According to Jung, rules are a substitute for consciousness. The everyday mind that we use to understand the world is made up of rules and so too – as a direct consequence – is the simulation (or representation) of the world that this mind shows us. The only reason this representation of the world is ‘understandable’ is after all because it is made up of rules – if it wasn’t then we wouldn’t understand it! And yet the world itself (i.e. the genuine article!) is not composed of rules, and neither is consciousness!
The mental representation of reality that we are presented with and which we automatically take to be the genuine article is exactly like a ‘literal message’ – the thing about a literal message being of course that the way we understand it is not open to negotiation. The meaning that each component of the message has for us is strictly governed by rules and so there is precisely zero freedom in the interpretation of the message. Literalism means that there is a 1:1 transcription from the message (in terms of how the message itself requires us to read it) and there is most emphatically no freedom for any deviation from this template. When we real a literal message we are therefore ‘compelled’ to understand it in the particular way that it has been designed to be read. That’s the only meaning it has in it – unless we ourselves choose to break the rules and stop looking at it in the way we’re supposed to, that is.
All of this might seem to be rather unremarkable – what other way could there to be to read a message, after all? Naturally we read messages in the way they are designed to be read. The point that is so easy to miss however is that the world itself (which is of course what we are supposedly portraying with our literal signifiers) does not have a literal or defined meaning! The world as it is in itself isn’t a message. Reality isn’t that sort of a thing at all – it isn’t a ‘final statement’, it isn’t an object that was designed to be read just in the one way – or in any way at all, come to that. Reality is what it is – it doesn’t carry some kind of limited or finite message, that’s just a projection of our limited or finite minds! That’s just our limited (and limiting) understanding.
We could also say, as Ram Dass does, that “your environment is as high as you are”, by which he means something like, ‘when I am shallow then the world is shallow, and when I am deep then so too is the world.’ The more we look the more there is to see in other words, and so if we can’t be bothered to look very deeply (because we are too lazy or too greedy or too afraid) then there isn’t very much to see at all! This is like the line from the Beatles’ song, It’s All Too Much – “And the more I go inside, the more there is to see.” Ram Dass also says, “The quieter you are, there more there is to hear.” which is clearly getting at the same thing. All of these quotes are putting the responsibility on us for what we see, which is not at all the way with literal meanings, which involves us putting all the responsibility – so to speak – onto the message itself. ‘Taking things literally’ is how we hand over responsibility, therefore!
If the world were a mere literal object then it wouldn’t be a question of ‘the more you look the more there is to see’, but simply that when we look at the world the right way, then we see ‘what we’re supposed to see’. End of story! This is obviously a different kettle of fish entirely. Literal objects are limited – they are what they are and that is all they are. The non-literal world on the other hand isn’t limited at all and it only appears to be such when we project our own cherished limitations upon it. We’re very often proud of our wretched finite creations, reckoning them to be pretty damn amazing, but what is some crappy finite creation in comparison to what we’ve just been talking about? A positive (or ‘literal’) creation might appear great for a moment or two, giving us a bit of boost, a bit of a high, but then – as is always the way with just things – we will get fed up of it, we will get bored and have to move on, find something else. Literal objects (and literal statements) are actually sterile – they never go beyond themselves and what they are in themselves is, as we have been saying, fundamentally limited. If the world which we live in were to be a literal object (like all the products of our rational mind necessarily are) then this would be a complete and utter disaster!
In fact this wouldn’t so much be a ‘disaster’ as it wouldn’t actually be possible in the first place, since it is the negative or unstated aspect of reality that facilitates the operation of all the positive structures (or features) that we make so much of. If the world were a ‘literal object’ that would be like the situation where the words written on a page think that they’re so important that they can get rid of the page itself, or like the situation where all the waves get together and vote to abolish the ocean, or like the situation where all thoughts we’re thinking get so high-and-mighty that they decide eradicate the undefined consciousness that is facilitating them! This – needless to say – is an utterly absurd proposition. The tail does not wag the dog. Nothing happens without the underlying ‘negative’ medium –negative meaning uncommitted or unstated or undefined or unformatted, and so on…
The thing is however that the rational mind can’t afford to acknowledge the infinite relativity (i.e. depth) of the medium which facilitates its operation because for it to do so would highlight its own lack of any absolute basis, and without this assumed ‘absolute basis’ it simply can’t get anywhere. This doesn’t mean that the rational faculty doesn’t completely depend on this medium however, because it does! The rational mind could not even take a single step without the underlying medium of ‘consciousness’ (which is really just a word that we are using here because we have to call it something!) and yet not only does it have no interest in consciousness, it denies it at every turn….
Despite the fact that we are flatly incapable of rationally understanding the point, reality is not a literal object, nor indeed is it any kind of an ‘object’ at all! Neither does it have any kind of a meaning that can be read or understood; the idea that reality – which is to say, ‘the Whole of Everything’ – has a particular meaning is quite ludicrous, it is of course utterly laughable. The way that a signifier works is that it signifies something, which is to say, it points to something outside of itself. In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, the stylized feather symbolizes truth, for example; in chemical notation, Ag signifies argentum, or gold; in a road sign, three wavy lines on top of each other may signify a lake or the sea. The world itself however does not signify anything, which is to say, it does not represent anything outside itself! It’s the original article, it is ‘the All’, so what else is it going to point at, what else is it going to refer us to? We’ve already arrived! As Alan Watts says “This is it!!”
For the thinking mind, however (which is the same thing as ‘the self’), this is never ‘it’. On the contrary, ‘it’ is always somewhere else – it has to be because the thinking mind is a system of mental representations, and so it has to be representing something else! It can’t do otherwise. It can’t very well represent itself either – this would be a thoroughly redundant operation since there’s absolutely no need of it! The rational mind is made up of a system of ‘pointers’, we might say, and this being the case, it has always got to be pointing at something. [Or to put this another way, there has always got to be a perceived ‘gap’ between just as the between the mind and its ‘mental objects’.] If we examine this idea of the ‘necessary gap’ in terms of the mind-created self instead of the thinking mind we can then equivalently say that the self always has to have some sort of a distance between it and its goals and that this distance is provided by its own thinking process.
After all, if I can’t think about something then how can I appreciate it, how can I enjoy it? How can I know what my relationship to it is? How can I know if it’s good or bad, right or wrong? If I can’t think about my goal then how do I even know that it’s a goal! How can I know if I have achieved it or am going to achieve it if I can’t think about it and measure thereby its proximity to me? That wouldn’t be any good to me at all! Everything hinges on ‘distance’: if there’s no more distance between me as the thinker and my ‘mental objects’, then everything is banjaxed because not only are my mental objects created and maintained by my thinking, so too is the self that perceives itself to be doing the thinking. The self, in other words, is a thought just the same as every other thought only it can’t see itself as being such…
When distance is brought into the picture then we’re able to get a handle on things: we can get a sense of where we are and where we’re going, and how fast we going there. There’s a framework. We can count up to things and we can count down from things. There’s a ‘before the event’ and there’s an ‘after the event’. There is ‘getting closer’ and there is ‘getting further away’. All of this gives us a lot to get our teeth into, for better or worse! The only thing that isn’t possible with distance is to actually get intimate with whatever the thing is that we’re counting up to or counting down from, and whilst we can get an awful lot of mileage out of an idea (in terms of ‘turning it over and over again in our minds’) there is no actual substance, no actual nourishment to it… Everything is always about the thing – whatever the thing in question is – it is never ‘the thing itself’. It’s always the menu, never the meal.
We have asserted that the self (or the thinking mind, which is the same thing) has no actual interest in attaining the goal, but this seems to contradict common experience. After all, when we achieve something that we’ve set our hearts on we’re usually very happy about it! If I pass an exam I’m happy, if get the job that I’ve applied for I’m happy, if I lose the weight that I’ve been trying to lose I am happy, if my team wins the match I’m happy, and so on. This is all very well but what we almost always lose sight of is that it is the idea that I have attained the goal that makes me happy, not anything else! When my thinking mind tells me, verifies for me, confirms for me that the goal has indeed been reached then this is when I get the good feeling, and not before. I can only get that euphoric reward when the mind lets me. This is especially clear in the case of formal games perhaps (which is to say, games that everyone recognizes as games): if I win at the game I am playing (or if my team wins) then this is an event that takes place only in my mind (i.e. in the situation that has been invented by my mind). We don’t have any problem seeing this because we know games are made up by ourselves, because we know very well that they don’t exist unless we agree for them to exist. So when I feel good because I win in the game, then this is purely because I have agreed in advance that such-and-such an outcome constitutes that ‘maximally good state of affairs’ known as ‘winning’, which means that I feel good because I have agreed that I can feel good! I feel good because I have ticked the box that I myself have arbitrarily agreed to have some special value, and so no matter which you look at this it has got to be a rather peculiar type of a thing…
The same thing, obviously, is true for all goals, whether they occur within the context of a formal game or not. After all, if I designate some state of affairs as a ‘goal’, then this automatically means that I think it is a good thing! So I say that such-and-such is a good thing and I rejoice accordingly when it happens, I am delighted, I am elated, I am over the moon, but it’s clearly not genuinely because of some event in reality that I feel good but because of the meaning that I have imposed upon that event. This means that the root of my ‘happiness’ (using the word loosely) is not reality, but my mind’s interpretation of reality. It’s because I am thinking about things in a particular way that I am feeling happy, not because of the actual things itself; as Shakespeare says in Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2 –
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
But if thinking can make something good then it can equally well make it bad, since it is perfectly free to make it any way it pleases! This ought to tell us that the ability of thought to make us feel triumphantly elated at the drop of a hat is something of a double-edged sword since it could just as easily (and just as arbitrarily) make us feel utterly despairing. And the undeniable fact that the very same event could constitute ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ depending upon how we choose to designate it, and the associated fact that we could equally well – on this account – feel either elated or despairing about that very same outcome, demonstrates something else that we very rarely – if ever – see: it demonstrates that everything that thought tells us is ultimately meaningless, as are all the ‘euphoric’ or ‘dysphoric’ states of mind that arise out of its evaluations.
Whether I think that an outcome is either a good or a bad, this equals distance. It is distance both ways. Any sort of an idea, any sort of a judgement or description always involves what we are calling ‘distance’. When something actually happens in reality, on the other hand (some kind of real not nominal change), there is no distance involved. If I am genuinely happy or genuinely sad (as opposed to merely being euphoric or dysphoric) then there is no distance in this at all. Anything real is ‘up close’ or ‘intimate’ – reality is not a mind-moderated event that happens at arm’s length, in some kind of a fundamentally disconnected way. Reality does not occur in some kind of abstract mental arena that is at all times safely removed from where I am. It’s not a mental construct. It’s not happening on a microscope slide or on the screen of my mobile phone or on TV, its happening right in my living room! Because changes that take place in reality itself are so intimate (because there’s no distance involved), there is no possibility of evaluation or interpretation, no possibility of description or conceptualization, no possibility of labelling what is going on so that I can feel certain about what sort of a thing it is, whether it is good or bad. Unless the correct conceptual box is ticked I don’t know that I have attained my goal and if my attainment isn’t ratified by the rational mind then I’m not allowed to feel good…
There is more to it than just this, however. This is a bit of a simplification. It’s not just that I can’t feel good about my achievements unless I’m able to think about them, but – much more importantly – that I am not able to maintain the ongoing fiction of the mind-created sense of ‘me’ which wins or loses, unless I can continuously evaluate the world, interpret the world, label the world, talk about the world, and so on. It’s not just that I can’t feel good about my achievements (about the ‘positives’ in my life, as is said in popular psychology), but that I can’t feel good unless I keep on maintaining the fictitious core-construct which is the psychological ego, which imagines that it has accomplished all the attainments, is in receipt of all the advantages, etc…
The self needs its psychological distance in order to construct itself – which it does as we have said by constantly evaluating and commenting on the world around it in terms of its own biased way of looking at things. It maintains itself by seeing the world in terms of itself, in other words! When what Wei Wu Wei calls the I-concept relates to the world that it has constructed in terms of itself, this naturally confirms the biases in question, the rules in question, so that they become solidified, or ‘reified’. Psychological distance is another way of talking about what Krishnamurti calls psychological time; which explains in the following passage:
Do you know what time is? Not by the watch, not chronological time, but psychological time? It is the interval between idea and action. An idea is for self-protection obviously; it is the idea of being secure. Action is always immediate; it is not of the past or of the future; to act must always be in the present, but action is so dangerous, so uncertain, that we conform to an idea which we hope will give us a certain safety.
Do look at this in yourself. You have an idea of what is right or wrong, or an ideological concept about yourself and society, and according to that idea you are going to act. Therefore the action is in conformity with that idea, approximating to the idea, and hence there is always conflict. There is the idea, the interval and action. And in that interval is the whole field of time. That interval is essentially thought. When you think you will be happy tomorrow, then you have an image of your-self achieving a certain result in time. Thought, through observation, through desire, and the continuity of that desire sustained by further thought, says, ‘Tomorrow I shall be happy. Tomorrow I shall have success. Tomorrow the world will be a beautiful place.’ So thought creates that interval which is time.
It is in this interval between idea and action that the self exists, and has its life. The action makes sense in terms of the thought and the thought is validated by the action (or result) that is to follow, which is a neat little tautological scheme since the action (the proposed outcome or goal) is merely a projection of the thought into the future! Because the thought and the goal that comes out of it are the very same thing there isn’t actually any space between the two and so the logical continuum that is the whole world for me (which is the continuum between ‘where I am’ and ‘where I want to be’) is basically a type of ‘virtual reality’ in that it seems to contain space (or the possibility for meaningful change) but it doesn’t…
Another way of looking at this is to say that the self needs distance (or psychological time) in order to create boundaries, which make the all-important line between where I am, and where I want to be. Without boundaries there can be no such things as a goal, and there can also be no such thing as ‘the one is who is planning to obtain the goal’! Clearly there can be no self without boundaries since the whole idea of the self is that it is distinguished from its environment by a line of demarcation which differentiates between ‘what it is’ and ‘what it isn’t’. Thus, it is not overstating the matter to say that the conditioned or mind-created self is really nothing more than a sort of glorified boundary, and what is supposedly ‘contained’ by this boundary is actually quite irrelevant for the purposes of the game that is being played. It’s a game of difference, a game of separation.
We can therefore say that the self creates distance by creating boundaries, but what this means – paradoxical thought it may sound – is that the self is actually a function of the distance which it itself creates. A simpler, and perhaps less confusing way of explaining this point is to say the self is only the self because it keeps its distance from everything, because it distinguishes or separates itself from everything. The boundaries which it places around itself is its way of saying that it is not the same as what lies on the other side of the fence, and it is this sense of ‘not being the same’, of being quintessentially different, that facilitates the sense of being an ego-self. Since I’m not really different from what lies outside of my boundaries (this being merely a necessary fiction for the sake of the game) we could say that this supposed ‘difference’ also equals ‘the distance between me and reality’.
In order for the self to secure itself it needs to establish boundaries, and establishing a boundary means drawing a line in the sand and then investing this line with absolute importance. Once the line has been drawn and invested with importance, then I can count up to it and count down from it, I can measure how close I am to it and how far I am from it, and it is this counting up and down, this measuring, that constitutes what we have been calling distance. Distance is therefore the realm of the measurable, the realm of the quantifiable, and before there can be any measuring or quantifying there has to be a standard, there has to be a ‘base-line’. Once we have the base-line in place then we’re away, once we have this then there’s no looking back – in fact there definitely mustn’t be any looking back because if we do check up on our starting-off point then we might discover something suspicious, we might uncover a lack of any good reason why we should have chosen to draw the line here instead there, here instead of somewhere else! We might discover that the base-line could equally well have been established anywhere…
Discovering this is of course the same thing as discovering that we don’t actually have a base-line, that we don’t actually have a fixed reference point, and so that spells the end of the neat little set-up that we have going for us. Without the base-line, without the reference point, we have no distance because as we have said distance proceeds from the fixed reference point. I need somewhere to start measuring from, some concrete marker to either count up to or count down from. I can’t count up or down from one imponderable to another! In fact (although this isn’t quite so easy to see) not only is it that case that distance proceeds from the fixed reference point – in the same way that a washing line can be strung taut from a nail driven into a tree – distance is a projection of the fixed point, an extension of it. Distance is the same thing as the fixed point, in other words – it is the fixed point or concrete marker ‘stretched out’ so that it actually seems to go somewhere – although the truth of the matter is that precisely because it is fixed, it can’t of course ever go anywhere! This might be said to constitute the basic ‘contradictoriness’ of distance, although it is a contradictoriness that no one ever sees. We are convinced that distance really does take us somewhere, which is of course why we don’t get heartily fed up with it.
Distance is as we have been saying the ‘fundamental necessity’ for the whole set-up, the set-up in question being the thinking mind and the measurable (or knowable) world that the thinking mind creates for itself. Without distance there are no boundaries, no ‘here’ and no ‘there’, no ‘right’ and no ‘wrong’, no ‘hit’ and no ‘miss’. Without all of this there can be goals, nothing to aim for, no way to succeed, and therefore nothing to feel good about ‘when we get it right’. Without distance there’s no self to have these goals, to strive after the goals, to feel either excited about attaining the goals or fearful of not attaining them. Without distance there is no way to think about our goals and work out whether we are progressing towards them or falling away from them. The logical continuum that is made up out of ‘quantifiable space’ is the absolute requirement if any of this business is to take place. Given that it is an absolute requirement (if there is to be a thinking mind and the continuum of thought that the thinking mind spins) then we might be forgiven for wondering what is so wrong about using this sneaky device where we pick a reference point and then make sure that we never ever look into the matter of whether that base-line or reference point is any better or worse than any other reference point that we might have chosen? As long as we get a helpful result from this manoeuvre, do we really need to worry about how we got it? What’s wrong with such a ‘sky hook’ if it actually works?
The trouble with this arrangement is however that there’s a hidden snag in it: we seem to be getting some kind of an advantage in the first instance, but only at the price of a disadvantage that we have conveniently made ourselves blind to once we’ve bought into the arrangement! This situation – where we have an advantage and a counterbalancing disadvantage that we are constitutionally unable to appreciate, is clearly not a good deal – it’s as if I offer you a thousand euros and then tell you that I’m going to take it back off you again after a few days, but that you won’t realize that I’ve taken it back off you because I will have hypnotized you into thinking that you still have it! The only way this is going to seem like a good deal is once I have been hypnotized, but in this case the ‘advantage’ I am obtaining from the manoeuvre is plainly delusory. The constitutional blindness that automatically befalls us once we buy into the package has to do with our inability to see that the distance (or psychological time) that we have manufactured for ourselves as a kind of ‘basic commodity’ doesn’t actually exist at all. We’re ‘blind’ in other words because we can’t see that when we count our way up (or down) from our reference point we aren’t actually getting anywhere!
It is of course true that when we either count up or down we obtain as a result the superficial appearance of getting somewhere, the superficial appearance of movement or change, but that’s all it is – ‘a superficial appearance’. Obviously counting is going to provide a superficial perception of change because one number is succeeded by another, which is in turn succeeded by another and another, over and over again in serial fashion. Within the terms of the game there is change therefore, but there is absolutely no change at all happening in any genuine sense. Its movement in name only – nothing is really happening. For genuine change to occur I would have to be getting somewhere unforeseen, somewhere that I couldn’t predict in advance, but as I trudge wearily along the linear number line it’s only ever ‘more of the same’, ‘more of the same’. Linear (or rule-based) change is essentially a repetitive business – I just keep on adding one more unit each time. The so–called ‘change’ occurs therefore because the basic unit is being repeated (or multiplied) indefinitely! Of course I can go on repeating and multiplying this basic unit as many times as I want – it goes without saying that I can go on expanding and expanding forever this way but I’m not really getting anything out of it!
The absolute predictability inherent that we’re talking about here shows unmistakably that there is no meaningful change occurring in the industrial expansion of the same basic unit. Change means change after all, and there is just isn’t any of that happening here. Quantifiable space is a product that is very easy to produce – it can be expanded and expanded, inflated and inflated, indefinitely, at no cost to the system, and the reason it is so easy to produce, so cheap to manufacture, is because there’s nothing in it – its like a type of all-purpose mental Styrofoam. What we’re calling ‘distance’ is capable of being infinitely extended in all directions, at zero cost, but at the same time the whole thing is an entirely redundant exercise.
When we talk about the substitution of rules for consciousness we aren’t just talking about the transition from spontaneous (or ‘free’) motivation to conditioned or rule-based motivation (although this is certainly one way of talking about it) – we’re talking about ‘collapsing into redundancy without knowing we are collapsing’. It is this cataclysmic collapse that is ‘the event that we are incapable of knowing about once it has taken place’ – via this event we enter into a redundant collapsed analogue of reality without have even the slightest clue that anything has happened! When we move wholesale into ‘the analogue version of reality’ then instead of genuine space we have mere distance and instead of free volition we have compulsion and the transition is profoundly invisible to us: distance looks like space and rule-based compulsion looks like free will! It’s a perfect switch.
The false analogue of space that we’re calling ‘distance’ and the false analogue of free will which we are referring to as ‘compulsion’ are actually two different aspects of the same thing, as we can show. Distance is as we have said a continuum of logic, the simplest representation of which is a ‘number line’ or ‘linear axis’ and a linear axis is essentially – although we may not see it as this – an exercise in ‘separating the opposites’ since we have [+] at one end and [-] at the other. As an exercise, we could also say that it is more of an imaginary project more than anything else because the truth of the matter is that the opposites never get to be separated at all really, although it looks on the surface as if we have succeeded brilliantly! A good way to see why the linear axis or number line doesn’t really separate the opposites is to think about Alan Watts’ example of a bar magnet – a bar magnet has a North Pole at one end and a South Pole at the other, and whilst it might seem that the two poles are effectively separated by the actual length of the iron bar, if we try to chop the magnet in two (so as to really separate them) we discover that we now get two magnets, each of which – of course – has a North at one end and a South at the other. We can go on chopping the bar magnet up as much as we like but we will still never end up with a ‘uni-pole’ – South Pole all by itself or a North Pole all by itself. In the end we can’t help but learn that separating UP from DOWN is an impossibility!
In the same way, a linear axis with [+] at the one end and [-] at the other is always going to resolve itself into linked pairs of PLUS and MINUS, no matter how finely we subdivide it. When we look for hard evidence that the opposites have indeed been separated therefore, we never find it! When it comes down to it a linear axis is actually no more than an ‘information-free’ expansion of a single point – a point that is made up equally of PLUS and MINUS. This basic unit – which is as we can now see perfectly self-cancelling (or empty) in its ultimate nature since it is as much made up of one opposite as it is of the other – is duplicated or replicated an infinite number of times, and – as if by a conjuring trick – we have an apparently continuous straight line produced as a result! This number line, this axis, shows every indication of stretching off to infinity in both positive and negative directions but the truth of the matter is that the whole exercise is entirely redundant…
The expansion, the copying, the serial duplication, the indefinite extension or expansion is pure redundancy because its all been said before and there’s zero point in saying it even one more time, never mind obsessively saying it over and over again an infinite number of times! There’s nothing new here, there’s no new information. As we’ve said distance (or linear extension) is in reality no more than a projection of a fixed point and so the plain reality of the matter is that there is no distance in distance.
So far we’ve gone over the idea that that ‘distance is a hollow analogue of space’ very thoroughly, but where does the compulsivity come in? The key to understanding this is to see that compulsivity arises automatically out of polarity. Distance is polarity after all – it is made up by stretching apart POSITIVE and NEGATIVE and then acting as if there was some kind of genuine space or leeway between the two when there isn’t. When we’re caught up in this spuriously inflated ‘pseudo-space’ then everything automatically becomes about trying to gain one opposite and get rid of the other – everything becomes about trying to WIN and not LOSE, in other words. But in reality there is no space between the two opposites, which means that WIN equals LOSE. The rule of the game we are playing is that we must struggle to obtain the RIGHT outcome rather than the WRONG one, but all rules are inherently self-contradicting (just as James Carse says all Finite Games are inherently paradoxical) because RIGHT is inseparable from WRONG!
Saying that that any given pair of complementary opposites are inseparable, or that RIGHT equals WRONG or that [+] equals [-] are all ways of saying that there is no actual space in linear extension! And saying that there is no actual space in linear extension is just another way of saying that linear extension is a fiction, an abstraction, a game, an unreal or artificial domain. We could say that within a game (or within a ‘formal system’) there is no space and this lack of space shows itself in the form of compulsivity. Compulsivity – we might also say – is ‘the complete lack of freedom to do anything other than going along with what the rule wants us to do’. But what the rule (all rules, in fact!) want us to do is to ‘separate the opposites’, which is an impossibility!
All of this, therefore, is just an illustration of the basic statement that ‘rules are a substitute for consciousness’, where ‘consciousness’ is our true unlimited and undefined nature, and ‘rules’ are what govern the life of the ‘inferior and self-contradicting analogue of our true nature’, this analogue being ‘the everyday conditioned self’…
