The Invisible Transition

When there is a transition from structurelessness to structure, no rules to rules, no system to system, etc, then something happens that we can’t see happening; an event occurs which we are flatly incapable – due to the mechanics of the situation – of having any awareness of. The event happens, in other words, but then – the very next moment – it gets erased from the history books.

We have a major problem appreciating this in that we don’t see how structurelessness can be an actual thing and if we don’t acknowledge that there is such a thing as ‘structurelessness’ (if we don’t acknowledge that there is such a thing as ‘a situation in which no rules are operating’) then clearly we’re not going to understand the significance of the amnesia-inducing transition that we’re talking about here. We are in this case hardly going to see how extraordinarily significant this principle is – we aren’t able to see how significant the transition is because we have already made it.

A more familiar way to talk about the transition in question is to say that it is where we switch over from ‘not thinking about the world’ to ‘thinking about it’. We don’t know that anything has happened (or that anything has changed) because we’re always thinking! It is thought therefore that is generating the irreversibility (the amnesia) for us. Alternatively, we could say that what we’re talking about here is the transition from ‘not playing the game’ to ‘playing it’ and – again – this doesn’t seem like something we can relate to because we’re never not playing it! We’re never ‘not playing the game’ and so we don’t know that there is such a thing as the game. Just because we don’t know any other mode of being (other than the one we are in) doesn’t mean that there isn’t the possibility of another mode however, it just means that we are incapable of imagining it. If we were to talk in terms of David Bohm’s ‘System of Thought’ we can say that the SOT doesn’t see itself as being ‘just an arbitrarily derived system’, and so it doesn’t provide us with this information either; as a result we don’t know that there is anything else other than that which is being presented, that which is being positively stated, and so we ‘don’t miss what has been taken away from us’. This is the ‘amnesia’ that we are talking about.

Because all we know is structure, we don’t see structurelessness as being an actual thing; because all we know is form, we don’t see space as being real. We can’t detect space with our instruments, we can’t locate it and say “there it is!”, we can’t describe or measure any characteristics that it might have, and for this reason we never give it any consideration. We can’t define space or structurelessness with any of our theories, any of our models or hypotheses and so – for us – this means that it doesn’t qualify as ‘an actual genuine phenomenon’. If someone were to ask us if something that we can’t sense, detect, describe or define (or in any way ‘prove’) can still be real we will almost inevitably say “no”.

We will almost inevitably say this, but at the same time it remains true that without space there couldn’t ever be anything. Our cleverness – which we can’t see beyond – is perfectly absurd therefore! The more rationally sophisticated we are the less we value space (or formlessness) and the more we exalt the value or importance of structure; the reason we can say that this is ‘an absurd attitude to take’ is because structure or form doesn’t exist in any absolute sense but only in a strictly arbitrary or provisional way. This is easy to see – space has the property of being able to facilitate any form (or ‘shape’) we want it to (which is how it gets to act as ‘space’) and this means that any particular form, any particular structure must be entirely arbitrary. It could equally well have been ‘any other way’, in other words, and this means that no special importance or significance can be attributed to any one specific form or structure.

No special significance can be accorded to any particular form or structure, and yet this is just about all we ever do! Assigning special significance to certain configurations, certain structures, certain statements is our ‘bread and butter’ – this is what occupies us for almost all of our waking hours. This is what control comes down to – it comes down to ensuring, via directed or goal orientated action, that one specific arrangement comes about rather than any other. We say that one particular defined state of affairs is ‘special’ and that all others aren’t. Control is what it’s all about in our day-to-day existence, and as a result we take the position that if we were to relinquish control then this would be a terminally irresponsible act and no good could ever come of it. Control is God for us, therefore; control has got to be our God just as long as we take it for granted that outcomes which are in truth only arbitrarily different are in fact absolutely different. Control is the ‘be all and end all’ when we’re living in the World of Absolutes but the thing about this is that the World of Absolutes exists only in our heads, only in our imaginations.

Obtaining the advantageous outcome and avoiding the disadvantageous one is what it’s all about in the World of Absolutes and we will take the position that there is no higher meaning in life than this. An outcome is ‘advantageous’ only because we say it is however – we make up the rules of the game ourselves and then our next move is to refuse – on a very deep level – to see this. This is how we play a game – this is the only way we can play any game. Arbitrarily assigning values and then denyingthat we have assigned them is the very essence of game-playing and the enactment of this sneaky strategy this results in is the creation of two levels of meaning, [1] being that theatrical (or overt) level (i.e., the level of what we say is happening) and [2] being the hidden or covert level, which is the level of what’s really happening, whether we admit it or not.

The thing about games therefore is that they are secretly meaningless – a game would only be genuinely meaningful if it were the case that the meaning in question of what constitutes ‘winning and losing’ hadn’t been arbitrarily assigned, which is never the case. When we refrain from assigning meaning then what we discover is that all outcomes are perfectly equivalent; we discover – in other words – that the nature of reality is symmetrical. To be presented with a situation in which ‘all possible outcomes are equal’ is to be presented with a vista of sheer undiluted meaninglessness. The perception of Original Symmetry – from our normal (biased) point of view – is something that appals us to the very core – this is the very devil himself as far as we’re concerned. The perception of Original Symmetry throws our whole world into irresolvable chaos. Ironically, however, what we’re recoiling from, what we’re objecting so strenuously to, is the actual truth of our situation. We are existing in opposition to the truth, in other words.

What we’re looking at here is an inversion therefore – we’re looking at everything backwards. It’s our normal way of looking at things that is meaningless – we say or assume that the World of Assigned Values is the only real world, and that the values in questions are absolutely meaningful and can never not be, but the truth is that it is our games that are meaningless, as we’ve already said. Our games are only meaningful because we arbitrarily decide to say that they are and this is just another way of saying that they are meaningless (even though we can’t see it). This is the reason that we are existing ‘in opposition to the truth’ therefore; that’s what game reality is it’s the type of reality that exists in opposition to the truth.

It is because of this inversion of values at the transition that we have been talking about his invisible, therefore. The transition from unconditioned to conditioned reality is invisible because the latter necessarily excludes all traces of the former. The world of structure or form contains no reference to the deeper reality of structurelessness – there is no way that we can infer the existence of formlessness, any more than we can infer quality for mere quantity or infer the taste of sweetness just from the word itself. In general terms, the entropy of a closed system can increase but never decrease; we can ‘move forward’ (in the direction of ever-increasing entropy, that is) but we can’t ever ‘go back’, and this is the classic irreversibility associated with the Second Law of thermodynamics.

This is using the Second Law in a rather unorthodox way however – it’s unorthodox because we are applying the Second Law to space and we’re saying that ‘space has zero entropy content’. We don’t think of space as possessing infinite complexity, as having an infinite information content, but this follows on from our previous ‘definition’ of space, which is to say, that space can function as space only because of the way it can accommodate all possible forms. Space can only function as space because – in other words – it is unbounded or unlimited and thus must contain everything. This is an ‘open-ended’ definition of space because we’re not saying what can (or should) be included in it, but rather we’re stating that there can be nothing (no matter what) that isn’t included. This isn’t a ‘logical’ statement because it doesn’t divide or exclude; exclusivity is the mirror image of inclusivity, we might say, since there can be nothing in the boundaried (or closed world) that has not been defined in terms of the boundary conditions that have been put in place that for that system. The entropic decay product of space is thus polarity (and polarity is – we might say – where nothing gets to exist unless it can be understood within the framework of positive versus negative).

The ‘strong point’ of polarity (which is to say, the strong point of a logical framework) is that everything which takes place within it is guaranteed to be knowable in every aspect – there are no surprises, nothing left out, nothing that can’t be pinned down. The fact that everything happening within the FW is exhaustively defined is also its weak point, however; this is also its weak point because nothing new ever happens in the polarity. It seems to us that events occur in the FW but they don’t! Nothing ever happens in a polarity – nothing ever happens in a polarity precisely because the only type of event that can happen here are the ones that are defined and defined events aren’t actually real. They aren’t real for the simple reason that anything that is defined by the system is the system; the act of defining means they are represented in terms of two complementary opposites (such as YES and NO) but opposites are only ‘different’ in our imagination. Opposites are reflections of each other (they are the two sides of the same coin) and so what this means is that all definitions are empty. How could they not be? Needless to say, we don’t see that all our definitions are tautological  – that would be the same thing as seeing the Positive World to be an illusion, which is clearly something we don’t tend to do very often!

In conclusion therefore, we can say that the transition we’re discussing is the one that occurs between the Original World and the mind-created simulation of that world – a simulation is a system of tokens and so the irreversibility that we’ve been talking about comes into play because these tokens can’t be used to infer the existence of whatever it is that is being tokenized…




Image – jaquelinemhadel.com







4 thoughts on “The Invisible Transition

  1. Just recently found your site, interesting!

    Thank you for giving words to the extreme; the only kind of thinking that still interests me. That is, until thinking ceases alltogether.

    I’m wondering how you think you are escaping the system. Do you think you can reason your way out of the system by using the tools that make up the system: aren’t you tautological yourself? Are you presenting, adding someting new?

    Just giving food

    Tx!

    1. Hi Ron! Only just seen your comment, which is a bit synchronistic since I have just now finished a short article that deals exactly with the question that you just asked. Which is an excellent question as well as being a most confounding one. In essence, as you have said, the construct is trying to escape from the system of which it is a construct, and this is never going to work out!

      Speaking personally, if i were to think that I was escaping the system then this would only be a hallucination on my part since all identities are created by thought, but there a kind of ‘get out clause’ here in that the act of creativity is paradoxical since ‘I’ can never do it. I can never be the author of anything creative but this isn’t to say that creativity can’t happen through me if I ‘stand aside’ (or ‘let go’). I think this is the only way creativity can EVER work.

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