are always like this – there is no other way for them to be. They are as mean as ditch-water and yet they claim to be the soul of generosity; they let on that they have something to give but all they can do is subtract.
Our goals represent something impossible for us, only we can’t see that it is impossible. When we strive to obtain some over-valued goal we are not striving for anything real, we are simply striving to escape our own pain (the pain of our existence as a conditioned being) – and this is not an outcome that exists in the real world. It’s pure projection on our part! When we are being drawn towards an E-state this state represents for us that sense of finality for us – finality in a good sense, finality in the sense of ‘finally getting there’ (wherever ‘there’ might be). It is the motivation to find this longed-for release (when all problems will at last be solved) that fuels our struggle to achieve equilibrium but as we have been saying when we get there we discover that where we have got to is not what we were imagining it to be, not by a long chalk. The E-state is ‘final’, but not in a good way, not in the sense we were imagining it would be. It’s ‘final’ because once having ‘got into it’ we find that we can’t get out again (just as is generally the case with all abusive relationships). The equilibrium state is not the longed-for solution to all our problems at all, it’s the unholy author of them!
Having said all this we must back-track somewhat to acknowledge that this is not necessarily what we do discover, for the simple reason that we may not wish to entertain this unpleasant insight and would rather avoid it by validating the equilibrium state that we are stuck in – which is to say, by ‘making excuses for it’. The E-State is as we have said ‘a terminal destination’ – it is the ‘end of the road’, the ultimate ‘cul-de-sac’. It’s really nothing more than getting very badly stuck indeed. It is when we get terminally stuck. We thought we were getting somewhere when we reached our longed for goal – we thought everything was going to change in a very good way but that didn’t prove to be the case. It isn’t a bed of roses at all but a bed of particularly vicious thorns. As such, the E-State might be said to be ‘the ultimate let-down’, the ultimate disappointment. It’s actually as tedious as hell and actively unpleasant into the bargain. But rather than allowing ourselves to see this we will in all probability ‘turn the vice into a virtue’ and say that the terrible sterility of the equilibrium state is in fact a good thing – not just a good thing but a fantastically wonderful thing! We may choose to sing hymns of praise to it. So we will say that the E-State is ‘the right place to be’ – the only true and valid state of being, and so on. This is after all what the E-state does in order to make itself the E-State – it promotes itself and at the same time it writes off all other possibilities as being ‘errors’, as being heretical. When we get subsumed by the equilibrium state we become that E-State and so of course this is what we do – of course we claim it to be the only true way to be. Of course we condemn and vilify everything else as being ‘wrong’. Robert Anton Wilson (in Reality is What You Can Get Away With) tells the story of the bad fiddler who used to torment the life out of his wife by playing the same note over and over again, ad infinitum. Despairing, she asks her husband why he can’t play other notes, or even play the odd tune or two, as other fiddlers do. “Those other guys are still looking for the right note,” he replies scornfully, “I’ve found it…”
Another way of looking at how the E-State keeps us stuck in it is to say that it does not reveal itself for what it is when we are in it (since we no longer have the perspective any more to see what it is) but the stark unmitigated impoverishment of this mode of being (or rather ‘pseudo-being’) manifests itself via innumerable highly attractive goal-states that keep popping up for us everywhere. The basic impoverishment of the E-State reveals itself deceptively, in other words, in terms of brightly-coloured promises and what these promises are offering us is the blessed remediation of our impoverishment. It is as if I am dying of thirst in the desert and I am offered a glass of cold spring-water, only in this case I have no direct perception of my own lack (my dehydrated state, so to speak) – the only perception I have of my own inner impoverishment is via the seductiveness of the images that are being shown to me. When enslaved (or ‘possessed’) by the nullity which is the E-State I have no interiority left to me and so I simply have no way of seeing my own inner desert – instead, everything is perceived in the form of exteriorized images, either attractive or aversive in character. My whole life exists ‘on the outside’, in terms of the exteriorized images, which means therefore that I am living my life on an entirely false basis. My ‘interiority’ is who I am, and so when this is lost – and all I have in place of it are sterile external dramas – I’m not actually living my life at all. I’m simply a ‘puppet of the nullity’ – or we could say that I am simply the way that the nullity has of distracting itself from seeing itself.
The thing about the equilibrium state therefore is that whilst it looks great from the outside what we are chasing after when we go hell-for-leather for the goal, when we fixated for all we’re worth on the terminal destination, is a state of perfect informational vacuity. What we are trying to accomplish after all is that state of affairs in which [Actual] equals [Expected] and this is another way of talking about the state of zero information. Zero information means that there’s no possibility of getting anywhere – without information there is no change, there’s no ‘moving on’. There is no possibility other than the one we’re stuck in and the one we’re stuck in isn’t really a possibility at all when it comes down to it. It’s a ‘virtual possibility’; it’s the over-valued idea of a possibility; it’s the ‘image’ or ‘picture’ of a possibility. It’s a token of something, but not the actual thing. It’s an exercise in ‘empty tokenization’, therefore. When we’re stuck in the equilibrium state therefore this really isn’t a healthy situation at all – it would be completely unbearable if it wasn’t for the fact that we keep falling for the compelling illusions that the equilibrium world keeps generating for us. To exist in this ‘unreal way’ would in other words be a completely impossible thing if it were not for the fact that we keep on placing value on the ‘empty tokens’ that are all we have to keep going with. We keep on putting our money on them; we keep on buying into them. We keep on ‘playing the bum note’ on our violin string over and over again, whilst imagining the whole time that we’re knocking on heaven’s door, waiting for the pearly gates to swing open and admit us…
Yet another way we could have of talking about this situation (where we are impoverished but do not know it, and distract ourselves by chasing after the exteriorized ‘inverted signifiers’ of our own inner vacancy) is to say that the state of perfect vacancy (or nullity) manifests itself deceptively in terms of paired opposites, so that there appears to be ‘something to be gained’ and ‘something to be lost’. Rather than seeing the sterility or ‘blankness’ of the equilibrium state (which is as we have been saying a state characterized by its profound lack of any actual information content) we see the constant bubbling up of wonderfully attractive appearances – appearances that exist on the outside of us. If the vacuity were to be perfectly honest about itself (if we may be forgiven for speaking so anthropomorphically of it) then it would come clean and show itself in its true colours as a vacuity, as a mere theatrical pretence at content. It would declare itself (we might say) as being a ‘null set’ – as being ‘a set with nothing in it’. But it doesn’t do this – rather than being absolutely frank and honest about itself the vacuity resorts to what we might call ‘a cheap trick’ – it manifests itself in terms of pairs of opposites, pairs of opposites that seem to have a separate existence from each other. Or we could say that it manifests itself in terms of an ongoing vibration between a negative and positive pole – a basic ‘back-and-forth’ repeating action. The vacuity shows itself in disguised form therefore – it shows itself in the form of a vibration or oscillation. Really, the vibration is the very same thing as the vacuity because every movement is unfailingly cancelled out by the subsequently occurring counter-movement – added together, the peaks and troughs of a vibration will – of course – cancel themselves out. It seems – if we take a small enough scale of reference – that something has happened, but when we take a broader view we see that actually nothing has happened.
The reason the vibration gets to look like it isn’t ‘a perfectly self-cancelling event’ is because we don’t add up all the peaks and troughs. We don’t see it all in the one go, all in the same sweep, but rather we see it piecemeal – we see the vibration in ‘serial’ fashion, first the crest and then the succeeding trough, and so on and so forth. As we have said, we see each opposite as being separate from (or independent of) the other and this fundamental delusion creates the possibility of playing a game – it creates the possibility of playing what Alan Watts (in The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are) calls ‘the game of black versus white’:
Again, this is a problem which comes from asking the wrong question. Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees the head, and a little later the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable. Yet again, the cat turns round, and he witnesses the same regular sequence: first the head, and later the tail. Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause of the event tail, which is the head’s effect. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes from his failure to see that head and tail go together; they are all one cat.
The cat wasn’t born as a head which, sometime later, caused a tail; it was born all of a piece, a head-tailed cat. Our observer’s trouble was that he was watching it through a narrow slit, and couldn’t see the whole cat at once.
Not only is it possible for us to play this game, to distract ourselves with this game, we are compelled to play it. We are so very thoroughly and so very effectively compelled to play it that we don’t even know that there is any alternative. This is a game that we can’t avoid playing – it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that we are going to get totally sucked up in it, lost in it so profoundly that our chances of escaping it are virtually zero. Every last bit of our available energy goes into this business of frantically striving for one opposite and throwing away the other, of frenziedly pursuing winning and shunning losing. This is an intoxicating kind of a business, a maddening kind of a business – it drives out all of our sense, all of our actual sanity. This frenzy is what the Buddha has called “licking honey from razor blades” – it’s like a kind of addictive self-harming that we just can’t tear ourselves away from…
So when we talk about being sucked up into the ‘black hole’ which is the equilibrium state (and getting stuck in it) this is what we mean. It’s not that we just sit there slap-bang in the middle of the equilibrium world, staring out at the terrible blankness of it all, wishing we weren’t trapped in it – it’s not like that at all. That would imply that we had some insight and we don’t. We don’t have any insight. From the point of view of the E-State – which is the only point of view we have access to – there’s a lot going on and there are a lot of exciting possibilities open to us. From this point of view the equilibrium world is a busy, busy place – it’s fizzing away like a big mass of wet sherbet, it all seems to be happening here and if it isn’t happening here then it’s simply not worth bothering about! It’s all happening in the equilibrium state and yet nothing’s happening – it might look like there’s a party going on but really what we’re looking at is a tomb. The party is a simulation. We might look (when we’re in the E-state) as if we’re alive, but really we’re dead. As the line goes in Revelation 3:1: “Thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”
All of the apparently diverse activity comes down to back-and-forth vibrations of one sort or another and it is because our attention is wholly absorbed in these vibrations that we are unable to see the true (‘tomb-like’) nature of the equilibrium state. It is because our attention is caught up in this mechanical reverberation-type activity (as if it were the only thing that matters, as if it were somehow going to lead us to deliverance) that keeps us from seeing the vacuity for what it is, and which prevents us from seeing therefore that we are ‘going nowhere fast’. If we didn’t preoccupy ourselves with this ‘chasing our own tails’ business (pretending that the head of the cat and its tail are two different things) then we would see the vacuity as a vacuity – as the absence of what it pretends to be. This is like being brave enough to see a prison as a prison, or a barren wasteland as a barren wasteland. And yet this isn’t the full story either – after all, the absence of an illusion is an illusion just as much as the original illusion was! The absence of what we thought was there (the samsaric fairground, the simulation) isn’t actually ‘an absence’ at all because what we thought was there never actually was there in the first place!
Even though we have been saying that the equilibrium state equals ‘the absence of information’ there actually isn’t any such thing as ‘an absence of information’ because information is all that there is. Or to put this another way, there’s no such thing as ‘unreality’ because if it’s unreal then it just isn’t there! So when we look at the E-state full on, facing it squarely without fear and not getting hypnotized by its tricks, the first thing is that we see it for what it is (i.e. a vacuity, or nullity), but then the second thing we see is that there’s no such thing as a vacuity because ‘the vacuity’ (or the ‘nullity’) was only ever a ‘side-effect’ of us taking the samsaric playground seriously. If I focus narrowly on the illusion show then I have created by my focussing a blind-spot, but this blind-spot is no more real than the illusion-show is. The appalling sterility of the equilibrium world is a function of the fact that I never see this world for what it is – the more I invest in distracting myself from seeing the truth the more painful the backlash is when I can distract myself no longer and the fearful spectacle of the nullity is simply the ‘back-lash’ that I have been saving up for myself all this time. Its’ like a coiled spring that I have been pressing down on. The reason we find ourselves so averse to seeing the equilibrium world for what it is therefore is not because it is a terrible thing in itself, but because we have invested so much in the equilibrium world not being the equilibrium world. We have put so much stuff in the bucket that we really can’t bear to see that the bucket has a great big hole in it. We’d rather carrying making out that it hasn’t got a gaping great hole at the bottom of it – we’d rather carry on imagining that our efforts in the E-world really can ‘come to something’ in the end, and the more time we spend in denial of the fact that these efforts are forever wasted (like water thrown in the desert is wasted) because all mechanical activity is self-cancelling, the harder it is to find the moral integrity to look at our situation in an honest way.
What we’re saying here is there’s nothing really so bad about the unreal world because the unreal world doesn’t exist in the first place. What is painful is to see how much of what is precious to us we have sacrificed on the altar of this unreal world, in the hope of getting something back. What is painful is to see that we have traded our soul for ‘a mess of pottage’. The unreal world is as we have said created by pretending that black and white are separate things, by playing the game that one opposite can be separated from the other. When the opposites are brought together as one however the result isn’t merely ‘the end of an illusion’ but the discovery of the unconditioned reality which this game was concealing. As the second line in the text of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes says (from Georgio Beato, Aurelium Occultae Philosophorum) –
What is above is like what is below, and what is below is like what is above. To make the miracle of the one thing.
Similarly, in Verse 22 in the Gospel of Thomas, we read,
Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, “These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.”
They said to him, “Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?”
Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the kingdom.”
According to Jung, the journey of individuation is synonymous with the union of opposites – the more ambiguity and paradox we can tolerate the more we come back to ourselves as the true ‘rounded’ individual we are. As Jerry Gifford, in his website Myths-Dreams-Symbols, says:
Jung used the term individuation to describe the inborn desire to integrate oppositional dynamics within the personality, and this universal psychological process is represented in various mythologies throughout the world, e.g. “the hero’s journey”, “the alchemical wedding”, etc.
The more ‘one-sided’ we are therefore the more we are puppets to mere mechanical impulses – we might be full of energy and drive and goals and plans but it’s all meaningless! It’s all ‘activity for the sake of activity’ or ‘business for the sake of staying busy’. We are merely being possessed by mechanical energy, and being thus possessed precludes any possibility of ‘coming back to ourselves’ and remembering who we are. Wholeness is denied us. The more we simplify the world into black and white (logical) terms the more mechanical we become and the more mechanical we become the more driven we become. And what is driving us is the vibratory back-and-forth movement of the ‘definite logical statement’, which secretly contains its own opposite. Trapped in the paradox (because we do not see the paradox) we are condemned to acting out the self-contradictory nature of all definite statements (which is the self-contradictory nature of logic itself) ad infinitum. We are condemned to act out the paradox in a sad marionette’s dance, unable to see what it is that we are doing and unable to appreciate the irony of our actions. It is the lack of insight (which caused by lack of perspective) that both gives rise to the vibratory activity and perpetuates it, therefore.
To be ‘ridden’ by the logical mind is thus to be a made a fool of – a fact that we don’t tend to see because we’re all being made fools of in the same way, in tandem, so to speak. It has become normal, and no one questions the normal. A strange thing happens as we stop being controlled by this logical mind however and this ‘strange thing’ is that we move out of the equilibrium world! We move out of what is normal, we move away from what everyone else believes in, and we see that ‘normal’ never actually existed at all, apart from the fact that so many people believed in it. As we rebel again the iron rule of the tyrannical machine which is the thinking mind we find ourselves more and more in ‘a strange and uncharted realm’ – we find ourselves in stepping through the veil of banal shop-worn illusions that previously hemmed us in and witnessing first-hand the living mystery of the Non-E World that lies all around us.
If the E-World is the world we see all around us when we are not ourselves but only our crappy idea of ourselves, then the Non-E World is what we see when we ‘come back to ourselves’ and see things as they really are, not as they appear to be when viewed exclusively through the cognitive apparatus of the thinking mind. The Non-E World was there all along – it never went away, we just became blind to it. We just lost interest in it. It exists in the nooks and crannies of our workaday world – passed over, dismissed, neglected because of its ‘unimportance’. It is to be found in un-swept corners of the room, in the cracks between the floorboards. It’s in all the places we never look. It’s actually there all around us, if we only had eyes for it (or the time for it). Some folk know about the Non-E World, most don’t: the busy, efficient people (the ones who rule this world of ours, the ones ‘in charge’) don’t know about it! They don’t know about the E-World either because to know about the E-World it is necessary to be outside of it. The people we have nominated (one way or another) to be in charge of this world, or to run important institutions or organizations, don’t know about the Non-E World because they live in the world created by the hasty mind, the goal-orientated mind, the calculating, planning mind. This is the world that doesn’t exist – the hyperreal world that feeds off the world that actually DOES exist! It is the hyperreal world that all the talk is about, all the news is about, all the excitement is about. The only people who know about the Non-E World (and don’t laugh at the mention of it) are after all the poets and the artists, the misfits and the mystics, and who cares what they have to say?
