In the Unreversed (or ‘open’) World there are no goals, and there is – therefore – none of the satisfaction that comes from successfully approaching them. There’s no goal-orientated motivation, there is no euphoric reward for effective controlling, no kudos that attaches to it. There are no ‘conclusions’. What there is instead, is freedom.
The particular type of satisfaction that comes from achieving doesn’t exist in the Unreversed World; getting to where we want to be, successful problem-solving, or making progress in some matter or other, doesn’t exist. Instead, we could say that there is exploring – which is to say, breaking out of whatever familiar situation we are in, into something new and unexpected. Everything is exploration in this realm – it is exploration without consolidation. We can’t ‘consolidate’ because there’s no standing still.
The Unreversed World is a Heraclitian World – which means that there’s no ‘doubling back’, no ‘looping back on ourselves’ to revisit where we have already been. ‘Where we have already been’ doesn’t exist! We can’t – as Heraclitus says – step into the same river twice; we can’t step into the same river twice because it’s not the same river, and it’s also not the same ‘us’.
When we can’t loop back on ourselves then something that we take totally for granted in everyday life is completely lost – we lose our ability to create a narrative, we lose our ability to have a store of knowledge or expertise, we lose our ability to check up on ourselves to see whether we are right or wrong, on-target or off-target. We lose the ability to know anything about what is going on with us. We have no context to help us makes sense of our lives.
We can do stuff in the Unreversed (or Non-inverted) World, but we can never know either what we have done, nor who it is that has done it. We could only know that if we could loop back on ourselves, and that’s the one thing we can’t do! It’s easy to see that goal-orientated activity can’t take place here therefore – there’s no way to specify a goal and no way to know whether we have achieved it or not. What’s more, if something happens, there’s no way for us to take credit for it. There is no ‘causing things to happen’, there’s no causality.
To say that this ‘puts a different complexion on things’ is to completely understate the matter, therefore. Although I am very unlikely ever to focus on the fact, it is nevertheless the case that – in my everyday existence – ‘everything I do I do for me’. In normal everyday life we aren’t motivated to do anything unless we can hope to benefit from it in some way but in the Unreversed World there’s no one there to benefit. I can’t perform some action for my own sake because there’s no continuity of ‘me’ – there is only the River of Change.
This goes way beyond our normal conception of ‘selfishness’ – I might say that ‘I’m not selfish’, or that ‘I want to be unselfish’, but my reason for claiming not to be selfish is purely because it is a black mark against me if I am. My motivation for saying this is a selfish one, in other words. If I say that I don’t want to be selfish and that I aspire to a higher form of motivation than this, then that’s only because I want to ‘escape the taint’. It’s only for my own sake that I want to improve myself. Self-improvement is of course only ever for the sake of that same old self.
There is no way to escape this glitch because everything the self does is necessarily ‘self-orientated’ – I might aspire to be altruistic but it is this self that is doing the aspiring and so there can be no escape from the trap this way. I might put myself out to help someone, or benefit someone, but this is my idea of what constitutes ‘helping’, my idea of what constitutes a ‘benefit’. It’s self-orientated. Everything I do is from this basis, everything I understand is understood in relationship to this fixed point of view. Everything I see is merely this same taken-for-granted viewpoint reflected back at me, without me realizing it, so how can I hope to go beyond it?
Actually, therefore, the world itself – as I understand it to be – is only a projection of this same taken-for-granted POV, which means that no matter where I (deliberately) go, and no matter what I (purposefully) do when I get there, I’m still only ever playing about with my own projections. The self can never escape from the world of its projections – the very thought of ‘escaping’ is a projection. Who is it that is supposed to be escaping, after all? The self is itself the problem that it always seeks to solve, but it can’t see this.
We can’t escape from our assumed viewpoint on the basis of that viewpoint, and we can’t escape from our thinking by thinking about how to do that, by ‘planning’ or ‘analysing’ or ‘problem-solving’, or anything like that. We can’t ‘plan to stop planning’ any more than we can somehow learn to ‘solve the problem of our own constant problem-solving’. We can’t escape from our assumed position on the basis of that same position, and yet in the Unreversed World – which is the only world there is, outside of our games – there is no such thing as ‘a position’. In the Heraclitian (or Open) Universe there are no positions, no asymmetries, no reference points for us to lean on…
Image – themeraider.com
