The Group Mind is always absolutely certain of itself. This is the apparent ‘advantage’ of identifying with the Group Mind – the advantage of being free from doubt, the advantage of being free from all uncertainty. The Group Mind is always 100% sure of itself because it automatically agrees with itself – this is ‘the power of self-agreement’, therefore.
The sort of thing we’re talking about here isn’t ‘reasonable’, it isn’t open to falsification – we’re dealing with 100% conviction and 100% conviction is of course a law unto itself. It doesn’t depend on reality, after all. In one way we can say that this affords us an optimal degree of security (because we’ve found a rock to cling to) but we could also point out that this is a form of strength that acts against us. It ‘acts against us’ because we’re totally trapped in it – our ‘clever trick’ ends up tricking us.
Being absolutely sure of ourselves, or of our view of the world, sounds like a great advantage (which is why signing up with the GM sounds like such a good move) but the other side of the picture, which we don’t of course see, is not such an advantage. The other side of the picture is that what we’re so very sure (show to the point of not being able to ever change isn’t actually true at all. Far from ‘helping’ us having a viewpoint that we can’t ever escape from is ultimately disempowering. There’s nothing more disempowering than this.
We couldn’t say that we were ‘trapped’ in a view if that true view were correct, but the whole point is that it isn’t. There’s no such thing as ‘a sure and certain picture of things’ that is also true! That’s an absolute impossibility – sure and certain views of the world only get to be sure and certain when we screen out all disagreeing information, which is what we do all the time. The power to be 100% convinced by some arbitrary view of the world is the superpower we tap into by joining the Group Mind. We get to be 100% convinced about stuff by tapping into the power of the Group Mind, but the power of self-agreement is a power that works entirely to our detriment, as we have just said. It’s a ‘power’ for sure, but strictly a dark one.
The power to induce a state of absolute conviction is thus the very same thing as ‘the power to create a world’ – we’re not saying that there will be anything good or wholesome about the worlds that have been created in this way but there are nevertheless ‘worlds’ inasmuch as we live exclusively within them and can’t see beyond them. ‘Not being able to see beyond the Stated Reality’ is what traps us in that reality and at the same time it is what causes the stated reality to have the convincing appearance of actually being a reality. If we weren’t 100% trapped (or 100% immersed) it wouldn’t convince.
If we weren’t trapped in the Stated Reality then it wouldn’t be a reality to us – it wouldn’t be anything. Joseph Campbell uses the terms ‘transparent versus opaque’ in this connection – a story that presents itself as being literally true is opaque whilst a story that is playful, a story that is not meant to be taken literally, is transparent, (and therefore non-coercive). It’s transparent because we can see beyond it to a bigger reality that is being hinted at, but not stated directly. Anything that we state directly is a lie. Literal descriptors don’t permit us to see beyond them, they don’t let us know about any bigger picture; they implicitly deny – by the way in which our awareness is ‘captured by the construct’ – that there isn’t a bigger picture, and This is why literalism traps us; this is why literalism can’t do anything else but trap us.
Thought (which can – by itself – only ever produce literal descriptions) has a Demiurgic aspect to it, therefore. It has a ‘Demiurgic aspect’ because it creates prison worlds for us to live in, worlds which are sterile and narrow, but which nevertheless present themselves as being the genuine reality. The ‘Demiurgic Principle‘ means that we are pressurised into accepting these ‘prison worlds’ at face value even though they are cheap and nasty ‘prefabricated surrogate versions of reality’ whose only function is to prevent us from ever seeing what is actually real. The most important thing any of us could ever understand is that thought has this Demiurgic aspect, the Demiurgic Principle which operates whenever we take thought seriously, and yet no psychology book will ever mention this. Somehow, it’s not considered worth mentioning!
Thought, if left to itself, is fundamentally uncreative, which is to say, it can never go beyond itself. The Demiurge can only imitate. Thought accepts its own judgments, its own evaluations, its own categories absolutely at face value – it ‘automatically agrees with itself’ in other words, and this is how it gets to be so convinced about its own utterances. This is how it gets to say (or rather imply) that its descriptions of the world are ‘literally true’. There is no mechanism by which thought could not agree with itself; certain rules are taken for granted and then these rules are acted out and we then accept the output of the thinking process as being true universally true, as being universally valid. The only reason the output of the thinking process seems so self-evidently true is because we took the assumptions we started off with as being ‘self-evident’; will agree to see (without knowing it) to see thought’s assumptions as true and so at the same time we have agreed to the output of thought as being true. It’s only true because our agreement that makes it so, in other words. Since the conclusions that thought draws are the tautological extrapolation of our arbitrarily chosen starting-off point of course we are going to see these conclusions as being ‘unquestionably correct’.
This is an example of self-agreeing because the conclusions were inherent in the place we chose to start off; from the result of the operation tells us nothing therefore, it tells us nothing because self-agreement is redundant act, but we nevertheless contrive to believe that it does tell us something. It is this inattention to the redundancy of that is inherent in the act of self-agreement that creates the phenomenon of 100% certainty, which we could also refer to as ‘literalness’. It is not possible to create a literal truth except by turning a blind eye to the illegitimate operation by which that so-called ‘truth’ has been produced. ‘Certainty with regard to our descriptions of reality’ is not a real thing – it’s only a projection.
When the Group Mind gets to be totally sure of itself (via the mechanism of each member agreeing with every other member as if each of those agreeing have I had a chance of not agreeing) then this is a totally fraudulent mechanism but no one in the collective ever paid any heed to this very obvious ‘hole in the argument’. ‘We all say so, and so it must be true’, says the spokesperson for the Bandar-log, (the monkey people) in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. This is the motto of the Group Mind for sure but it’s a spurious one – there is great conviction when many people say the same thing but if we were to take the time to notice that all of these people are actually ‘just the same person’, so to speak, and that it is a ‘Borg-like’ entity that we’re dealing with here, then the whole thing falls flat on its face. The Group Mind is always absolutely sure of itself, and at the same time it is always completely wrong, always completely mistaken, and its solemn utterances are always completely spurious.
Image – vg247.com
