The self is obliged to close down space. The self absolutely has to shut down space, and it’s not too hard to see why it has to do this. All we have to consider is what would happen if it didn’t shut down space, if it was unable (for whatever reason) to do so. How would it cope?
Space is relativity – there’s nothing that it will not (or cannot) relativize. Space (we might say) is pure relativity – it allows everything but promotes nothing. Nothing gets to be special, nothing gets to stand over anything else, nothing gets to have the much-coveted ‘elevated position’, and this is of course utterly antithetical to all notions of selfhood. Relativity is lethal to selfhood the self cannot survive it.
Space is generous – it never holds back. It has no limits and therefore it makes no measurements, whilst the self – on the other hand – is always mean. It counts everything and it never does anything unless it believes it’s going to get something back in return. The self ‘holds back’ the whole time – it is ‘strictly transactional’. The self – we might say – is all about limits; it is all about what it calls its ‘boundaries’. Without its precious boundaries the ego identity cannot exist – it creates the limits and the limits create it. The self is nothing else but limitation – it’s the glorification of limitation. It is both the ‘glorification of the limit’ and the demonization of the unlimited and the unregulated.
The self always needs to be promoted – if it wasn’t being actively promoted then it simply wouldn’t exist. It’s like a heavy weight that we are lifting off the ground – it’s in the air only for so long as we keep lifting it. It’s also like a dent in a thin sheet of metal – there’s going to be no dent without someone putting it there, without someone going out of their way (by hitting it with a big hammer) to put a dent in it. The dent is there only because we actively promote it. We promote the positive displacement but – in order to do this – we have to turn a blind eye to the negative displacement that is created at the same time. Ignorance of what we’re really doing is the key criterion here.
When we are going along with this business of ‘promoting the self’ then we feel good and because this feels so good we are highly motivated to push it to the limit. We’ll push it as far as we can. It feels ‘right’ to assert the self; it feels so right that we never question it. This isn’t just ‘a’ motivation, it’s the only motivation, the sole motivation. Nothing else matters – the only motivation the ego has is the motivation to promote itself and extend itself indefinitely until all the available space is taken up.
This is the self’s core drive therefore, to annihilate space. We could also say that the core motivation is to flee from space – it’s the same thing. Aggression is fear, it is fear directed outwards. It’s fear that is designed to pre-empt what we’re afraid of. This movement of self-assertion feels so right to us that we never it never even occurs to us to question it, but at the same time it isn’t really right at all. It’s only right from the very narrow perspective that we’re looking at things from really it’s only as right as it’s wrong, and it’s only as wrong as it’s right.
We are seeing winning as being something quite different to losing, pleasure as something that is entirely unrelated to pain. If pleasure were completely different to pain – if moving forward along the X-axis were a different thing to moving backwards down it – then we would be home and dry, all would be good. The ego could then celebrate forever (which is what it wants to do), but unfortunately for it this isn’t the case: pleasure is pain, ‘going forward’ equals ‘coming back again’ and it is for this reason that we can say that promoting the self is ‘only as right as it is wrong and only as wrong as it is right’.
We could also equate space with consciousness. We can do this because space provides us with an endless number of viewpoints – not just the one ‘official viewpoint’ that thought does. Space is rounded therefore, not narrow or partial or biased; as we have already said, space is rounded because it excludes nothing, because it excludes no viewpoint. Space gives us all round perspective because it has ‘no agenda to push’ (as we might say). We’re not being secretly manipulated here, which is always the case with the thinking mind (which has the covert agenda to prove itself right no matter what).
When we are blessed with all-round perspective then we can clearly see that everything thought produces is illusory in nature. Or as we could also say – everything the thinking mind tells us is a lie. In Alfred Korzybski’s words, ‘Whatever you say it is, it isn’t’. Everything we think is untrue, without exception, and this is counterintuitive – so to speak – since all of thought’s statements are 100% definite (or 100% certain) in the way that they presented. They are presented – in other words – in such in a way that doesn’t brook any questioning. The statements have nothing to do with communication (or passing on information’) and everything to do with control – we are being instructed on how to see reality.
This is thought’s authority – thought has authority over us because of the way in which it compels us to look at the statements which it makes only in this one specific way – the one specific way that makes these statements true. Thought’s ‘definite statements’ are true – relatively speaking – in one way, the one way that makes it ‘true’. The only way a positive statement of fact can actually be ‘a positive statement of fact’ is when we only have the one way of looking at it. The thing about this however is that when we look at everything from only the one perspective (or the only the one viewpoint) then we have no perspective, then we are occluded – we can’t see what’s really going on.
If we had the perspective that comes from being able to see whatever it is that we’re looking at from all angles, from all sides, with an all-round view (excluding nothing), then we would see that ‘going equals coming’, that ‘up equals down’, we see that ‘the road up is the same as the road down’, as Heraclitus says, and if we were able to see this then we would also see that what we’re looking at isn’t actually a thing at all. It’s not actually a thing at all because – as Spencer Brown tells us – ‘to cross twice is not to cross’. What we took to be an actual thing in its own right is in reality only a mental construct; it’s an illusion we cultivate without admitting our role in creating it, in arranging for it to be there. Thought – we might say – is a liar. It is a liar because it states that there are two things and not just the one; it tells us that there is the seeker and the sought, the seer and the seen, the doer and the done, but nowhere is to be found in reality. Hence, we read in the Lankavatara Sutra –
False-imagination teaches that such things as light and shade, long and short, black and white are different and are to be discriminated; but they are not independent of each other; they are only different aspects of the same thing, they are terms of relation, not of reality. Conditions of existence are not of a mutually exclusive character; in essence things are not two but one.
Just as it is to for any other mental constructs (any other mental objects) it is also true for the self. The self only gets to exist because it asserts itself but the act by which it asserts itself is inherently self-contradictory (or ‘paradoxical’); the act by which it asserts itself is self-contradictory because the way up is the way down, because to assert the self is also to deny it. To assert our unwavering belief in something (whatever it might be doesn’t matter) is to admit doubt, is to admit disbelief. To chase security is to put ourselves at the mercy of unrelenting insecurity.
If we could clearly see that the self (and its projected world, which is also itself) is nothing more which is itself than a loop of logic which is doomed to voraciously devour itself for all eternity, then it would no longer be possible for us to believe that we ‘are’ it, and so that would be the end of that. We would lose our comforting illusion. In order to keep the show going therefore we are obliged to ‘shut down space’, this is only way there is to continue with the show. Shutting down space means shutting down perspective, as we have said – it means tying ourselves to a particular view of the world, a particular description or account of ‘how things are’.
In order to be able to achieve and enjoy the pleasure that comes with getting rid of all ‘disagreeing’ perspectives we have to be stupid in this very particular way therefore. The illusion of achievement that comes with positive self-expansion can only be enjoyed I may not conscious of that. Just Heraclitus points out when he says that ‘A fool is excited by every word’ so too an unconscious person will believe any story that they are told by thought; in the conditioned modality of being we are at the mercy of our thoughts, and – as we’ve already said – what our thoughts tell us is never true. Thought might be said to be the ‘ultimately authoritative liar’, therefore. Or to put it another way, thought is the Great Deceiver…
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