Virtual space is always positive, it is inevitably positive. It can’t be otherwise – anything that is planned, anything that is specified, anything that is mapped out in advance is by definition going to be taking place in ‘positive space’. Any guess or prediction on our part with regard to ‘what’s going to happen next’ is by definition going to close reality down for us. That’s how thought works – it shuts down space…
Positive space corresponds to what Krishnamurti calls Psychological Time, therefore, and the point about psychological time is that it isn’t real, is that it’s the mind’s projection. Any movement at all into the future is a projection, obviously enough – it has to be a projection because it hasn’t happened yet! It hasn’t happened yet and so we’re running a model, we’re running a simulation of what we think is going to happen. A model or simulation can never be equal to reality however, no matter how much time we put into polishing and perfecting it.
This impossibility is not immediately apparent to us, however; far from being ‘immediately apparent’ we don’t appreciate the point at all – for the most point we unconsciously assume that our ideas about ‘what’s going to happen next’ are the same thing as reality. We conflate our ideas about what’s happening with what’s really happening. What we take to be the real world (what we relate to as if it were such) is a model, a map, a simulation, etc.; we don’t generally have anything at all to do with raw or unprocessed information. We have no way of relating to it, no way of processing or digesting it, and also no way of knowing that we have no way of relating to it or processing it. This is the situation we find ourselves in – the situation where we can’t for the life of us see the transition point between the present moment and the mental extension of the present moment into the hypothetical future, which is the future which exists only in our heads, the future which exists only as an idea. We might be banking on it – we might be banking on it with everything we’ve got – but it’s still only ever an idea…
The transition from ‘non-extended’ to ‘extended’ is an invisible one therefore, and what this means is that we can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not. We ought to be able to tell the difference – we might say – we ought to be able to tell the difference between what is reality and what is the fantasy projection because this is of course the biggest ‘difference’ that could ever be between any two situations, and so if we can’t spot this critical difference then we’re completely lost. We go about our day-to-day lives confident that we have a basic orientation, a ‘basic grasp on the essentials’ (we almost always do believe this to be the case) but this belief of our is absurd – the actual reality of our situation (as opposed to what we lazily think that situation is) is precisely the thing we don’t have any insight to.
There’s no way to extend anything without creating positive space. Extension equals positive curvature. Any sort of extension, in any dimension / direction, creates positive space because space itself (the open type, that is, not the type that folds imperceptibly back on itself) has no extension (or no ‘duration’, if we want to think in terms of time). Duration or extension means that we are reproducing what was already there – we’re copying, we’re duplicating. We’re taking our starting-off point as a template and then we’re going on to print off serial copies of it, all of which are faithful to the original, all of which are joined up together to create the impression that there is such a thing as duration, that there is such a thing as extension. There isn’t, however; duplication is an unreal act – it’s an imaginary action, an action that seems to take place, but which actually doesn’t. It’s an hallucination.
Extension exists, we might say, but only within the remit of the continuum of logic; extension is only ‘a thing’ when we’re considering what happens within the abstract context of the Framework of Thought. The framework – we might say – is an exercise in stretching – each linear axis is like a rubber band (a special type of rubber band which is infinitely elastic and can go on extending forever without ever reaching a breaking point) and the thing about these rubber bands (these infinitely extendible axes) is that if they aren’t being stretched then they don’t take up any space, they don’t have any extension. What’s been ‘created’ here is entirely artificial, therefore – if we don’t force ‘the thing’ to happen then there won’t be ‘a thing’. We can say that the framework is an exercise in stretching, therefore, with the proviso that the thing which is supposedly being ‘stretched’ never actually had any existence in the first place. Nothing is being stretched and the stretching itself isn’t a real thing. Stretching (or extending) is a ‘fantasy operation’ – it only makes sense within the fantasy that is the Continuum of Logic.
We might ask why it is that extending a point always results in positively-curved space, space that turns in rather than turning out (or just ‘flat’, as we imagine it to be. When we take a geometrical point and stretch it out in a linear dimension it looks very much as if the figure thus produced is a straight line and that it will, on this account, never ‘turn around and come back to meet itself again’, but that’s simply an optical illusion (or rather the mental equivalent of an optical illusion). Linearity is an illusion because the way that we have of looking at (or understanding) the world shares the same invisible bias that the construction of the straight line does; either way, the viewpoint we’re using comes with a blind-spot built into it that makes it impossible for is see anything ‘wrong’ or ‘suspicious’ with the picture that we are being shown. The blind-spot that we have unwittingly acquired at the same time as utilizing the prescribed VP (because it’s part of the same package) means that we can’t see the bias that lies behind the picture of the world that is being displayed to us. When we’re operating in rational mode then what this means is that we are biassed towards believing that our way of looking at things is ‘the only possible way’, and thus we see the extrapolation of our viewpoint as being exactly what it presents itself as being. We have no awareness whatsoever of the artificial context within the terms of which we are perceiving everything. This is ‘the trick’ in a nutshell.
What’s happening here is that we see the straight line (the straight line which is the ‘presented reality’) but we don’t see the artificial context within which it makes sense, within which it gets to look like a straight line and not like ‘a feedback loop of runaway redundancy’, not like ‘a self-negating circle’. We don’t ‘see the context’ because we assume that that aren’t any special conditions in effect, because we naturally take it that this is just the way things are. It never occurs to us to investigate this. The ‘bias’ that we mentioned is the context which we see everything through and the reason we don’t notice it is because it is our viewpoint, because it’s our only way of looking at things. We have ‘adapted to the viewpoint,’ we have ‘conformed to the system’, and just as a fish doesn’t pay any attention to the water that it’s swimming in, we’re not able to know that there is a system, we’re not able to know our perceptions of the world are being distorted (or ‘misrepresented’) by an artificial context of framework that doesn’t need to be there at all.
The context within which everything is perceived to be happening (the context which frames and conditions our understanding of the world) is perfectly invisible to us as a context and this means that we take it for granted that it has all the attributes of what we might call ‘a genuine context’ without actually being one. An artificial viewpoint (the System of Thought by another name) is merely an arbitrarily selected set of restrictions, and ‘an arbitrarily selected set of restrictions’ isn’t a thing! Wearing blinkers causes us to be subject to ‘cut-off points to our attention that don’t exist’ and the shadows that we call ‘things’ are a function of this invisible limitation. In reality, there are no ‘things’ – if the world appears to be composed of discrete units or entities then that’s only because our awareness has been conditioned (i.e., it has been systematically distorted by the limitations that we have adapted to and then forgotten about). Our blind spot makes us see things that aren’t there, in other words. It makes us see ‘flowers in the sky’.
Thought makes us see the world in a reversed way – the context that we take for granted (the framework we have been given to interpret everything that happens to us within) isn’t really a context in any meaningful sense of the world – which is to say it’s not a ‘context’ in the sense of a genuine or authentic space within which stuff can happen freely (or happen ‘all by itself’) – but rather it’s a construct, an artifact, a ’made thing’, and because of that nothing can happen within it that hasn’t been previously scripted. Nothing can happen in an artificial context (or logical system) apart from what we might call ‘the (unfree) simulation of freely occurring events’. The principle here is clear – as James Carse tells us, the Infinite Game cannot be contained within any finite game. Spontaneity cannot occur as a result of ‘following a formula’…
The truth of the matter is that the stuff that goes on (or rather, the stuff that is perceived to be going on) via the mind-created context is not ever going to be separate from that context. Paradoxically, the event that is (supposedly) occurring is not a different thing to the ‘designed’ space within which it is (supposedly) happening. What lies behind the ‘context of understanding’ that we keep on talking about is a set of rules or criteria and what happens within this context equals ‘the working out of these rules’, the ‘observation of these criteria’. There is the appearance of an event happening but really this event is a logical function of the way we have of understanding the world. The ‘context for understanding’ and ‘what is being understood’ are thus not two different things but the very same thing and when ‘the way we have of looking at the world’ is the same thing as ‘what it is we believe we’re seeing via this way’ then what we are looking at here is 100% informational redundancy, which is the situation where <ACTUAL> equals <EXPECTED>, the situation where ‘the greedy map gets to subsume the entire territory’. Instead of trying to explain what ‘informational redundancy’ is in an intellectual way however we can take a more direct approach and represent it visually (or topologically) as positively curved space (which is to say, ‘space that is forever turning in on itself’, or ‘space which ostensibly claims to be going somewhere but which isn’t’), and it is impossible therefore not to think of the ancient mystical image of the Ouroboros in this connection.
image credit – The ADHD Alchemist, on monicadena.substack
