The world we routinely live in (and fondly imagine ourselves to understand) is made up entirely from some sort of inert padding. The word ‘padding’ implies, of course, that there is nothing in it. Or perhaps we should say that ‘padding means that we are pretending that there is something in it when there isn’t’. We’re ‘pulling the wool’. If we wanted to be more technical on this point we could say that the ‘padding’ which we’re talking about is a kind of tautological expansion; we could in other words say that the world routinely we live in is entirely redundant. It’s ’empty’, as the Buddhists say.

 

 

This – needless to say – is one hell of a thing – the implications take a little while to sink in. Everything we thought we understood we didn’t; everything we thought meant something doesn’t actually mean anything (and when we say ‘everything’ we mean everything). Not only is it the case that the world we routinely live in is made up entirely of padding (i.e. some kind of bland and inert ‘filler’ like polystyrene beads), it is also the case that we go around manifesting maximum resistance to ever seeing this. We are maximally resistant to seeing this because it’s too challenging (or too frightening) for us. What happens as a result therefore is that we live in a world that is entirely made up of padding which we are maximally resistant to seeing the truth about. We keep imagining that there is something there when there isn’t…

 

 

It’s not possible to be resistant just to seeing the truth about the redundant pseudo-world that we are living in and yet not be in denial with regard to any other possible manifestations of the truth – if I refuse to see the truth about the type of world that I’m living in then this clearly means that I’m going to refuse to see the truth about everything. I’m not going to be open to any manifestation of truth (no matter how harmless it might seem) – my orientation is always going to be towards ‘comforting untruths’ (instead of any potentially discomforting truths that might come my way) and so this is no small thing that we’re talking about here. It’s not enough to say that ‘we are living in the realm of Samsara, which is a place where all appearances are deceptive’, there is an all-powerful bias operating deep within us that causes us to want to relate to lies in place of the truth, and the truth not at all. The truth is a thing that we most definitely don’t ever want to encounter; we want to pretend that it doesn’t exist, and keep on pretending for as long as we possibly can…

 

 

To say that this orientation of ours is ‘far reaching in its implications’ is not going far enough – the type of life we lead when we are orientated towards the truth (which is to say, when we are interested in what is actually happening not what we want to be happening) and the situation that prevails when our orientation is away from the truth (when we are interested in concealing the way things are at all costs) couldn’t be more different. In the first case the revealing of a deeper level of truth – so to speak – brings delight, and in the second case the very same revelation brings dread and suffering. It is the exact same process in both cases (which is to say, ‘the unveiling of the truth’) but the truth comes to us as a friend in the one case, and the deadliest of enemies in the other. As G. I. Gurdjieff says, ‘waking is bitter’, and the reason it is so bitter is because we don’t like the truth that is revealed to us.

 

 

There is no opposite to being since non-being doesn’t exist but there is an inverse of it. When we are orientated towards self-deception or illusion then instead of being we have its degenerate analogue, which might be referred to as ‘the situation where we are able to successfully avoid being without knowing that this is what we are doing’. What interests us is when we are living the inverted modality of life is how to successfully hide from the truth (or how to successfully defend and promote our chosen illusion), only – this being the inverted world that we are talking about – we don’t understand it like that. We understand what we doing as pursuing an actual positive value, which means that the endeavour we are engaged in is a wholly laudable one, rather than being something crappy, something that we can’t help feeling bad about. Our avoidance, our fear-driven avoidance of reality, gets to be seen (in an inverted way) as being both ‘freely undertaken on our part’ and ‘wholly unquestionably and unquestionably virtuous’. Neither of these two perceptions is true.

 

 

Non-being doesn’t exist ‘in reality’ but – when we’re in the inverted modality of existence – we create it as a sort of super-attractive illusion that we are then compelled to keep chasing madly after. The illusory prize is ‘real in the sense that we keep chasing after it’, or ‘real in the sense that we honestly believe in it’, but it is unreal in the sense that it is something that we ourselves have made up (and which has therefore no existence outside of the game that we are playing). It (which is ‘the prize of non-being’ seen invertedly or deceptively as the greatest of all values) is unreal in the sense that we can never possess it. We can however dream of possessing the prize or feel bad because we don’t possess it; we can talk endlessly about it, gossip about it, make it the subject of our plans – it is real in this very limited way but not in any other way. It isn’t real in any intrinsic sense; it is ‘extrinsically real,’ so to speak, which is another way of saying that it is a projection.

 

 

We could also talk about inverted being by saying that it is ‘padding’, or ‘stuffing’, or ‘filler’, which is what we started off talking about. Padding fills up all the space, but it fills it up with nothing. There’s no nutrition in it – padding is only padding, as everyone knows. Packaging is only packaging but it is nonetheless exciting for us because the implication is (of course) that we are going to find something very wonderful when we peel away the final sheet of brightly-coloured tissue paper. Just so long as we never see the truth about this exciting padding (which is that it has no actual content) then we can operate perfectly well in this realm; we can continue to chase the prize to our heart’s content – we can feel good when we think that we are we’ve got it in the bag and we can feel correspondingly bad when we perceive ourselves to have blown our chances.

 

 

In the Realm of Extrinsic Meaning everything hinges upon us never looking any deeper into the appearances that we have been presented with by the mechanism of thought, therefore. The Projected World that is being created by thought runs on the basis of a currency that only means something because we think it stands for something real, which is not the case. There was a time when bank notes only worked as genuine tender because they represented actual tangible physical gold bullion in a vault somewhere, and in the same way the Realm of Extrinsic Meaning only means something when we believe that whatever it is that we read on the label actually corresponds to something real. Or – if we were to talk in terms of games – we can say that the game only functions as a game when there is what we perceive to be a real prize which can be won as a result of our successful playing of it. This isn’t so however: the prize that is to be won as a result of us successfully playing the game is actually ‘part and parcel of the game that is being played’, which makes the game tautological. The game is tautological because of the blatant meaning loop that we are operating within – the game only makes sense as a game because the prize we win as a result of playing it is seen to be real (or understood to be somehow ‘independent of the game’); how else could we be motivated to engage in it, after all? The prize we are playing for is only real if the game is therefore. The prize is real only if the game is real because – as we have just said – it only has the meaning that it does within the context of the game that we are playing in order to win it.

 

 

If the prize is to remain real for us then we must never look any closer into the game that we are playing. We mustn’t see that we are playing a game. We must never question or doubt the signifiers that the game is made up of; we must never look into the ornately decorated box in which the prize is said to be held, we must make sure never to unwrap the delightful packaging too diligently or else we will one day get to the bottom of it and discover to our dismay that there is nothing behind all this fancy wrapping paper. When we say that dwelling in the inverted realm of extrinsic meaning is the same thing as ‘being orientated towards illusion’, or ‘orientated towards self-deception’, this is what we mean. We are compelled by our fear to take extrinsic meaning at face value (or interpret the world only in the way that it itself demands we interpret it) because if we don’t (if we allow ourselves to get curious about any other way of looking at things) then the whole system immediately collapses. Holding on tightly to extrinsic meaning is the very same thing as shunning the truth, therefore. If our exercise in self-deception is to continue to work effectively then we can never stop fighting against the bigger picture – we can’t let any morsel of the truth get through. Being dogmatically small-minded is a virtue we make sure to preserve, therefore.

 

 

When we hold on tight to Extrinsic Meaning (when we hold on tight to our thoughts!) then Extrinsic Meaning (or ‘our thoughts’) continue to seem real to us, and ‘holding on tight’ also includes fighting against it, since – as Douglas Flemons says – ‘desired separation forges a connection. Living in the World of Padding (or living in the Insulation World) means living with a closed mind, we might say. We have to have a closed mind or else we will discover that the padding which constitutes our world is only padding; we will discover that there is nothing in the padding but more padding; we will discover that the whole damn thing is nothing more than an indefinitely extended exercise in tautology. The phrase ‘living with a closed mind’ has a precise meaning, it means living within the Realm of Thought or the Realm of Extrinsic Meaning exclusively in the way that that deterministic realm compels us to live, interpreting things only in the way that we have been given to interpret them. We live in the Thought-Created World in the way that thought itself tells us to live in it, and the completely unfree nature of this situation is what allows for it to work as ‘a world’.

 

 

We can only experience the world that has been generated for us by the system of thought as being real when we let that system of thought define everything about us, in other words. That’s the price we pay. We have to ‘play by the rules’ and when we play by the rules (the ‘samsaric game rules’, that is) then we have to be who the game says we are, just as we have to see reality is being what the SOT says it is. When we are what the Realm of Extrinsic Meaning says we are then there is zero freedom for us in this. The only meaning in town is the extrinsic variety (which is the type of meaning that has been provided for us by the ‘all-determining external authority’) and this means that we are living in a completely unfree situation, a situation that has been imposed upon us entirely from the outside, with no regard for any other consideration. As we have been saying, that’s the only way the game can work – and – furthermore – we desperately want it to work. We want it to work because that’s the only way we can escape the irreducible uncertainty of unconditioned (or unconstructed) reality.

 

 

There is a bit of a problem with this however and that is that unfree situations don’t really exist, as we have already said. Reality and freedom are synonymous terms – there’s no such thing as ‘a reality that isn’t free’, or ‘freedom that isn’t real’. Zero freedom (or determinism) only exists as an idea, and ideas themselves don’t exist in any ‘intrinsic’ way; they only exist because we say they do, and – in a similar way – the lack of freedom that we rely on only exists because we say it does. Limits only exist because we say they do. The thing about this however – the ‘self-contradictory thing’, we might say – is that we are compelled by deterministic mechanical forces to say that lack of freedom exists, that limitation (or definition) is real, and once we say this then – as far as we’re concerned – it absolutely does exist. We are ‘free to deny our own freedom’. The Positive World exists in a pragmatic way for us because the deterministic reality that is being imposed upon us doesn’t contain the freedom for us to question what is being imposed. We are trapped by our own device and the device in question is thought.

 

 

The function of thought – we might say – is to manufacture padding or insulation on an industrial scale (which is of course what is needed if we have to create an actual world out of it). This is equivalent to saying that the process of thinking creates entropy – the process of thinking creates entropy as a by-product, and it also needs entropy to be there (in the background, so to speak) if it is to operate. Thought is like an arrow that points at something – it points so narrowly, so specifically, that nothing which is not being pointed at gets to be acknowledged as existing, therefore. A huge quantity of entropy has to be created, in other words; in order for the World of Abstractions to seem real; everything else (everything that hasn’t been specifically defined or pointed at) has to be dumped, has to be jettisoned as being garbage (or meaningless noise). The amount of entropy that has been produced in order to facilitate the creation of the world of abstractions is equivalent to the amount of information that is in reality, that is in the Integesic Universe, and that is an ‘amount’ that cannot be quantified. This is another way of talking about the Great Inversion, therefore – everything flips abruptly over from ‘light’ to ‘shadow’ and we don’t know that anything has happened. No one ever knows that the Inversion has happened, after it happens…

 

 

We don’t know that anything has happened because we can’t see the padding to be only padding, the filler to be only filler. The whole point is not to see this, as we keep saying. That’s how it works – by us not seeing the padding to be padding, by us not seeing the tautology to be a tautology. If we take the wider view of things (which thought cannot facilitate) – then we would straightaway ‘spot the snag’, and this means that taking the narrow view of things becomes very important indeed to us. Holding onto the prescribed view of the world becomes all important, but we don’t have a clue as to why. We don’t know why holding on tightly is so important, so crucial, but we don’t really care to look into it either. We’re far too busy controlling to question our controlling. If we stopped being as dogmatic or as concrete as we are then we’d start to see the padding that makes up our world for what it is – the Logical Continuity would then shrink back to its proper size (which is no size at all) and this shrinking would allow us to see the space that was previously being obstructed or blocked or covered over by the ‘unstoppable proliferation of empty categories’ which is the Continuum of Logic.

 

 

We can look at this situation in terms of ‘the Continuum of Logic’ versus ‘the Singularity’ – the Continuum of Logic seems, from its own perspective, to stretch on forever. How long is a straight line, after all? We can go on adding numbers (or subtracting them) for as long as we want; our funds are unlimited in this respect – there’s always room for one more, after all. We can always find one more polystyrene bead; we can actually produce a billion polystyrene beads for the same price that we can produce one. What we have here is therefore is ‘quantity’ rather than ‘quality’, but the thing about quantity (which is to say, a multiplicity of generic units) is that it is never more than the fancy card trick. we could say that the continuum of logic is a card trick or we could also say that it is a ‘house of cards’. The COL is a house of cards because it can be completely collapsed at any time and when this collapse happens we see that it doesn’t really have any extensiveness at all, despite prior appearances to the contrary. It has no more ‘actual extensiveness’ than a shadow has genuine content of its own. In place of the overblown, over-inflated, and utterly over-rated logical continuum (which is the Realm of Extrinsic Meaning) we have the Singularity – in place of the nice, safe, Positive World we have the Enigma, we have ‘a surd left at the bottom of our teacup’, we have ‘the question that can never be answered’, we have ‘a thing that can never be described’, we have ‘the existential risk that can never be evaded’…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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