When we believe what the External Authority tells us then we automatically become a reflection of that external authority, a ‘mini-version’ of it. This is what ‘obeying’ means – it means that we are becoming what we are obeying. To obey is to surrender autonomy. Whatever the External Authority tells me, I go along with – ‘it’s ‘telling me something’ is the same thing as ‘my believing that thing’. This is a seamless process, there is zero questioning of (or zero reflecting upon) what we are being told; the message sinks in automatically (like a virus we have no protection against) and so this is just another way of saying that ‘we are all the one system’. The system never disagrees with its own logic and I am simply just another part of that system.
The External Authority operates on the principle of the Trojan Horse – it gets inside of us before we know what’s happening and this happens every time we take in any information via that source. What we don’t see is that when we accept something that the External Authority tells us as being meaningful at all (either in a way that we like, or in a way that we don’t like) we also accept the ‘assumed context’ for whatever it is that we are being told, and because this assumed context isn’t something we can directly focus on, or look at, we never pay the slightest bit of attention to this part of the deal. It sneaks in under cover of whatever the particular message in question is, no matter how harmless it might seem.
This is true for any literal or concrete message – the moment we find it in any way understandable we have – at that point – unwittingly accepted the unspoken context that goes with it. That’s the only reason it is understandable to us, after all! The External Authority only can send literal / concrete messages, it doesn’t deal in anything else and so if we take seriously anything that it tells us we’re trapped – we’re assuming the same context that it does (without knowing that we’re doing this) and so it is now defining everything about us. We’ve been ‘subsumed by the Giant Amoeba’…
There are two ways in which we can react to the literal messages that the External Authority is constantly bombarding us with – we can react with euphoric excitement, because we think that there is something good there for us to obtain, or we can react dysphorically because we believe that there is something bad that is about to happen to us. Either way we’re motivated to ‘do something’ and ‘doing something’ solidifies the literal or positive realm all around us in such a way that we cannot even for a second imagine it not being as real as it seems to be. The Defined World has subsumed as – from this point onwards it owns us, and that is all that there is to be said on the matter.
What we can’t see is that everything is already a foregone conclusion in the Defined World and so there isn’t really any point in getting excited by anything, either euphorically or dysphorically. Everything is a foregone conclusion because everything is defined by the framework, because everythingis the framework. If absolutely everything in the positive or definite world is defined by the invisible assumed context (which it is) then what this means is that everything IS that ‘invisible assumed context’, as incomprehensible as this statement might be to us!
Everything is the framework and the framework – as we all know – isn’t real; it’s just an abstraction, it’s just a way of looking at things that we arbitrarily chose and then got stuck in. When the only information about the universe that we allow ourselves to take notice of is ‘information that is generated by me comparing everything I come across to my measuring stick’ then the universe is my measuring stick, is my thinking (or framework-utilising mind); anything that isn’t a reflection of this ruler, this measuring stick, never shows up on my viewing screen after all and so I have no relationship with it. It might as well not exist, as far as I’m concerned.
How can I ‘be’ the framework, though? How ridiculous is that? What does the framework even look like? What is its ‘essential nature’? This isn’t as hard a question to get to grips with as we might at first think, however. Whilst the framework itself can’t be said to have any physical or tangible properties (obviously not, since as an abstraction tangibility is hardly its strong suit) it does have one that we can talk about – it has the property of being able to impart definiteness (or ‘concreticity’) upon the world which we construct on its basis. It turns everything into ‘a known thing’, in other words.
When we see a world that is cognisable therefore what we’re looking at is a world that has been made definite by the framework that we are utilising without knowing it. Every feature or nuance of our environment that has definition for us is a reflection of this assumed context therefore it certainly isn’t a reflection of anything else since there are no defined things in the real world. When we relate to the known world (the world that is both made-up of known things and which is itself a known thing) then we are relating to a projection of this invisible in a framework as if the projection were real and the magic lantern of the abstract framework which is doing the projecting doesn’t exist. It creates a world for us in other words, but its function remains fundamentally inaccessible to us.
By fixating our attention on the world of the known as we do we become unconscious, in other words. ‘He who looks outside dreams,’ as Jung says. We become the helpless victims of our own unexamined assumptions and our unexamined assumptions is just another way of talking about the abstract framework. We think that we know something but we don’t – we know only what we have been told that we know by the system that is conditioning our consciousness. All we know is ‘thought’s version of events’, in other words. Everything we know or learn is a prefigured outcome, an outcome that was decided right from the very beginning, just as all our purposeful doing (which is the acting out of our so-called ‘knowledge’) is.
This is a world in which new no freedom exists, and in which therefore no change can take place. To be free is to be free from ourselves; it is to be free from what we were ‘predetermined’ to be; we can’t talk about ourselves as ‘being free to remain as we assume ourselves to be’ (or ‘free to remain as we imagine ourselves to be’) because this isn’t a freedom at all, even though we think it is. That isn’t freedom, that’s ‘being trapped in an illusion’. The problem here is simple and we can summarize it as follows – When we believe what the External Authority of Thought tells us (and it never stops telling us stuff) we automatically accept its premise and in this act of accepting the premise we never get to look at what it is that we are accepting. This neatly puts us in a box that we can’t see, it limits our horizons without us being able to know that they have.
We are accepting ‘the world which thought takes for granted’ and this is all well and good apart from the fact that the world in question is an unreal thing. It only seems like a real thing because we’re trapped in it, because we can’t get outside of it to look at it. The box is invisible to us when we’re in it and we’re almost always in it. All outcomes are the same in this world – everything is just ‘the working out of a tautology’ and when we ‘work out’ a tautology we find that we’re in the same position than we were in to begin with. To win is no different than to lose because both are tautological extrapolations of the same starting-off point.
Everything is simply ‘the box’ and the box is an unreal thing – we experience an intense, overwhelming need to adapt to the box because we feel that there is a huge potential benefit to be had as a result of doing this. When we do adapt however then we become afflicted by a particular type of blindness – a blindness that prevents us from seeing that all outcomes that happen in the box simply are ‘the box’. ‘Winning’ equals ‘the box’ and ‘losing’ equals ‘the box’ – the ‘Huge Benefit’ which we seek so desperately is at the same time a ‘Terrible Disaster’ which we are utterly terrified by and must do our level best to avoid…