Our consciousness is owned by the Matrix – it gets caught up in the Matrix, absorbed by the Matrix, subsumed and exploited by the Matrix on a full-time basis. This is ‘the established order of things’ – it’s so established that even to pay attention to the fact that this is how things are is a heretical act. Even to start looking at thing in this way feels strange – the world gets turned upside down the moment we seriously start to question the status quo, and this is of course why which is why – in general – we are very much inclined not to do so! The Matrix owns us because we are so very afraid to look beyond it, or even admit that there might be something beyond it, in other words.
The Matrix is nothing more than thought when it comes down to it – it’s our ‘thinking about things’. When we think about things in a particular way then we create a tendency or inclination to think in this way and this tendency or inclination very quickly turns into a rule. A rule gets to be a rule because it has great authority, because we know that we have no choice but to do what it says. A rule gets to be a rule because of the way in which it has power over us, in other words; this power isn’t absolute in the way we take it to be however but rather it is the result of simple precedence. If we go along with the tendency long enough it will become an irresistible force – a juggernaut that would run us over in a flash were to have the temerity to stand in its way.
The end result of this process is therefore that we get totally trapped in our thinking – we fall headlong into the system of precedents that we ourselves have created and that system then subsumes us. The World of the Known swallow says, it eats it alive. Our thinking is no longer just start thinking it just now become everything to us, it has become the world, it has become something we can either go beyond no see beyond. Thinking is easy (just as falling off the proverbial log is easy) – it happens before we know it, before we realise that anything’s happened, but the countermovement – the movement that takes us out of the opaque fog of thinking that we have created for ourselves – is extraordinarily difficult, extraordinarily demanding. It’s another thing entirely. We can fall down, but we can’t fall up. If we are reminded of Virgil’s famous lines – ‘Easy is the descent to Avernus…,’ then this is hardly a coincidence!
This is straightforward thermodynamics therefore – a ball rolls down a slope, but it doesn’t roll up it again; a cup of tea left untended on the kitchen table cools down to the ambient temperature, but it won’t heat up again no matter how long we wait. By ‘repeating a particular thought’ we increase the probability of repeating it further – thinking in that particular way becomes more probable than not thinking it. The more times we think a thought the deeper the groove we cut and so this means that the probability level associated with thinking it increases even more and so this of course is a classic positive feedback mechanism. The more often we do it the more we have to do it, the more we use a particular theory or model the more that theory or model seems real. What we end up with is a rule, the rule in question being the reified version of the initial tendency.
Classical thermodynamics provides us with a very straightforward way of understanding the irreversibility that comes into play as a result of thinking. Normally, we would of course concern ourselves with the question as to how good a match a particular idea or theory is with the reality it seeks to explain; when we’re looking at thought in terms of thermodynamics then we can see that it’s not a question of what idea or theory is ‘right’, but rather which particular pattern of thinking gets repeated often enough so that it becomes unchallengeable. This is what society is – a pattern of thinking that has become repeated often enough by enough people to become ‘set in stone’. The socially constructed world that we relate to every day is simply the result of various tendencies being reified into cast-iron rules. A system has been created, a bureaucracy that we are obliged to submit to.
Bureaucracies are the antithesis of intelligence – instead of being intelligent they are fundamentally inflexible, fundamentally ‘stupid’. Instead of flexibility (or the ability to be spontaneous) bureaucracy relies purely upon the oppressive weight of its authority, just like a person who doesn’t actually know anything but who is – all the same – supremely confident. We gravitate towards such confidence in others just as we gravitate towards politicians or religious leaders who seem to know what they’re doing – it never occurs to us that their very great confidence might be the result of some sort of mental impairment. We gravitate towards authority wherever we come across it because of the sense of security or safety that we can enjoy as a result of unthinkingly obeying it, but this is a ‘deal’ that isn’t in any way going to benefit us. Right wing ideologies spouted by supremely confident politicians won’t benefit us any more than the bloated bureaucracy of thought will, but we’re not really worried about that, we’re just concerned with a sense of safety that comes with submitting to an external authority. Whether that external authority is a liar or not, we just don’t care – that’s something we’re not in the least bit curious about…
In alchemy we come across the basic mythologem of the spirit Mercurius descending from the upper atmosphere into the dark insensibility of matter and becoming lost in that dark, fog-like insensibility. This mythologem provides us with a way of understanding (in a metaphorical rather than a literal way) our essential situation in life; this is an understanding that is in no way given to us by any of our contemporary psychological models which are – needless to say – rational rather than mythological. The rational picture of what’s going on is in no way going to help us; ‘the rational picture of what’s going on’ is simply another manifestation of the bloated bureaucracy of thought after all, and we really ought to know better than to expect bureaucracy to save us from itself!
Life is not to be understood in rational or literal terms – to try to do so is a guarantee of unconsciousness. If it’s thought we’re dealing with then we descending, not ascending; we’re rolling down the slope, not climbing up it to freedom. The way we ‘do’ psychology in the Western World is to turn it into an external authority which we are obliged to take heed of, which we are obliged to follow without question. If we believe in this external authority then we will feel that we are ‘addressing the issue’, but really all that’s going on is that we’re handing over our power to some meaningless formula or other. No genuine psychology can come from the outside of us in the form of experts, books, journal articles, online seminars, or whatever else; psychological help never comes from the outside – the only thing that ever comes from the outside is bondage, is slavery.
Myths don’t ‘tell us what to do’, they don’t ‘impose themselves on us’. They don’t oppress or enslave us from the outside, but rather they hint at hitherto unglimpsed (or perhaps half-glimpsed) possibilities. Crucially, mythologies don’t colonise us with foreign ideas which we are then compelled to take on board as if they were our own, but rather it resonates with what is already within us in the form of latent possibilities. The understanding – when it comes to us – is ‘our own thing’ therefore and not merely some formula that we have copied from the outside. When we are ‘adapted to the system’ (when we are ‘creatures of the Matrix’) then everything has to be copied from the external authority – if it isn’t then it doesn’t have any legitimacy, if it’s coming from anywhere else then it simply isn’t allowed. If we are to become free then we have to look inside and come up with our own intuitive understanding, however lacking in validity that understanding might seem to be to those around us. We have ‘find out for ourselves’ rather than mere going along with everyone else (in the fond belief that that know what they’re doing just because they act as if they do). We don’t – in our socially-adapted (or ‘heteronomous’) state – even know that there is such a thing as ‘the inside’; in this rational world of ours ‘the inside’ is a myth that we have long since dispensed with.
Image – bfi.org.com
