Thinking is how we organise the world so that it makes sense to us, so that it can be practically ‘usable’ by us. We can also say that thinking is how we screen out the endless complexity that is adherent in all things. Thinking is how we ‘regularise’ the universe so that we know how to handle it, how to process it, so that we can get some kind of purchase on it. We’re ‘one-up’ on the world when we understand it, obviously. This is fine up to a point because the need to screen out complexity is a practical necessity (i.e. we need to do this so that everyday life can take place) but the proviso here is that when this we go beyond a certain point and create a reality for ourselves (which is the logical end result of this process of decomplexification) in which there is no complexity (or no chaos) and in which everything is perfectly regular then we are actually ‘hiding from the way things are’. Our modality of existence is one that is in principle ‘oppositional to reality’ and what this means is that we have now entered the Fear Realm, the world that is both predicated upon fear and governed by fear. This is what Conservative Mode always comes down to in the end, it comes down to ‘hiding from the challenge that is reality’ without knowing that we are doing this. We are ‘retreating to a place of safety’, only this place of safety doesn’t actually exist; the place of safety that we are retreating to exists only in our nice, regular thinking.

Regularity looks good to us, but the reality is quite different – life is in the chaos, not in the orderliness. Reality is in the chaos – the ordered or regular contains nothing but repetition, after all. If it didn’t contain ‘nothing but repetition’ then there couldn’t be said to be any ‘regularity’ there, and yet the point here is that repetition is not real – a repetition is a redundancy not an actual event. It’s an echo; it’s a copy of the original event that gets echoed over and over again. Is the original event ‘the real thing’, in this case, we might ask? Does the original event constitute ‘actual information’? It seems to make sense to say this but if we do then we are missing something important; what we’re missing is that is that there is a difference of kind between the one and the other, between ‘the duplicate’ and ‘the original’. The difference in essence is that the duplicates exist in the world of the measurable and the knowable, whilst the Original does not. This – needless to say – is a rather big difference. What we are saying here is that along with the ‘duplicate event’ there also comes ‘an extra’ that we don’t spot, that we don’t have our attention drawn to. The ‘extra’ in question here is the continuum of logic within which the duplicate exists, within which the duplicate absolutely has to exist. We don’t see the continuum of logic any more than a fish sees water; we take it totally for granted (i.e. it is our ‘assumed context’ or ‘assumed basis’) and what this means us that we can never depart from it, not so much by hair’s breadth. When we operate from the basis of the assumed context then departing from this AC is the greatest of all impossibilities! So what’s happened here is that we have bought into a package deal without realising that we have; we are focusing our attention on the duplicate event (or on the duplicate thing) and so we think that this is all we are dealing with, whilst the truth of the matter is that we are dealing with a ‘package deal’ of ‘the duplicate event plus its assumed context’ (aside from which, as we have said, the duplicate can have no existence at all).

Things are not what they seem here however: really, there are no ‘duplicates’, there is only the AC that we cannot see, the COL that we completely take for granted. The duplicate – the conditioned phenomenon or event – is ‘the assumed context made tangible for us’, to us so to speak. Neither ‘the continuum of logic’ or ‘the duplicate’ which we are unreflectively relating to (i.e. the regularity) has any real existence of its own (the COL being something that we have assumed and the duplicate/regularity/conditioned event being, as we have said, the ‘tangible manifestation’ of that unconscious assumption) but this is the last thing we are ever going to appreciate about our situation. It’s the last thing we are ever going to see because our perception is that ‘the regularity’ which we are focusing on is an actual self-existent phenomenon in its own right. Saying all of this allows us to see that ‘the original’ and ‘the duplicate’ are very different kinds of thing indeed; the two are ‘different in kind’ because the Original does have an existence in its own (despite being immeasurable and unknowable) whilst the duplicate has no existence of its own even though it is perfectly measurable and perfectly measurable! This being the case, we can’t really say that ‘the duplicate of the original’ is any sort of ‘duplicate’ at all; it isn’t a duplicate because it’s not the same. Instead, we should call it an ‘unrepresentative analogue’, a ‘misleading or deceptive analogue’, an ‘analogue that is going to lead us astray every time’. What happens when we ‘copy reality’ (so to speak) with the thinking mind is therefore that we end up with a copy that is actually something completely different to what we have supposedly copied. In reality there is no such thing as measurement, there is no such thing as ‘comparing one thing with another’, whilst in the analogue, mind-created reality the only way something can be real is if we can measure it, if we can compare it with something else that we already know about, some standard or other. Thought grants it reality, in other words. This is what our ‘knowing’ is, after all – it’s where we compare everything we come across with a standard so that we can create a Standardised World. The Known World is the Standardised World and so it’s ‘all about our standards’, whether we realise it or not. We say that ‘having standards is important’ and this is why! This is parody of reality however, not an honest expression it – in reality no ‘standards’ exist (the very notion of such a thing is absurd) whilst in the Mind-Created Virtual Reality nothing can be real unless a match is found with the sacred standards or measures that we use without acknowledging that we are using. We have created a world out of our standards and yet our standards are nothing but fictions. We are repeating and reiterating our standards in all our purposeful doing – we think we’re ‘being purposeful’ (which is our fantasy) whereas the truth of the matter is that we are just extending the domain that has been created on the basis of our fictitious standards. We create a whole world out of our ‘knowing’ and so this is a world that has nothing in it, a hollow world, a null world…

Regularity looks good to us however. The standardised world looks good to us, a world that follows rules and which can therefore always be explained looks good to us. The Western–Rationalist position is that we loudly claim to be genuinely interested in the big wide universe in which we find ourselves – we say that we want to understand it and lay bare the principles which govern it. What we’re really doing is not so much that we are trying to ‘explain’ the universe as we are wanting to ‘explain it all away’; the unprecedented, the irregular, disturbs us and we want to sweep every last trace of it away with the broom of rationalism. When this is done then there will be a feeling of great satisfaction, a feeling indeed of unrivalled triumph. This – we say, or at least we imply – will be humanity’s greatest achievements – we have explained away the whole of creation and so all will be well as a result! A new Golden Age will probably ensue – or so we imagine. If this is the type of ‘science’ we believe in then we will undoubtedly see ourselves as being very different from the literal-minded Christian fundamentalists (or any other religious fundamentalists) but the unpalatable truth is that we are coming from exactly the same place – we want everything to be explained away. The threat that is posed by irreducible irregularity – by which we mean ‘utter uniqueness’ – has been removed forever and as far as we are concerned this is the best news ever!

Far from being a glorious accomplishment the ‘standardised world’ is our hiding place, however. It’s our escape from reality. Although the universe contains regularities, it is itself not one of them. The universe is not one of the regularities it contains just as the Universal Set contains innumerable bounded sets without itself being bound. A bounded set cannot contain anything but itself, for the simple reason that its bounds (i.e. its limitations) ARE it; apart from the rules that both limit and create it there is nothing else to a closed set. We might imagine that there is some kind of ‘essence’ there apart from the rules that separate it from the rest of the world but this is simply not so – a closed set (or closed world) contains only what it has been defined as containing and its definition is (of course) the very same thing as ‘the rules which limit it’. Definitions and limitations are two ways of talking about the same thing and this is why we have said that ‘out of our knowing we create a word with nothing in it, hollow world, a null world’. It’s simply not possible to have ‘genuine content’ in a world that has been created by limitations – if we want a world that isn’t completely hollow or completely null then we have to abandon all our blinkered ways of looking at things (attached as we are to these blinkers) and ‘go the whole hog’, as it were. It’s ‘all or nothing’, as we might also say – there’s no room for negotiation as far as reality is concerned! Awareness cuts no deals. So what we think is great (the regularities, the world where everything is accounted for) is actually a type of mirage. It’s not the type of mirage that afflicts us when we are dehydrated and suffering from too much sun in the desert, it’s the type of mirage that pops up before us when we are full of fear and are busy trying to run away from reality. It’s the ‘hiding place’ conjured up by the mind where everything is neat and orderly and nothing ever breaks from precedence.

From the not-very-reflective standpoint of ontological terror nothing ever looked as good as this; nothing ever looked as good to us as this ‘World of Regularities’ – this is safety, pure and simple. This is our longed for refuge from the terrors that were assailing us. The illusion of the MCVR is immensely attractive to us therefore; the attractiveness of the illusion of refuge is the same thing as the terror or inversion feel towards open-ended reality – ‘aversion’ and ‘attraction’ are therefore the same thing. The pull that the world of regularities has on us (the pull which turns us into sleepwalkers marching towards the precipice) is a siren song however – it’s not our salvation that we are heading towards but our doom. We’re manifesting Doom-Seeking Behaviour. It’s our doom we’re seeking because the world of reassuring regularities is actually ‘the nullity in disguise’, the nullity being infinitely sterile and life-denying treadmill in which nothing really meaningful ever happens, despite appearances to the contrary. The brisk broom of rationality ‘sweeps clean’, it is true, but this type of ‘cleanliness’ is actually the worse news ever. This is the cleanliness of a well-maintained tomb…

What does exist in this Tomb World is the constant straining for reality, the constant straining for meaning, but this is sterile straining, futile straining, because we are always looking in the wrong place. We are always looking for meaning within the nullity itself and this is the place then no meaning can ever be found! What does exist in the nullity are promises of meaning, promises of reality, and we keep acting on these promises – it is us acting on these promises that creates and sustains the null domain which we take to be a legitimate reality in its own right. The mind created world is fulfilling the role of Satan here, figuratively speaking – we keep striking deals with Satan and Satan keeps on cheating us, as is his prerogative! Satan will be Satan, after all… If it is left to its own devices the thinking mind will create the Nullity, it will create the Nullity every time. Every single time the rational mind is promoted above its station it will create a null world. We can hardly expect it to do otherwise – the thinking mind is a regulator, a manager, a controller, a governor, and in the absence of any other factor it will get rid of all irregularities, all idiosyncrasies, all peculiarities, and establish the perfect equilibrium state which is the Regular or Standardised World. It will do this and then we will have to live in that world, inimical as it might be to any actual genuine (a spontaneous) life.

If there was ever a law that we could absolutely rely on it is this – that thought will act against us if it is allowed to rule the roost. In the absence of any other ‘factor’ what happens is that we totally identify with thought so that ‘we think we are our thinking’. When I think that I am my thoughts, when I think that I am the thinker or that I am the one doing the thinking (when really this perception that I have that I am the thinker of my thoughts is entirely false since it is thought itself which provides me with this perception) then this creates a situation where there is only the ‘supposed thinker’ and the ordered or organised world that the thinker is projecting. Both the thinker (which equals ‘the rational mind’) and the world which is being projected by thought (the Projected World) are the same thing however and so this is an information-free situation. My perception is that the world which I routinely perceive and relate to is an independent set up and not merely my own projection and this creates the misleading impression that ‘new things can happen’. New things can’t ever happen when I’m identified with thought however because I have fallen into that very particular trap that we have been referring to as the Nullity; in the Nullity nothing new can ever happen but what is provided for us instead is the apparent difference between the two poles of <positive> and <negative> – which is to say, the transition from negative to positive is taken to be the same thing as genuine change. What we take to be ‘genuine change’ therefore is simply us going around and around in circles. Regularity (i.e. the escape from chaos or randomness) is always a circle, and what this tells us is that regularity doesn’t really exist…