The things that we fear and the things that we covet are both glitches caused by the mechanism of projection. The objects of our attachment – either attraction or aversion (more specifically the attraction or aversion we experience towards the object of our attachment) – is glitched. It’s glitched because there’s a paradox here that we don’t see, a paradox that might be expressed in the form <STOP means GO>.

 

 

The fundamental principle lying behind rationality / purposeful action is that STOP is fundamentally dissimilar to GO. When it’s goal-orientated activity we’re talking about then (very obviously!) the point of it all is to go and keep on going until we obtain the goal, at which point we stop. This is the basic formula and for this basic formula to work it is necessary for STOP and GO to be ‘non-equivalent’ therefore, and where the glitch that we’re talking about comes from is because the actual reality of the situation is that GO equals STOP, YES equals NO. The actual reality of the situation is symmetrical not asymmetrical.

 

 

The last thing we’re ever going to see is that <YES equals NO> and so – on what we might call a ‘subjective level of truth’ – our behaviour is meaningful. When it’s the stated level of meeting that we’re talking about then our behaviour in avoiding one opposite and seeking the other is unquestionably meaningful. Even though we don’t see it however, the problem is still there – It hasn’t gone anywhere (and it never will). The problem – which of course isn’t really a problem – is that YES is not different to NO. The reason Y equals N (or PLUS equals MINUS) is because these are the two sides of the same membrane, the two sides of the same boundary, and that membrane, that boundary, is infinitely thin. There’s no substance in it.

 

 

The boundary / membrane is an abstraction – it’s a line that has been arbitrarily drawn in the sand, an ‘conditioned state of affairs’. The unconditioned state of affairs – on the other hand – is simply ‘the sand’ – it is the way things are, and the only way they ever can be. We can condition the sand by drawing lines in it (as we have just said) but these lines are only subjectively true – which is to say, they only seem to be true because we have altered our perceptions so that they seem to be so. The conditioned world is thus the world that would exist would be real if these arbitrary lines in the sand weren’t arbitrary lines in the sand.

 

 

In order to define or measure anything we first need to have boundaries, we first need to ‘divide up the Whole and turn it into various categories or parts’, but the thing about this is that the act of dividing up the whole is that the all-important boundaries (or ‘dividing lines’) that we use to do this are purely abstract in nature. Boundaries aren’t real. A boundary isn’t really part of reality – it’s just a convention that we ourselves have settled on – we randomly pick a dividing line between ‘here and there’, ‘right and wrong’, ‘up and down’, and then we take this as our basis. To define or specify anything is always like this – we always have to pick a point at random. If we don’t ‘pick a point at random’ then it’s not going to be possible to start, it’s not going to be possible to measure or define anything.

 

 

The glitch behind purposefulness comes about when we fail to see that our point of reference is random, when we act as if there is nothing arbitrary about our starting-off point. The glitch comes into action just as soon as we start utilising the thinking mind in other words, and this is because the only way thought can work is by assuming an absolutely true basis or platform. Logic can’t go anywhere (or be anything) without this platform of unqualified certainty. If we were to think of the Continuum of Logic as being a kind of giant imaginary checkerboard that stretches on forever then we can say that each square represents a state of affairs that has been nailed-down definition wise such that everything about it can be caught or captured in a formula, in a black & white explanation. This is the Formal Realm that we have been talking about – everything in the formal realm happens lawfully, according to the rules, ‘by the book’, and if it doesn’t then it isn’t going to be there. The FW is the same thing as the rules that give rise to it (or as we could also say, the FW is the same thing as its description or definition).

 

 

This is all very straightforward therefore – just a matter of ‘following the rules’ – what isn’t straightforward is the question of how we get onto the logical checkerboard in the first place, the problem here being that the checkerboard is our own invention (which is to say, it exists only within our own imaginations). Reality itself – on the other hand – is not subject to our rules – it doesn’t fit into our boxes, our compartments, and neither does it not fit into them. Our rules have no relationship with reality whatsoever. Reality as it is in itself can’t be pinned down, which simply means that there’s nothing we can say or know about it. ‘Certainty’ becomes a word without meaning, therefore. There’s no basis, no platform that we can utilise, and so we can’t take any logical steps; we can’t get started with the game. We can’t take that first step, that first ‘mapped out’ movement. Or if we were to express this another way, we could say that when we’re not caught up in the Formal World (which is the Continuum of Thought) then we are able to plainly see that there is no ‘framework’, that there is no ‘Formal World’, that there is no ‘Continuum of Thought’.

 

 

The incoherence that exists between our way of looking at things means that – ultimately – all of our purposeful output comes down to travelling in circles. The type of journey we get involved in are ‘journeys in the imagination’, ‘fantasy journeys’, ‘virtual journeys’, etc. It is the meticulous working out of an equation that doesn’t say anything, the slavish obeying of a rule or instruction that is 100% self-contradictory. It doesn’t matter what our approach is either – any approach that we might pick will have the same result, without exception. All of our approaches are closed – there’s no such thing as an approach that isn’t closed – and the projection of a closed viewpoint on the world results in a closed world, and a closed world is a world that ‘cancels itself out’ (which is to say, it’s an illusion, a null world).

 

 

There is no right way to look at the world, which is a statement that we find totally baffling. There must be some way of seeing things (or understanding things) that is right, we say. Something’s got to be right. We just don’t get it (or at least, we don’t get it when we’re operating out of the thinking mind, which is very nearly all of the time). Any angle that we might take is always going to result in the creation of a closed world; the bias that we automatically assume in order to be able to objectify the world closes everything down on us – it closes everything down without us being able to know that it is. We can’t know that everything has been closed down because we’re taking the validity of the assumptions we’ve made for granted, which means that we can’t see it, which means that we never even think of questioning it. Not in a million years will we think of it.

 

 

We can’t see that the conditioned world is closed (or null) because we’re looking at it from the point of view of the conditioned self, in other words. What we see around us on a daily basis is ourselves, our own viewpoint reflected right back at us, and it is because we don’t recognise it as such that we can’t see that we are living in a closed or null world. Were we to have awareness of this fact then this would equal ‘awareness of the Nullity’ and having an awareness of the Nullity is the thing we’re guaranteed to run away from the most! The conditioned identity has no appetite for seeing that it (along with its projected ‘world’) is a perfectly null phenomenon (or rather a perfectly null ‘pseudo-phenomenon’). The coercive mechanical impulse which is our master commands us to put every last bit of our energy into running away from this terrifying awareness and this movement is what we are referring to as aggression. Psychological violence is ‘denial in action’ we might say, and denial is all we know. Forcing is all we know, aggression is all we know…

 

 

We could say that psychological violence is ‘denial in action’ and we could also say that it is the situation where we ignore (or deny) the self-contradictoriness of finite play. We can’t purposefully do anything without denying the self-contradictoriness of finite play – if we ‘work towards obtaining a goal’ we incur the paradox and if we ‘work towards avoiding the unwanted outcome’ we also incur it. Whatever it is that we do purposefully we are going to incur the ‘killer glitch’ which is the Cybernetic Paradox. This is true of whatever we might think, too. We could ask how we could free ourselves from this knot of self-contradiction and we could also ask how it is that we manage to live within the confines of this paradoxical knot without ever realising it, without ever realizing that all we ever do is travel around in self-defeating circles. The answer to the second question is that we can manage the ‘feat’ of ‘living within the Simulation without knowing it’ because we are one-sided in our outlook (i.e., because we can only see one half of the picture at any one time’). The answer to the first question is therefore that we can escape from this tortuous fate by allowing ourselves to see the Whole picture, rather than just half of it…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit – vocal.media/futurism/solipsism