The Manufactured Reality is always a long drawn-out exercise in tedium and futility. There’s nothing else it can be – it is either a long drawn-out exercise in tedium and futility that we can see as such or it is long drawn-out exercise in tedium and futility which we can’t see as such. No other options exist. We might imagine or hope that there is another possibility apart from the two that we have just mentioned but there isn’t. Either we’ve seen through the illusion, or we haven’t, but whichever way it is it’s still an illusion. And even when we don’t see the inherent sterility of the Manufactured Reality for what it is that can’t really be considered to be ‘a good thing’ because it’s only a matter of time before we do – disappointment’s always going to be waiting in the wings, in other words…
Disappointment’s always just around the corner and – what’s more – there is a fundamental principle at work here which means that the more comfort we get when we are safely oblivious to our true situation (and think therefore that the MR does indeed contain real possibilities for us) the more this illusion of comfort has to be paid for later on in the coin of disappointment. Hope is always paid for in terms of disappointment in the Manufactured Reality such that the more hope we allow ourselves to have the greater the disillusionment we’re going to experience later on. The more hope we allow ourselves to have the worse it’s going to be for us later on and so ‘hope’ isn’t really the good thing that we say it is! Hope is only needed when there’s no reality and – contrariwise – where there is reality there is no need for hope.
It could be said that what we SECRETLY hope for out of the manufactured reality is that we never see it for what it is, therefore. We want to see possibilities that aren’t there, in fact we absolutely depend upon seeing possibilities that aren’t there! If we were to suddenly find it impossible to see these illusory possibilities then the impact on us would be tremendous – the wind would have be taken out of our motivational sails in a big way. Our sails would be quite useless to us. The problem is however – as we have already said – that there is no good in the Manufactured Reality; the only ‘good reality’ is the one that we ourselves haven’t made, the one that no one has made, the one that no agency has had any involvement in whatsoever. That’s how we know that it’s good and pure!
What we don’t tend to see particularly quickly (if at all) is that anything we make is always us! Whatever we make is an extension of us. If I make something then what I’ve made is (of course) my own construct and if it’s my own construct then it’s me. We can’t make anything that is more than us, anything that is greater than us or different to us – we wouldn’t know how. When we live in a manufactured reality then we are living in a world that is never any bigger than we are and this creates a problem – albeit a problem that we can’t see. When we live in a world that is the same size as us – i.e., a world that is a projection of our own thinking – then a special sort of glitch comes into play – the glitch of tautology. The glitch of tautology is a glitch that we absolutely can’t get away from and which renders everything we do absolutely meaningless. Or to put this another way, the glitch creates a fictional world that we can’t see to be fictional and when we act on the basis of a fiction that we don’t know to be fictional then everything we do is null. We have become nullified.
What makes everything we do or think meaningless is the fact that no change ever takes place, or can take place, within the MR. For change to take place we would have to reach out beyond ourselves and relate to something that is not ourselves. If there is only ‘relating to ourselves’, relating to stuff that we ourselves have made, then this is not any sort of ‘reaching’ or ‘relating’ at all. For there to be actual relating there has to be information coming into the picture as a result and when we are relating to ourselves there isn’t. Nothing comes out of that, nothing can come out of that. When we ‘relate’ to our own constructs, our own devices, our own extensions or projections, then there is no information coming our way, clearly, and to say that there’s no information coming our way is just another way of saying nothing is happening. It’s a ‘null situation’; it’s a situation that isn’t a situation (even though we think it is). Nothing happened and there wasn’t a situation – it was a mistake to think that, an error of perception…
Tautology – then – means that nothing new is happening, even though we think that there is. We perceive it to be the case that an event has happened although it hasn’t. Naturally we wouldn’t use the word ‘tautological’ if there wasn’t the plausible-but-deceptive impression that some event or other has happened, that there actually has been some sort of change taking place – there wouldn’t be any need to say anything otherwise. When no change is taking place and there is no impression that any change is taking place, no suggestion that it is, then why would we have to draw attention to this fact? Why would we go to the trouble of pointing out that nothing has happened every time nothing happens? The reason we are launching into this discussion is because when it’s the Manufactured Reality that we’re talking about then there very much is the plausible impression that events are taking place, that changes are happening. There has to be this impression – what sort of reality would it be if no events ever occurred in it? That wouldn’t be a reality at all, it would be an empty set. So the only way the MR gets to continue to seem to exist is by lying about there being something happening when there isn’t. This could be compared to a kink or twist in the air causing a mirage or heat-devil to appear.
This brings us back to our original statement about the Manufactured Reality being a long drawn-out exercise in tedium and futility. This has to be the case when we consider the key characteristic of a tautology, which is that nothing, despite appearances, despite what we think, is actually being said – if we’re sticking with the tautological reality (which we are) because we are ‘waiting for something new or something meaningful to be said’ then we are going to have to stick with it for a very long time; we’re going to have to stick with it forever because there never will be anything new or meaningful coming out of it. We start off with a deck of cards and then we keep on shuffling and reshuffling them, hoping for something unexpected to come out of our shuffling, hoping for something that wasn’t inherent in the original, only this never happens (naturally enough). Nothing new ever comes out and yet we are convinced that it will if we improve our shuffling skills sufficiently it will. We’re banking on getting an outcomes that wasn’t inherent in the starting off position and yet that can’t happen, which means that we never do leave our starting-off position even though – subjectively – we get the feeling that we are. Either we get the subjective feeling that we’re progressing, which causes us to be jubilant, or we get the feeling that we’re not progressing (or perhaps even going backwards) which of course dismays, demoralises and depresses us. There’s no cause either for the noisy celebration or the bitter self-recrimination however since in reality we are getting nowhere with our efforts and never can. There is neither gaining nor losing in the MR, despite all appearances to the contrary; there is neither gaining nor losing in the MR because the MR isn’t a real thing…
The Unconstructed Reality doesn’t contain any limitations precisely because no one did construct it and because it contains no limitations whatever situation we are dealing with in life will always give way to something else – something which doesn’t follow on logically (or unfreely) from where we started off from. ‘Everything always gives way to everything else’ in the real (or unlimited) world and so there is no question of getting trapped in anything / getting stuck anywhere. What this all-pervasive ‘mutual interpenetration’ means is that we can never say definitively what anything is and this situation is a profoundly unsettling one for us because our entire way of looking at things is based on the tacit understanding that we can say what things are definitively are, which is of course the rational way of looking at the world. We want to say what things are (and what we are) because this affords us some sort of ‘purchase’ on the world but just as soon as we obtain this purchase we straightaway get stuck in thought’s sterile fantasy!
The rational way of looking at the world is useful to us (in a superficial way) because it compartmentalises everything so very neatly but the price we pay for this superficial convenience is however that we get permanently (and dismally) confined in these made-up compartments. The ‘neatness’ that we like so much is a curse. The Manufactured Reality is ‘a dead-end that we can’t see as such’, in other words – no one aspect of the world leads onto any other aspect and the reason that this for this is that these ‘aspects’ are abstract rational constructs and abstract rational constructs (or categories) don’t lead onto each other. That can never happen because rational compartments only have the type of existence that they may provisionally be said to have because they are quintessentially non-communicating. Rational compartments come to existence because of rules, in other words, and rules divide rather than connect. That’s what rules are – artificial divisions. Rules are divisions that don’t really exist and because of this grievous deficit in reality they have no ‘integrative function’ – the Whole can’t come out of rules because it was never in them to start off with. Only the ‘unconstructed reality’ has an integrative function and that is why it isn’t a dead end in the same way that the MR is. This is why we can’t get ‘trapped in actual reality’ but only in the endlessly proliferating abstract compartments of our runaway logic.
There’s no ‘getting stuck in reality’ because there’s no one there to get stuck. There is no one to get stuck and there are no ‘locations’ to get stuck in. When we’re operating within the terms of the Manufactured Reality however then getting stuck is all there is. There isn’t anything else apart from ‘being trapped’ so all we can do is ‘choose our prison’. To imagine that we are this Mind-Created Identity is be stuck – it’s a form of being stuck that we see as having great potential in it, a form of being stuck that we see as actually having tremendous value in it.
Thought divides everything up into non-connecting unreal compartments and then suggests to us that by identifying with one of these compartments (which as we keep saying aren’t really there anyway) we will be in the position of being able to obtain a thrilling advantage if we play our cards right. There are no ‘advantages’ to be had however, thrilling or otherwise – both ‘advantage’ and ‘disadvantage’ are unreal concepts. All there is here is ‘futile struggling’…
Art: goodfon.com
