The only way to live is in the gap between one known thing and the next. Life in the continuum is not life; it is a ‘semblance’ of a life, it is true, but it’s never more than a semblance! We could also say that the type of life that we get when we’re living in the continuum of thought is not our life, but someone else’s ‘generic idea of life’ (so to speak) – a generic idea of life that actually has nothing to do with anyone. We can’t be ‘ourselves’ when we are living in the continuum of thought – we can’t be ourselves because the continuum can’t simulate us. There are two things that can’t ever be simulated – one is ‘who we really are’ and the other is ‘reality’. We could be even more succinct than this and say that there’s only one thing that can’t ever be simulated and that is reality (which includes everything – obviously enough).

Why can’t the continuum of thought simulate reality? Is this a question we even need to ask? The one thing a simulation can never be is what it is simulating! The simulation can be anything at all, but the one thing it can never be is real. Reality only gets to be real by virtue of the fact that it isn’t being simulated, after all. Instead of using this word ‘simulation’ we could say that the way reality gets to be reality is by virtue of the fact that it hasn’t been ‘made’, or ‘caused’. Anything that has been created, anything that has been caused, is by definition not real. It isn’t real because if we didn’t ‘cause it’ then it wouldn’t be there! Anything that is made is dependent upon a maker just as everything that is caused is dependent on that cause; reality however is dependent on nothing and that’s what makes it reality.

When we live our lives in the continuum of thought then we become unreal just as thought is unreal. There is no getting around this – we can’t inhabit the continuum without forfeiting reality, we can’t take up residence in the Designed World without becoming virtual human beings. Thought – as we have just said – is unreal because it’s made, because it’s a construct. If we didn’t think a thought then it wouldn’t be there and when we’re living in the COT the same could be said for us – i.e. if the COT didn’t think us then WE wouldn’t be there. How would we be any different to anything else in the COT, after all? All of our thoughts are essentially unreal, and so are the thoughts that we have about ourselves! Saying that we are ‘living our lives in the COT’ is the same as saying that we’re ‘letting thought simulate reality’; thought is simulating reality just as it is simulating us – there’s nothing of who we really are in the simulation just as there is nothing of what reality is in it. There is a type of life in the continuum of logic (we could therefore say) but isn’t real life – real life could never be ‘a continuum’.

‘Real life’ (so to speak) is an unfolding of the new; it has not been caused, it is not the result of something else doing something or not doing something. There’s actually no mechanism possible that could produce this ‘unfolding of the new’ – machines can’t do ‘new’, they can only do what they’re programmed to do, which is of course always old. What machines produce is always old, just as Krishnamurti says that thought is always old – it’s the same thing. There is no cunning arrangement of rules that could ever be used to produce ‘an unfolding of the new’ (or ‘ungrounded change’) that’s not what rules do! If we think that this is what rules do then we’ve misunderstood things in a big way…

Rules can never result in any sort of unfolding of the new for the same reason that machines can’t (machines being made up of rules). Rules specify and what is specified stays the same. What is specified can’t very well be anything else other than what it is been specified as being! When a rule results in ‘change’ it is always change that has been specified in advance, and change that has been specified in advance is not change. It’s a frozen moment – it’s a ‘forever frozen moment’ that is extending itself outwards into the virtual space which it itself creates. If it was ‘change that hasn’t been specified in advance’ that we wanted to see then why would we bother having rules at all? In this case we would simply need to ‘leave things to be the way that they already are’, and we don’t need rules for this. We don’t need anything for this.

What we’re doing here is simply restating what we said before about the ‘definition’ of reality being ‘that which has not been caused or created’. Reality is ‘that which has not been brought about as a result of rules’ therefore. Rules can’t bring ungrounded change about. What rules bring about is the very antithesis of this – what rules bring about (the only thing that they can bring about) is a ‘frozen frame, a kind of ‘static moment in time’ which is endlessly repeated, endlessly recycled. When we live in the continuum of thought therefore then this is the type of situation that we have to adapt to – a frozen situation, a crystalline situation, a situation that never ever changes…

What type of life – we might ask – could take place in a ‘crystalline world’, in a world where there is never anything more than a single frozen frame that is being restated over and over again so as to create the illusion of change? We have the illusion of change is true, and we can orientate ourselves towards this illusion by ‘identifying with the framework of thought’ so that it now seems real to us; we can orientate ourselves to the illusion of change so that it really does seem like change, but no matter how plausible the appearance, the bottom line is still that nothing ever changes, not ever.

No matter how effective the surrogate form of change might be there is always going to be a problem in the equilibrium world that is the COT which we can’t ever get away from and that ‘core problem’ is that nothing can ever change. What happens therefore is that we start off (often enough) feeling that we are making fine progress but then – later on – all sorts of snags and difficulties crop up. Things are revealed as not being as straightforward as we thought they were going to be and so we end up enmeshed in endlessly proliferating complications, complications that can never really be resolved.

We are trying to solve a problem by using the same thinking that produced it and – as Einstein said – this isn’t ever going to work! When we are trapped in the continuum of thought however this is all we can ever do and so we are always going to be trying to ‘solve problems on the basis of the very same thinking that created them’ and this doesn’t bode particularly well for us. This is why our initial problems never get resolved as we would like them to be; this is why we can never satisfactorily go beyond the problems that we started out with. There are no real solutions in the Equilibrium World which is the continuum of thought, only solutions that bring in their wake yet more problems to be solved. Every solution is another problem in disguise. The COT is itself ‘a non-terminated problem’, in other words – it’s a ‘non-terminating problem’ that we can’t see as such.

The only way to get away from the original snag – whatever it was – is to get some perspective and the only way to get some perspective is to be in the gap that exists outside of the continuum. This ‘gap’ is made up of nothing other than pure perspective! It isn’t so much that the continuum of thought contains snags as much as it actually is the snag; when we are no longer trapped in the continuum then the problems it presents us with our no longer meaningful and because they are no longer meaningful they are no longer problems. This doesn’t mean that we have solved the problem however – we most definitely haven’t solved the problem, it’s just that the ‘problem’ (whatever it is) is no longer meaningful to us, as we have just said. If we were trying to solve the problem (on its own terms) then we’d still be stuck in the continuum. In that case we’d be stuck in the continuum forever…

The type of life we get when we’re ‘living in the continuum’ is the type of life where we are always trying to fix the same old problem over and over again. We don’t realise that it’s always the SOP of course, we think that it’s ‘lots of different problems’. We think that they are lots and lots of different, unrelated problems and that one day will be able to see the back of them all; on that day – we imagine – we will experience a joyous triumph that comes when we have ‘finally solved everything’. This is the King Buzz of being ‘the All-Time Winner’. We get a little taste of this good feeling every time we solve a little problem – this rewarding euphoric feeling is our reward for successful controlling and this is why controlling is so addictive! We’ve had a little taste of how good it feels to control successfully and that has whetted our appetite for the big taste that will come when we finally master the trick of controlling ‘100% successfully‘.

It is this ‘addiction to euphoria’ (or ‘addiction to solving the problem’) that keeps us so effectively trapped in the COT – it is tormenting for us ‘not to be able to solve the problem’ just as the thought of reaching a solution is deliciously enticing and so between the carrot and stick there is no time for anything else. Between the threat of failure and the lure of success there isn’t time to draw breath. This is a full-time job and we can never retire from it. As we have said, there is no solution to the problem which is the COT – it’s an ongoing business, a non-terminating problem. It is the ever turning wheel of euphoria and dysphoria…

This is the type of ‘life’ we have to put up with when we are caught in the COT, but it’s not really any sort of life at all. It’s just a ‘carrot and stick affair, it’s just been pushed mercilessly from behind and pulled equally mercilessly from in front. We are driven on unrelentingly by the promise of life that is being held out in front of us, despite the ironic fact that life is the one thing that the wheel can never deliver for us. Life isn’t to be found in the continuum; there’s no life there – only frustration. Life has nothing to do with the constructs of thought; it is not to be found through solving tasks that the thinking mind is forever setting us. On the contrary, life exists in the discontinuity, in the gaps between the paving slabs, in the Great Gap that we never stop to notice in our hurry; the break between one structure and the other, between one known thing and the one that succeeds it…