When we are inhabiting the Nominal Realm – which is the world of formal descriptions – then the one thing that is absolutely impossible here is for us to have any connection with reality. Such a thing is totally out of the question; it cannot happen, not under any circumstances. This comes across as being completely crazy, of course since reality is (as we know) ‘what it’s all about’ and the plain fact of the matter is that we can’t expect to get anywhere (or to do anything) without it! Reality is ‘the necessary ingredient’, as everyone must agree, and so no matter what else we might choose to get rid of we surely can’t afford to get rid of this!
There is a ‘drawback’ to reality that we ought to mention however, the drawback being that whatever comes in contact with it has to change. There’s no way to engage with the real world without coming out of it irrevocably changed – changed in a way that can never be undone. That’s what reality does! ‘Irrevocable change’ means that ‘who we used to be’ is lost forever; whatever identity we used to have (or – at least – that we used to think we had) is now gone and we won’t ever get it back. Getting it back is a fundamental impossibility. It turns out – unsurprisingly enough – that we’re not necessarily OK about this. Actually, it turns out that this is the one thing that we don’t ever want to see happen, not matter what. It turns out that our whole way of existing is geared towards not letting go of our thought-created identity (which isn’t actually a real thing). Expressed in the simplest possible terms, our approach to the matter is to say that letting ourselves be irrevocably changed (changed in a way that we can’t predict) equals ‘losing’…
We’re playing a game, in other words, and ‘success’ in this game means hanging on to our identity (however arbitrary it might be) at any cost. Questioning our identity is considered bad form – we laugh scornfully at people who do this. We’re all playing this game – it’s the default mode of existence, it’s ‘the norm’. James Carse calls this finite play and he says that the aim of finite play is to make sure that we aren’t ever taken by surprise; the point of the game is to make sure that we always stay in control, in other words, and if we can’t do this then that straight away makes us into losers. What’s essentially happening here is that we’re ‘maintaining the status quo’; which is something we can all understand. We are maintaining the equilibrium state, we’re fiercely protecting against all comers. We’re ‘resisting change’…
This is a very easy game to define – the basic idea is that ‘the known’ is good and ‘the unknown’ is bad. We have the psychological attitude that we already have the right answer (thank you very much) and that anything else by definition is a menace, that anything else is a threat to be taken with the utmost seriousness. Our way of doing things (which is a function of our way of seeing things) is the most precious thing ever and it absolutely needs to be preserved. If ever there was an ‘imperative,’ then this is it. ‘Winning’ means [1] Defending our position against any challenges and [2] Vanquishing all opposition wherever it exists and victoriously converting everyone we come across to our way of thinking, our way of seeing things.
This isn’t just ‘a’ game, it’s The game – it’s what we all do all of the time. Everyone on the planet understands the rules of this game – it’s universal, it’s across the board, it’s pretty much the only thing we care about. What we’re essentially looking at here is therefore viral-type behaviour, which is behaviour that isn’t based on intelligence (or ‘awareness’) but merely the unreflecting acting out of a senseless mechanical impulse. Preserving the pattern that we started off with is ‘mechanical behaviour’, which is to say, it’s the behaviour that comes from the day one very simple rule, which is The Rule of Precedence. The Rule of Precedence – as we were saying earlier – means that what has gone before is ‘right,’ whilst anything else is ‘wrong’. If it is a copy of the all-important template, then it can be allowed, if not (if it’s something original (and therefore unprecedented) then it’s dangerous and it’s up to us to put a stop to it…
This is of course how all machines work; if they didn’t work like this then they couldn’t qualify as being machines – they’d be something else in this case. Machines ‘copy out the template that they have been given’ – if they can do this we say that they are working correctly and we’re happy and if they can’t then we say that they’re broken that they need either to be fixed or thrown away. This is how machines work, but – as we started off by saying – it’s not how reality works! Reality doesn’t work in a mechanical way – it doesn’t obey ‘viral logic’. The real world is not predicated upon the crude protocol of randomly picking some transient configuration and then replicating it over and over again on the basis that it is ‘special’, on the basis that it represents ‘the only true way for things to be’! Life would be terribly tedious if this were the case (and it wouldn’t just be ‘terribly tedious’, it would be hideously sterile).
The ‘Formal Realm’ that we started off talking about is the Machine World, therefore – it’s another way of talking about the Mind-Created Simulation of Reality (which is all we ever know). The Formal Realm is an artificial (or abstract) domain that is created by machine logic, machine thinking, and we are inhabiting this domain (which we mistakenly understand to be the same thing as the world itself). The machine that we’re talking about here is the Thinking Mind, which we don’t see to be a machine, but which absolutely is. The way thought works is quintessentially mechanical – it explains the new in terms of the old, it makes sense of the world via the procedure of ‘comparing all incoming information with its own patented template’ (which – if the machine is to continue working – must never be questioned).
In his book The Wisdom of Insecurity Alan Watts notes that
The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.
The reason we engage so very persistently, so very stubbornly, in this counterproductive activity is simply because we are following thought’s lead in all things. We trust the thinking mind with everything, we trust it with our lives. Thought identifies something as being good, as being valuable, as being desirable, and so it wants to make it permanent. It wants to ‘optimise the benefit’. The ‘good’ thus becomes ‘the enemy of the better’, as Jung says. We end up living in a world where we are continually defending ourselves against the new, as if ‘the new’ were something terrible, as if ‘the new’ were our mortal enemy. But ‘the new’ isn’t our mortal enemy – that’s a big, big mistake on our part. ‘The new’ is actually reality itself and there is no such thing as a good outcome when we pick a fight with the way things actually are…
When we end up living in a world that is made up of ‘things being what we think they ought to be’ rather than ‘things being what they are’ (which is to say quintessentially transient) then sterile self-contradiction becomes our fate, it becomes our whole world. That’s all there is for us. We can make positive statements about the world for sure (i.e., we can make statements that we know to be ‘definitely true’) – if that’s what we want to do – but every time we come out with a ‘definitely true statement’ we also invoke (without knowing it) the corresponding opposite to that statement, the reverse proposition to that statement. We can escape from the Unitary Movement that is reality if we want to, but only at the price of being continually crucified in the ‘World of Warring Opposites’.
Image credit – wallpapers.ai
