When we live in ‘the Box’ – the box of our thoughts, the box of what we have automatically assumed to be true – then we’ll never come across anything that is genuinely new. When we live in the box we will never come across anything that isn’t the box, in other words. The box doesn’t acknowledge anything that isn’t the box, and what this means is that it doesn’t acknowledge itself to be ‘just a box’.
This is a much bigger problem than we might at first think. It’s more than just ‘a problem’ – in order to relate at all – in any meaningful sense of the word – we have to be able to go beyond ourselves, we have to be able to go beyond what we have assumed. The only real type of relationship is where we relate to what is not us, what is radically different to us. This – we might say – constitutes a basic principle – self-relation is no relation. When I use myself as ‘the measure of the world’ then the world I create as result is a reflection of myself, and this is the closed, claustrophobic loop that I live in.
Instead of talking about relating (i.e., having a relationship with the world) we could just speak in terms of awareness (or consciousness). The problem with living in ‘the Box’ (which is the box of our rational understanding, the box which is our conceptual model of the world) is – we might say – that we can never come across anything that is truly new, and if we can never come across anything that is truly new (which is to say, anything that isn’t the box) then there is no awareness, there is no consciousness.
This is a ‘deficit situation’, therefore – it is deficient in anything real, in anything authentic. Since there can only be consciousness in the mix when we’re relating to something that is not us, and since there is no ‘not us’ in the Continuum of Thought (no ‘not us’ in the mental box of our thoughts) then we’re going to be living in a situation that is deficient in consciousness. We are going to be spending our lives in a situation where there is a radical lack of something vital, and where – crucially – we are going to be supremely incapable of seeing (or knowing) that this is the case. All of our motivation – when we’re in the Deficit Realm – is therefore going to be directed towards ‘making good the lack that we can’t know about’.
When we exist within a situation where there is ‘zero possibility of anything new ever happening’ (i.e., zero possibility of consciousness ever arising, since there are no real ‘objects’ for our attention to alight upon, only virtual or produced objects) then there must be some other principle applying here (something other than the ‘Principle of Consciousness’) and this might be said to be the Principle of Causality, the Principle of Linearity, the Principle of ‘Following Rules’, etc. In order to relate to ‘that which we have never before come across’ we have to be able to jump across the fence of our own unconscious assumptions and the thing about this is that there is no such thing as a rule that can jump over itself, no such thing as a rule which will lead us beyond itself…
There can be no such thing as ‘a rule that doesn’t agree with itself’, no such thing as’ a rule that is able to miraculously transcend itself’, ‘a rule that which leads to somewhere where it isn’t’, to somewhere that it itself does not ‘presume in advance’. When we’re in the mechanical (or rule-following) modality of being then we’re going to STAY in this modality, therefore! We’re in jail. Just as long as we remain in ‘Mechanical Mode’ we’re never going to be awake, in other words. The system that brought us unconsciousness is never going to turn around and cure us of it, as Gurdjieff says; there’s no way to become conscious by ‘following mechanical instructions’ no matter how assiduous we might be in the execution of this task.
The truth is that all mechanical tasks are the SAME task – the difference between one task and any other is only trivial. All mechanical tasks equal ‘faithfully reproducing the pattern that we started off with’ (just as linearity means ‘preserving the essential proportionalities that we have been given’).There are no two ways about this – any mechanical task that we are set, without exception, comes down to one thing and one thing only – the preservation (or replication) of the original set of proportionalities. The bottom line in matters of logic is that the essential proportionalities (or ‘key ratios’) be preserved and there’s no leeway in this, no leeway at all. Anything that results in the loss of the key ratios is error, is ‘things going wrong’. When the laws of logic (which, as we have said, are all about the preservation of what was originally given to us) aren’t being followed in every single instance then there’s chaos (which is the very thing we’re always trying to avoid). Chaos equals ‘the loss of the regular pattern’, ‘the loss of linearity’, ‘the loss of the thread of logic that we are supposed to be following’.
The task which thought presents us with in life – the program that we are encouraged to ‘get with’ – is to stay true to whatever (limited) picture of reality we have been given at the onset of the task. This is true for any machine – the task for any machine is to ‘act itself out’ (or ‘act out its programming’. All machines are the same in that they invariably ‘act out their design specification’ (which is all they can do, anyway). That’s the definition of a machine. The task thought gives us in life is the task of promoting and perpetuating the self or identity (this is obviously true – who can deny it? – but at the same time we never stop to consider this most peculiar fact. We ‘obey the directive’ like good machines and ‘obeying the directive’ means not reflecting on the sense (or otherwise) of what that directive might be.
The mind – if left to its own devices – will always coerce us to protect and perpetuate the literal self, the concrete identity. The thinking mind – if obeyed unreflectively (as it generally is) will turn us into machines, therefore. The definition of a machine – we might say – is that it should be 100% inflexible with regards of executing the task that it has been given (and we can hardly blame machines for their single-mindedness in this regard, after all) and this definition fits us perfectly (that’s us just as long as we’re living within the ‘Boxed-off Reality’ (or ‘rational context’) that is generated automatically for us every time we utilise the machinery of thought. To dwell in the MCVR is to be a machine, and there’s simply no way around this. We can’t have our cake and get to eat it…
This is very obviously true, but what is also ‘very obviously true’ is the fact that we never ever acknowledge our status as machines, as mere ‘mechanical creatures’. It’s obvious that we are functioning as machines just as soon as we look at the definition that we have just given – we are exhibiting in our ordinary lives, the constant, obsessive need to preserve the identity that we have been provided with, no matter how ridiculous that identity might be. Identities are always ridiculous – the ‘self we understand ourselves to be’ has no connection with our true nature which naturally enough can’t be quantized (or ‘digitalized’) and this is what makes it absurd, this is what makes it ridiculous.
We celebrate our randomly allocated identities – the fortunes of our cockleshell identity determines our mood – and yet it has nothing to do with us! If the accidents of my birth, my family and upbringing, and so on, had resulted in me having a different identity to the one I do have then I will be struggling to protect and preserve that one instead. It doesn’t matter to me what my ID actually is – holding on is the point, not what I am holding onto. I will put everything I’ve got into the job no matter what. As a machine, my role is not ‘to reason why’ but to obey my instructions to the letter, the matter what they may be. A machine can’t take responsibility for what it does. This is true for the social template as a whole – we will act out the social template and give it everything we’ve got, no matter what form it might take. What the ‘template’ is simply none of our business.
We could equivalently say that we are slaves to the identity as formulated by the machinery of thinking mind. If we are slaves to a mechanical template (or – as we could also say – ‘slaves to the arbitrary identity-construct’) that makes us into machines too. There is of course no way for us not to end up as machines – we’re always going to end up as ‘extensions this system’ when we become adapted to it. We are then victims of an ‘invisible’ type of slavery’ and our perception of ourselves as autonomous or self-willed creatures is nothing more than pure fantasy, pure imagination. As long as we’re living out our lives within the confines of the mental box which is our thoughts about the world (which we are perfectly happy – if not downright insistent – to carry on doing) then very basis of our existence is going to be completely false. Personal volition is a manufactured illusion – an illusion we are sold by the machine to keep us happy.
This highly salient fact is not compatible – to put it mildly – with the way we want to carry on seeing things; we must make sure we never see this awkward truth (if we are to continue with the show), and for this reason we are obliged to confine our awareness to the virtual domain that has been provided for us by thought. In order to make sure we don’t ever see anything that rocks our boat, anything that compromises the integrity of the game we are playing, we have to be scrupulously careful to stay within ‘the Box’ at all times, and yet it is the fact that we religiously avoid leaving the box that creates the situation which we are so afraid of finding out about, and which is – therefore – the reason we have to make very sure that we ‘stay in the box’.
Image credit – ekosystem.org
