We can’t change ourselves, no matter how dogged we might be in our attempts to do so. The ego or self can’t change itself any more than a leopard can it spots – it can never cover them up, it can temporarily cover them up perhaps, but in no way can it ever be rid of them. Not only can we ‘not change ourselves on purpose’ we perfectly incapable of seeing that we can’t. There’s no way to explain to the ego or self why it can never change itself to be the way it thinks it ought to be, no matter how steadfastly it might apply itself to the task. This is information we simply aren’t open to – the System of Denial is in ‘denial’ precisely in regard to this point. We’re living in full-blown denial of the unreality of the conditioned self.
The other side of this is that were we to see that we can’t change ourselves then we would straightaway be liberated from the illusion that we are this self, that we are this ego. That’s why this awareness is taboo. To see, in all clarity, that there is no changing the self (to see that the ego is only ever the ego) is also to see that we can’t ‘be’ it. This isn’t a viable proposition. We see that we can’t ‘be’ this thought-generated self because this TGS is not really a thing. We are led to believe that it is a thing (and a very good thing) and that we are it, and that there is (potentially) a great future in store for us, but none of this is true…
To see that altering the basic mechanics that go to make up what we might call ‘the self game’ is a laughable impossibility is to wake up from a dream, it is to emerge from a suffocatingly heavy illusion and the odd thing about this is that the process of emerging happens against our will. We don’t want to wake up, we think that’s a bad thing! When we understand – intuitively rather than rationally – that there is zero possibility of us being able to ‘change the self’ so to make it more palatable / attractive (or – alternatively – less offensive or obnoxious) to whoever its ‘audience’ is (and that it therefore has no future) then we emerge at last from what feels like a long dark enchantment. We come back into the light, and ‘the light’ is – we might say – freedom from a uniquely pernicious misapprehension (which is to say, freedom from having to believe that we ARE this ‘dead-end unreal identity’.
The suggestion that we can be freed by seeing that what we most want in the whole world is sublimely impossible doesn’t make any sense to us; we can’t see how that would work at all; we like ‘positive stuff’, after all, we like optimism, we like personal empowerment, we like ‘can do’ philosophies. We can’t get enough of that sort of ‘feel-good’ stuff. We refuse to hear that we aren’t empowered and that – what’s more – we never can be. We refuse to hear that – just as G.I. Gurdjieff says – that we cannot do, that we cannot ever be empowered to ‘do’. That’s the type of bad news we absolutely aren’t interested in learning about. When we read this then it simply doesn’t make any sense to us. The self can’t be empowered to be anything other than what it already is, which is analogy; saying that the self or ego can never be any more than analogy is simply another I have seen that it’s fundamentally conflicted in itself, it’s another way of saying that the ego-identity can never be that it can never be not self-sabotaging. It’s what it likes its successes what it likes to call it successes are all ‘failures in disguise’. There’s no way to get anywhere when we’re starting off from an unreal place (and yet we won’t be told).
‘Duality is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts’, says Namkhai Norbu, and duality means precisely that we are made up of equally of both opposites, even though we are – as J.G. Bennett points out – ordinarily incapable of perceiving both of the opposites at the same time. We are a mixture of ‘yea and nay’, says D.H. Lawrence – we’re made up of both grasping and revulsion, desire and fear, love and hate, and so on. This type of unequivocal irreducible self-contradiction translates into pure suffering; when we partake in the conditioned life then we’re handed what we might call ‘suffering on a plate’ and what’s more is that it is the type of suffering we can’t evade or avoid without automatically creating even more suffering in the future. This is of course another way of saying that it is the type of suffering we can’t escape from on purpose, because we want to…
We can’t escape (on purpose) from the self-contradictoriness of duality because the attempt to do so involve us in a paradox, the paradox being that the move by which we exit the game is also the movement by which we renew or reinstate it. ‘STOP means GO’ – we might say – and there’s no way out of this just as long as we are following the logic of the game. Or as we could also say, we can’t escape from a logically constructed situation by using logic. The logic of the game is precisely what imprisons us – it’s not the cure for the problem but rather it is the problem, just as Krishnamurti says.
The reason we can’t escape logic by utilising logic is because logic is an artificial sort of thing and we can’t ‘escape’ it since escaping means (if it means anything at all) leaving the formal or artificial setup and re-entering the real world again. The snag here however is that we can’t move on (or escape) with this as our basis, with this is with this as our ‘springboard into reality’, so to speak. Very clearly therefore, there is absolutely no way that this can ever work.
To exit the game doesn’t really take us away from the game because exit in the game is a legitimate part of it or as we might also say trying to active the game is the game. We can see this very clearly from the outside as it were we can see that irony again appreciate the irony of the situation but from the inside of it it’s a different story. From the inside of it there’s simply no way that we can see this since when we’re playing the game only now is the logic of the game and the logic of the game is telling us that go and stop doesn’t equal stop, that yes positive is definite to negative. This is why duality is the deadly trap that it is.
When Michel de Montaigne talks about us as being ‘double in ourselves’ this is exactly what he is alluding to – ‘what we believe we disbelieve’ says de Montaigne and this paradox traps us because the more we try to escape the curse of disbelief by putting ever-more effort into believing and this only serves to accentuate the problem. The more effort we put into the task of ‘being a believer’ the more we miss the mark. As believers in a rule-based religion such as Christianity, Judaism or Islam we are told that it is our belief that will save us (i.e., that will allow us to exit the game of mortal life) and this strongly incentivizes me to believe (naturally enough) but the more we try the more our disbelief increases against my will. This calls for yet greater efforts in belief on our part, which escalates our distress all the more. The only way out (and it’s not really a way out) is for us to compartmentalize ourselves so that we are ‘insincere without knowing it’.
This is the double bind that lies at the heart of every logical system in existence – logical systems are based on the principle of polarity (or duality) and so they can’t be anything else but double binds. Logic is a stick with two ends (to borrow Gurdjieff’s metaphor) – one end being <GO> on the other <STOP>. If we say that the stick equals ‘the game’ (or that it equals ‘the logical system’) then we can clearly see that STOP is just as much ‘the game’ as GO is (even though playing the game requires us to see the two options as being radically different to each other). If we say that one end of the stick is ENTER and that the other is EXIT, then we can see that exiting the game is just as much a legitimate part of the game as ‘opting to play the game’ is. What we’re looking at here is ‘the invisible closure of positive space’, therefore – positive space makes a claim to be spacious (which is to say, it makes the claim that it contains many possibilities, not just the one) whilst never actually being able to deliver on this.
The game (or the stick) is – as we have said – an ‘artificial situation’ and for this reason it will not serve as a springboard to get us anywhere (least of all anywhere that isn’t every bit as artificial as our so-called ‘starting off point’). To put this another way, the stick in question isn’t a real thing and that’s why we can’t escape from it! If we do manage to escape from the unreal situation then what this means is that our escaping is itself unreal (and – by the same token – if we fail to escape from the artificial situation then our failure isn’t real either). This is how it is with games (needless to say) – games only deal in ‘tokens for the real thing’, never the real thing itself.
The stick is inherently self-contradictory; its very nature is to contradict itself this is clear just as soon as we take a good look at it – the stick is made up of <YEA> at one end and <NAY> at the other, after all. The stick is the stick, but the stick is also YES and NO at one and the same time; the stick flatly contradicts itself, therefore. It neatly negates itself. If we think in terms of a regular bar magnet then we can say that the bar of iron is what ‘separates the North Pole from the South Pole’, but then – having said this – it is also true to say (as Alan Watts does) that how matter how finely we slice the bar magnet we are still going to end up with a ‘bar-segment’ that has a North Pole at one end and a South Pole at the other. No matter how fine we go in our dissection we’re always going to end up with exactly the very same situation that we started off with, in other words. We might think we’re getting somewhere, but we’re not.
The point Alan Watts is making with this is that we can carry on cutting ever thinner and thinner slices of the bar magnet but no matter how thin we make so we never going to end up with a North Pole without a South Pole, or vice versa. That would be an unreal thing – every stick has to have two ends in order to exist. Like I said stick with only one end, or solid object that has a front but no back. Nothing can exist in ‘extended form’ that does not have a front and a back; existing along an axis means that we have to have two ends. We’re chasing an abstraction, and so we’re going to go on chasing it forever! More essentially, we can say that there can be no such thing as a line segment that doesn’t have both beginning and an end (a start and a finish), but the point about this (as we keep on saying) is that there’s no difference between the starting and finishing point, which means that to say one end is ‘north’ and the other ‘south’ is merely a convenience – it means nothing. Opposites only have the meaning that they seem to have in relation to each other.
Another way of putting this is to say that North is only North relative to South and that South is only South relative to North – outside of this closed frame of reference there is simply no way to distinguish the two poles from each other. We could say bad for the outside of this closed frame of reference there’s no such thing as North versus South (or Yes versus No), that there is no such thing as ‘opting to see things from the point of view of North versus seeing them from the POV of South’ (which is to say, when we look at the world in a particular polar way then what’s happening is that we’re creating a virtual reality world in which everything is seen or defined in terms of the two poles (the two opposites). This is a ‘world’ that is exclusively made up of two terms that are actually the very same term (which is another way of saying that the Conditioned Realm is a domain that is ‘only real in relation to itself’).
This is a very peculiar sort of a ‘world’ however – it’s the type of virtual world that comes into being only when we fail to see the central tautology upon which everything is based. The reason we say that that virtual world in question is based on a ‘tautological relationship’ is because plus and minus are only nominally different. The fact of the matter is that North and South, Plus and Minus, Winning and Losing, etc, are the very same thing – both equal ‘the stick’ and ‘the stick’ is an artificial construct (just as all constructs are artificial).
If North and South really were ‘as different as different could be’ (which is what they implicitly claim to be, which is what they are said to be for the sake of playing the game) then the domain in question wouldn’t be ‘virtual’ but actual. Any conditioned reality (any reality that is that’s created by thought, any reality that is perceived in a compartmentalised or fragmented way) is going to be purely nominal, is going to be entirely virtual. ‘Once the whole is divided the parts need names’, we read in the Dao de Jing. On the other hand, the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides is quoted as saying ‘Truth is whole and cannot be broken into parts.’ Putting these two statements together we can synthesise a third, which is that the Named World (which is to say, ‘the world that has been broken up into parts by the action of thought’) is not the real world.
Anything conceived of by thought is not the real world. When we are inside the virtual world that has been created by thought then we are insulated from all awareness of the essential relativity of our situation (which is to say, we have no awareness of the way in which the terms that we’re using to construct this world only exist in relation to themselves) and it is the fact that we don’t have this awareness that makes the VR Bubble that we have created seem genuine to us). We would always tend to say that we know something to be true because we have the information that tells us that it is, but the way it works is actually the reverse of this; in reality it is the absence of information (or the ‘unavailability’ of information) that facilitates us in believing that our situation ‘truly is what it appears to be’, that the appearance we perceive ‘is no different from the reality it stands for’. ‘Entropy is the price of structure’, as complexity pioneer Ilya Prigogine says. Without entropy the Positive World (the world that is made up of ‘positive space’) can’t exist.
The Positive World only gets to exist (in the strictly subjective way that it does exist) because of the way in which we are hermetically sealed off from the Big Picture (the ‘Big Picture’ being the unlimited or unconditioned view we see when we do have an awareness of the essential relativity of our situation). Not being aware that we exist within a domain that only gets to be there because it is made up of the complementary terms of North versus South (which as we have said are terms that only have meaning in relation to themselves) means that the essential ‘hollowness’ of this situation is perfectly invisible to us – that disturbing information isn’t accessible to us and so we aren’t bothered by it. We enter into a state of ‘complacency’, we could say. There are two things we can’t see therefore (two things that are really the same thing):
[1] We can’t see that the virtual world that we perceive and relate to on a daily basis is only an hallucination caused by lack of perspective (or lack of information / consciousness).
[2] We can’t see that nothing we do (or hope to do) in this domain is ever going to be real. We can’t see that we’re just playing a game.
In Gurdjieff’s uncompromising words, in the ordinary run of things (in the ordinary run of things which is conditioned existence) we cannot ‘be’ and neither can we ‘do’, but we are at the same time completely unable to see this. Not being able to be and not being able to do constitutes rather a large drawback (we could say!), and the result of this ‘drawback’ is that we completely fail to see that all our efforts in the cause of self-improvement or self-betterment (no matter how heroically we perform them) are ridiculously futile. There is no such thing as ‘improving our situation’ when we’re living in a simulation! There’s no such thing as ‘going somewhere different’ when we’re stuck in simulated domain. If we could see the utter futility of all our efforts to achieve then we would be ‘freed from the need to keep on trying’ (we’d be ‘freed from the need to keep on playing’) but because we can’t see it our noses are kept to the grindstone on a full-time basis. Because of our lack of perspective on our situation we’re kept busy trying to improve something that can’t ever be improved, trying to ‘get somewhere worthwhile’ with something that doesn’t actually exist. We’re trapped by our all-consuming obsession with ‘how well we are doing versus ‘how badly we’re doing’, we’re trapped in Positive Space by our frantic need to somehow ‘turn a profit from samsara’…
Image credit – eurogamer.net
