Before we can engage in any sort of purposeful (or deliberate) activity we first have to assume a ‘context of meaning’ to act out of. We can’t impose any sort of order on the world unless we make some sort of assumption as to what order is, as to what it looks like. This also applies to rational thought we can’t have any rational thinking going on unless we have some sort of basic framework, some sort of basic idea about the world. ‘No framework’ means no purposeful activity, no rational thought-formation. Actually – therefore – our framework, or angle, our context of meaning is the same thing has the order which we automatically project outwards onto the screen that is provided by the world around us.
We have therefore no freedom in this situation – all we can ever do is ‘act out the angle that we have adapted ourselves to’. That is our basis and so – naturally – it determines everything we do and everything we think. It’s a bit like being employed by a particular organisation or corporation – once we’re working for some sort of entity like this then our public utterances must always be in line with the values of that entity; if we come out with anything else (which is to say, any type of ‘independent content’) then we will be let go. Our employment will be promptly terminated. Or we could say that it’s like being a citizen of a totalitarian state – we are free in this case to come out with any opinion we like just so long as it doesn’t conflict with what the state wants us to think. To adapt to a system is to become that system, so we have no separate existence, no existence of our own. As we started off this discussion by saying, we can’t engage in any purposeful activity at all unless we first have a context to act out of, but once we do have a context then everything we come out with (all our ‘behavioural output’) is going to be a linear development of this same context. Everything ‘we’ come out is going to be the system that we’ve adapted to, therefore. Originality is a always fantasy when it’s the System of Thought we’re talking about.
Another way of putting this is to say that adapting ourselves to a framework, to an angle, means that we become the slaves of that FW, the slaves of that angle. It acts itself out through us, just as a virus will act itself out through the protein-manufacturing factories of a cell that it has infected. A virus – by definition – has no interest in anything that isn’t itself, anything that is incongruent with its all-important agenda; it will utilize everything it comes across for its own ends, it will exploit the whole world if it is allowed to. And what this means is that – for a viroid entity – anything that can’t be utilised, anything that can’t be exploited, simply doesn’t exist. Continuing with this metaphor we can say that – for the viroid entity which is the assumed FW – the world is made up entirely of two things – it’s made up of those things that help it to enact its agenda, and those things which are working against it in this regard. Anything that is neither for us nor against us doesn’t exist as far as we are concerned (as we have just said) and this is why we can say that we are the slaves of the FW, the slaves of the ‘assumed context of meaning’. We’re slaves because we are restricted in what we’re allowed to be aware of to matters that are relevant to the fulfilment of the agenda that comes out of this context. We are the prisoners of this unvarying agenda, therefore – we have to serve it no matter what. This ‘unquestionable agenda’ equals the False Master.
We are kept prisoners or slaves by ‘not being told the whole story’, so to speak. We tend to think in terms of being forced into slavery, in such a way that the shackles are clearly visible, but we can be compelled to follow the tracks that have been laid out for us simply by limiting the information that we have available to us. We don’t know that anything else is possible, in other words – we are being controlled by our own ignorance. This is exactly our situation when we are adapted to the assumed FW (or context) – we can only see what the context allows us to see, we can only register what our evaluative criteria set us up to register. The only view we have is the view that corresponds to the circumscribed viewpoint, to the narrow aperture that we’re looking through and – as we were saying – it doesn’t just ‘correspond’ either – the aperture (which is to say, ‘the viewpoint’) is the view). The latter is a projection of the former, only we don’t recognise it as such. If we did recognise it as such then that would signal the end of the game.
When our awareness is conditioned by a particular Frame of Reference then of course all we will ever be able to see is stuff that is relevant to that VP, stuff that is relevant to that FOR. When our attention is funnelled through a single viewpoint then we can’t see anything that doesn’t make sense to that viewpoint. With regard to ‘the conditioned sense of identity’ (or ‘self’) we can say that our awareness is being constrained so that all we are allowed to perceive is stuff that is relevant to that self, to that identity. If it isn’t relevant to me (which is to say, if I neither like nor dislike it, approve nor disapprove of it) then – as far as ‘I-as-the-conditioned-identity’ is concerned – anything irrelevant to me just doesn’t exist. The conditioned identity lives in a world that is composed of its own likes and dislikes, and the world that is composed entirely of its own likes and dislikes is simply itself projected outwards. What we’re talking about here is therefore a private world that only works as such when we stay identified with the designated viewpoint (or as we could also say, it is a world that only functions as such when we’re not able to see that our designated viewpoint is ‘one amongst many’, and is not special in the way that we take it to be).
The viewpoint or context of meaning in question isn’t true in the way that it (very much) appears to be when we are looking out at the world through it. To utilise a particular VP is to unwittingly create the virtual world that corresponds to that VP. To choose to make use of a VP means to see what things look like from this perspective and this perspective alone; we are ‘conducting an experiment’ here (albeit without realizing that we are). We’re acting as if this randomly selected angle were the only possible way of looking at things, we’re acting as if it were uniquely true, and (as we have said) the result of this experiment is that we get to create that particular virtual world which corresponds to our chosen viewpoint. The viewpoint has been stretched, or ‘extended’ so that it fills up all the space. It’s only a ‘virtual’ world (we might say) because the taken-for-granted’ premise that ‘there are no other ways to see things’ is actually untrue. The basis for thought’s virtual worlds is always going to be a lie. The Mind-Created Virtual Reality – which seems so solid, so concrete, so utterly unyielding – comes into existence as a result of ‘us not being able to see the truth’. It rides on the back of entropy. Instead of talking about ‘angles’ and ‘viewpoints’ we could speak in terms of the ‘self’ and say something to the effect that we can only have the experience of being this concrete self when we are restrained from seeing the truth of what being that self means. To have unconstrained awareness is to see that everything is the self and not just this arbitrarily assumed position, and if we can see that everything is the self then that ends the game. When everything is the self then there is no self.
When we’re restricted to just the one viewpoint then this gives rise to the virtual world corresponding to that VP (which is the VP projected outwards) and so what we have here is a Closed World, a world with no information content, a world in which no genuine event can ever occur. This might sound rather demoralizing, but the self simply can’t exist in any other sort of world; it can only live in the type of world that is constantly validating it the type of word that is relevant to its ideas, to its likes and dislikes, and this type of information isn’t really information at all. It’s information only in relation to a certain nominated yardstick, a certain specified set of criteria, as being specially or uniquely true which means that it is provisional information, it is ‘information in a dream’, ‘information in a game’. It’s ‘information from the point of view of the position that we say is special when it isn’t’. Actually, there aren’t any positions in the Open Universe, special or otherwise – there can’t be any such a thing as ‘a position’ because in the OU nothing is final, nothing is decided. The world is an open book – it’s a wide-open book that can’t ever be shut, no matter how hard we try to do just that. What we’re looking at here is a ‘continuously evolving situation’ – new perspective is continually coming into play, changing the nature of whatever it was we (mistakenly) thought we were dealing with. In this unfinished situation even the past is evolving…
We started off by saying that can’t engage in purposeful action (or make any positive/rational statements) without first assuming a context of meaning to act out of, to speak out of. When we talk about ‘a context of meaning’ then we are necessarily referring to a Closed World – the Open Universe (as we’ve just said) offers us no fixed or reliable context to adapt to. It offers us nothing ‘positive’ at all. When we talk about a closed world then what we’re talking about is the world that is strung out between an absolute <YES> on the one hand and an equally absolute <NO> on the other. Any logically formulated question that we ask must have an answer that is either in the affirmative or in the negative (which is another way of saying that core stipulation in a formal world is that ‘all properly constructed questions will be validated by the system’. Where there is no determining context then none of our questions are valid, none of our questions are meaningful. All positive statements are revealed as being absurd – we’re ‘shooting in the dark’, we’re ‘missing by a mile’ every time we make a guess. We need to have positive knowledge before we can ask any sort of valid question and positive knowledge is simply ‘not a thing’ in the Open Universe. In the OU none of our statements are meaningful because the context we are assuming isn’t real. Our basis (or context) isn’t true – the ‘context’ for our actions and thoughts simply isn’t there but we nevertheless keep on acting as if it were….
Image credit – everthenomad.com
