Excluding Wholeness

The rational mind works by excluding Wholeness. Therefore, we never experience it. Wholeness is a stranger to us – we never know anything about it!

 

 

There can hardly be any doubt that the rational mind (or ‘logic’) works by excluding Wholeness. How else could it work? What sort of logic doesn’t exclude? If the rational mind worked by ‘not excluding Wholeness’ then it wouldn’t need to be there! It wouldn’t need to be there because Wholeness doesn’t need any help in being Wholeness!

 

 

The rational mind works by focussing on its chosen field and excluding everything else – clearly. In order to see the figure we have to ignore the ground. The figure is created by ignoring, therefore. Or as Stuart Kauffman says, ‘knowing requires ignorance’. If we paid ‘equal attention to everything’ then there would be no figure – there would be nothing definite at all. The definite picture can only ever be produced by throwing away information – it doesn’t exist by itself, but only as a function of our way of looking at things. Only the Whole exists ‘by itself’…

 

 

Just as there can be no doubt that this is the way thought works (how else could it work?) there can also be no doubt that we practically never see the world without it. We take the rational mind with us wherever we go. We never go anywhere without it! We don’t know how to separate ourselves from thought – we don’t know how to perceive without thinking about what we perceive. We haven’t got the slightest clue as to how to go about doing this…

 

 

That’s not the half of it however. It’s not just that we don’t know how to divest ourselves of the thinking mind, it simply doesn’t occur to us a possibility. It’s never going to occur to us as a possibility. We identify with the thinking mind – whether we acknowledge this explicitly or not, we perceive the thinking mind to be who we are. We are our own thoughts, in other words. We are our own rational output!

 

 

If I unconsciously see myself as being nothing more than the thinking mind – and since I never go anywhere without it why should I? – then pretty obviously I’m hardly likely to go around wondering how I am going to divest myself of it. Achieving separation from the machinery of the thinking mind is not going to be very high up on my list of priorities – of course it isn’t since it is the thinking mind which sets the priorities…

 

 

The upshot of all this is therefore that we live in a world from which Wholeness is permanently excluded. We don’t know anything about Wholeness – we don’t even know that we are missing it. We don’t even notice that it isn’t there. If someone came up to us in the street and started talking to us about it we wouldn’t know what they were talking about. We wouldn’t be able to relate to what they were saying. If they were particularly insistent we would probably jump to the conclusion that they were suffering from some sort of serious mental illness. We would assume that they need some kind of anti-psychotic medication – this is after all what we as a culture tend to do with people who start talking about realities which the rest of us know nothing about…

 

 

The suggestion that there could be something that big, that significant, that we know nothing about and – in all probability – carry on not knowing about it for the rest of our lives is something that is very hard to take on board. If it were a small thing then we could take it on board (because we take on small things all the time) but because this is such an incalculably vast thin, how are we ever going to take it seriously? We will dismiss it in an instant. We don’t have a category for ‘the Whole’ after all, and if we don’t have a category for it then how can we know that it exists? If we don’t have a category for it then why ever would we take it seriously?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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