The big question that we never think of asking is “What happens when we live our lives in a world which completely matches our expectations of it?” This would be an important question to ask because this is exactly our situation – we live in the Universe of Confirmation, which is ‘the universe that unfailingly confirms the unexamined assumptions we have made about it’. What we’re talking about here therefore is the world that is made up of our thoughts.
Another way of approaching the matter would be to ask what possibilities are open to us ‘in the Known World’ (which is the only world we ever have anything to do with). This sounds like a rather stupid and pointless question to be asking but it isn’t as we can see very well just as soon as we hear the answer, which is that there are zero possibilities in the Known World, no matter which way we play it. If we can see this then this seeing will radically change our orientation in life – we will cease to be mechanically orientated towards the hyperreality of our thoughts and this will ‘free us up’ to pay attention to what that hyperreality was sneakily covering up.
There are no possibilities in the Known World because the Known World is only our own ideas, our own thoughts, our own labels. How could there be any possibilities in a world that is composed entirely of our own ideas, our own labels? The only possibilities here are imaginary ones, fictional ones. The fictional world of our thoughts is made up of various fictional possibilities, each of which appears to be ‘a possibility in its own right’, but the thing about this is that no matter how ‘nominally diverse’ these possibilities might be, they still only ever add up to nothing.
The nominally different possibilities that go to make up the world of our everyday experience are indeed ‘different’ when they are seen in terms of the specific framework that we’re assuming, but really there’s no difference at all between them – they’re all the same, they’re all just ‘the narrative’ and the narrative – being a narrative – isn’t actually true. It’s only a story, a metaphor that we don’t see as such. If only we could understand this then we’d be able to understand all that there is to understand about ‘life in the Known World’. This understanding however is not at all easy to come by – when we’re in Rational Mode we are no more able to see that the Known World is merely ‘a story that we tell ourselves’ than we are able to fly unaided to the moon.
We’re unable to see that the KW is a ‘Hollow Kingdom’ when we look at it from the standpoint of the everyday thinking mind, the reason being that the Known World is a projection of that everyday thinking mind. There simply isn’t the perspective there for us to see that the reality which we’re compulsively relating to is our own construct, and – as such – only ever ‘skin-deep’. If what I see is a logical extrapolation of my viewpoint then I am trapped in a tautology (which is why we can talk in terms of a ‘Hollow Kingdom’); the only way I would be able to see this would be if I were to step sideways from my habitual standpoint, but because I can’t even conceive of this ‘move’ I won’t ever realise that there is such a possibility. I can’t see that the groove I’m stuck in is only ‘a groove’ just as long as I continue to be stuck in it!
There are no possibilities open to us just as long as we are relating exclusively to the world that we ourselves are projecting – this is a loop that neatly side-steps reality and ‘gets us nowhere’ as a result. There is zero possibility of ever ‘saying anything meaningful’ when we are existing within the ‘camouflaged redundancy’ which is the Known World. The KW is – after all – composed of nothing else but our own arbitrary statements about reality and the domain that we are necessarily restricted to when we only ever focus on our own arbitrarily made statements about reality is a null domain. The world that is made up of our own ideas (or beliefs) is a null domain.
We – as the overly rational creatures that we are – will never see that the world we create for ourselves out of our own statements is a Null Domain. Nowhere in any book on psychology will we read anything about ‘the Null Domain of Thought’. This is something that has been left out of our calculations; instead, what we are met with when we open any book on psychology is a barrage of rational / logical statements which we are expected to take seriously. Becoming a professional psychologist – within the remit of the ‘rational paradigm’ – means studying and learning all of these statements so that we are able to regurgitate them within an examination setting. To ‘practice’ clinical psychology is thus to enact what we have learned in an entirely mechanical way.
This is the ‘positive approach to psychology’ therefore and the positive approach generates – over time – a vast and unwieldy superstructure of non-communicating theories and hypotheses, which are – to some extent or other – (supposedly) supported by what is termed ‘research’. As the Daoist sages have told us however (if not quite in these words) -“The more we know the dumber we become” and we aren’t interested in anything other than ‘the knowing’. This ‘knowing’ is however a smokescreen, a dodge, a decoy; it’s an ‘endless series of red herrings that we will be chasing after forever’ – it’s nothing other than samsara, in other words.
There is only one thing we need to understand if we want to see through the opaque confusion which is the rational simulation of life. No examinations or studying (or ‘research’) is necessary; the point we need to grasp is simplicity itself – it can be grasped in its entirely in a single moment, with no thinking or recall needed. The point is simply that the world which is created by thought is a null domain. This is no good as a ‘thought’ (or a ‘rational statement that we can make’) however – it has to be seen directly, without the need for any words or theories whatsoever…
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