Linearity is simply a trick or gimmick, nothing more – it’s a trivial affair, not a profound one. Having said this, we still have to acknowledge that it seems pretty nontrivial to us as we actually experience it – it’s not like a wet paper bag that that we can punch our way out of. On the contrary, the linearity of the physical universe is a cast-iron obstruction that we just can’t ignore! We can’t walk through brick walls, any more than we can jump back and forth through time. We are constrained by the laws of physics in everything we do (or so it seems).

 

 

The fact that we can’t bust our way out of the linear confinement that we are subject to doesn’t make it not a trick however, it just makes it a good trick, a trick that is very hard for us to see through. A linear journey takes us from Point A to Point B on the same page – linearity can never take us off the page we’re on because it’s just not that kind of thing. That’s not its nature. That’s not what it’s for. It can’t make a leap into the unknown but only plug along on a predetermined path. The future trajectory of a straight line has already been decided – it had been decided from the very moment it started off and there was never any chance of it behaving otherwise.

 

 

The future of a straight line is contained in its past, therefore. There was never any chance of it springing a surprise on us, never any chance of this at all. Everything was decided from the outset in the linear world, as no one can possibly disagree – all destinations are implicit in the origin. ‘Origin’ and ‘destination’ are one and the same thing, which means at all journeys undertaken within this realm are strictly virtual, strictly imaginary. Or as we could also say, there actually aren’t any journeys to be made in the linearity and if there aren’t any journeys possible in the realm of linearity then this is just another way of saying that there is no such realm. It’s only ‘make believe’.

 

 

When we travel from Point A to Point B (where both points are ‘on the same page’, so to speak) then our virtual journey is taking us from Point A to a projection of that same point, an extension of that point in linear space. The journey is real (or non-virtual) only in as much as linear space is real or non-virtual, therefore. The point is that linear space isn’t non-virtual however – linear space is composed of all the journeys that can possibly be made from every location in that defined domain to every other possible destination, and since each and every one of these journeys is virtual (because, as we have said, the origin equals the destination) then so too is the linear space in which these journeys are (supposedly) carried out. Linear space is a logical extrapolation of a geometrical point and thus so too is any journey that we might make within it, which means that we can’t use the argument that ‘the journey is real because the space that it is taking place in is real’. This is obviously an illegitimate argument, therefore. Linear transformations are meaningful only within the remit of the assumed framework, and the assumed framework is merely ‘something we assume’, ‘something that only exists in our imagination…’

 

 

The so-called ‘journey’ isn’t a journey when it’s the same thing as the space which it is supposedly taking place in, but – on the other hand – if we take it that linear space actually is an independent reality in its own right (as we do), then we will experience the compelling illusion of there being a journey (which is to say, there will be the illusion of genuine movement, the illusion of genuine change taking place). What this comes down to, in psychological terms, is ‘the assumption of a framework’, the ‘assumption of a set of rules that are universally valid, universally applicable’. A more familiar way of putting this would be to say that the virtual journeys which we are enacting in daily life seem real to us just as long as they are see seen in terms of the abstract framework that has been assumed by the thinking mind. This is what the thinking mind is – it’s the presumption of there being such a thing as ‘a universally valid framework of reference’. Ultimately, there’s no such thing, but we nevertheless act as if there is.

 

 

When we look at the (pseudo) spectacle of linear movement from the basis of the rational or logical mind then this movement or change very much appears to be a legitimate thing. From this vantage point, there’s no way we can say that linear change isn’t a real phenomenon, a phenomenon that we totally have to take into account. It would be stupid for us to say otherwise. To see that linear change is ‘a projection of the platform which is the thinking mind’ is impossible for us when we’re operating rationally and it will necessarily remain so until we stop looking at things from a single, ‘over-valent’ viewpoint. Until we do this, the notion that linear motion is an artefact, an illusion, a gimmick, etc, will be profoundly incomprehensible to us.

 

 

It’s not just that we are ‘compelled to take linear change seriously when we’re operating out of the thinking mind’, we are – psychologically speaking – totally dependent upon this being the case. What we’re talking about here is ‘the Realm of Cause and Effect’: I do X, and Y happens as a result, and the (apparently) infinite reliability of this law means that we take it totally for granted, naturally enough. If I were to perform action X one day and Y didn’t happen then this would come as a tremendous shock. My world would start to unravel. I wouldn’t see it coming – I would be completely thrown, I would be completely at a loss. Putting this in a more poetical way, we could say that this degree of predictability causes us to fall fast asleep and lose all touch with the real world. As science fiction writer Roger Zelazny puts it, ‘Repetitious actions have a lulling effect…’. Reliability, consistency, predictability, etc, sends us swiftly to sleep, it induces a state of psychological unconsciousness and the reason for this is that the real world – as opposed to the simulation – isn’t reliable, isn’t consistent, isn’t predictable or foreseeable. We have been subsumed within the simulation and to be subsumed within (or adapted to) an infinitely predictable simulation (which all simulations are) means that we are not in any way aware of the radically unpredictable or unexpected nature of reality. We’re not aware of the otherness of reality and not to be aware of the otherness of reality is to be unconscious. We’re in the ‘identified’ state of existence and as a result everything we see is a projection of the determinate set-up that we’re identified with.

 

 

The reason we tend to find this impossible to understand because it never occurs to us that ‘the way things are in themselves’ isn’t a continuity, isn’t a seamless extension or projection of the same logical platform. We can’t for the life of us imagine that there is anything else it could be – the tautological extension of the logical platform is all we know. The logical mind is such an overwhelmingly dominant influence in the way we understand the world and the only way the logical mind can envisage reality is as ‘a ceaseless repetition or reproduction of a basically unchanging situation in which trivial (i.e., non-radical) change occurs’. This is such a fundamental assumption for us that we can very easily go through our entire lives without ever wondering about this, without ever questioning the concept of ‘a static reality within which events occur’ even for a second. This assumption is however completely unfounded – reality – as it is in itself – is not a continuation or extension of anything. Only that which has been exhaustively mapped out (or defined) can be extended, but nothing real can be mapped. The whole idea that there is such a thing as a ‘continuation’ or ‘extension’ is absurd therefore, it only exists in our thinking, not anywhere else. It’s a preposterous notion that we nevertheless take with the utmost seriousness. Terence Grey – writing as Wei Wu Wei – speaks of the tautological extension of the logical platform in terms of ‘serialising eternity’ –

What we know as ‘life’
is the analytical realisation
in the seriality of time
of our eternal reality.

 

The word eternity comes across as being something mystical and vague – at the very best it might be seen as being ‘poetical’ in flavour and definitely not what we like to think of is being properly scientific. It’s not measurable for a start. There’s absolutely nothing anyone can ever do to ‘prove eternity’, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t real! What we’re talking about here is simply the lack of extension in any linear dimension however, and there’s nothing unscientific about this. This unprovable phenomenon that has no extension in any linear dimension is nothing other than the state of Original Symmetry, the ‘uncollapsed state’, the state that ‘precedes the coming into being of space and time’ (only we can’t really use the word ‘precedes’ here because that implies time and the state of Original Symmetry doesn’t exist in time. The Symmetrical State has no <before> and no <after>, no <up> and no <down>! We can’t meaningfully talk about what comes before space and time anymore then we can talk about what comes after it – nothing comes before time and nothing comes after it, only this isn’t the regular old ‘nothing’ that we all look down on so much, this is the Pleroma itself…

 

 

Linear change (or linear motion) is how we escape from Eternity, how we escape from the Pleroma, only it isn’t really an escape because – as we’ve been saying – there’s no such thing as linear change, no such thing as linear movement. ‘Extension’ equals tautology, nothing more. Extension is of course ‘the whole trip’ as regards our everyday experience of life; we have escaped from the pleroma (as it seems) and entered into the state of seriality, which is where the same basic situation is repeated over and over again, with only trivial variations. This is virtual journeys are all about therefore they only seem to be non-virtual because we are no longer able to relate to ‘the Immeasurable’ (which is – ultimately – the only thing there is). We simply have no perspective on the matter; we have no perspective on the matter because perspective is what comes into the picture as a result of us bravely relating to what isn’t quantifiable, not as a result of us cosying up to what is capable of being measured, of being turned into ‘quantity’. Perspective turns out to be another way of talking about consciousness, which is where we see the world in a non-comparative way (which is to say, without us comparing what is being seen to a static template or accepted standard). Consciousness does not compare, whilst this is all the thinking mind can do.

 

 

When we do compare what is being seen to a previously agreed-upon standard then this equals ‘the operation of this rational mind’ and what happens here – as we have said – is that we never see anything that wasn’t already contained within our viewpoint. What we see is determined by the way that we have of seeing it. When it’s consciousness that we’re talking about then there’s nothing – no standard, no nothing determining what we see, no vantage point, no raft of assumptions (hidden or otherwise) and this is why we can speak in terms of actual consciousness – because it hasn’t been pre-programmed (or biased) to see anything in a particular way. Linear movement – when observed by the rational mind – is seen as being ‘the real deal’, it’s seen as being ‘the only thing that matters’. When linear change is observed by unconditioned consciousness however (when it is seen for what it is) then it doesn’t look like change at all. It’s not so much that linear change is spotted as being ‘purely tautological’, but rather that our attention simply doesn’t get hung up on it in the first place. There’s nothing there for attention to be hung up on, after all. There’s nothing going on in the continuum of logic. There are no hooks here, only a perfectly smooth, perfectly featureless surface which we can’t hang anything on at all.

 

 

A perfectly smooth, featureless surface is what we call nothing. We call it ‘nothing’ because there’s nothing there to hang onto, nothing there to attach our attention to, nothing there that we can talk about or describe, nothing there that we can relate to with the thinking mind. We can only recognise as being ‘real’ a situation where there is some obvious form of inequality, a situation where there is a glorious YES in one direction and a deeply disappointing NO in the other, a situation that is predicated upon some kind of bias, in other words. The biased (or ‘non-symmetrical’) situation is a doorway to nowhere however – it’s ‘a doorway to nowhere’ because <yes> leads to <no> and <no> leads to back to <yes> and that’s all there is to it! It’s a closed loop, a revolving door, a journey that only ever leads right back to where it started. What we are pleased to call ‘something’ isn’t anything therefore, whilst what we automatically dismiss (in the most disdainful way possible) as being ‘nothing’ is everything there ever was or ever could be…

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit – deepdreamgenerator.com