We can go along with what happens, but we can’t predict what will happen. We can’t know what is going to happen before it happens. This creates a glitch because we – by default – refuse to have anything to do with a universe that cannot be predicted, a universe that can’t be ‘second-guessed’. Instead, we opt to live in the type of universe that is predictable, but which – at the same time – is merely a mental projection (and thus not independently real). We opt to live within the confines of a ‘Formal World’, not for any good reason but simply because it’s easier (because the Formal / Designed World does all the work for us) and this is why we are glitched…
The glitch comes about because we insist on seeing everything through what we might call a ‘logical filter’. We don’t meet the world head on, in other words, but only via the intermediary of the logical mind. Logic is fundamentally closed in its nature – it will only deal in answers that fit its categories, it can only deal in ‘affirmation versus denial’, ‘agree versus disagree’, ‘allow versus reject’. This is all it understands – thought operates via boundaries and without boundaries it can do nothing. Without boundaries the thinking process cannot proceed.
Logic asks closed questions of the world: if the answer to the question is ‘yes’ then the logic behind the question is validated, confirmed, shown to be relevant, and if the answer is ‘no’ then the question is still validated, is still confirmed, is still shown to be relevant. There is no way logic can ever be devalidated, therefore. Because logic is the judge (either allowing or disallowing) it can never be questioned. Logic bends reality to suit it (rather than vice versa) and the result of bending reality to accord with logic is a Closed World, a world which has ‘yes’ at one pole and ‘no’ at the other. Every time we think we create a closed world to live in – if we didn’t do this then our thoughts wouldn’t make any sense to us!
Logic can only ever operate in the world which it itself has created and that world has to be a closed one, as we have just said. Logic can only operate in the world which it itself has assumed, has posited, and this so-called ‘world’, if only we could see it, is merely ‘itself’ projected outwards. We however – when we’re looking at things in a logic-based way – see something very different. We don’t see that we’re living in a closed world (which would be a very terrible thing to see) – as far as we can tell there is a road ahead of us that we are free to travel down.
When we are inhabiting the closed domain that is generated by thought (Heraclitus’s ‘private world’) then we perceive it to be the case that new possibilities are constantly unfolding in front of us and because of this erroneous perception we are happy to keep on doing whatever it is that we’re doing, we are happy to keep on motoring along. There are (we might say) two types of ‘illusory movement’ that keep us busy, that keep us from seeing that actually nothing is happening, that actually nothing at all is changing. One type of illusion is the type where we think that things are changing in a way that’s going to be advantageous to us, whilst the other is the converse of this. This is what reality looks like when we look at it from the point of view of the illusory self or ego, this is the Conditioned World.
This sense that we’re voluntarily moving towards some kind of advantage, or deliberately striving to get away from a disadvantage (which is the same thing seen the other way around) is an entirely spurious one. There is no volition here, merely an ‘external compulsion’ that we have automatically identified with. The motivation in question doesn’t belong to us, it derives from the false representation which is the Mind-Created Analogue of Reality. The Mind-Created Analogue of Reality is virtual ‘stretch’ of distance between the ‘Affirming Pole’ (‘YES’) on the one end and the ‘Denying Pole’ (‘NO’) at the other and the trick that’s being played on us here is that YES and NO aren’t ‘two different things at all’. They are the very same thing.
In our imagination, yes and no, advantage and disadvantage, are completely different things they are ‘poles apart’ (as it is said) and between the one pole and the other is a whole virtual world, a virtual world that is made up of [1] Movement in the forward direction. and [2] Movement in the reverse direction, where both [1] and [2] are – ultimately – the very same movement. The Virtual World of our thoughts is a world that is made up of <plus> and <minus>, of <steps that take us closer to a positive (or ‘winning’) outcome that doesn’t exist> and <steps that take us towards a negative (or ‘losing’) outcome that doesn’t exist>. We’re either getting closer to something that seems to be there but isn’t, or we’re moving further away from from something that also seems to be there but isn’t. We totally believe that the positive (or winning) pole is a real thing in its own right and act accordingly, but the truth of the matter – which we won’t acknowledge – is that the positive (winning) pole is the negative (losing) pole in disguise…
Actually – if we were to get right down to the nitty gritty of what’s going on here – neither the affirming nor the denying pole exist independently of each other – they’re just a pair of ‘slippery opposites’ (slippery because when we think we’ve got a handle on the opposite we want it escapes out of our grasp at the last moment and morphs into its unwanted counterpart. This is just a ‘tease’, therefore – there is no positive pole, there is only a positive / minus oscillation, there is only a conundrum that keeps flipping over on us to become it’s opposite. There’s nothing there to grab hold of and the fact that we think there is is due purely to our blinkeredness, our short-sightedness – if we were to see the whole picture (rather than just half of it) then we’d see that we’re grasping at something that has a dual nature; we would see that, as Gurdjieff points out, that every stick comes with two ends.
The virtual world (which is Samsara) comes into being as a result of us not seeing that every length of stick always has to have two ends; it comes into being as a result of us believing that the front end and the back end of the stick are two unconnected entities. We don’t see the mechanism of compensation (to use J.G. Bennett’s term) that is inherent in every situation we find ourselves in; we don’t see the paradox, and as a result there is the illusion of there being something there when there isn’t. We see an ‘uncompensated reality’. The Principle of Compensation is still operating but we just don’t see it; the wheel continues to turn( as it always does) but we are – all the same – sublimely unaware of the fact. Living only on the superficial or theatrical level of things, we perceive Hyperreality as containing actual possibilities for us; where we to look deeper however, we would see that our situation is utterly devoid of any new possibilities. We would see that Samsara is ‘barren’, as Milarepa puts it.
In our imagination there is a whole world that exists between ‘yes’ on the one hand and ‘no’ on the other – a word that can ‘go either way’, a world in which things can either ‘work out for us’ or ‘work against us’. This is a world in which both ‘really good things’ and ‘really bad things’ can happen, a world in which ‘things working out well’ and ‘things working out badly’ are apprehended as two completely different scenarios, scenarios which have real distance between them. This is ‘life as we imagine it’, whilst the reality is that when things work out well for us it’s the very same thing as when things work out well badly – it’s all just a turning wheel and what the turning wheel turns around (the ‘centre’) is the ‘me’, the ‘ego’. The self or ego – being a mental construct – cannot move with life (which is a movement without an aim, a movement without a goal) because there are no guidelines for this, no rules for ‘how to do it’; instead, we move in accordance with the dictates of thought, with the dictates of logic, which straightaway embroils us in never-ending paradox.
All purposeful / directed movement embroils us in ‘never-ending paradox’, ‘never-ending conflict’ – thought, as we have said, can only function within the domain that it itself has assumed and this is a domain that ‘substitutes itself for reality without actually being reality’. It’s a lower or degenerate analogue. When we do something that is purposeful, directed, deliberate, goal-orientated, etc then we are ‘reflecting’ thought, we are ‘enacting’ thought, we are ‘proceeding on the basis of thought’. The illusion here is twofold – on the one hand we perceive it to be the case that it is us who are doing the directing, that it is us who are setting the goals, conceiving the purposes, etc, and on the other hand we perceive it to be true that these goals and purposes are ‘meaningful outside of the context that thought has assumed’. We imagine that we are ‘reaching out into the real world’, in other words; we image that we are interacting with actual reality (and not a projection) when the truth is that everything is coming out of the loop of logic that we’re caught up in. Logic is running the whole show – as David Bohm says, thought is telling us that ‘we are operating it’ when the exact reverse is true. The system operates us, and part of its operation is to create the illusion that ‘we are operating it’ and not vice versa…
Our sense of being an independent agent, our sense of owning (or being personally responsible for) the motivation that is driving us, along with our perception or idea of what is real, is all supplied for us by the polarity. It all comes from the same shop. All of this comes into being as a result of us not seeing that ‘yes’ equals ‘no’, not seeing that that ‘stop’ means ‘go’, not seeing that ‘travelling in the direction of the North Pole invariably brings us closer to the South Pole’ (and vice versa). As soon as we see that <more> and <less>, <up> and <down> are the same thing then the whole setup is revealed as being entirely empty, entirely without substance. When we engage in purposeful (or directed) action it feels very much as if it’s ‘us doing it’, to see that we aren’t directing anything (but rather that ‘we are being directed’) is all but impossible for us, it’s all but impossible for us because the only reality we know is the one that is created for us by thought (and because the only sense we have of ‘who we are’, who we are ‘in relation to this conditioned reality’, is also created by thought). “I cannot know what I would be if I were not me.” says Robert Wyatt. The analogue of who we are cannot see through the analogue of what reality is; a shadow cannot understand itself to be only a shadow…
Image credit – sickgirltravels.com
