We say that a human being ‘has a mind’. The truth is the other way around for almost every person you will ever meet. When you meet another person you’re not meeting a human with a mind, you’re meeting ‘a mind with a human’.
The everyday mind acts as predator here – the mind consumes the human and then puts it in its place its own conception (or version) of ‘what constitutes a human’. After this event I am no longer human but rather I am the thought of a human. I am the idea of myself that I don’t understand to be ‘only an idea’.
This isn’t some crazy, whack-job, ‘out-there’ conspiracy theory; it is – very clearly – the only way thought ever could operate. This is what the thinking mind IS – it’s a device for making models (or representations) of the world. ‘Making representations of stuff’ is the beginning and end of what the thinking mind does – there’s absolutely no way it can do anything else. There’s absolutely no way the TM can create anything new, it can only ever ‘repeat’ what came before. It can only make ‘copies’, it can only ‘duplicate itself’. Thought is ‘the conservative principle’: it conserves whatever it was that it started off with (whatever it was that it was given to conserve) but at the same time it doesn’t have any interest in what it’s perpetuating, in what it is championing. Thought is fickle.
All representations are ‘repeats’ – we might say – because all representations are generic and to be generic is to be reproducible. If there was something that couldn’t be copied then it would of course be unique, not generic. The generic exists only through its reproductions, only through its copies, only through its endless duplication of itself. It exists via the action of ‘continually extending itself’, it exists purely because of the way in which it ‘continually assumes itself as a legitimate / meaningful basis for its own progression’ (which is to say, because of the way in which it takes itself as being worthy of being reproduced). It ‘builds upon itself’, in other words – it takes itself as ‘the authority’. The generic has therefore no more existence than the famous ‘average’ which everyone talks about quite happily, but which no one can find.
What this comes down to is that what we’re calling ‘the Generic’ (and what we could equally well call ‘the Blueprint’, or ‘the Template’, or ‘the Dogma’, etc.,) can only exist in a reality that is comprised exclusively of itself; it can only come into being via the operation of self-reference. The system of thought ‘creates itself’ – so to speak – by reference to the assumption which is itself. If the endlessly repeating pattern which is the system of thought (or the system of logic) didn’t ‘fill up the whole world’ (or ‘fill up all the available space’) with itself then the presence of what it implicitly claims to represent would show it up as being ‘only a representation’ and this and thus, as being empty of substance. The Generic Reality only gets to have (apparent) substance by banning anything that isn’t itself, by banning anything that doesn’t obey the rules.
When there is nothing to go on but the ‘generic representation’ (all representations being generic, as we have said) then ‘the descriptor’ is elevated to the level of ‘the described’ which does away with the need for the described. It eliminates the described without ever referencing the fact that it has done so, just as Jean Baudrillard says. The symbol surreptitiously replaces the symbolised. The representation promotes itself by claiming to be representing a higher authority whilst secretly it is only representing itself (which is the ‘False Steward’ motif, the ‘Sheriff of Nottingham’ motif).
It is therefore only ‘natural’ – if we may use the word when talking about the activity of thought – that the mind should make representations of everything it comes across, everything in sight. it has no ‘off switch’, we could say – it just carries on doing what it’s doing, no matter what. The thinking mind is a machine for describing (or modelling) stuff and so this is exactly what it does – it describes everything it comes across in its own patented / copyrighted terms and there is never a point at which it won’t do this. The Whole of Creation is a legitimate target for its activities – it can do nothing but expand, even if this expansion or proliferation of terms leads inevitably to disaster (as it always does). From the POV of the thinking mind it’s not a ‘disaster’ that it is heading to with all its unchecked proliferation, with all its heedless ‘viral-type duplication of itself’, but the exact opposite – it sees itself as ‘heading for glory’ (in exactly the same way that a Fascist ideology will claim to be leading the nation to some great and awesome destiny). [The Euphoric Ego always imagines that it is on route to a great and awesome destiny.] Assimilating everything within the system of logic is the Great Solution, we say; this is the Great Goal which – when attained – will make everything magically come right. This is the Promised Land, this is the Final Victory, and all the rest of it…
Completion of the Great Task is called winning and winning contains all possible benefits within it. It contains all possible benefits all rolled up into one; nothing is left out. The Final Victory means that I own all these benefits; it means that they’re all mine and that no one else can ever take them away. It is ‘the permanent exclusion of the loser from any possibility of receiving any benefits at all’ that makes winning as sweet as it is, as satisfying as it is – ‘It is not enough that I succeed, others must fail.’, says Gore Vidal. ‘The winner takes it all’, just like the line in the Abba song. Your losing is what makes my winning meaningful. ‘Owning all the space’ – or ‘putting your stamp on all the territory’ – represents the ultimate ‘winner move’ from the perspective of the narrow, divisive viewpoint; it represents the ‘ultimate advantage’ from the perspective (or rather lack of perspective) of the hard-edged, no-nonsense rational ego, but because the proposed beneficiary which is the mind-created version of ourselves is an abstract representation that has no basis, that has no correlation whatsoever in reality, this makes our so-called ‘victory’ perfectly meaningless, perfectly hollow.
When the mind subsumes the human then this is an Utter Disaster (even though we will never we will be told this by the non-stop propaganda that is being generated by our minds). The mind is Rumi’s Dragon which – when awoken – will devour all around it in a flash. Hence Rumi’s warning that if we do come across this terrible monster in its dormant state, we should leave it well alone, that we shouldn’t – no matter what – allow it to defrost in the heat of the Baghdad sun. When the mind subsumes the human then there is no longer a human there; when this is done on scale then there are ‘no more humans left’. ‘A life lived in imagination is a life unlived’, says Robert Burton. There is the appearance of the human, the shallow theatre of being a human, but with absolutely nothing behind it. This is a mockery, in other words – ‘the generic’ mocks ‘the Unique’.
The impression that there is an actual human there is nothing more than laughable two-dimensional pretence. The Mind-Created Identity is a hollow shell, a cardboard ‘cut-out’ of an actual person, but just as long as we never look to deeply into it we won’t see that there is anything amiss. Everything will seem sweet; everything will seem fine and dandy. What we see if we do see deeply – as a philosopher sees deeply – is that there is no human in this mind-created image of a human. There’s nobody home – only the system cycling through its routines, only the machine that simulates the living, breathing reality. When we meet a ‘conditioned human being’ then what we’re really meeting is this system, therefore. We’re ‘talking to the hand’, we’re ‘talking to the conditioning’. The presented image is just a distraction, just a red herring to stop us seeing what’s really going on, and ‘what’s really going on’ is that the System (the Great Amoeba) has already eaten everyone in sight, has already replaced everyone there is to replace. It’s a fait accompli. The Great Amoeba sails under a flag of convenience here therefore – it sails under the flag of being ‘an actual autonomous person’, whilst the unpleasant truth of the matter is that this isn’t the case at all. Just as it suits a corporation to have a human face (rather than its actual inhuman one) so too does it suit the generic human being to cultivate the appearance of being an actual individual. Something sinister is afoot – a ‘person’ who is member of a group isn’t a person – they’re not just a ‘representative of the group’ either – they ARE the group. There are no humans left. There’s no one taking responsibility here; there is no actual awareness or intelligence, just the derisory trappings of it, just the mockery of it…
image credit – pinterest.com
