If the negative psychologist pays attention to stillness, then positive psychology concerns itself exclusively with action, with noise, with measurable parameters, with ‘blank rules’ rather than unspecifiable nuances. Stillness doesn’t figure, and it certainly isn’t seen as the ‘cure’ for anything. It’s given no value whatsoever and so we ignore it roundly at every turn. In our highly focussed ‘busy-ness’, we are all about executing strategies, performing targeted interventions, defining outcomes, optimizing our performance, and so on. We hope to ‘cure noise with noise’; we (bizarrely) hope to fix the ever-proliferating problems caused by thought with the helpful addition of yet more thought and this – needless to say – is a total delusion. ‘Trying to fix the problems caused by overvaluing the rational faculty with the addition of yet more rationality’ is the recipe for a little thing called the Cybernetic Disaster. The CB is the ultimate train-wreck – it’s the train-wreck to end all train-wrecks.
The positive path promises much, but it leads inevitably to a bitter end – it’s exactly like an addiction in this regard. The positive path is an addiction; it’s an addiction because once we start going down it then we have no choice but to follow it through to the bitter end. It’s all been decided right from the very beginning. Once we start at all with the game of logic then we’re obliged to keep on playing it – there is after all no move in the game that does not continue the game, no move that does not further the game. There is no way to exit the Positive World via positive (i.e., ‘purposeful’) actions, and positive actions are the only type of action that exist in this domain. That’s all there is for us.
We can step into the Positive World quite freely – there is no prohibition to prevent us from transitioning from the negative realm to the positive. There are no rules, no prohibitions, no regulations in negative reality. There are no rules at all, that being the whole point, that being what negative means in this context. There are however lots and lots of rules, lots and lots of prohibitions, in the Positive World (in fact there’s nothing else in the Stated or Positive Reality apart from rules (naturally enough) and so whilst passing from the Open Universe into a closed (or private) one is permitted – there’s no rule against it – the same is not true with regard to moving from a closed domain to an open one. There isn’t the freedom there to do that, there isn’t any freedom there to do anything that hasn’t been explicitly sanctioned by the system. This is really just a less well-known variant of the Second Law of Thermodynamics – we can’t reverse our way out of it when we travel in the direction of losing information; we can’t ‘go back the way we came’ because the info relating to that possibility is no longer there. It’s been discarded; it’s been thrown away. We have no way of knowing anything about ‘where we came from’ (that information no longer exists for us) and so we have no way of knowing that there ever is, or ever could be, such information. To talk in terms of an irreversible process is to talk in terms of forgetting, therefore.
Because of this ‘forgetting’, illusion comes into the picture – a ‘second order reality’ is coming into play as a result of us not being able to know that it is a second order reality. That it is second order. We don’t have access to the info that relevant info that would allow us to see that what happens to be a complete or unsupported reality the real gaol in other words is actually the result of manoeuvres that are taking place out of sight. Or as we could also say, we can’t see that what we take to be a natural thing in itself is in fact dependent upon conditions that have to be set up, conditions that have to be set up with it without us knowing that they have been. If we knew that it had all been ‘set up in advance’ then it wouldn’t present itself as a primary reality, but we don’t and so it does. Ignorance is our way of knowing stuff therefore – we proceed on the basis of our deliberate-but-unacknowledged ignorance, and that allows us to substitute our rational knowledge (which isn’t really knowledge at all but just a game we’re playing) for actual gnosis, for actual awareness. The substitute needs to exclude all traces of the original or else it will be revealed for what it is, which is nothing. Control isn’t an option for the tyrant ruler, it is an absolute necessity. Freedom simply cannot be allowed.
Freedom means spaciousness, it means that we aren’t hemmed in on all sides. It means that we aren’t being compelled to see things in only the one particular way – it means we are free to see the world in any way we want (which means we don’t have to see it in any specific way). we’re not being corralled, we’re haven’t been tricked out of exchanging the freedom of the open field for the indignity of the cattle-press. The term ‘spaciousness’ indicates that there are no established grooves to drop into – no precedence, no bias, no influence of the past, no pressure to conform to the pre-existing pattern. The view that we end up with is a function of the viewpoint we are limited to and no matter what happens we’ll never see anything that doesn’t agree with the premise that we have assumed without realising that we have. When we fall into a pre-established groove then – of course – we lose the capacity to see anything that the groove doesn’t show us. We develop a very profound form of amnesia – we fall into a spiritual coma.
The groove equals zero perspective and that’s the whole point – the whole point is that we can’t see over the lip. We’re stuck in the furrow. The point is that we are ‘constrained in our vision’ (which also means therefore that we can’t see the constraint in question). We’ve lost perspective, we’ve lost the ability to see the world in a way that isn’t a non-representative static ‘snapshot’ (which is to say, in a way that doesn’t give us a completely false idea of our situation). If we hadn’t dropped into ‘the groove of rationality’ then we would have the perspective and as a result what we see wouldn’t be conditioned by our ‘way’ of seeing – we wouldn’t have a way of seeing. When we look out at the world from our habitual groove then this isn’t anything resembling ‘awareness’ – it can’t be called awareness because we’re not seeing anything new, because we’re not seeing anything that wasn’t already contained in the premise. Everything then becomes ‘perfectly futile’. We can’t see anything that hasn’t been set up in advance for us to see, and whatever we have been set up in advance to see isn’t real. ‘Real’ is the thing that no one sets up.
Image credit – arnolditkin.com
