Acting Out Of An Assumed Baseline

When we act out of an assumed baseline then everything we do and think is that assumed base-line. When we act out of an assumed baseline then all we ever do is this baseline – there can’t ever be anything else but the baseline, in this case. Everything that happens in this situation is an extrapolation of our starting-off point, a tautological ‘development’ of our starting-off point.

When we ‘act out of a baseline’ then this baseline is King, it is the sacred template from which we can never deviate. Once we embark we can never look back – we can never question our starting-off point. It’s a purely arbitrary starting-off point, but we can no longer see this. The baseline is now totally taken for granted by us and that is why we can’t ever depart from it. How can we depart from something that we unknowingly bring with us wherever we go? How can we escape from a premise that we can’t see to be a premise?

We’re ‘locked in’, in other words; all we can ever do is ‘act out our assumed premise’ and – as we’ve just said – we can never go beyond our premise by acting it out. This might all seem very straightforward and easy to understand but at the same time not particularly interesting. We might not see the relevance of the point that is being made. ‘So what?’ we might ask. ‘Why do we need to bother ourselves about this?’ The point is of course that it’s thought that we are talking about here, thought is the baseline we can’t depart from and this of course makes it relevant to everyone! We all do lots of thinking  – just about all of our waking hours are spent thinking and – what’s more to the point – we create everything we know with our thinking.

This is kind of a big deal, needless to say – it’s kind of a big deal given that the only world we ever know is the world that has been created with our thinking. All we ever encounter (pretty much) is our own thinking; all we ever encounter is ‘reality as it is represented to us by our thoughts’ and so all we ever encounter are our thoughts. Or if – we were to phrase this slightly differently – all we ever know is the world that makes sense to us, and ‘the world that makes sense to us’ is the world that has been made by our thoughts. If something didn’t make sense in relation to our thinking then we would simply disregard it, obviously. It would be an error and utterly unworthy – therefore – of any further consideration.

The problem here however is that the world that does make sense to us isn’t real and – contrariwise – reality itself is guaranteed never to make sense to us! The only reason stuff makes sense to us after all is because it fits in with our ‘established way of understanding things’ and our established way of understanding things is arrived at by scrupulously comparing all incoming information to our taken-for-granted ‘framework of reference’ or ‘yardstick’ (which is of course another way of talking about ‘the baseline that we can’t depart from’). Stuff ‘makes sense to us’ simply because we have imposed meaning on it, in other words…

When we act out of an assumed framework then everything we do is that framework and whatever we understand on the basis of that framework is also that framework. ‘Purposeful doing’ and ‘rational cognition’ are the same thing. If the only world we ever encounter is the world that has been made by our thoughts then what this means is that the only world we know is actually nothing other than our assumed framework (our assumed baseline) reflected right back at us. It is reflected right back at us in what (misleadingly) appears to be endlessly new and unexpected ways. There appears to be a progression or flow of different things happening when this isn’t actually the case – there is no flow at all, only stasis.

What we take to be ‘the world’ is nothing more than our own assumptions reflected back at us as if they were something different, something that has absolutely nothing to do with us. I say something, and then I relate to what I have just said as if someone else had said it. There’s nothing new happening here at all therefore, it’s just the same old thing, which is the world as it appears to be when it is understood in terms of the same tyrannical old framework. The framework we’re talking about here is ‘tyrannical’ because nothing gets through unless it agrees with our viewpoint. The control that is going on here is never relaxed, not even for a second.

Nothing can be validated as ‘making sense’ unless it agrees with the rules of interpretation. But here’s the problem – when we relate to a world that is only there because it makes sense in terms of the framework through which we choose to see the world then ‘the framework is validating the view produced by the framework’ and this is a meaningless tautology. So when we act out of an assumed baseline then we can’t ever escape it and everything we do is that baseline and when we understand things in terms of our taken-for-granted framework of reference then everything we understand is that same old framework and so – in this modality of ‘existence’ – the world we live in is a tautology and so too are all our purposeful actions within it. This is of course the inevitable consequence of ‘projecting our own meaning on the world’, and not doing this is something we have maximum resistance to ever doing! To echo something that Jung has said, we would rather do anything rather than see what is there when we don’t say what is there…




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3 thoughts on “Acting Out Of An Assumed Baseline

  1. You need to study the Nature more. I really dislike this article, its dualism at play, things do make sense, when you understand evolution. The internet/media are a bad psyop gone bad, in Denmark in one Of the IP they tryed to mess with. Watch Joe rogan and that “hunter episode” and you Will understand why.

    1. I will check out Joe Rogan! I Like his angle on things. From a non-dual perspective (I would say) ‘making sense’ as a concept doesn’t make sense because we can only make sense of stuff by comparing it to what we already ‘know’. If we can’t do this then there’s no ‘sense’. There’s no comparing in a non-dual situation, obviously, and yet comparing is how we make sense of the world. Otherwise, there is only what in Buddhism is called suchness – it’s like what its like because there’s nothing outside of the present moment to relate to. I wonder if we understand the same thing by making sense’ however – for me making sense of the world (or of life) means projecting our own subjective meaning on it. When we withdraw our projections there is nothing but the profoundest mystery, mystery and no unreal point of reference can ever make sense of. Thought HAS to make sense of stuff if it is to exist, we get panicky when we can’t understand what’s going on, but thought itself is merely a set if conjectures that don’t exist in reality! Or that’s what I would say, anyway, from my experience.

      1. ‘Evolution’ as a concept doesn’t exist in non-duality – in the Holographic Universe (when everything contains everything else, and there aren’t any separate things) how there be any such thing as it? We move from one unknown to another and who is moving is also unknown – if I say that I am ‘evolving’ that means that I am projecting my own map (which of necessity DOES contain separate things) on what’s happening.

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