When positive and negative are separated then the world of vibration is created. There is an oscillation between the one pole and the other and this oscillation is what creates the phenomenal world. What else could the phenomenal world be made up of, after all? The whole universe is made up of vibrations of one sort or another, one frequency or another, as Itzhak Bentov says in Stalking The Wild Pendulum. There is nothing that doesn’t vibrate – we live in a vibratory universe!
The thing about this however is that the world which is created by separating positive and negative isn’t real! The vibratory world which is forever oscillating between plus and minus isn’t ‘real’ because plus and minus can’t ever be separated. This so-called separation isn’t ever going to happen! There’s nothing more impossible than this… The separation of the opposites is a fundamentally unreal proposition and so the world that is produced in this way cannot be real either.
‘Positive’ and ‘negative’ always refer to one and the same thing seen in two different, complementary ways. It’s the same thing in both cases – the cat is on the mat / the cat is NOT on the mat. What has changed? We’re still looking at the same thing – we still have the ‘cat’ and we still have the ‘mat’ and nothing new has been introduced into the picture. If something new were to have been introduced into the picture then it would no longer be an oscillation – it would be something else. It would no longer be an oscillation because it would no longer be ‘the same thing repeated over and over again ad infinitum’, which is what an oscillation is.
There is no information in an oscillation, no information at all. This is obviously true – an oscillation is in essence just the same thing repeated over and over again, as we have just said. It’s a repeating unit – on/off, on/off, on/off… What’s more, there’s not really anything there that’s being repeated because ‘on’ and ‘off’ are mutually defining. ‘On’ only means something in relation to ‘off’ just as ‘off’ only means something in relation to ‘on’. The two terms can’t ever be separated, therefore; they can’t be separated anymore than ‘up’ can be separated from ‘down’, or anymore – as Alan Watts says – than ‘buying’ can be separated from ‘selling’. Each is only real in relation to the other – it’s a closed system that generates (bootstraps) itself via a process of self-reference.
So the thing is that there is all this buying and selling going on the whole time but actually there’s nothing going on! There’s nothing being bought any more than there is something being sold. Outside of the vibratory universe there is only stillness (stillness being ‘the absence of any apparent oscillation between two equally unreal poles that are only real to each other’) and stillness is all of one piece. Stillness doesn’t come in two parts, as an oscillation does. So because stillness is ‘all of one piece’ you can’t sell stillness to stillness any more than you can buy stillness from stillness. There’s nothing outside the stillness to buy and there’s nothing outside the stillness to sell and this means that buying and selling are both thoroughly unreal operations.
Even when we’re in the vibratory universe we’re not really buying or selling anything – we just think that we are. When we buy nothing changes and when we sell nothing changes and so the whole operation is null, in other words. There’s no difference between plus and minus because both are just ‘the vibration’; there’s no difference between the crest of the wave and the corresponding trough and so swapping the one for the other is a perfectly null operation. It’s null but we don’t know that it is null so we keep on doing it; we don’t know that swapping [-] for [+] is a null operation so we build a whole world out of it. There’s no such thing as ‘loss’ or ‘gain’ and yet our whole way of life is based on this fatuous polarity!
The vibratory universe is unreal because it has zero information content. Its information content is zero because nothing ever happens in it, as we have said. What’s new about on/off, on/off, on/off being repeated forever? This is the very antithesis of ‘something happening’! The world that is created by separating positive and negative is a virtual world in other words, and yet it is the only world we know or care about. We know nothing of stillness and yet stillness is the only ‘thing’ that is not virtual. Stillness is real because it wasn’t caused, or ‘made’…
Everything we ‘know’, we know with the aid of the measuring stick of the discriminative intellect. This ‘measuring stick’ is quintessentially made up of positive and negative (there’s nothing else in it!) so how are we ever going to know about stillness? How are we ever going to know about anything that isn’t a (virtual) construct of the mind? Every measuring stick there ever was is made up of a ‘plus’ at one end and a ‘minus’ at the other; there is no such thing as ‘a stick with only one end’, after all. Actually, when it comes down to it (for the reason that we have already given) there is no such thing as ‘a mental measuring stick’ at all; there’s no such thing as a mental measuring stick because there’s no true separation between the plus end and the minus end – there’s only ‘virtual separation’!
The polar mind reports back to us about the world of polarities, the world of vibrations, and what it tells us about what is going on there can be incredibly accurate, incredibly reliable. This is why the tool of the rational mind is so useful. But the very reliability of the categorical (+/-) mind is also our downfall because this mind tells us (categorically tells us!) that there is no such thing other than the world of polarity, the world of vibrations. The measuring stick of the mind cannot measure stillness (stillness of course being quite immeasurable) and so it tells us that stillness doesn’t exist. Actually, of course, the thinking mind doesn’t so much as tell us that stillness doesn’t exist as it ignores it; the categorical mind doesn’t have any category for ‘stillness’ (the polar mind doesn’t have any category for ‘non-polarity’) and so it can’t very well denounce as non-existent something that it doesn’t have a category for.
Assuming that something doesn’t exist is of course far more insidious than denouncing it as being non-existent. As soon as we denounce something as being nonexistent we draw attention to it, we announce it as a possibility, so really we are defeating our own purpose, which was to deny it. To assume that something doesn’t exist is on the other hand to have never been aware of this possibility in the first place; with regard to stillness not only are we never aware of it in the first place we now have no means of becoming aware of it…
This puts us in a completely absurd position – we are like the branch of a tree that has got ideas above its station and has taken to denying the reality of the trunk that it is growing out of. Or we’re like waves that arrogantly deny the existence of the sea. So ludicrous is our position that we are implicitly denying the existence of the stillness from which the vibrations that go to make up the world arise. All we know is the vibratory world and so we implicitly deny stillness in everything we do. We implicitly deny anything that isn’t made up of +/- vibrations. And yet, for reasons that we have already given, the world that is made up of plus/minus vibrations isn’t real whilst stillness – which we deny – is the only thing that genuinely does exist! On the basis of foolishness such as this, how can we ever hope to see anything real about our lives?
Hard-headed people will always scoff at the suggestion that the phenomenal world has no ultimate reality. They will say that there most definitely IS such a thing as the movement from [-] to [+]. They will say that this type of change is fundamentally real. But if this is true then it must also be true that the complementary movement from [+] to [-] is also real, and thus the one will always cancel the other out! Such after all is the nature of the vibratory universe – vibrations always cancel themselves out, this being the quintessential nature of all vibrations! A vibration cancels itself out and then – as its next move in its (very limited) repertory – it starts up all over again…
In contemporary Western culture we call ‘a virtual reality production that we mistake for being the whole of reality’ the matrix. We are therefore – on an intellectual level at least – ‘matrix savvy’. We’ve got a handle on that concept. The simulated reality which is the matrix is of course associated with the computer – this being the defining metaphor of our age. In ancient India the matrix was known simply as maya (the magic show of illusion) and – naturally enough – computers were not part of this metaphor. We can relate the two by stating that whilst a computer generated matrix can of course exist in maya, maya itself is not generated by any sort of computer that we can envisage!
The type of simulated reality that we are talking about here in this discussion is created by introducing some sort of ‘disturbance’ into Original Symmetry (or as we have also called it, stillness). A good metaphor for this would be throwing a pebble into a pond, and creating thereby a concentric pattern of ripples which are apparently radiating outwards from the point at which the pebble entered the surface of the water. Stillness however is not a computer – computers need separate compartments to work with and there are no separate compartments in stillness! From our perspective, it is simply not possible to say what stillness ‘is’ – clearly, it’s not possible to say what stillness is from any perspective! From over here in ‘Vibration World’ all we can say that stillness is what lies behind all the vibrations that we take so seriously. Stillness is what lies behind the vibrations that we are always relating to so seriously, and at the same time it is what utterly falsifies them…