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Prisoners Of The Construct

Where we can see the construct to be ‘only a construct’ then this automatically makes it real to us. When we can’t see the construct to be ‘the construct’ (or ‘the thought’ to be ‘the thought’) then this is what is meant by being psychologically unconscious. Psychological unconsciousness is where we ‘confuse the signifier with what is being signified’, therefore…

 

 

Thoughts aren’t designed to be seen as thoughts, so to speak – being transparent about how their output is arrived at isn’t part of the design spec.  The thinking mind functions like a ‘black box’, as Guy Claxton says, so that all we’re required to do is to just take the output and run with it. We don’t need to know what’s going on. This isn’t malign intent on the part of thought – the rational mind takes it for granted that the view of things which it rests upon to be is self-evidently true. A special kind of universe is being assumed here – the type of universe which can be described or catalogued in a meaningful way. The universe which we can describe (or the universe we can know) is not the real one, and yet it’s the only one we’re interested in.

 

 

For us, there’s nothing suspicious about this universe, nothing suspicious at all, but if we were to look into it we would see that this type of universe is a pure artefact, an invention of the mind and nothing more. This is a sterile version of the original – it is a universe which we wrongly perceive to contain the possibility of genuine movement, the possibility of ‘actually getting somewhere’. The Great Dream keeps beckoning us onwards, in other words, but the one thing it will never do is deliver. Delivering is not what the dream does. The only sort of movement going on here is a kind of restless, jostling movement, the ‘endless jostling movement of Brownian motion’, we might say. We won’t ever get anywhere like this (despite what Adams Douglas says to the contrary in Hitchhiker’s Guide) since the sum of all the jostling movements is always zero. We are however ‘free to dream’, and that is exactly what we are doing.

 

 

We can’t blame thought for not ever examining its basis because it doesn’t have the capacity to do this – a rule cannot ever doubt itself, a positive assertion cannot ever interrogate itself. For a logical assertion to be able to interrogate itself it would have to have the capacity to be open to the possibility that it’s entirely wrong. It would have to have the capacity to see that it is wrong and therefore relinquish its claim to be right, but this is precisely what a positive assertion can never do. In order to be able to make a logical ‘yes-or-no type assertion’ about reality we need to have a definite position to anchor ourselves to, and in order to have a definite position we have to ‘make a choice’. We have to make a choice because there are very many possible positions out there and unless we select one of them there’s absolutely no way that we can make a definite statement about anything. Definite positions – we might say – give rise to black-and-white statements. Each possibly viewpoint offers a different perspective, which is another way of saying that no two viewpoints will ever agree with each other; if they do agree with each other then they are the same viewpoint. In order to say something that is ‘definitely true’ about the world therefore (a statement that no one can doubt) we have to have only the one viewpoint, as we have said.

 

 

The point here is that making a choice with regard to what position to take (with regard to what viewpoint to survey the world from) equals ‘throwing away information’. To choose a location, to choose a particular viewpoint from which to survey the world, is to incur a huge entropy debt, in other words. When we say that no two viewpoints will ever agree with each other this is another way of saying that each position has its own ‘take’ on the world, or that each angle provides us with genuinely new information. When we narrow down our view to the one which is provided by the single position we lose access to this information; via the strategy of ‘choosing’ we throw away the information associated with all of those locations that haven’t been chosen. The manoeuvre whereby we ‘choose a particular viewpoint’ places all that information completely out of our reach therefore – it simply no longer exists for us.

 

 

This is why Ilya Prigogine states at ‘the price of structure is entropy’ – a structure – any structure – is made-up of defined points or locations, linked up together in a logical fashion, and so structures incur entropy just as the act of specifying a particular point-location does. Everything that is true for structures / systems is also true for this business of ‘specifying a location’ therefore – before any choosing takes place all positions are on an equal footing and so no information has been thrown away. No possibilities have been excluded and so the information content relating to this situation is infinite.

 

 

When we do select a specific location – out of ‘the open-ended set of all possible locations’ – then there is the perception of this being a positive development, there is a perception of there being the possibility of actual progression, but this is an illusion caused by lack of perspective. What has actually happened here is that we have ‘lost awareness of the big picture’ and as a result we’ve rendered ourselves infinitely manipulable, infinitely gullible. In the absence of consciousness – which is to say, in the absence of any other viewpoints – we no longer have the capacity to question anything. We can ask trivial questions but that’s all – there’s no way we can ever ask any questions that are going to be genuinely meaningful. We can – and do – ask no end of trivial questions, but we’re flatly incapable of questioning the structure or system that we have adapted ourselves to. We’re blind to ‘the Big Lie’, as we might say; we can learn to play the game perfectly well, but we absolutely can’t see that it is a game. We can’t see this because it has become our viewpoint, our basis, our reference point; we can’t see the game to be a game because it has become ‘the thing that we are taking for granted in this exercise’.

 

 

When we’re in the identified state of being we can’t ask profound questions and because of this we are obliged to live lives that are made-up entirely of trivial matters. Whilst life itself is not trivial, our conditioned lives are and this is the predicament that we find ourselves in – the predicament of having to live a superficial (or ‘non-profound’) life when such a thing is ridiculous.  We don’t admit this superficiality to ourselves – we can hardly do that – but this is nevertheless what it all comes down to. We can’t play it safe (and live according to the template that has been laid down for us by society) and yet live profoundly at the same time. When we are in the state of ‘passive identification’ then we can’t help believing in whatever picture of things it is that thought presents us with – we can query the petty details but not the ‘overall paradigm’, so to speak, which these details are part of. In summary, we can say that without the ‘magic ingredient of consciousness’ we are incapable of questioning the system and so because of this incapacity we automatically become the helpless prisoners of that system. All of this happens because we’ve let the system of thought become the source of all our information about the world, when – through no fault of its own – it’s not an honest reporter.

 

 

Looking at things in terms of information – as we’ve have been doing – means that we are better able to talk about the phenomenon that we’re calling consciousness. ‘Consciousness’ – we may say – is where no viewpoints have been excluded, and where, therefore, the information content of the system is at a maximum. There are no shadows in this situation, only light, only ‘unrestricted perspective’. The amount of perspective we are bringing to bear may be said to be infinite inasmuch as there are an unlimited number of possible viewpoints out there, each one of us gives us access to hitherto unsuspected information about whatever it is that’s being considered. This gives us a useful way of talking about the difference between ‘structure’ and ‘space’, or between the ‘conditioned world’ and the unconditioned reality that gives rise to it: structure can only come into (apparent) existence as a result of our perspective being strictly limited, whilst space (or ‘unconditioned reality’) is the situation where full perspective has been restored, has been brought back into play. We can relate this ‘opened-up’ or unrestricted’ situation to what James Carse calls the Infinite Game.

 

 

Instead of focusing on the difference between ‘structure’ and ‘the space within which this structure gets to exist’ we could talk about the difference between rational thought and consciousness – ‘thought’ is where we see everything from a specific viewpoint, whilst in ‘the state of consciousness’ no viewpoints have been excluded and so we are seeing everything from ‘all angles’, so to speak; we’re seeing things with no blind-spot operating on us, no entropy in the system. Consciousness – we might say – is where we look at the world in an unblinkered way and because we’re looking at the world in an unblinkered way whatever it is that we’re seeing we’re seeing truly. Contrariwise, we can say that when we’re looking at things in a blinkered way then we aren’t ‘seeing truly’ – we’re only seeing what our blinkers permit us to see. Instead of the true picture we’re getting the blinkered view. We’re losing two things here, not just the one – we’re losing the ability to know what’s going on, and we’re also losing our freedom. We are losing our freedom because everything we think and do is now based on a view of the world that isn’t true, a view of the world that has been supplied for us by an untrustworthy ‘outside agency’.

 

 

When we’re acting on the basis of a view that isn’t true, a way of understanding things that is flawed, then there’s no freedom in this – on the contrary, we’re being controlled by the conditioned view of things that we’ve been provided with. We’re ‘prisoners of the construct’, prisoners of the Conditioned Realm that we can’t see as such; we’re prisoners because when we look out at the world we do so on the basis of our conditioning, which – of course – shows the conditioned world to be true (i.e., not a construct). When thought replaces consciousness then we don’t have any way of being aware that this has happened, just as we don’t know the Conditioned Realm we’re living to be ‘only the Conditioned Realm’ (which is to say, the projection or extrapolation of our limited way of looking at things). The conditioned viewpoint which is the thinking mind and the picture which this viewpoint produces for us constitutes a loop of logic that we are trapped in, and this is the only ‘world’ we know.

 

 

When there is psychological entropy in the system – when we’re dwelling within the Shadow World that is projected by thought – then everything has been turned around on us – what we’re essentially doing here is that we are repeating or reenacting the same old finite pattern over and over again without seeing that this is what we’re doing. We don’t know that this is what we’re doing because we can’t see the pattern or structure that we are committed to perpetuating; we can’t see that structure because it’s our basis, because it’s our way of looking at things. When we’re living within the predetermined context of the construct then we’re taking that construct for granted in all our purposeful activities and the construct thus becomes ‘the world’, becomes ‘the everything’, to us. Our attention is on the details, not the context of these details. We’re acting out of our basis completely unconsciously in other words – we act or think without ever doubting either [1] the validity of the mind-produced picture of the world, or [2] the mind-produced picture of who we are (and what we’re doing) in that phoney picture.

 

 

As soon as we identify with the construct then we lose the ability to see it as such, therefore. We just take it to be ‘all that is possible,’ as we’ve just said, and so what’s happening here is that the construct has substituted itself for reality; we’ve ‘downsized’ without realizing it, we’ve swapped the open situation for a closed one and we can’t tell the difference. It’s the fact that we can’t tell the difference that traps us – we automatically take on the limitations that are inherent in the finite game we’re playing without ever seeing them. In effect, we’ve assumed those unreal or made-up limitations to be reality and this is ‘the Great Inversion’. Reality doesn’t contain any limitations – only our constructs, only our projections, only the things we make ourselves, contain limitations, and so what we doing to ourselves (in the act of identification) is that we’re taking on a whole bunch of entirely arbitrary limitations which we can’t see to be there and which we perversely take to be the same thing as reality. This is what downsizing is all about – it’s all about ‘shrinking our world without knowing that we have’, it’s all about ‘shrinking our world whilst imagining – quite ludicrously – that we are progressing in a most wonderful way’.

 

 

We seek refuge from the Big Picture in the Small Picture, and the Small Picture – when it comes down to it – is nothing more than a hideously tangled web of pointless, wearisome self-conflicting bureaucratic regulations that are designed to keep us too busy, too preoccupied, too caught up, to ever stand a chance of emerging again into the light of day. Until we satisfy all the stipulations we aren’t ever going to be allowed to move on to the next stage (whatever that may be), but what we can’t see is that the rules are jinxed and that there’s absolutely no way that they’re ever going to be satisfied. This is what part of us wanted all along, however….

 

 

 

 

Image – grafittiartinprison.it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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