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Null Events In The Mind-Created Virtual Reality

To be conscious of thought is to see through it, but whoever sees through thought? When does this ever happen? Far from ‘seeing through thought’ we’re ‘enclosed within it’ – we only go where thought says we should go, we only ever see what thought says we should see, we only ever do what thought says we should do.

 

 

 

When we only see what thought shows us then this doesn’t count as ‘awareness’, this doesn’t count as ‘consciousness’ (even though we think that it does). This is the same thing as ‘being indoctrinated’ and to be indoctrinated is not to be conscious! It as if somewhere were to come along and tell us a whole bunch of stuff that just isn’t true, and we believe what we’re told simply because it’s what we have been told. No one can say this counts as ‘actual awareness’

 

 

 

All thoughts are arbitrary, just as all beliefs are – we could in other words just as well think anything and it would seem equally true to us. I can believe in one thing, and get all worked up about it, or I could equally well believe in a totally different thing, and get every bit as worked up about that! That’s the way beliefs are, that’s why beliefs are ‘a joke that we just don’t get’.

 

 

 

When this is the case (when I could think one thing to be true but equally well think anything else should be true as well and be equally convinced of that) then what this means is that nothing I think is genuinely true. It’s all just a game. Were we to be aware of the arbitrary nature of thought, the arbitrary nature of all mental productions, then there would be no ‘lie’; where I to make the qualified statement that ‘I arbitrarily believe such-and-such a thing to be true…’ then this would be perfectly honest and above-board, but the whole point is that this honesty, this transparency, never happens. Thought’s statements are never qualified…

 

 

 

Were we to see that the view of the world which thought is showing us is only ‘arbitrarily true’ then there’s no deception then no lie is being perpetrated. But because thought’s productions don’t come within advisory label on them stating that ‘any other viewpoint we choose to take would be equally true’ (were we to put that particular pair of vision-distorting spectacles on) then this means that our thoughts are lies. They lie by omission, they are lies because of what they don’t say… The only way our thoughts are able to seem real to us is because the implicit claim that they make to be absolutely true rather than just relatively true. All thoughts are ‘dishonest’, all thoughts are ‘deceptive’ – that is their inherent nature, that is the way they work.

 

 

 

When we live in the world that has been made by thought then we cannot be said to be ‘conscious’, we cannot be said to be ‘aware’. We only know what we’ve been told by the middle-man – we are 100% unquestioning, 100% uncritical, 100% gullible as regards the narratives that we’re being fed, and the narrative we are being fed is a lie pure and simple (for the reason that we have just explained). It is not in any way true. Any world that has been made by thought is going to be a phantom appearance, a ‘shadow on the wall‘.

 

 

 

Just as a sheet of paper passively accepts whatever is written on it, we accept whatever we are told by the mechanism of thought. We are entirely passive in this regard, bringing nothing to the table ourselves. We’re clay waiting to be moulded. Our lack of curiosity about what’s going on, our total inability to reflect on what we are being told, our complete lack of freedom as regards ‘questioning the mind-created narrative’ means that we accept to the thinking mind’s output completely literally (which – if only we could see it – is a complete and utter absurdity).

 

 

 

This ‘literal-mindedness’ is therefore the inevitable consequence of not being able to question (or reflect on) our thinking process. What we call ‘being literal-minded’ is where we’re totally controlled by thought and the situation where we are being totally controlled by thought is the very antithesis of being conscious. Being ‘concrete’ or ‘literal-minded’ is the antithesis of being conscious, ‘believing in stuff because everyone else does’ is the antithesis of being conscious. The rational life is the antithesis of being conscious…

 

 

 

Another way of saying that ‘thought is controlling us’ would be to say that ‘the thinking mind is running its own version of us’. This is a clearer way of explaining the situation – it’s not really that thought is controlling us because we’re not actually there at all. Thought is running a simulation of us. We could if we wished argue that thought is controlling the simulation which it is running but to say this is to miss the point. Simulations are extensions of the thinking mind; the simulation of us is an extension of thought, not a separate independent thing. It’s all the one seamless mechanism.

 

 

 

When we’re in the situation of being passively identified with thought’s simulation of us and the system of thought is feeding us the information that we are in charge, that we are in control (just as David Bohm says), then this necessarily involves us in a knot of self-referentiality. There’s no other point of reference, only the system of thought (which is arbitrary). The system is simulating us and it is simulating the world that we are supposedly existing within – it’s running the whole show. The illusion that is being created here is therefore the illusion that ‘it’s not all ‘just the simulation’. The illusion is that the simulation isn’t the simulation…

 

 

 

This illusion comes with a cost, however – the cost being that every single thing we do creates an echo that bounces right back to erase what we’ve done as if it had never happened. There are no exceptions to this, not ever – there isn’t a single purposeful action that we can perform that isn’t going to be raised later on by the nemesis of that action which came into being at the same time it did. Every thesis invites its antithesis, every deliberate movement we make provokes its negating echo. Every positive displacement comes with an equal and opposite negative displacement. ‘The road up is the same as the road down,’ says Heraclitus.

 

 

 

This is how mind-created illusions work; this is how samsara works. Samsara is a turning wheel, as it is said. Thought generates positive appearances that are ‘reversed later on’; they are reversed so effectively that it is as if they never happened in the first place. Actually, the truth is that they never did happen – there’s no such thing as a ‘positive appearance’ coming onto the scene that doesn’t have the mirror-image negative appearance in to. There’s no such thing as a wave that has a crest but no trough. There is an interval, a ‘separation in time’ between the positive displacement and the complementary negative displacement, that’s all and this separation in time allows us to believe – for a while – that thought’s glossy productions can be taken at face value, that they actually are real…

 

 

 

Entropy is the hidden master behind this show – entropy is what stops us seeing that any statement we make can only ever be relatively true (i.e., true in relation to the assumptions that we have had to make in order for that statement to appear to true). If there wasn’t any entropy then we would have the perspective to see that ‘everything is true and nothing is true’, we would have the perspective to see that any positive description of the world that we entertain is always going to be arbitrary in nature, (which is to say, ‘freely made’). When entropy is brought into play then we just can’t see this – we have no perspective whatsoever. We can’t see through thought – we’re stuck fast to the picture of the world that the thinking mind is showing us, we are in that profoundly unfortunate position of ‘literally believing whatever it is that thought is telling us’, be it positive or negative. We’re stuck fast to the turning wheel and this stuck state is what the unconscious life is all about.

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit – Sir John Tenniel (1820 – 1914), in Lewis Caroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There” (1871)

 

 

 

 

 

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