Anything that comes out of a system based on logic is tautological, or hollow. Because logic is hollow, because logic is tautological, so too are we when we organise ourselves into systems, into logically coherent collectives. So too do our lives become hollow, or ‘redundant’. Anything that is organised by thought is like this; Krishnamurti’s ‘favourite joke’ (the one about the devil and his friend) being a good example of this. First comes reality (which is to say, the natural order of things,) which is wholesome and good then thought comes along like the Great Grandfather of all interfering busybodies and organises it…
No matter what the situation in question is, we imagine that it will be improved by organising it properly, by making it more efficient, by optimising the process (or rather what we understand to be the process). This never works, but – somehow – we completely fail to notice this, and when things go wrong – as they always do – then we are always able to blame some extraneous factor (which were it not for which everything would have proceeded perfectly according to plan).
It is – we might say – the rarest of events for us to glimpse the actual truth of the matter, which is that the fault lies in thinking itself. ‘Thinking cannot solve the problem because thinking is itself the problem’, says Krishnamurti. Thought organises the world for us (and in this it doesn’t wait to be asked) and it organises it around its own categories. It fragments the world according to its own arbitrary divisions (or distinctions) and then – having done this – it takes these categories, these divisions, totally for granted. It takes them as a ‘given’, even though it was thought itself that created them.
‘So what’s so very wrong with this?’ we might ask, playing devil’s advocate. ‘If the rational mind helps us in our day-to-day lives, if it does the job as regards giving us a basic orientation in life, helping us to solve practical problems, and so on, then why object to it? Why go on about it as if it were a bad thing?’ The answer to this question is of course that these divisions, these distinctions, these boundaries that we take so seriously, are unreal, being merely a projection of the rational mind (and what’s more, being a projection of the rational mind that we can’t see beyond and so are permanently trapped within).
If we take a whole bunch of artificial categories as being fundamental, as being inherent in the very nature of things (instead of seeing them as being arbitrarily imposed, which is what they are) then this means that we’re ‘living in an unreal world’. When we can’t see through the divisions that are created by thought but – on the contrary – use them as a means of orientating ourselves, as our means of navigating reality, then this means that we are utterly oblivious to the fact that we are inhabiting a virtual reality. And if that doesn’t sound bad enough, the fact that we are fundamentally orientating ourselves to thought’s categories, thought’s divisions, means that we’re living in the world on the basis of a fictional identity. We too get constructed on the basis of thought’s made-up divisions…
Although it might seem far too obvious to actually come out and say it, the simulation is inferior to the original, to the ‘unsimulated’. It falls short. We might perhaps think in terms of a stall holder in a street market selling super-cheap knockoffs of expensive brand name goods, but that would not in any way be extreme enough. That not doing justice to the starkness of the situation. A better example might be to think of the difference between a genuine banknote and a forgery – clearly the forgery isn’t merely ‘inferior’ to the original but utterly worthless. We can’t do a thing with it (unless we come across a sucker or mark we can pass it on to, that is). The copy in this case has no value, but it pretends to; it is a ‘robber’ or ‘brigand’ in that it claims to have the value which belongs only to the true article (i.e., the ‘Emperor’ in the Zen story). It has no glory of its own to shout about.
We can say the same of the mind’s simulation of reality therefore – any value we ascribe to it is entirely mistaken (because there’s no value whatsoever there, any more than there is heat in a picture of a roaring fire). The only meaning in the simulation is tautological meaning, hollow meaning, and that’s no meaning at all. Not only is the Mind-Created Virtual Reality ‘empty of meaning’, by taking all the glory for itself it covers up the meaning or value that is actually there. In alchemical / symbolic terms, we can say that this is the work of ‘the seven-headed dragon’ (i.e., ‘Satan’, or ‘the Beast’ in Revelations). The following quotation is taken from Jung: CW Vol 14. Mysterium Coniunctionis. [Ref – Rev. 20:2. Honorius of Autun, Speculum de mysteriis ecclesiae (Migne, P.L., vol. 172, col. 937)].
The seven headed dragon, the prince of darkness, drew down from heaven with his tail a part of the stars, and covered them over with a cloud of sins, and drew over them the shadow of death.
The simulation of reality (which is the output of the system of thought) is nothing other than ‘the shadow of death’ therefore, which is a statement like no other. This isn’t just some dry old philosophical idea that we can play around with to amuse ourselves – this is dynamite. It’s a revelation, it’s an insight that comes like a bolt of lightning. We will never be the same after receiving it. We started off this discussion by saying that all logical systems are hollow, having zero content in terms of anything that’s actually real. We made the point that the output of a logical process (any logical process) is always going to be tautological (which is to say, it doesn’t tell us anything at all (in spite of us thinking that it does).
This point isn’t too hard to understand (or take on board) – the idea of ‘living in a simulation’ motif is very much part of our current cultural endowment, thanks in no small part to the science fiction output of Philip K Dick, along with the cyberpunk movement of the 80s and 90s (both sources having broken through significantly to the wider sphere of popular culture). What we’re looking at here is darker again however – instead of the simulation which sounds relatively neutral in tone we find ourselves talking now in terms of the Prince of Darkness, the Epitome and Source of all Evil, who rules unchallenged over this poor world of ours. This is a very sombre view of things indeed, testified to in numerous references to Satan’s dominion over the earth in both the Old and New Testament.
If reality itself is ‘God’ (looking at things somewhat pantheistically here) then we can say that the MCVR is what separates us from the divine, from the ground of our being, and causes us to live our lives ‘at a remove from our own being’, which – according to St Augustus – causes us to exist in a state of privation with regard to the to God. Augustine of Hippo argues that evil isn’t a thing in its own right but the absence of the all-pervading goodness of God (or ‘the ground of our being’, or reality if we want to put it like that). In City of God, Book X11, Chapter 7, he says the following –
No one, therefore, need seek for an efficient cause of an evil will. Since the effect is, in fact, a deficiency, the cause should be called deficient.
This understanding of the simulation thus echoes not just Philip K Dick and the cyberpunk movement therefore but, also the Bible, Gnosticism, mediaeval theology, and the writings of the alchemists, to name just a few connections. We are a very long way from this particular understanding of the role of thought (or logic) in our present approach to psychology, however… Our present approach in psychology is to ‘use thought to cure the problems caused by thought’. Our approach is to put the Prince of Darkness on a throne and seek his advice and guidance in all things! We let the Devil (metaphorically speaking) devise the means by which we are to be cured from the malaise which he himself has inflicted upon us. This is a mark of the times – we happily authorise Count Dracula to take up a top management role in the National Blood Bank, and no one sees anything wrong with this. We idolize our oppressors and seek to please them as every opportunity.
The thinking mind – though we don’t see it – is the simia dei, the ‘Ape of God’, and the point of its fake creations (its generic productions) is to mock and torment us. To tell ourselves otherwise is to add to this humiliation, is to make even bigger fools of ourselves. The joke is kept going for as long as possible, and it is a joke that is against us, a joke that is at our expense. It’s milked to the very last drop. To see that thought can be meaningfully symbolized as Satan, as the Beast, as the Seven-Headed Dragon mentioned in Revelations, and that this symbolism is highly illuminating, involves such a radical reversal of our ordinary, conventional view of things that we can be sure it’s never going to happen. Educated folk will laugh out loud at such nonsense. How can the thinking mind be Satan? How ‘unscientific’ is that? Thought is our best and truest friend, we say…
And yet – at the same time, as Augustine says – there is no actual ‘agent of evil’ to be found anywhere, only the complete absence of anything good. There’s no such thing as darkness, only the absence of light. The way thought works however is that it has to have something to fight against; that’s the only way it can function – if there’s something wrong then whatever it is that’s causing problems must be fought against, must be overcome. That’s our thinking on the matter. This way we get to feel that we’re doing something and there’s satisfaction in that. We’re trying to ‘fix the problem’. What we don’t see – in our two-dimensional culture – is that the problem is the thinking mind telling us that there’s a problem needing to be fixed, which straightaway means that we are going to call on its help, on its guidance. We’re going to place ourselves in its hands. The real problem is that we have no autonomy, and thought can’t help us with that because it is thought that has taken that autonomy away from us in the first place.
Image credit – freelancer.de
