To repeat is to mock – every child knows this. To repeat is to mock and Thought is the great repeater. Thought is the Great Repeater and the world that it creates for us is nothing but blank repetition. The MCVR is nothing but blank repetition – nothing but ‘meaningless duplication’, nothing but ‘duplication without an original’.
Logic itself is nothing but repetition, we might say. Logic is repetition because it is made up of ‘cause and effect’, the ‘antecedent and the consequent state’, the ‘rule and the lawful acting out of the rule’. <Cause> and <effect> are the same thing however – if the same cause always produces the same effect then the effect is the cause. The effect is the cause and the cause is the effect. How could we possibly argue otherwise?
We would of course usually differentiate between the one and the other by considering them to be separated by time – the time interval between the former and the latter is what allows us to think in terms of C and E, in other words. Without time it wouldn’t work! We can say that cause and effect are separate because there’s an interval between them but since the latter is inherent in the former there is clearly no need to bring in this phenomenon called time. We don’t need to define C and E in terms of ‘which comes first’; in fact doing this confuses things – the supposed passage of time is entirely irrelevant to what we’re talking about. Time doesn’t add anything to our understanding of causality but – rather – it obscures what’s really going on by creating the impression that there are two things going on where there is only the one. It sends us down the wrong road, it sends us down a road that doesn’t go anywhere…
What’s really going on is nothing the outcome of whatever logical function it is we’re talking about – the output is the very same as the input, the subsequent state of the system is a unbroken continuation of the prior state and therefore there is no ‘prior state versus the subsequent one’ – that’s merely a convention, that’s merely the way we choose to look at things (and we’re free to look at things in any way we please). The convention we’re using is that there is an actual boundary between the before and after, the cause and effect, and there simply isn’t. There are no genuine boundaries in the Continuum of Logic (or the System of Thought), only make-believe ones, only the abstract ‘dividing lines’ that our arbitrary way of looking at things imposes from the outside. The other way of talking about boundaries is to talk about rules – both are abstracted versions of the world that we put together with logic (and also therefore with thought) is a world that is entirely predicated upon rules (which is to say, nothing unlawful ever happens). That’s the definition of logic. Logic can have nothing to say about any other world than this obedient / compliant one – the Rational Mind cannot conceive of such a possibility, it is incapable of acknowledging that there is or ever could be such a thing as legitimate rule-lessness (i.e., ‘it being OK to have no rules).
This blindness towards anything but its own form of order constitutes the ‘limitation’ of logic, the ‘limitation’ of thought, we might say. Logic can only have any authority within the world which it itself has created (but within that unreal world it has absolute authority). It can only ‘say what’s true’ when it gets to define what is and what isn’t true. This isn’t just a limitation therefore – that’s a euphemism, that’s the way of not seeing what’s really happening – a system that makes sense only on its own terms (only in terms of itself) isn’t just limited, it’s non-existent, it’s imaginary. What we’re talking about here is an example of something a Buddhist might call ‘co-dependent origination’ – the Continuum of Logic depends upon itself in order for it to have existence, in order for it to have validity, and this doesn’t count for anything. Bootstrapping (which is to say, ‘self-reference’) creates a Hollow World.
If the Continuum of Logic depends upon itself in order to exist – which it does – then this could hardly be described as ‘a limiting condition’ – to say that would be to imply there is an ‘independently existing domain’ somewhere within which logic’s authority is legitimate and there isn’t. Logic can only make true statements within the domain which itself has created. This means nothing however – to say that logic’s assertions hold good only in the world which itself automatically takes for granted is no different from saying that the world which logic creates (in order that it might have validity, in order that it can get to be an actual ‘thing’) ‘is true only because logic asserts that it is’ is plainly ridiculous.
Self-reference is the means or mechanism by which unreal worlds get to be produced within the terms that have been imposed by a self-referential system. Everything that happens here within this ‘closed context’ is ‘stuff that agrees with our core assumption, stuff that agrees with the standard or template that we have arbitrarily selected and then placed in a position of absolute authority over us’. Everything that happens here is ‘an extension or furtherance of the lie that we refuse to own up to’, therefore. Just as standard is only a ‘standard’ because we have agreed that it should be so, so too therefore is everything else in our world, so too therefore are all the statements (or structures) that are made in reference to this assumed standard. Truth thus becomes a perfectly meaningless word – in the world that is created by logic ‘truth’ doesn’t exist. We could also say that within the System of Thought the word true has an inverted meaning (which is to say, we can say that ‘truth’ here doesn’t mean truth, it means whatever it is that we ourselves have chosen to be true whilst all the whilst denying that we have had any involvement in this). When we say the word truth we mean ‘whatever suits us’.
On the face of it, the mechanism of SR allows us to ‘get away with anything’, so to speak. We can ‘create our own reality’ – as the shop-worn old phrase has it – and this of course sounds fantastic to us. It sounds like the answer to all our dreams, it sounds like ‘the best thing in the world’. It’s not the best thing in the world however – it’s the worst. It’s a nightmare we can’t recognize as such. What we’re talking about here isn’t freedom, it is – on the contrary reversed freedom – it is ‘the freedom not to know that we are deceiving ourselves’, it is ‘the freedom not to realize that we’re slaves’, etc. When we turn truth into a meaningless word then we don’t benefit from this action; when we deal exclusively with lies on the laughable basis that ‘the lies we tell are true’ then all that happens is that we make utter fools of ourselves. We have got what we wanted to get but in achieving this we make ourselves into the butt of a joke we cannot for the life of us see. We do however sense it from time to time, when we’re not otherwise engaged, when we’re not preoccupied with trying to achieve our goals. This is why the everyday self or ego is so damnably prickly, so wretchedly insecure – it is wretchedly and irredeemably insecure because it is driven in everything it does to protect itself from the devastating awareness of its own utter absurdity. Its lofty goals aren’t so very lofty after all, therefore…
The Duplicate (or ‘Repeated’) World isn’t just an ‘unreal one’ – we might therefore say – it’s a travesty, it’s the mockery of everything that is true. We can look at this in terms of the symbolism of the Simia Dei (or ‘the ape of God’) – the ape of God is called thus because he maliciously presents the Deity with a caricature of the True Creation. Thought is the Simia Dei and what it creates for us is the Mockery of the real world, the Trashing of the real world. It is an inversion of ‘actual truth’ – what is most precious gets thrown into the rubbish bin and we worship nonsense instead. We worship nonsense with great enthusiasm and look down on anything else. Because we are so hopelessly hypnotized by our attachments (because we are mentally enslaved by our projections of ‘gain versus loss’) we cannot see the fact that we have become utter fools, interminably repeating our foolish actions in the hope that one day things will actually come good for us, in the hope that our driven / mechanical activity will eventually deliver us from the vicious triviality of our conditioned lives. This hope – utterly ludicrous though it might be – is the source of all our motivation, the coiled spring that ruthlessly drives us on every day. The theatre that is thereby enacted is ‘the Theatre of Unconscious Living’, which we can also call ‘the Theatre of the Absurd’…
Image credit – shakeandstir.com
