Reality doesn’t work by rules (there are no rules for reality). Logic works by rules, machines work by rules, thinking works by rules’ – all sorts of things work by rules, but not reality. Sewing machines, toasters and clocks work by rules. Computer software works by rules, as does the hardware it runs on, as does the screen we look at. Simulacra work by rules, our models of reality work by rules, our mental representations of the world work by rules, but the thing itself doesn’t.
Rules divide reality; rules divide reality and yet reality can’t be divided. To apply a rule is to split the world in two – on the one hand there is the part of the world which agrees with the rule we’ve just applied, whilst on the other there’s the part that doesn’t. Instead of talking about ‘ordering the world via the enactment of a rule’ we could speak in terms of ‘a criterion that is being applied across the board’ – there is the part of the world that fits with the requirements of the criterion and there is the part that doesn’t. The rule or criterion defines a set and as soon as we define a set we have two things – we have what on the inside of the set and we have what’s on the outside. We have <yes> and we have <no>.
Rules give rise to conflict, therefore. No matter how vigorously we apply our rule there is always going to be a struggle going on, there’s never going to be a final victory. The world is going to be divided into ‘obeyers’ and ‘non-obeyers’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and that’s what conflict is all about. We might argue that when the rule is recognised by all, accepted by all, then there will be peace, then there will be no more struggling, but this will never happen. No matter how hard we try, we can never achieve perfect control. If we want to speak in terms of having a model or theory of reality, then we could say that the ideal situation would be the situation where our model accounts for all possible phenomena but again this can never happen. The unaccounted is always going to be there, no matter how much effort we put into trying to repress it. No matter what set we define, it’s never going to be equal to the Universal Set.
No matter what, rules always excluding something. That’s what a rule does – a rule is ‘an act of excluding’ and there’s no such thing as ‘an act of excluding that doesn’t exclude’. Reality itself – however – doesn’t exclude anything. Reality itself therefore is not conflicted, is not ‘a thing which is divided against itself’. What is there to agree or disagree with? Where does right and wrong come into it when we’re living in an ‘All-Inclusive Universe’? This doesn’t mean however that we aren’t being continually tantalised by the feeling that it is possible to get somewhere as a result of applying rules, as a result of chasing goals, as a result of controlling – believing this is the reason we keep persevering with our purposeful endeavours, why we never lose our taste for them. We said earlier that ‘rules divide reality’ and we also said that ‘reality can’t be divided,’ and so what we’re looking at here is a bit of a contradiction; if reality can’t be divided – and yet if this is the only thing rules can do – then what is this telling us? How is this contradiction going to work itself out?
The answer to this riddle is very simple of course – the answer to this apparently perplexing conundrum is that we’re not dividing reality at all, we only think that we are, we only imagine that we are. We think we’re divided reality up into parts or categories or classes, but really we’re just departing from it. We’re heading off in the opposite direction, we’ve broken up with reality and now we’re making stuff up ourselves, we’re ‘inventing it as we go along’. We’re assigning our own values, our own meaning to the world and then saying that it was there already, we’re saying that it was already present in the actual, God-given reality (just as David Bohm says). This is the Big Spoof therefore – we’re substituting an artificial world for the original and then (both implicitly and explicitly) demanding that everyone accords the crass substitute the same respect and veneration that ought to be reserved for the real thing. The false is being worshipped as true and the true has been secretly gotten rid of, the truth has been ‘disappeared’…
This isn’t to say that we ‘ought’ to treat the original, the authentic genuine thing with respect, with veneration, with adoration, etc, – that would be a mechanical rule, after all. As we keep saying, there are no rules with regard to how we should relate to reality, that absolutely isn’t the way it works. We can usefully apply this principle – the principle that says that there are no rules when it comes to reality – to religion, and what religion has to tell us on the subject of cosmogony. The time-honoured formula here is to say that the Creator demands that we worship Him – “For you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” (Exodus 34:14). It is required of us – worship is compulsory not optional. This tips us off straightaway therefore, it tips us off (if we needed to be tipped off, that is) that religion is a man-made or artificial system, not anything natural, not ‘the way things really are’. It’s a stilted game that we make up ourselves and then demand that everyone play, that’s all.
Rules are redundant (in a technical rather than the colloquial sense of the word, that is; anything that happens as a result of a rule being enacted is guaranteed to be utterly hollow, guaranteed to be utterly meaningless, guaranteed to be an empty charade and nothing more. If I was to play at being God, and if I had access to some super-advanced technology from four hundred years in the future, then maybe I would be able to give it a go, maybe I could create an artificial world with living, sentient beings in it. If I were then to use my power as the creator of this pocket universe to make all the beings in it praise me every day – which would only be right, seeing that I had created them – then all this worship, all this praise and adoration would be a sublimely meaningless. It would be sublimely meaningless precisely because it was me that made it happen. Self-praise is no praise, after all. Everything that happens in my pocket universe is null because it was me that made it happen. We’re talking about a ‘null set’ here because there was never the freedom for anything not to happen the way I wanted it to, the way I instructed it to be.
This is ‘the Great Glitch’ inherent in all logical systems, the glitch that derives from the fact that nothing ever happens freely in a logical system. ‘Freely occurring stuff’ is always going to be a deviation from the plan’ (is always going to be seen as ‘an error’) and so nothing that happens in a logical system is ever going to be meaningful. Nothing that happens in a logical system is ever going to be meaningful and yet the whole point of putting systems in place is to successfully obtain outcomes that we want to obtain, outcomes that we have said should happen. But in doing this we make what we have done null and void, which defeats the purpose. We could refer to this as ‘the Jinx Inherent in All Positive Doing’ and as jinxes go, as glitches go, this is without any doubt the Great Granddaddy of them all. Glitches don’t get any glitchier than this.
We’re not ‘dividing reality’, we’re simply playing games. We are ‘making back-to-back definite statements about the world’, we’re ‘engaging in purposeful or goal-orientated endeavours’. We’re arranging for stuff to happen that we want to happen, that we feel should be happening. We’re pushing out a big fat ‘Positive Reality Bubble’ ahead of us wherever we go. “And what’s wrong with that?” every last one of us is going to demand indignantly, “isn’t purposeful activity what it’s all about?” This is indeed what it’s all about, if ‘compartmentalising reality’ is our bag, if ‘utilising the machine of the thinking mind on a nonstop basis’ is our thing, if ‘replicating fake realities and then getting lost in them’ is what we’re all about. Producing positive / illusory worlds and falling headfirst into them is how we avoid reality, it’s how we avoid reality as if it were the very plague whilst at the same time getting to believe that we’re ‘progressing’ that we’re ‘moving triumphantly forward’. Or to put this another way, we think that slavishly ‘obeying the rule’ is going to save us, whilst the truth of the matter is that we’re falling down a deep dark hole….
Image credit – scriptualthinking.com
