‘Awareness of the particular precludes awareness of the universal’, says J.G. Bennett, although not in exactly these words. The former excludes the latter, and this is the principle which is responsible for the ‘Differentiated World’ – the world that is made up of many (apparent) parts. This exclusion of the awareness of the Whole by the (conditioned) awareness of the part is total – when we live in the Plural World, the Conditioned World, the word that is made up of what appears to be lots and lots of little separate bits, this is the only reality we can know. We only know the fragment that doesn’t let on to us that it is only a fragment. We can only know the illusion.
Plurality we understand, the absence of plurality – on the other hand – is utterly incomprehensible to us. We can talk about Wholeness of course and we often do. The idea of Wholeness holds a great deal of fascination, naturally enough – it sounds like a ‘good’ thing, a ‘wholesome’ (!) thing, an ‘inclusive’ thing. The idea that we have of Wholeness has nothing to do with the thing itself, however – the thing itself has nothing to do with our ideas about it. What could be more absurd than ‘having ideas about Wholeness?’
What in fact could be more absurd than having ideas about anything really, seeing as how all our ideas pretend to be about Wholeness? Wholeness is the only thing that is real after all and we’re not going to be thinking about anything that isn’t real. What would we be doing that for, after all? Our thoughts seem real to us and that’s why we keep giving them our attention – this doesn’t mean that they are real, however. The world that thought creates pretends to be ‘a whole world’ (or ‘the whole of the world, with nothing missing’) but despite being a very persuasive illusion, this is also a vanishingly thin one. The world that is made up by thought is also a world that is hemmed in by thought; it is hemmed in by thought on all sides, but we don’t see it. We don’t see it because we are so very used to seeing everything ‘bracketed’ in this way that we never see the brackets. We’re so used to being blinkered that we don’t see the blinkers anymore. It would simply never occur to us that there could be anything more to life than what thought shows us. We don’t miss what hasn’t been shown to us, in other words.
The world we know is hemmed in by our assumptions, bracketed by our assumptions, and we haven’t a clue about what those assumptions are. We haven’t a clue that they are there, even. We have zero interest – precisely zero interest – in these assumptions of ours; all of our attention goes on what can be seen through the aperture that is framed by our assumptions and this is a different thing entirely. This is a figure / ground type of thing – it’s only by ignoring the ground that we get to see the figure, it is only by ignoring the assumptions made by thought that we get to see the world that thought that has made. The reason we pay no attention to our assumptions isn’t because off mere laziness or carelessness therefore – ignoring the assumptions that thought makes in order to create the Defined or Positive World is essential if we are to live in that Defined or Positive World. ‘Knowing requires ignorance,’ as Stuart Kauffman says.
What we’re looking at here is an ‘inversion of interest’ therefore – it is the inversion of our natural curiosity about the world so that it becomes something else, something that is very far indeed from being curiosity. We could – if we wanted – say that in our normal, conditioned mode of existence we aren’t interested in the assumptions that frame the world we live in, but that we are at least interested in the details that constitute this thought-created world. That’s something at least, we might argue. At least – we might say – we are interested in something! This turns out to not to be true at all, however! We have no curiosity in the thought-created world at all – we aren’t interested in this (supposed) world, we are only interested in doing what this world says we should be doing. We’re interested in ‘handing over responsibility to some convenient external authority’ (so that this EA can tell us what to be interested in). We’re not interested in why the rules should be there, or what their actual legitimacy might be, we are only interested in obeying them. We are ‘obeying machines’, in other words. There’s nothing else to us.
The ‘inverted form of curiosity’ isn’t curiosity therefore, but the perfect antithesis of it. We’re not curious about this so-called world that we living in, we merely require it to endlessly distract us so that we can carry on ‘not knowing anything about anything’. We want it to tell us what to do, what to believe, how to see or interpret things, etc. We want to be externally-controlled (or externally-determined) in this way, but we also want not to know anything about it! This is the red pill / blue pill scenario, therefore! When we’re drawn towards playing the game this isn’t because we are ‘interested in the game’ – we are interested in what the game can do for us in terms of facilitating our state of ‘ongoing ignorance that doesn’t know itself to be ignorant’. It’s not that I am interested in the game itself therefore – only (as we have said) in what that game can do for me. The situation is that I am interested in playing the game without knowing that I am playing the game, without knowing that there is a game being played.
A game is a situation or domain in which there is no freedom. That’s one handy definition we could use, anyway. Another (more telling) way of putting it would be to say that the game ‘is a situation in which we have no freedom but do not know this to be the case’. No freedom means no curiosity because we’re not free to be curious; by playing the game we have guaranteed that we won’t ever be free to be interested in the real world, and – what’s more – we are also putting ourselves in a situation position where we will never find out that this is what we have guaranteed for ourselves! We can say therefore that ‘awareness of the particular precludes awareness of the universal’, and that’s fine, but it’s also true to say that awareness of the particular isn’t really awareness since the particular isn’t real! The particular isn’t real, the fragment isn’t real, and so the thought isn’t real…
How can we have awareness of something that isn’t real? Awareness – if there were any of it going around – would show us precisely that the object of our narrowed down attention isn’t real. There’s no way to be aware of any illusion without that illusion immediately ceasing to exist for us – relating to an illusion as if it isn’t illusion isn’t awareness therefore, it is merely us being manipulated or controlled by that illusion. We can have awareness of the Whole because the Whole is real, because the Whole is all there is, but we can’t have awareness of the Mind-Created World, the Projected World that comes into (apparent) existence when we ignore the bracketing of thought. This is only the illusion of awareness, the ‘inverted form of awareness’, which is ‘being controlled by an all-determining External Authority without knowing that we are’. ‘Rules are a substitute for consciousness’, as Jung says…
Art: streetartutopia.com
