Zero perspective equals ‘the self’. If we wanted a handy definition of the self – which is to say, the ubiquitous sense of having a concrete identity that we all subscribe to – then that would be it. To gain perspective is to lose the self therefore, and this explains why we are so very averse to it. This explains why we are forever running away from perspective. This explains why our lives are – very oddly – a continuous effort to hide from any sense of perspective that might come our way.
‘But exactly how are running away from perspective?’ we might quite reasonably ask. ‘Where’s the evidence – in what way is it true to say that our lives are a long drawn-out exercise in perspective avoidance?’ It certainly doesn’t seem this way to us – that’s not our take on things at all. To be in flight from perspective is to have our backs turned to reality (which is the same thing as being orientated towards illusion) and this being our orientation there is of course no way we can know this to be the case…
This matter is as clear as a bell when we see it and as opaque as an opaque can be when we don’t. We can’t ‘halfway understand it’, so to speak – it’s all or nothing depending upon our orientation, depending upon whether we’re either facing the shadow-play on the wall of the cave, or facing the light that casts them. There are no intermediate stages, there is no way for us to hang on to the comfort provided by the belief in the world of shadows and yet at the same time being genuinely interested in the world. The very best we can do is put on a show of being ‘interested’, of being ‘open to stuff’, whilst the whole time remaining completely uninterested. The best we can do is fool ourselves into thinking that everything’s fine and dandy when it just plain isn’t. Either we love our illusions or we love the truth – we can’t have it both ways.
The way we run away from perspective this simply by fixating on goals, fixating on outcomes. A goal after all can only be a goal if there’s no other way of looking at it. There can no such thing as a mysterious goal, in other words; there’s no such thing as ‘trying to attain an unknown outcome’! Control (or purposefulness) is how we both extend and consolidate the Domain of the Known, and the DOK is an artefact, a manufactured reality, a thing that isn’t really there. It absolutely needs to be maintained, therefore. In our heads, ‘extending the world of the known is the most glorious thing, the most heroic feat there is. In reality however, it’s a very different story. In reality, it’s not such a heroic thing at all – what’s so noble about cherished a sordid-but-comforting collection of convenient lies and ignoring the uncomfortable truth, after all?
In reality we’re not ‘conquering nature’, or ‘pushing back the frontiers of knowledge’ or anything like that. That’s merely our fantasy. We’re not doing anything even the tiniest bit glorious – we’re not ‘conquering territory’ we’re running away from perspective. We are – when it comes down to it – burying our heads in the sand as deeply as we possibly can. It’s a myth that ostriches do this, but an observable fact that we humans do! We do it all the time, and anyone who doesn’t is deemed to be a deviant, anyone who doesn’t is denounced as a weirdo. We won’t have anything to do with anyone who doesn’t want to play the ubiquitous ‘ignoring the truth game’ (in whatever local form that might take for us).
‘Having a sense of perspective’ and ‘categorical knowing’ are two mutually exclusive things; in order to have this reassuring feeling that we actually know something we need to have a set of categories that don’t overflow, a set of logical classes that don’t in any way interact or intermingle with each other. All ‘intermingling’ has to be banned; all categories have to be perfectly watertight or else the illusion that we know is punctured. Any breach of the boundaries, however minor, constitutes a disaster. What we call ‘knowing’ is a function of the machinery of thought, and so when this machinery gets compromised so too does our so-called ‘knowing’; it’s ‘all or nothing’ – if we can’t be 100% sure of what we know then we don’t really know it… Logic needs an absolutely solid foundation in order to do its thing.
The other way of putting this is to say that our so-called ‘positive knowledge’ is the result of us only having access to the one prescribed point of view. Positive Knowledge is a function of limitation, a function of entropy, a function of us being arbitrarily restricted in what we can see. If we want to protect the illusory sense that we have of knowing stuff, of having a fine big store of positive knowledge, then we are obliged to enforce one particular way of looking at the world over all others. We’re obliged to make all the other views illegal, illegitimate, heretical, irresponsible, insane, and so on. We have to rig everything, in other words; we have to ‘fix it in advance’ so it always comes out the way we want, just like a crooked politician (or rather crooked system) rigging elections so as to give the impression of there being some sort of ‘democratic process’.
This dirty business of ‘enforcing a particular viewpoint and closing down anyone who says anything different’ happens all the time of course, not just politics. This is how society works, this is how culture works. That’s how we operate. It’s even how science operates; as Cambridge Biologist Rupert Sheldrake points out in his book The Science Delusion, those who dare to depart from the established view are ostracised, isolated, shunned, ridiculed, defunded, starved of publicity, and so on and so forth (which is exactly what happened Sheldrake himself, of course). This is the pattern (as famously noted by Thomas Kuhn) – the prevailing paradigm is defended right up to the point where the experimental data cannot be ignored or repressed any further. ‘Science advances one funeral at a time’, says Max Planck, the man gave his name to the Planck constant h, (and hence the Planck length, the Planck interval, the Planck mass, and so on).
What we are pleased to call ‘scientific knowledge’ is not some kind of marvellous achievement in our part, therefore – it’s not something that will benefit the human race but rather it’s quite simply ‘a prison for the mind’ (as we say). It’s a ‘one size fits all’ mental strait jacket. This store of positive knowledge is only going to be there for us, as a source of comfort and reassurance, if we are willing to submit to the yoke that is put upon us, and ‘submitting to the yoke’ means being compelling to see the world in the one absolutely rigid way. We are compelled to accept this absurdly narrow way of seeing the world as being ‘the one and only true viewpoint’, which is clearly an utterly ridiculous premise. We are required to ‘submit to the lie’, in other words; we are obliged to ‘accept nonsense as being true’ and swear fealty to it every day. We are required to ‘salute the flag’ like idiots. We are required to participate in the transparent sham which is the collective picture of reality no matter what cost this might impose on our integrity as sovereign individuals.
Were perspective to be ‘let back into the picture’ – if the blinkers were to be taken off – then that would be the end of our ontological security, that would be the end of our knowing. ‘Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopaedia,’ says Robert Anton Wilson. The more independent viewpoints we have the less certainty we have about what we’re looking at, and there are an endless number of viewpoints out there. Space is an infinity of viewpoints, none of them having any validity than any other. Reality is nothing if not generous, we might say, whilst the conceptual mind is as mean-spirited as they come. Reality is necessarily unfettered, unbounded, unobstructed and what this results in is the complete absence of all certainty. We can only have a ‘relationship with the truth’ when there is a complete absence of all viewpoints, a complete absence of rules or criteria; otherwise, what we end up having a ‘relationship’ with is the world that is made up of our own crappy assumptions and this isn’t a relationship, it’s ‘ouroboric incest’…
Reality doesn’t look like anything at all, in other words. There’s no way to describe it, no way to categorize it, no way to know it – it’s a symmetrical state. ‘To lose perspective is to gain the self’ we might say, but what we’re ‘gaining’ here isn’t anything at all – we’re gaining a deficit which we are seeing invertedly as a wonderful bonus, as a free gift from above. What we’re gaining only seems worthwhile to us however because we have absolutely no perspective at all on what we’re looking at. We’re looking at ‘something which actually isn’t actually anything’; we’re stuck to the surface of a Mobius strip and everything we see is a deception – the deception that we’re getting somewhere, the deception that the mobius loop we’re caught up in isn’t a mobius loop, the deception that there is actually ‘somewhere to go to get to’ when there absolutely isn’t. The reason we can talk in terms of a ‘Mobius loop’ (or Mobius strip’) in this way is simply because ‘the vantage point of the concrete self’ and ‘the vista or view that this viewpoint commands’ are one and the same thing! This ‘thing’ occupies no space – it is, in other words, an abstraction, a ‘mental game’ that we are playing and nothing more.
Adding perspective to the mix would allow us to immediately see this deception – having access to other (discontinuous) viewpoints would immediately reveal the mobius loop of conditioned life to be exactly what it is – an infinitely sterile ‘circle of logic’ that – because of its tyrannical / dictatorial nature – substitutes itself with supreme effectiveness for the World itself. Seeing this terrible trap is therefore precisely what we are committed to running away from in our daily lives….
