There is no advantage in symmetry (by definition there is no advantage to be had in symmetry). For there to be advantage there must be the lack of symmetry, there must be inequality. We are all about chasing the advantage however – this is what life is all about we say (or at least, that’s what we would be saying if we were to be totally honest about it). Life is implicitly seen as being a game, and a game is always played to benefit oneself. Ultimately however, there’s only one impossibility in the world and that is the impossibility of there ever being anything that isn’t symmetrical. Symmetry is all there is, in other words. This is a Universal Law or Principle – Original Symmetry can never be broken; no event that has a ‘non-symmetrical’ nature can ever happen.
On a smaller scale there can be such a thing as ‘an asymmetrical situation’ but when we take the wider view (when we can access the view that isn’t artificially constrained) then we can see that what we thought to be there simply isn’t there at all – everything always evens out when we see the big picture. This is just like waves on the sea, of course – a wave is made up of two asymmetries that can be seen to cancel each other out when we look at the ‘above’ and the ‘below’ at the same time. Were we to look only at what is going on above the waterline, above the flat plane of the undisturbed ocean, then we would see no symmetry; on the contrary, we would see the positive displacement without the negative. We would then be living in a world that is fundamentally asymmetrical and we would have no reason to suspect that this is not the final reality. We would have no reason to suspect that we are ‘only seeing half the picture’.
This illusion comes about naturally when it’s ocean waves we’re talking about – when we look out to sea on a windy day we see ‘waves coming in’ and by this we mean that we observe a series of positive displacements of the water surface apparently rushing shorewards. When we talk about ‘a wave’ then – generally speaking – we mean just half of the actual wave (which of course contains positive and negative displacement in equal amounts). What we call ‘a wave’ is just an optical illusion therefore; the wave crest is sequentially replaced by the trough and this creates the impression of some kind of ‘thing’ that is moving along in a lateral fashion (even though there’s no thing and no lateral movement). What’s happening here is that we’re seeing positive and minus in a way that is separated by linear time, in a way which therefore represents them as separate unconnected entities, even though there’s only the one event going on. There’s one event occurring, but the twist here is that this so-called ‘event’ isn’t really anything. We could call this a ‘virtual event’ – it’s an apparent event that never really happened because it’s continually going back on itself – just like a statement we make, and then immediately take back again.
The perception of the wave as a thing that is travelling along the surface of the medium is a function of our one-sided vision therefore – when our vision is whole (rather than being limited or conditioned) then this perception never arises. We aren’t troubled by phantom events; we don’t get excited by the appearance or disappearance of entities that aren’t real. Everything is peaceful, everything is tranquil, everything is ‘all the one’. The term ‘Original Symmetry’ is thus another way of talking about the Unus mundus of the alchemists. This is what the famous quote from Hermes Trismegistus is all about –
That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below, to perform the miracles of One only thing.
The thing about ‘the miracle of the One only thing’ that Hermes Trismegistus is talking about here is that it isn’t really ‘a thing’ at all (not in the way that we normally think of things, anyway). A thing can only be ‘a thing’ when it can be contrasted with other things; a class or category can only be ‘a class’ (or ‘category’) when there are other alternatives for us to slot the incoming data into. A class that contains all possible data isn’t a class; a group that doesn’t have an outside isn’t a group. An open-ended class or group isn’t anything that we can define and if we can’t in any way define it then why would we bother it to assign it a name? The term is actually meaningless – we can’t talk about things being contained when containment is an impossible thing. An event that can be defined is an event that can never happen.
We could also say that data set which contains everything isn’t a set in the usual sense of the world word – a set both includes and excludes, it is strictly boundaried, in other words. There are criteria to take into consideration, criteria or rules which have absolute authority in their domain of applicability (and which also don’t exist themselves outside of this ‘provisional domain of applicability’). That’s the trick therefore – our flat acceptance of the ‘classes’ (which is to say, of the ‘things’) which thought uses to organize the world results in us living in a ‘mock-up’ of the world which is compromised solely of our ways of organizing it. We relate therefore not to ‘what is there’ but to ‘what we are biased to thinking is there’ (which is really only our own way of looking at things reflected back at us). When we take our ‘rules of organization’ for granted then the world which we end up inhabiting as a result is this same ruleset and nothing else. We’re living in the closed world of our own (unexaminable) descriptions. There’s no actual need for us to do this – it’s a ‘choice’ on our part, so to speak – the rules of the game are – according to themselves – inviolable and accepting this is itself ‘the game’. The game is a function of our automatic acceptance that there is such a thing as the conditioned reality that the rules of the game’ are generating for us. Life in this realm is a function of our lack of awareness therefore – it’s a function of our ignorance, a function of the information that is unavailable to us (so to speak).
This is bootstrapping pure and simple, therefore. This is ‘co-dependent origination’. There’s no reality involved in this – it’s all ‘a dance of the unreal’, it’s all ‘a spinning whirlwind of illusion’. Causality is the illusion since cause-and-effect (the mechanism upon which we build the world) isn’t a thing- it isn’t a thing because there’s no difference between the one and the other – it’s all just the one unchanging block of logic. Once we have unleashed the whirlwind however then the positive (or caused) reality thus created blocks out everything else, it covers over everything that is not itself (just like a car alarm annihilates the blessing silence that was there before it went off). We’re not going to be able to hear the silence when there’s a car alarm going off right next to us, obviously – it’s as if the silence has been utterly obliterated, obliterated so effectively that we can no longer remember that there ever was such a thing (even though silence – because it isn’t something that has been manufactured or caused – can’t be obliterated). The silence hasn’t been somehow eliminated or disposed of but – rather – our attention has completely captured or hijacked by the noise, by the ‘racket’, so that – for us – this positive manifestation, this racket, is all there is. The ‘produced’ thing becomes the only thing and this is how bootstrapping works.
Because the background peace (which is not the output of the machine, which is not the effect of any cause, which is not something that anyone has created) has been replaced in this way by the spectacle of ongoing self-creating, self-perpetuating agitation (which is the ‘noise’ which we are using here to analogize Positive Reality) it is inevitable that we define ourselves in terms of it. It is inevitable that we define ourselves in terms of noise rather than peace because that’s the only yardstick we have, because that’s the only thing we understand as actually existing. For us, asymmetry (i.e., the car alarm) is the beginning and end of everything, and yet – at the same time – were we to take a step back and look at the whole rather than the partial picture, we would see that Original Symmetry has never been broken and that it never can be. We have merely forgotten about it, that’s all. The ‘advantage’ that we are continually seeking (the advantage that we are continually yearning for) doesn’t exist…
Image credit – pichiavo.com
