Thought operates via ‘positive pressure’ – it operates by issuing instructions, in other words. Everything thought does is an instruction, everything thought does is a rule or assertion (or as we could also say, everything thought does is aggressive in nature, is coercive, is controlling, is manipulative, etc).
There is no way that thought can’t be like this – inasmuch as we are saying what things are in a definitive way (or as we could also say, in a one-sided way) we are being aggressive, we’re being controlling, coercive, and all the rest of it. When we say what something is (which is at the same time what saying what it isn’t) then this is ‘an act of control’; it’s an act of control because we are arbitrarily imposing our own frame of reference on the world. We’re making things ‘be what we want them to be’ and doing this means that we are completely disregarding what they actually are. There’s ‘no sensitivity in forcing’, we might say – control is a one-way street.
‘Positive pressure’ is just another way of talking about forcing therefore and forcing – we may say – is the very antithesis of sensitivity. Control systems aren’t sensitive! We aren’t being sensitive to what’s going on out there if we are compelling things to fit into preordained categories. Because thought works on the basis of positive pressure there is zero sensitivity in it, zero connection to anything outside of itself and its schemes, and this is a bizarre kind of a thing to consider – it’s a bizarre thing to consider because the whole point of the thinking mind is that it has the role or function of guiding us vis-à-vis the intricacies of the real world (as opposed to the ‘intricacies’ of some imagined one). If the instrument of thought is fundamentally insensitive to what is supposedly orientating us towards, and responding purely to its own internal biases, then this puts a very different complexion on things – what we’re looking at here is a different proposition altogether, what we’re looking at here is what we might call ‘being in the world but at the same time being wholly disconnected from it’. What we’re looking at here is ‘disguised blindness’ (or ‘disguised ignorance’) therefore – we can’t see what’s going on (we don’t know what’s going on) but by being particularly clever (or ‘tricky’) we manage to get by just as if we do see, just as if we do have genuine knowledge…
Given that thought does operate via positive pressure (via aggression, control, coercion, forcing, etc) it is inevitable that this is how we’re going to end up. It was always going to be the case that we would end up ‘disconnected from reality without knowing it’ (or ‘blind without knowing it’); when we opted to use thought as our sole guidance system then the very best we could ever hope for this way is to end up with a highly accurate map, a highly detailed set of instructions telling us how we should act in order to interact effectively with our environment but no actual direct connection with it. The only direct connection we have is with the set of instructions that we are acting on (which corresponds to the model or theory of the world that thought is running) but this isn’t connection. This is parallel development – what we’re talking about here specifically is the package deal of ‘being the rational ego whilst living in the world which is the projection of that very same rational ego’. This is therefore a ‘virtual state of being’ – the ego construct is a projection of thought and so is everything that that ego construct ‘knows’ or ‘believes in’.
A virtual state of being can never be any more than a virtual state of being no matter how accurate or detailed the information is that thought is providing with us. It doesn’t matter how detailed the map is – it still isn’t ever going to ‘equal the territory’! The way this works in practise is of course that we don’t spot the gap, we don’t spot our removal from the actual territory, and so we don’t go around feeling that we’re ‘disconnected’ or ‘existentially isolated’ (or however else we might want to put it). On the contrary, we feel interactive, we feel that we’re agents of change, we feel that we are really doing stuff, and so on. We don’t feel disconnected and so metaphysical questions about ‘role-playing life in an elaborate simulation and thus never touching reality’ never arise. This is an idea that never (or almost never) comes into our heads. This is absolutely the only way that the rational ego can continue with its game – by being 100% ignorant of what’s going on. Absolutely everything the self-construct (or rational ego) knows and believes in is a lie, therefore…
Just because we don’t ‘spot the disconnect’ doesn’t mean that it isn’t there, however. It’s there, and we need to compensate for it in some way or other so that we can continue to pretend to ourselves that all is well, that everything is going to plan, that everything is hunky-dory. There’s going to be a kind of fundamental frustration at the very heart of this strange two-dimensional business of ‘virtual living’ – a feeling of disconnectedness, emptiness and frustration that no therapy (or no treatment) is ever going to shift. Because therapy (as we understand it) comes from thought it contains the very same disconnect that we are trying to cure, the very same disconnect that was causing all the trouble in the first place. The best we can do in this situation is to simulate a connection as best we can, but a simulated connection is no connection. A simulated connection is a trick.
Because thought operates via ‘positive pressure’ (because it says what everything is, because it can’t tolerate any disagreement on this score, because it can’t admit the existence of radical uncertainty) it is never going to have a relationship with the actual nature of things. It’s like a person who has no empathy trying their best to speak in such a way that will sound as if they do – no matter how carefully we devise our response we are nevertheless completely at sea the whole time as regards what on earth it is that we’re trying to do, what it is that we’re trying to pull off. We might fool whoever it is we want to fool, we might get away with it, but we still don’t know what we’re doing. To use another analogy, we could say that it’s like AI because although AI can bring an immense amount of sophistication and technical brilliance to whatever it is that it’s doing (and although it appears highly successful in hoodwinking us poor gullible human beings into thinking that what’s not real is real) at the end of the day the AI still doesn’t know what it is that it’s trying to simulate, what it is that it’s trying to convince us of. The AI doesn’t know what it’s doing, but it fools us into thinking that it does.
The whole thing is a bluff and no matter how supremely accomplished it might be, this doesn’t in any way alter the fact. We can admire it as much as we like but it’s a hoax. It isn’t happening naturally, but the skill lies in making it look as if it is, making it look as if there’s no one there pulling the levers from behind a curtain (Wizard of Oz-style). Continuing with the idea of a bluff here, we might observe that when we’re living on the basis of the conceptual identity or self-concept image then this is exactly what we’re doing – we’re bluffing that this is the real deal, we’re bluffing that we’re leading our best life, we’re bluffing that we haven’t been tricked or ripped-off in a fundamental way, and so on and so forth. We’re pretending that we’re not the puppets of thought; we might be bluffing others, to be sure, but that’s part of the overall plan to hoodwink ourselves. To convince the audience – whether they’re real or only in my head – is the is a key part of this. I am my own audience, and my job is to convince myself.
My ‘job’ (which is don’t know I have) is to convince myself that the simulation isn’t a simulation, that the avoidance isn’t an avoidance. Rather than going anywhere near owning up to the existence of our own participation in the construction of the Mind-Created Virtual Reality we obfuscate – we hand over all our autonomy (our autonomous or uncompromised awareness) to the machinery of thought and in this way we compromise our essential integrity as autonomous beings to the point where we lose sight of the fact that we have been compromised. We have ‘handed over’ the independent awareness that would have allowed us to know that we have been compromised; all we have now is a mechanical analogue of awareness that is actually nothing other than ‘thought feeding us information that tells us we are independent’, just as David Bohm says. All we have is the surface-level simulation of autonomy. The sense of ‘well-being’ that we obtain as a result of this inability to know that the simulation is a simulation, as a result of our uncritical belief in whatever thought is showing us (i.e., our total lack of insight into the trick) is what we so glibly call mental health. What we call mental health is ‘that (contrived) state of being where we don’t see that the simulation is a simulation’.
Positive pressure essentially means that we’re making it happen. It means that we are compelling events to happen the way we want them to, it means that the thing we want to happen – whatever it is – is the outcome of our controlling, nothing more. This way, we never go beyond ourselves – whatever it is that we’re causing to happen must necessarily happen according to the way in which we’ve envisaged it to do so (obviously enough, or we couldn’t call this ‘control’) but what this means is that we are projecting (or logically extrapolating) a virtual reality, a virtual reality world that is entirely made up of our own baseless assumptions. We don’t even know that we’ve made any assumptions – we would say that we are promoting (or defending) what is true. All we’re really doing however is ‘repeating what thought has told us’, and the snag here is that nothing thought tells us is ever true. Thought can’t tell us what’s true because that’s not the way though works – thought has nothing to do with truth, that’s not in its brief at all. Thought is only ever ‘about itself’ (it’s only ever abut itself because it can’t register anything that doesn’t match its unexaminable assumptions) Only the unique can be true and the thinking mind will never come up with anything unique. Thought works by copying or repeating the same basic point or statement over and over again, with only superficial changes; that’s what linearity (or causality) is all about – it’s all about ‘the preservation of core proportionalities or ratios’.
The Positive World is the Caused World, therefore – it is the effect of some cause or other, and that cause – in its turn – must be an effect of some other cause. When it’s the Continuum of Logic we’re talking about then the law is that everything which exists (without exception) must have a cause, must have a precedent, must have a logical antecedent. Within the Continuum of Logic there are no ‘stand-alone statements’ – everything has to agree with everything else. It’s a club that no one will be admitted to unless they have the right credentials. This means that we’re looking at self-generating loops here, it means that what we’re looking at is a circular argument. If every statement that goes to make up the COL must have a logical antecedent (and must have therefore an affirming relationship with every other statement in the continuum) then what we’re looking at here is bootstrapping in other words, and this is another way of saying that that the everyday consensus reality we all believe in is nothing other than pure, runaway hyperreality (i.e., it’s a cheap ‘made-up’ world that feeds off itself).
Image credit – Kingspray Reality Simulator, on businessinsider.com
