It’s impossible to be in Rational / Purposeful Mode and yet at the same time be ‘in reality’. That just can’t be done. When we think about things then we’re not in the real world, and when we deliberately act (or plan to act) then we’re also no longer in the real world. This being the case -seeing as just about all we ever do is act and plan to act – how do we expect things to ever work out for us?
All thought is derived from an Inviolate Template (which is a level of programming that we cannot access, but are controlled by) and all directed action – needless to say – comes from thought, and as a result neither thought nor thought-mediated action can ever connect with reality. The only way this wouldn’t be so would be if the inviolate template itself were actually a real thing. It’s not a real thing however – it’s only so much code, it’s only a set of instructions.
This – the situation where we are 100% in Rational / Purposeful Mode (which is to say, Doing Mode) – is a situation marked by maximal incoherence, which is to say, it is a situation where we can never produce the results that we want to produce, the results that we have aimed to produce. Our efforts are all going to go awry – our attempts to improve our situation will, in the end, backfire painfully on us.
Our aim is off in other words. Our aim is off because our sights don’t correspond to what we think they correspond to – our sights don’t correspond to anything other than their own projection (or extrapolation). Our actions are irredeemably incoherent because they have their origin in a construct (or theory) which has not the slightest bit of connection with the world it claims to explain.
This is the classic point made by the Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski about ‘the map’ and ‘the territory’, in other words – our mode of relating to the world doesn’t happen to have any relationship to that world, but only to our ideas about it. Ideas or theories or philosophies of the world are always going to be incoherent – they’re always going to be incoherent because the world isn’t an idea. Our theories are necessarily logical in nature and the world isn’t. The universe isn’t logical – we live in an Alogical Universe.
Another way to put this is to say that it is impossible for us ever to leave the inviolate level of programming, to depart from it. If the Inviolate Template doesn’t connect with anything outside of itself (which is its defining peculiarity) then of course we aren’t ever going to leave it. What could be easier to understand than this? We aren’t inhabiting the Inviolate Template (or ‘the Code’), we are inhabiting the projection of that template or code, the linear extrapolation of it. Furthermore, we’re not inhabiting that projected domain as ‘independent or autonomous beings’ (which is the illusion) but as part of that projection.
There’s no way into the inviolate level therefore (because it’s not real) and there’s no way out of it either (for the exact same reason) and yet – at the same time – it is within this non-existent ‘projected domain’ that we all find ourselves in. This is the Consensus Reality, this is where we all ‘hang out’. For the most part we know nothing else, and if we ever do come across something else, we’ll ignore it because it has no correlates within the Inviolate Template.
For us, the null domain which is the produced by the IT is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, and we don’t as a rule ever stop to consider that the projects we spend our time engaging in (along with the problems we spend our time trying to fix) actually have nothing to do with life, nothing to do with reality. It’s all just ‘time wasting’, it’s all just pure distraction – leading nowhere – and yet we think it is all vital stuff. This is precisely where we think it’s at.
This ‘null domain which is the production of the IT’ is also known as Samsara, and – more recently, in the West – as the state of Hyperreality. The null domain of Samsara (or Hyperreality) is where anything at all can seem real to us, but only on the condition that the equal-and-opposite ‘counterpart possibility’ must also seem real. This is the all-important qualification, therefore: We can have one opposite, but only at the price of the other, complementary one; we can have pleasure, but only at the price of pain. We can have elation but only at the price of despair. We can have winning but only on the condition that we lose every bit as much as we win. One hand gives whilst the other takes, in other words…
When we succeed at whatever it is that we’re trying to succeed at then this feels rewardingly good, it feels like a genuine honest-to-goodness achievement. It isn’t however, the whole business is actually perfectly meaningless. We only pretend to ourselves that it’s meaningful. There’s no way winning can be a meaningful thing (outside of our imaginations) since – as the mystics of all ages never tire of telling us – Nothing can be added to reality and nothing can be taken away.
How can we add to (or subtract from) Wholeness, after all? Wholeness (or Original Symmetry) isn’t some kind of fanciful metaphysical notion or New Age froth – it’s all there is. We can’t escape Wholeness; we can’t ever break Original Symmetry. In Daoist terms, we could say something like, ‘The Dao is all-accepting’, or ‘We can’t contrive to act in any such way that is not an expression of the Dao’. There is no way to divide Wholeness; as Ken Wilber points out –
Boundaries are illusions, products are reality not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality.
Or in the words of James Carse,
What will undo any boundary is the awareness that is our vision and not what we are viewing, that is limited.
It is precisely this awareness that we don’t have, however. Not having this awareness is the condition of the game – as far as we’re concerned, dividing reality up into compartments is what it’s all about! Fragmenting Wholeness into untold myriads of illusory compartments and then acting as if these compartments are fundamentally, irreproachably real (and is the only reality there is or ever could be) is all we ever do – we have precisely zero interest in anything else…
Image credit – hostelworld.com
