Wherever there is purposeful activity there is a self, there is an ego. Were it not for the purposeful activity, there could not be a self. Not in a million years could there be a self. This is backwards to our usual way of seeing things, of course – we would say that if it were not for the self there couldn’t be any such thing as purposefulness. The self makes the goals and not vice versa, we will say. We control our controlling, our controlling doesn’t control us, we would argue.
That’s how we’re seeing things, but we’re seeing things backwards. We always see everything backwards when we’re looking at the world fire the thinking mind. The thinking mind is an ‘Inverter’ – that’s just the way it works, that’s the convention it uses and just so long that we remember this point everything will be fine. When we lose sight of the fact that thought acts as an inverting lens then that’s a different matter, however; in this case we’re going to find ourselves in trouble – we’ll find ourselves in trouble and we won’t be able to know what the problem is. We’ll always be looking in the wrong place – everything we do will sooner or later backfire on us and every strategy we use to get us out of the hole that we’re in will simply dig it deeper. This is our fate when we don’t have any insight into the nature of thought and how it works. It should – we might naively assume – be the job of psychology to delve boldly into the nature of thought and clarify that nature for us, but this isn’t the case. There are no clues for us in the deliberations of academic psychologist. Rationality can’t help us here.
The nature of thought is that it is tautological, the nature of the world that it creates for us is that it is a continual oscillation between positive and negative, and because positive and negative are ‘the two ends of the same stick’ (because <YES> equals <NO>) this world, this ‘projected mental domain’, is at all times perfectly null. This is the key datum we need to know, if we are at all interested in finding out whether we are: [1] Free from the simulation or [2] The helpless slaves of it. This is the key thing to know (if we’re to know anything) but thought can’t tell us anything about it because its operation is predicated upon the Principle of One-Sidedness, the Principle of ‘Only Being Able to See One Opposite at a Time’. To expect the rational intellect to tell us the one thing that it itself can never know would be rather unreasonable of us, to say the least!
To say that the self is the author (or origin) of its own purposeful actions and its own rational thoughts is to disregard the undeniable fact that the System of Thought is tautological in nature. It is no more true to say that ‘the self gives rise to the goal’ then it is to say that ‘the goal engenders the self that gives rise to it’ – it works both ways at the same time. Actually – of course – neither statement is true because the rational ego and its goal are not two different things: ‘the self’ and the ‘self’s projected goal’ (which is the magnetic object of its attention) constitute an example of what is called ‘conditional co-arising’ in Buddhist metaphysics. When we spoke of <YES> and <NO> as being ‘the two ends at the same stick’ we could equally well have said at the two ends of the stick are necessarily co-dependent, that they exemplify the phenomenon of conditional co-arising, since each depends upon the other in order that they might mean something (which is to say, in order that yes might mean ‘yes’ and that no might mean ‘no’).
All polarities hang together in this way – all polarities ‘bootstrap themselves into existence’, each one supporting itself by clambering onto the back of its counterpart. The Liar Paradox (which takes the form <If Statement X is true then it is false and if it is false then it must be true>) works just as well when we apply it to any pair of opposites – opposites support each other by contradicting each other. What we end up with is a straightforward oscillation, therefore – yes leads on to no, which leads on to yes, which leads on to no, and so on and so forth. In one way, we could therefore say that the continuum of logic is endlessly contradicting itself, we could say that it is ‘constantly at war with itself’, but – in another deeper way, as Alan Watts explains – the system is in total agreement with itself. It’s in a state of total agreement with itself and so nothing is ever going to change. There might be surface-level changes going on (or ‘apparently going on’) but this is a type of theatre which covers up the fact that the system is static, that the system is at rest, that it is in a state of equilibrium. The apparent movement acts so as to distract us from seeing that – actually – nothing is happening.
The system is representing itself to itself in terms of itself, it is explaining (or validating) itself in terms of itself, and the result of this type of operation is exactly what that we have just been talking about – we end up with ‘a non-terminating sequence of contradictory answers’, we end up with ‘a very long series of endlessly reiterated pairs of disagreeing opposites’. We end up with ‘If yes then no and if no then yes…’, reproducing itself over and over again. It’s beating out a message but the thing about this is that the message doesn’t actually mean anything – it’s a ‘garbage message’! A YES/NO oscillation (which is to say, a sine wave) is – from an informational point of view – the deadest thing there is – it is both infinitely predictable and utterly meaningless. It’s ‘infinitely predictable’ because yes leads on to no every single time, and it’s ‘meaningless’ (in the strictest philosophical sense of the word) because when a logical system represents itself in terms of itself the result of this operation is always going to be nonsense. If I try to prove a particular logical statement by pointing out that the said statement agrees perfectly with itself, and can thus be validated via reference to ‘the unimpeachable standard which is itself’, then no one’s going to have any difficulty in spotting that my argument is garbage.
In order to say that the argument is a ‘nonsensical’ one we would need a viewpoint that isn’t part of the system being observed however – otherwise, there’s simply no way that we can tell. When we’re seeing things in terms of the system then there’s no way that we can see this truth. There’s no way we can see that the stock-in-trade statements of that system (which is to say, the basic building blocks that are used by the system of logic in its operations) are all immaculately meaningless. This creates a particular situation therefore – it creates a situation in which there are lots and lots of nonsensical statements floating around, statements which we are completely incapable of seeing as being nonsensical, and which we are therefore completely vulnerable to. This takes us off somewhere else, somewhere that has no connection with anything real. When we’re ‘on the inside’ (with respect to the self-referential bubble of inverted reality which we’re calling the MCVR) then the only thing that can make sense to us are these nonsensical statements – we are only able to see things in terms of the system because we are 100% adapted to the assumed framework, and this means that we’re ‘unable to see that we’re not seeing anything truly’. We can only see ‘what makes sense to the Framework’.
We’re not seeing the world, when seeing the system’s representation of the world and we’re looking at that representation in that particular way that the system has told us we must look, which is self-reference. The system is looking at its own representations of the world whilst not realising that this is what it’s doing and what this means (when we’re ‘identified with a logical platform’, when we’re ‘identified with the all-purpose standard that is the thinking mind’) is that we are ‘busy taking nonsense seriously’. Taking nonsense seriously (on a full-time basis) is the name of the game when we’re inhabiting the conditioned reality – that’s what it’s all about. If we were to start seeing that there is something nonsensical, something absurd, about the mental objects that we are always focusing on (which is to say, the world that thought has provided us with and all the things in it) then the whole shebang starts to disintegrate; once cracks start to appear in the Positive Reality then that’s it, that’s the beginning of the end. A crack – no matter how tiny it might be – is all that it takes to show that there is something there that isn’t part of the Positive World, and that’s not allowed. The simulation can’t have anything in it that isn’t the simulation and so it has to pretend to be ‘not itself’; the simulation has to simulate itself not being the simulation, so to speak, and if it were to any degree unable to fool us in this respect then that would constitute a major system failure. It would in fact constitute a fatal system error…
In the tautological World of Thought – which is a logical domain that bootstraps itself into existence – ‘the self produces the goal, and the goal produces the self’. There is a cause and an effect, and the former has to precede the latter. We could look at this the other way around too however and it would work just as well that way too: we could say – with undeniable logic – that there can be no seeker after the goal without the goal, we could say (as Robert Wyatt does) that there can be no such thing as ‘a soldier without a foe’. What we can’t see however is that both statements are true at the very same time. We can only see this when we stop looking at things via the dualistic <either / or> lens of the Thinking Mind; to the TM either one statement or the other must be true (which is Aristotle’s Law of the Excluded Middle) and if we were to see that actually both are simultaneously true (if we were to see that YES doesn’t exclude NO and that NO doesn’t exclude YES), then this would falsify the basic function of the rational intellect. The Engine of the Rational Thought would be well and truly broken – the truth banjaxes the thinking mind every time (just as the presence of potassium cyanide banjaxes the Krebs cycle in our cells)…
We started off this argument by saying that the sense of there being an independent self, existing ‘centre-stage’, which is voluntarily performing an action is the exact reverse of what’s really going on, which is that ‘the mechanical actions are performing the self’. ‘Performing the self’ includes not just the actions and thoughts that are the self’s ‘behavioural output’, but also the sense that it is us (as the hallucinatory causal agent, the sense that we are the actor and not the acted, the cause rather than the effect) that is (supposedly) responsible for this output, for this behaviour. Actually – however – it would be better to say that ‘the actor’ and ‘the action that has been carried out by the actor’ make up a co-dependent pair of opposites. What we’re looking at here is, in other words, a prime example of dependent origination – when we talk about the ‘self’ or ‘doer’ we’re only looking at half the picture – we see ‘subject’ and ‘object’ (or ‘self’ and ‘other’) as being two separate things whilst – in reality – they are a mutually conditioning pair of opposites. Like ‘UP’ and ‘DOWN’, each needs the other in order to exist. Each needs the other in order to exist, but at the same time neither do exist! The Continuum of Thought is an empty tautology, after all – it’s a phantom that only makes sense in its own unreal terms. The ‘self-referential bubble of inverted reality’ that we spend all our time in is a mirage that only seems real to us when we’re trapped in it…
Image credit – The awakened, the destroyer, the tranquil, on behance.net
