When symmetry is broken then the nature of reality gets represented to us in terms of clashing opposites. This is actually the only world we know – the World of Conflict. The conflict goes on and on and it will never stop; the war between YES and NO will never be resolved – the wheel keeps turning. If we have hope that it will one day be resolved – as we do – then this is due purely to our misunderstanding of our situation. What we don’t get is that it doesn’t matter how long we wait (or how much ingenuity we put into it) because time itself is conflict, as Krishnamurti says. Linearity contradicts itself, goes back on itself…
Nothing ever changes in time; we’re always locked into the same frozen posture of ‘us against the universe’, ‘us against the problem we’re trying to solve’. We’re measuring ourselves against this problem, we’re defining ourselves in terms of whether we’re a success or a failure. This is a complete non-starter though because when a ‘problem’ is insoluble (because our attempt to fix it is the very thing that creates it in the first place) then this means that it isn’t a problem at all, and so we can’t talk in terms of succeeding or failing. There’s zero prospect of either winning or losing in this case (the terms aren’t applicable, as we’ve said), and so the whole thing is entirely hypothetical. When we do say that there is a start or a finish to the cycle (to what’s going on) this doesn’t really mean anything at all – it’s a purely arbitrary imposition on our part and it doesn’t reflect any underlying reality. Despite the pure arbitrariness of what we choose to call ‘winning’ (or ‘losing’) we act as if what we’re orientating ourselves around is an absolute given – an aspect of reality that no one can argue with. There is no such thing as ‘success versus failure’ in cycle that keeps spinning around, but we don’t want to know this…
As far as we’re concerned, there absolutely IS such a thing as ‘solving the problem’ and – what’s more it’s the most important thing there is. There is nothing more significant than the question of whether we win or lose, we say, and for this reason all our energy, all our intelligence, all our resources, go into trying to make sure that we come out on top’ (even though – as we have just said – there’s no such thing as ‘coming out on top’… If we were aware of the truth of what we’re doing here – which is that the conclusion we are pressing for doesn’t mean anything (because nothing actually ‘concludes’) then our motivation to get to the final post would instantly vanish – we would see that the end is not an end, and that after all is the only reason we’re so interested in it. The lure that keeps drawing us in is the lure of resolution, the lure of ‘everything finally coming out right’; the motivation that propels us onward in our struggle is the motivation of wanting to ‘bring the play to a close’, just as James Carse says, but that’s not what’s happening – there’s no closure, only endless cycles of striving to bring the play to a close, which isn’t the same thing at all. We believe that we’re going to be able to step off the merry-go-round’, but that’s just a convenient delusion; it is – we might say – a necessary illusion – it’s necessary to keep us playing the never-ending game. Without this delusion we cannot play.
Extrinsic Motivation is ‘the motivation to shut everything down’, therefore, and for this reason we can say – as Carse does – that it is a type of motivation contradicts itself. EM contradicts itself because whilst the whole point of it is to ‘bring everything to a close’ (which is to say, the point is to stop the wheel spinning so we can get off it) what we’re actually doing is spinning the wheel even faster than we were before; we’re feeding more energy into it, we increasing the momentum of the wheel and making it harder to stop. This being the case, it is abundantly clear that we’re never going to obtain any satisfaction / gratification from exercising extrinsic motivation (which is the motivation of games) – all that’s going to happen is that we’re going to wind ourselves up, all that’s going to happen is that we’re going to continually frustrate ourselves. We’re trying to bring it to an end but all we’re doing is perpetuating it. By trying to kill the thing we’re re-animating it, we’re bringing it back to life…
To play a finite game is to be locked into the same position and it is because being locked down (or ‘stuck’) like this is a state of suffering that we are motivated (very strongly motivated!) to find a release from it. My belief is that the change or movement that I want (or rather need) can only come about when I succeed at what I’m trying to do (when I finally get it ‘right’, in other words) but investing everything in the game in this way means that I am doubling down on my position – I am becoming ever-more entrenched in it. To act out of a fixed basis can’t ever have the effect of freeing me from that position – repeatedly acting out of the basis in question solidifies that basis, it reifies it, it makes is more real, and therefore the only way to become free from it is to not act out of it. Not doing is the key, not deliberate, targeted action. The posture of trying to control is thus a frozen one – it’s not dynamic at all. By demanding change on our terms (and only on our terms) we lock ourselves into a static position; putting all our money on control means that we are ‘locked into stasis’ – we are being controlled by the very framework that facilitates our controlling (since without a fixed basis, a fixed FW, there can’t be any such thing as ‘controlling’).
Attachment (or – as we might equivalently say – liking and disliking) causes us to be psychologically stuck, therefore, and being stuck in the way that we see the world and react to it means suffering. Our prejudice is to say that without attachment, without attraction and aversion, without the hunger to succeed, the hunger to attain goals, we would be uncommitted, aimless, fickle, weak, lacking in any sort of actual character, but this is getting it backwards – being attached to the world doesn’t mean we’re ‘engaging’ with it, it doesn’t mean that we are ‘participating in it (or interacting with it) – it simply means that we are now obliged to try to control things so that nothing can get past us without our ‘say-so,’ and there’s nothing about this that has anything to do with engagement’ or ‘interaction’. Everything has to be ‘on our terms’ (it’s ‘my way or the highway’) and this basically means being stuck. There’s no chance of movement here. Engagement is a two-way thing, it’s not about ‘me micromanaging reality’, it’s not about me ‘struggling to make sure that nothing ever happens that I haven’t previously agreed to happen’. When we engage with our environment so as to control it (so as to ensure that only the sort of things we want to happen can happen) then this is not us ‘interacting with the world’ – it’s us ‘refusing to interact’. This Is us ‘being as stubborn as hell’. There’s only one reason why we are maintaining tight control like this and that’s because we are afraid of what might happen if we let go, afraid of what might come through if we don’t keep the door tightly shut. Our resolute refusal to ‘loosen up’ comes out our fear of seeing something that will change our way of understanding the world in such a way that we won’t be able to go back to how we were before. We’re ‘afraid to grow’, in other words.
What lies behind our ‘frozen posture’, behind our ‘psychostasis’, is fear therefore – the frozen posture is fear, the psychostatic state is fear. In one way (and in one way only) we can say that there is activity taking place in this frozen situation – there is a vibration, there’s an oscillation between the two poles, between the two complementary opposites. So we can say that there IS movement (or change) taking place in the Psychostatic State, but it is movement of the ‘self-defeating’ type. The ‘locked-on’ or ‘frozen’ mental modality that J.G. Bennett calls ‘psychostasis’ might be described as a state of permanent self-frustration – there are times when we feel that we’re winning, when we feel that we’re finally getting somewhere with our situation in the ongoing struggle (and this is what keeps us hooked into the game) but then the next thing is that there’s a set back and instead of feeling the elation of impending victory (which is the feeling we’re addicted to) we get the other side of the ‘big stick’, the side which we don’t like. Instead of ‘the elation of impending victory’ we experience the dreadful despair of impending doom. We are continuingly being battered by ‘the stick of winning and losing’, therefore – when we get the feeling that we’re succeeding we’re only being set up for our downfall, we’re only being ‘built up’ so that we can be knocked right back down again. Nothing ever changes with this situation, which is why we call it ‘psychostatic’.
Thought always relates to the world in terms of polarities and polarities don’t actually go anywhere; YES doesn’t lead anywhere and neither does NO. One end of the stick brings us to the other end and that’s all there is to it; PLUS equals the stick and so does MINUS, and this is the symmetry we can never get away from, the symmetry we can never break. We can never escape symmetry (just as we can never escape Wholeness, as the philosopher Parmenides tells us), and yet – notwithstanding this – the Asymmetrical World (the World of Clashing Opposites) is the only one we know. All we know is the tension between opposites; that’s all we can ever imagine and so we can make two contradictory statements here: [1] We can never escape from the Symmetrical Situation, and [2] Escaping from this inescapable situation is all we care about. The answer to this apparent contradiction is that we don’t really escape from reality (because that’s not possible) but that we inhabit a mental construct in which it is possible (and not just ‘possible’ but essential). When we throw ourselves into playing the game then we don’t know that we’re only playing – the game acts as a kind of potent anaesthetic, we could say – an anaesthetic which prevents us from seeing that what we’re striving for can never be achieved. We escape the painful tension between the two opposites by proudly claiming that we have ‘won’ (we escape the ongoing conflict by telling ourselves that we have now ‘solved’ it). [We can also remove ourselves from the field of play by losing of course, but that’s not really the solution we want].
‘Unipolar success’ (which is to say, ‘success that is so complete that we’re never going to have to enter the field of play again’) is the fantasy we’re buying into here, therefore; clearly, there can’t ever be such a thing as <success> without the tension created by its complement but we don’t reflect on this inconvenient principle. We’re suffering from a particular type of blindness – a blindness that keeps us imprisoned in thought’s futile fantasy. There’s no restriction ‘in reality’ but there is in our perception, there is in our thinking. The restriction we’re talking about here is the Thinking Mind itself, in other words, and the reason we can’t see this is because when we’re ‘a slave of thought’ (when we’re ‘a prisoner of polarity)’ we can only see one half of the picture at a time. We therefore act as if the half we see is ‘the whole story’, is ‘all there is’, and the more assertively (or aggressively) we act on this delusion the more we unwittingly empower the other half of the picture to act against us, thereby neatly negating whatever it is we wanted to achieve. The more assertive (or desperate) the assertion the more vicious will be the consequent negation. This ‘assertion and negation’ cycle is simply a manifestation of Original Symmetry, which – as we keep reiterating – cannot ever be broken. If we could break it then we would be able to retire from the inconclusiveness of the game and take our place – with all due honour – amongst the ranks of the ‘all-time winners’, as James Carse puts it. The All-Time Winners have demonstrated their worthiness beyond any doubt and as a result have nothing left to prove – they need struggle no more therefore because the Supreme Goal has been achieved. They have entered Valhalla; they have entered the Abode of Heroes where they will receive the reward for their tremendous victory. In religious terms, we could say that they have ‘done right by God’ and will now be accepted into Heaven, where there will be peace, where there will be ‘Ultimate Vindication’, where there will be no more strife and struggling. Whichever way we choose to express it, the upshot is that we – as a result of our splendidly heroic efforts – have put an end to the ongoing back-and-forth uncertainty of the struggle and can now relax for ever. We can relax because we have achieved everything that needs to be achieved…
The situation that we have been talking about (the situation which is ‘the Asymmetrical World’, the situation which is the ‘World of Clashing Opposites’) is actually secretly symmetrical as we have said. It is at all times Perfectly Symmetrical but we can’t see that because we’re only able to see one half of the picture at the time. There is no prison, only our ‘conditioned inability to see reality’ (and the state of perpetual frustration that attends us as a result of this inability). There’s an open door in front of us, but rather than stepping through it (into Open-Ended Reality) we walk into the Closed (or ‘Recycled’) World that is made up of our own sterile imaginings. We indefinitely extend (or stretch) our starting-off position (because we think that it is a solid basis, and that extending or stretching it is therefore a perfectly legitimate thing to do) but all that happens as a result of this psychological naivety of ours is that we consign ourselves to the tender mercies of the never-ending ‘assertion-and-denial cycle’, which is of course as frustrating a situation as any situation could ever possibly be. This is not a realm that anyone would want to live in, if the truth about it could be seen (which it generally can’t be). The only way to live here is to not see the truth, the only way to ‘hang in there’ is to perpetually deceive ourselves.
We never actually connect with reality because in the Closed Domain which is the System of Thought; we can only ever relate to our own ideas of reality; we only ever get to ‘interact’ with our own hollow projections and this so-called ‘interaction’ is thus entirely futile in nature – there’s an open door in front of us, but rather than stepping through it, we get diverted instead into the Virtual World that is really nothing else but an extension of our unexamined (and unwarranted) assumptions. We never see the Conflict Realm (the ‘World of Warring Opposites) for what it is; instead, we see it as a ‘potentially resolvable situation’, we see it as an ‘opportunity’, we see it as a ‘fertile ground for success’, and this is of course what keeps us hooked in. This is what keeps us in the game. ‘Hope springs eternal’, as it is said. The upshot of our super-optimistic outlook on things (or as we could also say, our absurdly unrealistic outlook on things) is that we then have to live in this half-baked world, this ‘self-contradictory domain’, and – as we have just said – there is simply no honest way to do this. There’s no legitimate way to live in a self-negating world – the domain is frankly ‘unlivable’. What we’re looking at here is a puzzle that can’t be resolved, a problem that can never be brought to a conclusion, and yet we keep on trying to do just this. We keep on ‘trying to solve the insoluble problem’ and this – as Alan Watts tells us – is what Samsara is all about…
Image credit – dig.watch
