Just as a house has to have a foundation, if it is to be built on soft ground, so too do our mental constructs have to be formulated with reference to ‘a baseline that can never be questioned’. Saying that the baseline can’t be questioned is another way of saying that is quintessentially arbitrary, which is to say, it’s only there because we say it is. If it’s only there because we say it is then of course we aren’t going to question it! Our positive statements about the world only get to be ‘positive’ (which is to say, ‘definite’) because we tacitly agree (either with ourselves or with others) never to question their validity…
Once the baseline is in place then we can build on it, we can construct a whole world in relation to it. This sounds great, it sounds as if there are a lot of possibilities there, that great things are about to happen and so on, and we just can’t wait to get started, but there is a proviso that needs to be taken into account here. This proviso is a direct consequence of the fundamental lack of questioning or interrogation that the baseline is dependent upon; we can appreciate the nature of the proviso just as soon as we see that all the constructs (or statements) we generate on the strength of this baseline are tautological extensions of that very same baseline. The proviso is therefore that nothing we build on the basis of thought is ever going to get us anywhere. It might distract us for a while (it very much does distract us!) but it won’t get us anywhere. We’re ‘advancing’, but only in the direction of ‘increasing abstractedness’.
In order for a construct to be a construct it has to be 100% defined and if it is to be defined then this has to be done in relation to a baseline. The endeavour has to be anchored – there’s no other way to do it. But if the construct has be defined in relation to the baseline then that construct is that baseline and this means that there is a fatal flaw in the mix that will always bring everything to nothing. The flaw that we’re talking about here absolutely guarantees that ‘everything is going to come to nothing’. ever be surer than this. If there is one thing that we can rely on in life it is that our constructs – which is to say, our rational / purposeful output – will always come to nothing. This is like saying that our games will always come to nothing – that’s just the way games are, after all…
This is very easy to say but much harder to actually appreciate. Linearity seems both very straightforward and very reliable to us – we understand it to be the gold standard for reliability (we don’t actually trust anything else) whereas in reality linear change can be relied upon for one thing and one thing only, which is to never to get us anywhere at all. Instead of talking about ‘linear change’ we could equally well talk in terms of control and it is of course unnecessary to point out that we rely on control! Control is everything as far as we’re concerned it’s the beginning in the end. We know nothing but control in our everyday lives and as far as we’re concerned the better we are at it the better off we will be.
We control in order to obtain designated outcomes – there is of course no such thing as an act of control that is not aimed towards a designated outcome – but designated outcomes are extensions of the unexamined baseline. Our acts of control are, without any exception, ‘projections of our assumed baseline’ – we promoting something very enthusiastically but at the same time we don’t really know what it is that we’re promoting. We don’t know and we don’t care to know either; we haven’t any interest in knowing because that that would spoil our game. The BL – as we started off by saying – has to remain unquestioned because it has no solid basis and cannot withstand any questioning. If we were to question the BL then it would promptly disappear. Or – as we might also say – if we look at it at all then we wouldn’t be able to help immediately seeing that it is a made-up thing. This is why actual consciousness is most definitely not a welcome guest at this particular party…
All of our controlling comes out of this unreal basis therefore and – in turn – our entire world comes out of our controlling. What we believe to be true or real is the result of how we choose to look things, after all; it is the result of our thinking and thinking is controlling. All of our goal-orientated activity comes out of a fantasy basis therefore and this is a very peculiar thing to consider since – as we have just said – we look upon controlling is being such an eminently hard-headed, no-nonsense type of business. In our rational world we scoff at anything that isn’t controlling, which is a funny thing when we consider that controlling always comes down to ‘maintaining our prized illusions’; there’s nothing particularly ‘hard-headed’ or ‘no-nonsense’ about constantly and compulsively maintaining illusions, after all! Actually, maintaining illusions is all about fear – we are afraid of finding out what might turn out to be the case if we were to stop maintaining these cherished illusions of ours.
The world that is made out of our controlling (our purposeful activity) is thus the world that is made out of our fear and we can’t really expect too much out of a type of existence that is predicated upon fear. We can’t expect it to be exactly fruitful or rather, we can expect that, but the end result is that we are going to be disappointed. There are going to be no happy endings to this story. There is something terribly hollow about the world that fear makes, which is the world that we make up out of our endlessly multiplying mental constructs, and yet we don’t see it. On the contrary, it seems full of promise to us; we may not be able to avail of this promise very easily it’s true, but that doesn’t stop is believing in it – if anything, it whets our appetite all the more. We see nothing fraudulent about this situation at all – it’s the only world we know and as far as we’re concerned it’s everything it should be.
But if this world is made up of mental constructs (mental constructs that are all tautological developments of an assumed baseline which would instantly disappear if we actually looked at it) and if who I understand myself to be in this world is also a mental construct, is also ‘the tautological extension of an imaginary baseline’, then what kind of situation do we have here? All there is in this world – which is the world fear has created – is the assumed baseline which has been tweaked this way and that to create and ‘apparent diversity’ and that baseline – as we keep saying – only seems real to us because of the way in which we obstinately refuse to examine it.
Image – wallpapercrafter.com
