The less perspective we have the more stuck we are in the World of Descriptions, the more contained we are within the Formal Domain that we ourselves have created. The less perspective we have the more controlled we are by the rules or instructions that we ourselves have put in place. Perspective is therefore the ability to see that a description is only a description, it is the capacity to see that a rule is only ‘an invitation to obey’ (and not ‘a thing in itself’).
We could also say that perspective is what’s needed if we are to be able to tell the difference between what’s a ‘construct’ and what isn’t, between what is a ‘simulation’ and what is not. This may not necessarily sound like ‘the crucial ability in life’, but it turns out that it is. It turns out that if we don’t have this capacity to discern between what is a simulation and what is not then we’re absolutely guaranteed to get caught in a simulation of reality (which means thinking that it actually is what it implicitly claims to be). It turns out that if we don’t have the capacity to know the difference between the copy and the original then we will always be trapped in the simulation. We’ll never see the light of day; we’ll never emerge from Plato’s cave. This is – we might say – ‘the Law’. The law is that if we’re not conscious then we will absolutely always be ‘fobbed off’, so to speak. We’ll be played, we’ll be taken for a ride. This is a version of the well-known saying (attributed to W.C. Fields), ‘Never give a sucker an even break’. We live in a Predatory Universe, the kind of universe which never gives any leeway to suckers; if it can, the Predatory Universe will always predate you…
The standard interpretation of this phrase (according to The Free Dictionary) is ‘if someone can be easily swindled, you should do what you can to take advantage of them’. This is also sometimes referred to as ‘the Law of the Jungle’, which basically means that if you show any weakness or vulnerability (with regard to your ability to survive) then you will instantly be predated. It will be ‘game over’ for you. It might seem at this point that we’re jumping from one topic to another but this isn’t the case – the point is that when we aren’t able to tell the difference between ‘what exists all by itself’ and ‘what is said to exist’ or ‘what is represented as existing’ (i.e., if we don’t have whatever capacity it is that allows us to see a simulation as being a simulation then it isn’t just likely that we’ll get taken for a ride, it’s an absolute given. We’ll be taken for a ride every time. If we can be fooled then we will be.
If we don’t understand why this should be so then that’s simply because we don’t have any understanding of psychology; we may think we’re sussed out – psychologically speaking – but the truth is that we couldn’t be more in the dark. We don’t have any insight into the workings of the thinking mind, but – rather – we totally rely on what the thinking mind tells us (which is terminally unwise of us since the thinking mind – by its very nature – cannot ever tell the truth). ‘Telling the truth’ is actually impossible for the rational mind as it deals exclusively in symbols and symbols are never ‘true’. Thought creates ‘analogues of the truth’ – it represents the truth in its own peculiar fashion, in its own proprietary style. The-truth-as-it-is-in-itself can’t be told – it can’t be ‘told’ because when told it instantly becomes inauthentic, it instantly becomes ‘second-hand’ (as Krishnamurti says). This is not at all a hard point to grasp – the truth can’t be told because it’s unique and anything that is repeated (as we need hardly point out!) is going to be generic rather than unique. Reality cannot be reproduced without ceasing to be reality.
In order to describe or explain something we need to have a language, we need to have some sort of system of communication, and the thing about a system a language (or society for that matter) is that it absolutely has to be generic. If it wasn’t (if we talked entirely in neologisms) then no one would be able to understand what we were talking about. As Alan Watts puts it in The Wisdom of Insecurity,
Thoughts or ideas are ‘coins’ for real things. They’re not those things, and although they represent them, there are many ways in which they do not correspond at all. As with men money and wealth, so with thoughts and things. Ideas and words are more or less fixed, whereas real things change.
There’s no such thing as a language which isn’t generic (or ‘all-purpose’) – it simply wouldn’t work otherwise. We might think that because we are able to describe lots and lots of different things (from cauliflowers to neutron stars, from earwigs to nuclear-powered submarines) but this is an illusion. We might think that our inner life is rich and varied because we are able to conceptualize so many different things, but this isn’t true. There’s a sort of glamour (or ‘intoxication’) attached to thought (or language) which causes us to feel that there is genuine richness or diversity there, but when the intoxication or glamour wears off (as it always does) then we discover that we were under a spell, under an enchantment, and that our actual situation is an impoverished one We’ve been watching a show, and getting excited by it, but that show – no matter how exciting it might be – is at the end of the day only a show. It’s all quite empty.
No matter how many different things we might describe to ourselves, it’s all just words; no matter how many different things we may think about, it’s all just thought, it’s all just the thinking mind ‘doing its thing’. Our words are the same every time: there are only a finite number of them, just as there are only a finite number of thoughts, and so they get recycled over and over again. What we’re looking at here is the trick of ‘apparent diversity’ therefore – the worlds that are created by thought are quintessentially hollow but we nevertheless perceive them as being full of content. The same basic pattern is being repeated over and over again, but we don’t ever spot it – as far as we’re concerned, it’s new and thrilling every time! Or, as we could also say, the virtual reality that we live within is impoverishment itself, and yet we perceive it to be full of all sorts of wonderful things, all sorts of riches. And it’s not just that (as Jesus says in Saying 3 in the Gospel of Thomas) we ‘live in poverty’ either but rather that ‘it is you that are that poverty’.
Apparent diversity is the same thing as ‘virtual content’ and ‘virtual content’ is just another way of talking about Samsara, the Illusion World. There’s no diversity in Samsara, there’s no content in the Mind-Created Virtual Reality, but in order to see this we need to have perspective, we need to be able to see that our current way of seeing things isn’t the only way and that there are – on the contrary – any number of completely different viewpoints that will are just as good. Being aware of the existence of other viewpoints frees us from ‘the Tyranny of the One and Only Officially Prescribed Narrative’, and it is this tyranny (the tyranny of the established viewpoint) that is responsible for us being unable to see that the virtual reality we’re trapped in is only virtual. If we were granted any mobility at all (with regard to the question as to how we ought to look at the world) the MCVR wouldn’t work – zero mental mobility is what’s absolutely needed before we can ‘play the game’ (which is to say, before we can buy into the quaint notion that we live a universe that is made out of ‘literal facts’).
We could also say that zero flexibility in our outlook is what’s needed for us to perceive a world that is made up of absolute rather than relative truths. When there is only the one VP (and hence only the one description) then the world we create by ‘running everything through this viewpoint’ is an absolute one – there’s no freedom in this world at all, in other words. There is no leeway for things to be ‘other than they have been defined as being’. By being extremely rigid and narrow-minded in our outlook (in the fashion of a religious zealot) we create a world that oppresses us with its black and white terms, with its binary either/or nature. Everything that happens in this realm is the result of rules; everything that happens happens because it has been made to, because no other possibilities were allowed or acknowledged. There’s no genuine diversity here because genuine diversity comes about as a result of random chance, not because of the enactment of logical processes or procedures, not because of ‘the faithful obeying of established rules’. When a rule is ‘acted out’ then the output of that rule is already contained within it and what this means is that the acting out of the rule is a virtual event. When we have no perspective however, then we become fundamentally incapable of seeing this, we become fundamentally incapable of seeing that the ‘working out’ (or ‘acting out’) of a rule (any rule) is only ever going to be a ‘virtual event’.
Image credit – istockphoto.com
