Reality is nuanced, whilst our mental constructs never can be. The thinking mind works by ignoring all nuance – that’s how it gets to make its generalisations. Thought blankets the world with its bland generalisations, which means that the world we end up living in is 100% non-nuanced, 100% homogeneous. This is James Moore’s blank tidal wave; this is Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality. It’s also what we in our remarkably superficial culture celebrate as ‘the actual genuine true state of affairs’, as ‘the way things are supposed to be’.
To live in a nuanced reality is to live in a reality that is never what we think it’s about. Thought always sets the agenda and our agendas aren’t nuanced; they are – on the contrary – ‘all on the one level’. Agendas are (like all our thoughts) dumb and literal – they have no subtlety in them. Thought always knows what it’s doing, and this is equals ‘no nuance’, whilst life itself is always doing something different to what we think it is (which is why we can say that it is ‘nuanced’). The nuance is that level beyond the level that we know, beyond any level that we can know. Thought operates via its goals, and yet its goals are never anything new, never anything unexpected. Goals are repeats. Thought’s precious goals are boring extension of itself, that’s all.
We can explain the ‘non-nuanced world’ by saying that it is a reflection or projection of the ideas that we have inside our heads so that they seem to us to exist on the outside, so that they seem to exist as the actual world. This makes it very obvious why such a world is going to be ‘blank’ or ‘non-nuanced’ in its nature – the actual (genuine) world is only the actual (genuine) world because it isn’t us, because it has nothing to do with what we think or don’t think, or what we want or don’t want; Reality is real (i.e. not a construct of thought) because it has nothing to do with us.
When the world we live in is nothing more than a smooth continuation of the bland assumptions that we have collectively made over the centuries then to live in this world which is the never-ending extension of the past is not to live at all. Hence, Heraclitus tells us that ‘Life has the name of life, but in reality it is death’. Rumi says the same –
The mind sees things inside-out. What it takes to be life is really death, and what it takes to be death is really life.
When we unconsciously bend everything to fit our beliefs (as comes so naturally to us) then – with this cleverness of ours – we succeed in cheating ourselves out of life itself. When ‘we ignore the nuance’ (as we unquestionably do) then we ignore everything that’s actually real.
With regard to the actual true genuine world (which is to say, the world that isn’t an extension of our own half-baked / unexamined ideas) we can say that it’s never about what we think it’s about no matter what we think it’s about. It’s never what we say it is, no matter what we say it is; and what this means – although we don’t like to see it – is that our existence in this world (inasmuch as it is all about us fulfilling our goals or enacting our agendas, etc) is utterly without meaning. It’s entirely sterile – it’s a kind of short circuit in the business of living that makes what we call ‘life’ into a foregone conclusion, a type of living death. We’re playing it safe, we’re refusing to take any chances, and the result of this risk-avoidance of ours is ‘the failure to live’, so to speak. Instead of life we end up compulsively playing meaningless games with our own sterile projections.
The more value we place in our goals and purposes the more estranged we become from what’s really out there (or as we could also say, what’s really in there); if I have a goal in mind then this means precisely that I don’t care about anything else other than achieving this goal. The goal that has been identified / specified is what matters and anything that doesn’t help me to achieve it is of no interest whatsoever to me. I couldn’t care less. My world is made up of my goals and therefore my goals are simply ‘me’ splashed out onto the world stage; when I value my goals and don’t care about anything else – which is the ‘default human situation’ (to be only interested in our own ideas about the world) – then this means, quite simply, that I have exactly zero interest in what is genuinely true. It’s not just that I have ‘zero interest’ either – I have negative interest (I have negative interest in that I’m interested in going the opposite way). The overvaluing of the rational / purposeful mind is how I deny the reality that exists outside of my own half-baked, nonsensical scheme of things.
Nuance – we might say – is what we come across when we come across something that we haven’t had any say in, when we come across something that isn’t something that we ourselves have done. Nuance is non-mechanical (or non-linear) – it’s what we lose when we go down the road of controlling, in other words. As controllers, nuance means nothing to us – all that matters is power, all that matters is for us to be able to get our own way in all things. This – for us – represents ‘the solution to all our problems’; if we can get what we want in all matters then we won’t have any more problems, we say. Controlling is the answer to life, we say. The truth of the matter is however that the problem is ‘us always getting (or trying to get) our own way in all things’. We are the glitch, in other words. The blind-spot in the way we see things means that when we’re suffering from neurotic mental distress (which is caused by our one-sidedness, as Jung says) we will inevitably try to alleviate this suffering by purposeful doing, by manipulating and controlling, even though it is this inability to let go (i.e., the compulsion to keep on interfering) that has got us into this diabolical mess in the first place.
Neurosis is itself nuance, we might say, only it’s a painful and worrying nuance, a suffering-producing nuance, a thoroughly unwanted nuance. The task in front of us – which is to say, the task of everyday mechanical living – seems straightforward and eminently doable and yet when we come to try to do it we find that we’re being unaccountably blocked or jinxed in some way. We can’t ‘go ahead and do what everyone else seems to be able to do without any problem’ and – as a result – we’re forced to conclude that there’s something uniquely wrong in us, that there’s some problem which we specially have that other people don’t have. After all, we can’t do what everyone else can do without any difficulty. We don’t see this block (or ‘jinx’) as being a nuance, of course – we call it a ‘mental health condition’ that needs to be fixed by whoever the relevant and appropriate experts might be.
Neurosis isn’t really a sickness in the way we say it is however – it’s not a condition in the way that osteoporosis or anaemia can be said to be – it’s simply that we are paying the price for ignoring the inherent paradoxicality (or self-contradictoriness) inherent in all rational thoughts, in all purposeful actions. Purposeful action – obviously enough – is predicated upon the principle of avoiding risk – that’s the whole point of it and (as we said earlier) to avoid risk (in the psychological sense, which means that we always stick to the tried and trusted and avoid anything new, anything we don’t already know about) is the same thing of as avoiding life. Life is risk. Obviously, when we’re being purposeful or goal-orientated we’re avoiding risk – we’re ‘avoiding the risk of things not turning out the way we wanted them to’, we’re ‘avoiding the risk of things just happening accidentally or spontaneously’ (because who knows what might happen then)? When we’re in Purposeful Mode then all we ever do is make sure things always happen the way that we want them to. We are ‘in control’, we’re ‘calling the shots’, and that’s our comfort zone.
We can absolutely do this – there’s nothing to stop us – but when we go down the road of controlling reality in this way then we incur the Steersman paradox, the Cybernetic paradox, and what this means is that when we aim at a particular result we end up getting the opposite of it. We get the opposite result to the one we wanted. Things ‘go against us’ – the more intensity we fixate on obtaining the desired opposite the more viciously the unwanted opposite pops up for us. To live exclusively in the Purposeful Realm is to bring this incoherence down on our heads (which basically means that the harder we try to get ourselves out of the hole we’re in the deeper we dig it). We might seem to be getting somewhere if we take a very short-sighted view of things (which we do) whilst in reality, the truth is that we’re spinning around in perfectly counterproductive circles. This is what neurotic suffering is all about…
Incoherence is when our maps of reality don’t correspond to the thing itself and this is absolutely the case when we are pretending that what we know all about life (or pretending that ‘what we know about the world is all there is’) and that there isn’t a big chunk of stuff (called reality) out there that we don’t have any clue about (and that we’re not in the least bit interested in, either). Were it be the case that the picture the thinking mind shows us really was the same as what is being presented then all would be well, all would be fine and dandy, but this just isn’t the case – it’s not the case because the world doesn’t come divided up into categories or portions, because it doesn’t come all wrapped up nicely in boundaries, because it doesn’t correspond in any way to the ridiculous half-baked assumptions that we’ve made about it.
The picture thought shows us is based on polarity – which is to say, it’s based on yes versus no, more versus less – and the way things are in themselves has nothing to do with polarity, nothing to do with it whatsoever. We might as well claim that the word herpetology can tell us all about snakes, or that studying the chemical symbol S will allow us to know all there is to know about the properties of the element sulphur. Our minds – based as they are on what Alan Watts caused ‘the game of black and white’ – also cannot understand anything that is not that isn’t predicated upon polarity, and yet polarity isn’t a feature of reality. Polarity isn’t a real thing but merely the convention we use to represent the world to ourselves. This isn’t to say that thought’s representations of the world can’t be useful (they clearly have a vital pragmatic value) but simply that they aren’t ‘meant’ – so to speak – to tell us anything about the essential nature of things. The rational mind hasn’t any interest in philosophy, in other words. Binary (black and white) logic doesn’t have any access to the core nature of things; comparing readings with an abstract standard isn’t going to shed any light on this mystery. Comparison-making doesn’t cut the mustard – it only perpetuates the Illusion of the Known….
When we act out of a purely conceptual view of the world then our actions are going to be maximally incoherent, therefore – when we take a short-sighted look at what’s happening we won’t see the counterproductivity but were we to take the long view then we’d straightaway see that we’re not actually getting anywhere. We’re only vibrating on the spot. The conditioned self or ego wants to get somewhere – it really wants to get somewhere, it really wants to achieve, to excel, to attain goals, to win, etc. This is what goal-orientated activity is all about, after all. By buying into the short-sighted view (which is the view of the rational mind) we make our goals believable and because our goals are believable when we perceive ourselves to be moving towards the goal we get to experience pleasure, we get to experience euphoria. We can of course also experience the reverse of this, we can experience moving away from the goal, which results in us experiencing all those ‘loser-type’ feelings that we don’t like. In the non-nuanced reality there are only two things – there is winning and there is losing and it is as important to do the former as it is not to do the latter. There couldn’t be two more different ways for things to work out and so this absolute lack of symmetry puts a huge amount of pressure on us. When we take the long view – on the other hand – then we see that winning equals losing and that losing equals winning. We see that there’s no such thing as gaining and no such thing as losing and that both ‘gaining’ and ‘losing’ mean exactly the same thing – both mean that we’re ‘stuck in the vibration’, never moving out of the same old tired spot.
Image credit – inspiringcity.com
