We all get drawn into the Grey World, one way or another. We can’t help it – there is a current that inexorably pulls us in, in such a way that we don’t ever notice. We’re caught in this massive, slow-moving current and because we’re all moving with it at the same pace we don’t see that we are moving – the movement is an invisible one. The Lie is too big (or too ‘all-encompassing’) to see. When we’re in the Grey Zone (and leading our monochrome lives) we don’t know this to be the case – if someone were to come up to us and tell us that we were living in ‘shades of grey’ (with no actual colour content at all) we would laugh at them. We would laugh long and loud. We laugh because we have forgotten that there is such a thing as colour, that there is anything else apart from the ubiquitous, suffocating, ‘one-size-fits-all’ greyness. The Greyness is all we know…
The Grey World is grey because there’s nothing in it apart from repetition and repetition is bound to be grey – what else could it be, after all? What is repeated is old, what is repeated is stale, is of no interest to anyone. To be presented with a copy is to be is to have one’s intelligence insulted, to be presented with a copy that we can’t see to be a copy is to be cheated, is to be swindled. In the Grey World the same pattern is endlessly recycled and what is produced as a result does not therefore have any beginning or end to it. We’re ‘Trapped in the Linearity’ – we’re following the indicated direction whilst – in reality – there is no ‘direction’ there. We’re being hoodwinked – the sense of direction we have in the linearity is an illusion. All we know is the sense of direction that is provided for us by the Linearity, but this directionality, this possibility of being ‘orientated’ (i.e., the possibility of having a specific direction that we can travel in) is an illusion created for us by the Linearity, by the ‘Repeating Pattern’. There’s no direction at all really because all straight lines, all continua, always loop back onto themselves and there is no genuine orientation in a loop. We keep on moving in what we take to be a ‘forward direction’ but which is actually a circle. We’re not progressing in the way we think we are but rather we’re ‘going back’ on ourselves the whole time. We’re ‘turning in in ourselves’ (much as an ingrowing toenail might turn in on itself) and that isn’t ever going to get us anywhere. Our hopeless cowardly conservatism (or ‘self-cherishing’) isn’t going to get us anywhere. Fear isn’t going to get us anywhere…
It’s as if we are driving down a busy road and passing by signs telling us that we’re getting closer and closer to wherever it is we want to go. There are road signs telling us that we are fifty miles from our destination, thirty miles from our destination, twenty miles, and so on and so forth, but then the next thing is that we find ourselves starting all over again, going around a loop that doesn’t actually go anywhere (apart from leading to itself, that is). Or we could think about this in terms of ‘problem-solving’ and say that when we’re caught in the loop of the thinking mind then we are continually being presented with problems that we have to solve. This is compulsory – the ONLY way we’re going to progress in life is if we solve whatever the problem is that is has been placed in front of us. This is what stands between us and ‘life’, so to speak (or so it seems). Once we’ve ‘done the job’, once we’ve ‘cracked the nut’, once we’ve ‘resolved the issue’, then we have <arrived>, which means that we can now enjoy the fruits of our successful problem solving. We can sit back and rest on our laurels, we can sit back with a feeling of accomplishment, we can put our feet up and enjoy a well-deserved cup of tea (or whatever else). On the face of it, this is all fine and dandy – the set-up seems perfectly reasonable, perfectly satisfactory to us, but this impression is a superficial one. What we’re being presented with is pure theatre. What we aren’t seeing is the essential repetitiveness of the situation – the situation doesn’t go anywhere, it just keeps repeating, it just keeps recycling and recycling forever.
What we’re saying here therefore is that the so-called ‘problem’ which we have to solve – so that we can move on, so that we can get somewhere – is a trick, is a cheap and nasty gimmick. It’s a ‘movable goalpost’ – as soon as we think we’re about to score a goal someone runs up and puts the goalpost somewhere else so that we have to start all over again. The problem that stands in our way (the problem that we are obliged to solve) is actually a kind of ‘revolving door’, a ‘door that doesn’t lead anywhere’. The other way of putting this is to say that what we keep on being presented with what is actually the same old recycled problem which gets repeatedly keeps getting placed in front of us so that by dutifully ticking them off the list we obtain thereby ‘the illusion of progress’, ‘the illusion of actually getting somewhere’. If we can’t fix the problem then we get frustrated and down on ourselves, we get angry and resentful, but the joke is that ‘solving the problem’ doesn’t solve anything! Solving the problem doesn’t solve anything because as soon as we ‘succeed’ (so to speak) in solving it we find ourselves right back at square one. It’s Groundhog Day with a vengeance. Although one logical puzzle might look completely different to the next one that difference is only superficial – a logical puzzle is a logical puzzle at the end of the day – how can we say that there’s any difference? If I tell you a whole load of bad jokes, then actually all these bad jokes are the same – they’re all just bad jokes, there’s nothing to tell them apart. They’re a con, in other words. – I listen because I think I’m going to get a laugh but I never do (I never get a laugh because there’s nothing remotely funny there).
The story is that the repeating pattern is not just a repeating pattern. The story is that the jokes are funny. The story is that all the various steps or stages in the logical progression are qualitatively different from each other. If we could see beneath the surface level appearance of things then we’d realise that what’s going on here is merely ‘the surface level appearance of diversity’, is merely ‘an ongoing duplication, ‘a turning wheel’. Solving the problem simply means moving on to the next problem (which is – if the truth were known – the first problem that is been conveniently repackaged and then sold to us as something new. Trivial diversity covers up the underlining uniformity – or as we could also say (paraphrasing Douglas Flemons), ‘the possibility of making superficial choices disguises the underlying lack of choice’. Instead of speaking in terms of ‘puzzles that have to be solved’ or ‘jobs that have to be done’ we could say that thoughts that are being repeated (or rather – that it’s the one same ‘all-purpose’ thought that gets endlessly recycled, that keeps on being used over and over again in order to trick us into thinking that something’s happening when it absolutely isn’t). On the level of description that has been assumed by thought one thought can of course be very different indeed to the others – it might be about a separate or unconnected problem – but once we step out of this closed frame of reference then we can plainly see that ‘all thoughts are just thoughts’ (just as ‘all words are just words’). No matter what it’s about, a logical operation is just ‘a logical operation’. For the dedicated gamer, there can be a great difference between one game and another; if we’re not interested in games however then all games are ‘just games’. They’re all the same to us…
Thought operates by ‘distracting us from the open-ended situation’, by ‘offering us options on a superficial level that preclude us from seeing that those options actually take away our essential freedom’. By choosing between these so-called ‘choices’ we hem ourselves in, we lose the perspective that is necessary to see that was that there was (and always is) the option of not making any choices (which is the ‘radical option of ‘not needing to think about things at all’, or of ‘not needing to play the damn stupid game in the first place’ (despite all the momentum that there might be tied up in that pointless game). ‘He who has to play can’t play’, to paraphrase Professor James Carse, and – contrariwise – when we do play then we can’t see that we don’t actually have to (which is the principle of Self-Veiling). Playing a game means veiling from ourselves the freedom that we have to not to have to play it, and the same principle applies to this business of ‘thinking thoughts’. Once we’ve jumped on board with a thought then thinking it is 100% compulsory (which is to say, we can’t just ‘drop it’ halfway through) but behind this conditioned need to win and not lose there is the radical freedom to not have to think at all (RF being of course the only type of freedom there is). Loss of freedom equals loss of perspective (is the same thing as loss of perspective) and the result of this is that we can’t see the way out of the arbitrary game that we have opted to play. The result of losing P is that vanishingly trivial differences (such as the difference between winning the game and losing it) are seen as being crucial, are seen as being of absolute importance). The truth is that losing and winning are only ‘crucially different’ from each other from the point of view of the game and the game itself is only an invented thing. A game can never be more than a ‘whimsical pursuit’, and yet because of the loss of perspective brought about by playing it it can become a matter of life and death to us. Games are a manifestation of neurosis in other words (neurosis being how we restrict ourselves [1] without meaning to and [2] without knowing that we’re doing it, and also [3] without knowing that it’s us causing it.)
In order for us to be suitably entertained / absorbed by games we first need to make ourselves ‘super-petty’, we need to become ‘two-dimensional’. We need to ‘hem our awareness in’ to the extent that we find the trivial not trivial, to the extent that we take stuff seriously that no one in their right mind would take seriously. All this needs to happen. This is what decreasing perspective (or increasing entropy) is all about – it’s all about becoming appallingly petty in all things, becoming terribly, frighteningly superficial without knowing it. In order that we might be properly distracted by our games we need to have our consciousness degraded (or downgraded) to the point where we are functioning purely mechanically, to the point where we are 100% controlled, 100% determined by our mechanical environment, our mechanical context, without having any clue that we are, without realising that instead of autonomy what we have is ‘unquestioning obedience to a dead mechanical system’, or ‘unquestioning obedience to a turning iron wheel’. Degradation simply doesn’t get any more degrading than this…
When we’re operating on the basis of the Thinking Mind (which is to say, when we’re in Rational Mode rather than Intuitive Mode (which is just about always) then we get to be ‘citizens of the Grey World’. [‘All theory is grey, my friend, but forever green is the tree of life’. Says Goethe.] We get to live in a monochrome world that we can’t see to be monochrome; we get to live in the world in which everything is a repeat, a world in which everything is ‘more of the same’, and which we nevertheless find entirely engrossing, entirely absorbing. We get excited (either euphorically or dysphorically) by anything at all – ‘A fool is excited by every word’, says Heraclitus. We get all worked up over nonsense (we get excited over ‘a tale told by an idiot’, as Shakespeare has noted). We never seem to get tired of the Samsaric rigmarole, no matter how horrifically wearisome it proves itself to be. No matter how frighteningly meaningless it all gets, we nevertheless keep on coming back for more. We keep coming back for more as enthusiastically as ever. We are flatly convinced that the Grey World can deliver and will therefore keep on coming back to it no matter how many times we’ve been burned…
Image credit – behance.net
