Any artificial situation is always going to be balanced by the equal and opposite counterpart to this situation. This is how it always is with artificial things, and we shouldn’t really be too surprised about this – what else would we expect? This is the most familiar thing in the world – we push down one side of a seesaw and the other comes up, we throw a stone in a pond thereby displacing the surface of the water in a negative direction, direction, downwards direction, the same time that we depress one part of the pond surface we elevate another. We push down and something else goes up to compensate, and vice versa. We can’t displace the medium in one spot without the reverse counterpart of this displacement occurring somewhere else. We can’t say <yes> without saying <no> at the same time.
An artificial situation (we might say) is a situation that has been brought about by force, it is a situation that would not come about unless it was made to. We can understand this well enough, what we can’t understand so easily however is that whatever is made to happen (whatever it is that which is given no freedom but to happen) doesn’t actually happen. It’s an illusion that it happens. There is a principle here, we might say, and that principle has to do with the impossibility of making something happen on purpose when the only way it can happen is all by itself, without any external biassing factor, without any controlling going on. We all know that there are things in life like this such – as for example ‘being creative’, or ‘seeing the joke’, or ‘finding peace of mind’, and so on, but for the most part we are convinced that control is a perfectly legitimate modality. We spend most (if not all) of our time controlling things one way or another, and we don’t see any problem with this. Control is the way to go, we say.
We don’t – in other words – wait around for stuff to happen, but rather we make it happen and there is kudos attached to this. Successful controlling is a cool thing to be doing, in other words. We admire person who can conceive of a possibility – maybe one that nobody else has yet thought of – and who can then press ahead and achieve it in the real world. These are the doers rather than the thinkers, we say, and the doing is the only thing that counts. ‘Doing is where it’s at’, we say – successful doing is how we prove ourselves and show that there is actual substance to us as people. The bigger the achievement the bigger we are both in our own eyes and in the eyes of our audience. God Almighty – who as we know created the whole universe – gets the most respect of all, naturally enough. ‘Hey God’, we say, ‘how did you even manage to think of existence (or of the universe), never mind bringing it about ex nihilo?’
The ego identity is big into making significant changes in the world as a way of bolstering up its credibility, as a way of boosting its status as a prospective entity. It needs to project its will on the world because this gives it the immediate and tangible feedback or confirmation that it exists; the action that I successfully engaged in (the heroic act that I just pulled off) is proof positive of my potency as a causal agent, that I’m actually real (and not a figment of my own jaded imagination). It’s proof that I exist. We could also look at this in terms of games and say that the fact that there is such a thing as ‘winning’ – and the fact that we all know it to be a very important thing – means that there has got to be such a thing as ‘a winner’! If there is such a thing as ‘winning’ then there must also be such a thing as the ‘winner’ and that’s what we want to be. If I am a winner then everyone’s going to know that I exist.
What we like about games is the fact that they provide us with ontological security, which is something we simply wouldn’t have otherwise. OS can only come about as a result of limitation, and games are very limited situations! There are after all only two possibilities in a game – Possibility [1] is that you get to be a winner, whilst Possibility [2] is that you get to be a loser. There’s nothing about this situation that isn’t black and white – either you’re a winner or you’re a loser, and that’s the end of the matter. That’s the end of the matter so you either have to like it or lump it. If you’re a winner then you’re hardly going to question it, and if you’re a loser and you try to say that you’re not then everyone will know that you’re just in denial of the fact, that you’re just a sore loser. The fact that you’re trying to show that you’re not a loser proves to everyone that you are. There is an all-pervading ‘logical aggression’ at work here; we are being given no choice – we are being railroaded, we’re being told that it has to be either the one way or the other…
When it comes to ontological security then this is exactly what we want – we want to be railroaded, we want to only be given a few limited options. Games have the convenient function of providing us with wall-to-wall ontological security and so on this account we’re ‘over the moon’, we’re ‘on Cloud-9’. If I am designated as being <a winner> then there’s my ontological security right there, and if it turns out that I’m <a loser> then there’s OS there too; there’s OS in any of thought’s designations because if thought has defined something then that means that it must exist, and if it exists then there’s our security right there. There’s something there that we can hold onto. Games are good for providing us with this most precious of commodities simply because they never leave anything undefined. There’s no possibility of anything ever happening in a game that hasn’t been precisely and specifically defined in every possible way and it doesn’t get any better than this. The sense of ontological security is at a maximum in a game and so if that’s what we’re looking for, if that’s what’s important to us, then things couldn’t be better…
Things aren’t really that great in the game, however – we only say that they are. The story is that they are. A game – any game – contains ‘two opposing possibilities that aren’t really different at all’. One possibility is that our situation is designated as being <totally excellent> (which causes our mood to be elated) and the other is that it is designated as being <absolutely terrible> (which of course induces a depressed state of mind). These two possibilities aren’t really different from each other however; they aren’t really different because they’re both ‘merely how things are arbitrarily said to be’. The story is that ‘things are great’ and the story is that ‘things are terrible’ and these two stories aren’t different. They’re both just the story – the story can swing both ways without ceasing to be ‘the story’. Things aren’t really that great (or that wonderful) in a game because there’s nothing in it to be great, or to be terrible, or to be anything. There’s no well-being in a game – only the story of well-being, only the official designation it. There’s no mental health here, only what we arbitrarily nominate as such, only what the machinery of thought arbitrary designates as such. We’ve got all the OS we could ever possibly want therefore, but the price for this is that ‘nothing means anything anymore’ – all our values are arbitrarily assigned, which means that they can ‘switch around on us’ as the drop of a hat. YES becomes NO, GO becomes STOP, RIGHT becomes WRONG…
The ego identity needs to believe that it is an autonomous and efficacious instrument of change if it is to function as such. This belief is reinforced every time we perceive ourselves to be making a mark on the world, every time we have an idea about how things should be and are then able to get that to actually happen. Successful doing feeds the ego, in other words. Successful doing is taken as proof positive of our autonomous existence, but this so-called ‘proof’ doesn’t stand being examined – the idea or notion about ‘how things should be’ isn’t ours and neither is the motivation to achieve it. That all comes from the game, not from us; to play a finite game is to have one’s perceptions neatly inverted – the game plays us, and yet we perceive ourselves to be autonomous actors in this. The game plays us and the game is that ‘there is no game’; the game is that ‘I really am who I claim to be’. The game is that my idea of myself (and my idea of the world) is actually all there is to the story, that it is the Alpha and the Omega.
Another way of putting this would be to say that my (designed) environment is triggering me in everything I think and do (that it is triggering me in all my reactions) and that I am identifying with these thoughts, these actions, these reactions. I am owning them, so speak, even though they’re nothing to do with me. The ‘triggered version of me’ is a construct of thought, therefore – I am falling into the trap that is being prepared for me. We could also say that the trigger is my leash and it’s bringing me back every time to ‘who I supposedly am’, only this isn’t ‘who I am’ at all but the system’s idea of me. Who I am really can’t be triggered, isn’t reactive, isn’t manipulable and so if I am triggered, if I do react, if I am being led by the nose, manipulated at every turn, etc, then what this means is that I am the system’s version of me, the mechanical copy of me, the generic token for me. I am – in other words – only a mechanical reflex, a mechanical reflex with no genuine freedom. It’s not that my true undisclosed nature is ‘protected’ or ‘defended’ in some kind of way from the system of thought, or that it is able to ‘assert its boundaries’ (as we love to say) but rather that who we really are isn’t ‘a thing’ and so doesn’t belong to the world of things (which is the Defined Realm).
Whatever I do within the context that thought supplies me with is always going to be predicated upon thought’s idea of me, thought’s version of me, thought’s definition of me, and at the same time that thought provides the context it also provides the conditioned viewpoint that operates within it. It provides both the game and the player of the game. At the same time that thought provides ‘the way to look at things’ it also provides ‘the view that is seen as a result of looking at things in this way’; the view and the viewpoint are not two separate things – the Mind-Created Virtual Reality and who we think we are in the MCVR are not two separate things. What this means is that there is no simple, linear causation going on, which is of course what we all think. If I am the mind’s simulation and I am operating within the mind’s simulation of reality (i.e., within the ‘given context’, within the ‘Positive World’) then of course there’s no causation going on in the way that we always think that is. Instead of causation there is ‘simulated causation’, instead of genuine volition, there is the ‘pressure from the outside’. Instead of freedom there are rules.
So it is the combination of my conditioning and the designed environment which has taken the place of open-ended reality triggers me to act, and not just to ‘act’, but also to ‘take up – in its entirety – the role that has been scripted for me’. The combination of ‘external rules plus internal rules’ (triggers and propensities) results both in the conditioned self or ego and the illusion of volition that allows the conditioned self to carry on playing the game without knowing that anything is ‘up’, without knowing that the game is just a game. I have been induced to take ‘ownership’ of being triggered, ‘ownership’ of the automatic reaction that has been produced, and this facilitates the illusion that I am the one who has been triggered, the illusion that I am ‘the one who is reacting’. I have been tricked into thinking that the urges which are coming to my head are my own authentic volition and that it is me that wants to attain whatever it is the urge wants me to attain (or avoid whatever it is that the fear wants me to avoid) and by it is by falling for the trick that we have just described that I end up being ‘a creature of the system’ (instead of the sovereign individual that I am). This is the real ‘Replacement Theory’ – this is how the replacement mechanism takes place, this is how we get ‘sneakily substituted for’. This is how we get ‘unknowingly subsumed within the Artificial (or Designed) World’.
Image credit – Christianity’s Forgotten God, Tanner the Humanist, writing on medium.com
