When we have zero perspective then we’re trapped in the mind’s narrative, just as flies are trapped when they walk on flypaper. As soon as the unfortunate fly touches down on what looks like entirely harmless piece of paper this then becomes their doom. They arrived but they will never leave – their journey has been brought to a halt.
It’s the same for us when we lose all perspective then we’re stuck to whatever description of the world that we started off with. In order to say that the description is only a description in order to see that the thought is only a thought we need another point of view, we need another angle on things. Without this, we are Prisoners of Thought, we are Prisoners of the Positive Reality…
The PR ‘tells us what the story is’ – it tells us how it is, it doesn’t leave things open to guesswork, it doesn’t leave anything undecided. On the one hand this makes everything very easy – all the work has been done for us but – on the other hand – we’re taking an awful lot on trust here! As it happens, we’re taking everything on trust, the whole shebang.
We’re taking it for granted that the positive reality which we are being presented with is a legitimate kind of thing, that is not a hoax or a lie or anything like that. When we don’t have any perspective then we have no way of knowing it for ourselves. What the positive reality tells us is all we have to go on, in other words and this means that there is absolutely no way for us to know if the presented reality is indeed what it says it is, that it does indeed represent what it says it represents.
The Positive Reality doesn’t actually tell us ‘straight-up’, to our faces, that it is legitimate, that it is the genuine and proper article and is for this reason to be totally trusted in all respects – all that is taken totally for granted in everything it does, and this is what makes it so hugely plausible, so tremendously convincing. It’s beyond convincing – we never even think of questioning the PR because of the sheer compulsive force of the implicit claim that it makes to be ‘the gold standard for all that is trustworthy and authentic’. We’re bowled over by this manipulative force, we are completely ‘under the spell of the Positive Reality’….
Unbeknownst to ourselves, we are taking an awful lot on trust, here. There’s no bigger deal than this – our understanding of what ‘reality’ is forms the basis for everything else, it is the basis for how we live our life, it is what determines the nature of our relationship with the world, and yet here we are taking the story (the story that we have been so-casually handed) totally on trust. ‘Sure, I’ll go along with that…’, I say. We have to take what we’re told totally on trust since we don’t have access to any other source of information other than the thinking mind (and – also – since we don’t believe that there ARE any other sources). To automatically believe whatever it is we’re being told by our thoughts (by the interloper which is the rational intellect) is quite absurd; our utter gullibility in this respect is an utterly bizarre, utterly fantastical sort of thing, and yet we give it no consideration at all.
The point that we’re making here is that when we are actually < Told what reality is > (!!!!) then this straightaway places us in an entirely passive role. Our is not to reason why when we’re denizens of the Positive Reality, ours is not to wonder ‘whether things could have been different’. We’re not expected to question the task we’ve been given, but just to get on with it – the PR is ‘shutting us down’, in other words. The Positive or Defined Reality (which is just another way of talking about ‘the Simulation’) supplies us with everything, and this Simulated Everything doesn’t come with the possibility of asking whether there might have been else to the story than we are being told about, which means that we are left with ‘a deficit’ that we have no way of knowing about. This ‘deficit that we have no way of knowing about’ is of course nothing other than this thing that we call entropy.
Nothing meaningful can be said about the PR from the standpoint of the PR – the Simulation doesn’t come with the possibility of meaningfully questioning itself (which is another way of saying that we don’t have any way of seeing it for what it truly is). We have its word for it, then there’s no reason why we should accept this word, this guarantee. The PR implicitly guarantees itself, but the weakness and this argument is that if the system isn’t real (in the way that it implicitly claims to be) then this guarantee isn’t worth a damn. If the system’s claims turn out to be fatuous (if the whole thing turns out to be a hoax) then its assurances are going to be as fake as it is.
Nothing means anything unless we are able to ‘question it’, nothing means a damn thing unless we’re able to look at it in some way other than the way which it itself promotes. If we’re being coerced (however subtly) to accept a particular view of reality then this should tip us off as regards the legitimacy of this claim. Anything that happens as a result of control (or ‘forcing’) is guaranteed to be false. Nothing true is forced. Nothing means anything until we find another viewpoint on things, another angle to look from – the moment we have access to another perspective on the world then genuine (rather than assigned) meaning comes back into the picture. The ‘sterile monoculture’ has been broken. Perspective brings meaning into the world and it does this by showing up what we had previously taken for granted as ‘the truest thing ever’ as being totally false. Perspective ALWAYS shows up what we were previously sure of as being totally false – it can’t do otherwise. If you are given some perspective that doesn’t cause you to go back to the drawing board then it isn’t perspective at all, it’s ‘confirmation in disguise’.
There are therefore TWO reasons for us getting stuck in the PR – one is that ‘we only know what we have been explicitly told’ (and we aren’t told that our model or image is incomplete, that it isn’t the whole story). On the contrary, we are implicitly given to understand that this is the whole story, and that the Positive World we know is therefore the only one there ever could be. We don’t miss what’s been left out, we don’t know anything about it, and it never occurs to us that they could be ‘something else that they’re not being told about’ and so we’re going to stay as we are. We are ‘blind to the deficiency’, therefore. Reason Number 2 for us getting stuck – which is no less compelling – is simply fear. We’re fearful of hearing the full story and it is the deficiency in the story that we are being told (what’s been left out) that protects us from having to encounter (or gain awareness of) the Whole.
Perspective works – as we have said – by showing up what we previously thought to be true to be not so true after all; never once did it happen that an increase in perspective confirmed our established view of things. That doesn’t happen. Perspective is dangerous therefore – it’s not something that we can fool around with with impunity. Having access to a new point of view throws new light on our situation, and there’s no way that having new light shed and our situation is going to sit easy with us! This equals change, and change is the thing we don’t like, the thing we’re always fighting against. Perspective is another way of talking about Information, W and information – as Gregory Bateson tells us – is ‘the difference that makes a difference’.
Not only does the PR (which passes itself off as genuine information) ‘tell us what the story is’, it also – at one and the same time – creates a dependency in us; we become dependent upon an external authority to provide us with a plan to work from, a game to play, a structure to orientate ourselves towards. When a fixed – and therefore orientable – context is provided for us by the Positive Reality then this – we could say – is ‘grossly oversimplifying the situation’. It’s making the job of orientating ourselves very, very easy – all we have to do is to ‘go along is whatever it is that we’re being told’! all we have to do is be totally passive, and let ourselves be used. All we have to do is conform to the system, which is of course the ‘quintessentially passive act’. When we conform to the system then – we might say – everything is about the system, and nothing is about us. We aren’t important until we conform (according to the system).
Conforming to the system – which is to say, ‘accepting whatever it is that we’re being told with no hesitation, no reservations whatsoever’ we can call being unconscious and we can note that unconsciousness or sleep is the passive principle, whilst consciousness is the active one. In crude terms, unconsciousness means that we let others do our thinking for us rather than thinking for ourselves. Instead of working with the existential pain ourselves – the pain of not knowing what to do, the pain of not knowing what reality is – we make use of a handy anaesthetic. We eat the Lotus flowers. Lewis Carroll makes the point (via the character of the gardener) in Alice Through the Looking Glass that if flower beds are made too soft, then the flowers will generally be asleep; a good gardener will therefore ensure that the beds are good and hard, with the result that the flowers stay awake…
In the same way therefore, when everything is done for us when (we allow other people to do all our thinking for us, to define the whole of reality for us) then we fall fast asleep. The Great Sleep (the ‘Great Stasis’) falls upon us. Life is frozen, paused, arrested, and so on. There’s no such thing as ‘paused’ or ‘frozen’ or ‘arrested’ life however – the life is in the movement. ‘Frozen life’ is death. Life – we might say – is active, whilst ‘mechanically reacting to conditions’ is passive – we might look like we’re self-animating’ but we’re not, we’re puppets. When we are existing in the passive (or unconscious) modality then if the External Authority of the PR is taken away from us then this is the worst thing in the world. Someone has ‘cut the strings’. This therefore is terror itself – we would do anything rather than find ourselves in this situation. We’re totally dependent upon ‘being controlled by the game’ for our ‘sense of identity’, for our sense of ‘being this person’, and that abject dependency is what has us so banjaxed, so utterly corrupted by the system….
Image credit – ralphsteadman.com
