How can we analogize stillness? What is like stillness, and yet is not stillness? There can of course be no ‘analogues of stillness’ anymore than there can be ‘analogues of reality’ – the very fact that something is an ‘analogue’ of reality means that it can’t actually be real… How can we possibly have versions of reality?

Nevertheless, we can say that there are analogies of stillness (or ‘analogues of reality’) – we can say that there are such things as analogues of reality because we see them all around us every day! Anything we relate to either with our mind or our senses is guaranteed to be an analogue of reality (rather than the original article) because reality itself has no characteristics that we can relate to. It has no ‘hooks’ that we can attach our mind (or our senses) to – there is no ‘reference code’ (no ‘Uniform Resource Locator’) for it anywhere in the system! There is no URL for reality in the system for the simple reason that the system is not real.

Stillness – we might say – produces ‘lower analogues’ of itself – that’s what it does! It produces lower analogues of itself in the same way that space gives rise to POSITIVE/NEGATIVE oscillations or vibrations. A vibration between the two poles of plus and minus is the lower analogue of space just as a dissymmetrical situation is the lower analogue of the symmetrical one. We may say therefore that dissymmetry is an analogue of symmetry at the same time as being a complete ‘inversion’ of it!

Symmetry itself (or stillness itself, where stillness equals ‘the undisturbed situation’) is necessarily invisible and imperceptible. Our senses cannot detect it and our mind cannot frame it – it cannot be represented or conveyed (i.e. communicated about) in any way. Stillness – we might say – is ‘what is’ but even saying this makes assumptions and goes astray because the word ‘is’ doesn’t really tell us anything without a framework of some kind to qualify it. Nothing can be meaningfully said about stillness because whatever we say represents and inversion of stillness; whatever we say (or think) is always going to be a ‘disturbance’ and how can disturbances tell us anything about the state of being ‘undisturbed’?

No professor or doctor of philosophy can say anything about stillness and neither can any scientist be expected to ‘prove’ it. Since stillness cannot detected or in any way ‘re-presented’ we are hardly in a position to prove it – much as we love proof! But all the same – these qualifications notwithstanding – Original Symmetry does produce lower analogues of itself, as no one can really deny. How can we possible deny that there is such a thing as ‘a lower analogue of that which cannot be analogized’ when the ‘evidence’ – so to speak – is all around us?

Lower analogues are how we get to know about the Original. It is through the lower analogues of stillness that we get to know that there is such a thing as stillness even though – as we have just said – there is no way that anything can ever re-present stillness. This is a most peculiar thing, therefore! How can the analogue (or analogy) tell us about the Original when they are actually pointing us in the wrong direction (being as they are inversions of what they are analogizing)? How can the lower analogues of stillness tell us about the real thing when they are pointing us in the wrong direction entirely?

The Lower Analogue operates by denying stillness (or ‘the Void’). This is the only way it can operate; it functions by getting us to forget about stillness and so – if this is the case – how can we possibly say that the lower analogue lets us know’ about the Original, which is as we have said the very thing that it is causing us to forget all about?

Samsaric analogies analogize without saying that they are doing so and this is why we say that they are ‘samsaric’. Samsaric analogies are fundamentally deceptive in their nature – they couldn’t be otherwise because all they can ever do is claim to be talking about something in a ‘non-analogous’ (or ‘literal’) way. This is their right and proper mode of functioning – to be oblique metaphors whilst at the same time claiming – with a very straight face – to be non-allegorical, non-metaphorical. When we take them at face value, therefore, we get immediately referred into a concrete-or-literal-world that doesn’t actually exist. That is our fate when we take samsaric analogies (or ‘lower analogues’) seriously… This is the bottomess pit we fall into…

The reason that the concrete / literal world that we get referred to ‘doesn’t exist’ is because the lower analogue of stillness, whilst claiming to be a ‘literal descriptor of reality’, actually isn’t. It is only an ‘analogy of the absolute’ whether it admits it or not (and it doesn’t). If we saw the LA as a metaphor that would be fine but because we naively take it at face value we straightaway get shunted into a literal world that doesn’t actually exist, a literal world that has been created by our own utterly absurd credulity…

The samsaric analogy is actually being very honest, even in its deceptiveness. It is like a friend or companion who is being playfully ironic – to be ironic is not to lie, it is understood that the statement we are making is not really to be taken on the level of meaning that it is being presented on. That is where the playfulness lies. This is why the ironic statement always comes with ‘inverted commas’! If we miss the cues and take the ironic statement at face value then that is our own business. That would be entirely our own fault and we couldn’t blame any delusions that we might enter into on our humorous friend, who after all was only being witty. If we insist on being dumb about it then we have only ourselves to blame.

If we’re dumb enough (or ‘credulous’ enough) to do so then we enter into a world that is made up entirely of our own dumbness. If I misunderstand my ironic friend and as a result of this misunderstanding spend the next ten, twenty, thirty years in some convoluted subterranean literal world where dark, dank corridors keep branching off and branching off forever without ever re-emerging into the light then this is my own doing. This is a world of my own making. It is my own private world – it is the private / personalized world of my own foolishness. I created it, not my friend. I am responsible, no one else!

The analogue analogizes stillness because there’s nothing else to analogize! The lower analogue reminds us of stillness because there’s nothing else to be reminded of. If the samsaric analogy is there then this means that reality is there – there can’t be any illusions without reality, after all! If there were not such a thing as ‘truth’ then there couldn’t be any lies and for this reason lies always point to the truth, even though they don’t mean to!

Lies lie because that is their nature – they cannot do otherwise. Lies are therefore very honest in this regard – they are ‘true lies’. If we are foolish enough to believe in them and enter into the world of lies then – by the same logic we used earlier – this is entirely our own business. The lie itself – because it was honestly being itself – was we might say operating ‘within the realm of truth’. It was a true lie, i.e. it is honestly and genuinely a lie. As long as we ourselves are orientated towards the realm of truth (i.e. as long as we want to know the truth) then we will be directed towards it by the lie. The samsaric analogy will always direct us back to reality; the lower analogue of stillness will always refer us back to stillness itself. But if (for whatever reason) we don’t want to know the truth then we will of course make sure to keep on taking the analogue at face value…