Certainty (or ‘positive knowledge’) comes about as a result of the on-going vibratory motion from one opposite to the other. It comes about – we could say – as a result of us oscillating endlessly from one pole to another, as a result of ‘one opposite succeeding the other over and over again’. The succession of opposites creates a ‘context’ within which We don’t think about certainty in this way, we think of it – if we think of it at all – as being a solid, stand-alone fact, something that just ‘is’ and not as a mere ‘oscillation between plus and minus’, which clearly isn’t solid at all. The oscillation between plus and minus is a wave, not a fixture, not an intrinsic property of reality, not a ‘thing in itself’; it looks like a thing in itself but it isn’t – it’s a show that’s being put on, that’s all…
Plus versus minus, like a piston shooting frantically back and forth in a cylinder, isn’t solid at all – it’s not the immutable fact that we think it is but a continuous act of self-reversal. There’s activity, but it’s the type of activity that keeps going back on itself. How could we possibly imagine that something as empty as this has solidity, substance, reliability, and can be used to serve as a basis for living our lives? As we’ve just said, we think that stuff just ‘is’ and that this doesn’t need to be looked into any further (which corresponds to what Buddhism refers to as ‘the assumption of permanence’). This – we might say- is ‘the Great Error’, ‘the Great Mistake’. The assumption of permanence constitutes our Great Mistake because it causes us to invest absolutely everything we have in something that is guaranteed to be reversed later on. It doesn’t matter how careful, responsible, or diligent we are, if we start off from an unreal place then no matter what we do we’re always going to be bringing it along with us.
Our usual way of looking at this idea is to say that since everything is continually changing ‘hanging onto stuff’ will cause us suffering. This is the usual interpretation but we could also look at impermanence in terms of nullification and say that because all our activity takes place in the Known World – the world that we can be definite about, the world that has no discontinuities in it, the world that is like a Mobius Loop ((because it has only got the one surface and this ‘one surface’ has a kink’ in it that makes it look as if there are two different surfaces, one ‘positive’ and the other one ‘negative’). The Known World is like a Mobius strip (or ‘strange loop’) and what this means is that everything we do (or think) is guaranteed to be sneakily reversed on us later on.Inasmuch as we do all our living safely within the bounds of the Framework of Thought we are never going to do anything that isn’t perfectly ‘self-contradictory’. Our so-called ‘living’ is just a sham exercise therefore – instead of living we’re ‘thinking about living’ and thinking about living is a sterile substitute for life. It’s a cop out.
Reality is when we’re not looping back on ourselves the whole time, when we’re not feeding voraciously off our own output on an ongoing basis. It cannot be found within the field of tension that exists between two complementary opposites. It. If we say that ‘something exists’ then – although we never stop to consider this – we are defining the state of existence in terms of its opposite. The cat is on the mat because it’s not ‘not on the mat’. All of our thoughts, all of our assertions about the world we live in are like this – no matter what we assert we’re doing so in terms of ‘the reverse proposition’. Everything exists because of the fact that it doesn’t not exist and if it doesn’t exist then this means that the inverse of that statement is not true. This might sound eminently logical but what it means is that our definitions are actually empty; they’re empty because they’re self-referential – positive statements feed upon themselves (in true uroboric fashion) and thus they are devoid of meaning.
Reality – as we construe it – has to exist within the field of tension that is generated between <exists> and <doesn’t exist> and what this means is that it is bound by the logic that makes up this tension (which is to say, it has to play ball vis a vis ‘either existing or not existing’). Unless this all-important criterion is satisfied then it’s ‘no deal’ – thought will refuse to rubber stamp it, thought will have nothing to do with it. This doesn’t bode at all well for us however – we can choose to turn a blind eye to the reality that is bigger than we are, the reality that doesn’t fit in with our petty or arbitrary restrictions, but the joke’s on us when we do. If the world can only be encountered by us when it’s sandwiched between <yes> at one end and <no> at the other then what this means is that everything turns out to be a lot of ‘yes and no type answers’. This is the ‘digital universe’ – the universe that is made up entirely of boundaries. The world we encounter when everything is sandwiched between two bookends (negative at one end and positive at the other) is nothing other and a whole bunch of binary code, in other words. It’s all wrapping and no content.
We don’t get anywhere by subjecting the world to our crude yes/no, right/wrong questioning; we want to ask the closed question ‘Does it exist or does it not exist?’ before we will have anything to do with the data that’s come our way, but when we do this we’re projecting, when we do this we’re ‘imposing our own way of looking at things on the world’ and that’s just not going to work out for us. Reality has nothing to do with this sort of ‘hocus-pocus’ and so when we insist (as we do) on making sense of the world via closed questions what we’re doing is that we’re ‘substituting an idea for something that isn’t an idea and never could be’. The world of ideas that we substitute for the real thing is essentially a loop – it’s the loop that exists between <yes> at one end and <no> at the other (as we keep saying). No matter where we goand no matter what we do we’re always going to be travelling around and around in this loop, the reason being that we only have two directions to move in in the Formal World (which is to say, ‘Extrinsic Space’) -we have the direction of <<more of>> and counter-direction of <<less than>>.
In the formal world of our thoughts we can either move down a linear axis or we can move back up it, and – as Heraclitus observes – ‘The road up is the same as the road down’. And as Spencer Browne says, ‘To cross twice is not to cross’. In this artificial version of reality there are one only the two directions to move in: [I] ‘more of’ and ‘less of’ (or ‘UP’ and ‘DOWN’) and [2] these two directions are the same direction, as Heraclitus says. Furthermore, we can reflect upon Statement 2 again just to make sure that we get the point here, the point being that if the road up is the same as the road down and if travelling up the road ten kilometres is the same thing as travelling down the road by that same distance then this is a roundabout way of saying that we’re not actually ‘travelling’ at all. Ten kilometres minus ten kilometres equals zero kilometers – vibratory motion (activity that keeps going back on itself) never actually takes us anywhere.
So there are only two directions we can travel in when we’re in the world that has been created by our thoughts: either we travel in a positive direction or a negative one – this is the loop that we’re trapped in, ‘the loop of travelling from the negative pole to the positive pole, and then back again’. When we’re moving from one opposite to the other then we can be knowledgeable about this movement, we can make statements about it with a very high level of certainty. Certainty (or ‘positive knowledge’) can only exist when there is this vibratory movement – which is to say, it can only exist in the Causal Realm where YES follows NO (which follows YES) in an unbroken chain of cause-and-effect. It’s not possible to be more definite, more certain than a YES or a NO but at the same time YES and NO doesn’t tell us anything about the world we actually live in. YES and NO are the answers we receive when we ask close questions of the universe – they refer only to our own assumed framework, in other words. YES vs NO might seem to ‘cover all the bases’, it might seem to be a very ‘no nonsense’ kind of thing, but at the same time this certainty is entirely self-contradictory, and so it doesn’t – at the end of the day – count for anything. What we’re looking at here is ‘meaningless certainty’, therefore – it’s a paradox.
If this certainty which we value so much is only to be found in the jaws of a paradox, then what good is it to us? The good we imagine to be in it is always going to be cancelled out by the equal and opposite of whatever it was that we were considering a good thing in the first place. +N is always going to be replaced by -N a bit later on in the chain of events – what goes up must come down because up is down. +1 is certainty, +2 is certainty, +3 is certainty, anything we can state or (exhaustively define) is certainty, but everything we can state (or everything we can define) always comes as a package of two with its equal and opposite number, so to speak. Anything we can say always comes with its reverse in tow; to define one thing is good is to define another as bad. To have only one opposite – to only have ‘good’, for example – is quite meaningless, there has to be the other opposite in order for the first one to actually mean anything; <up> without <down> just isn’t ‘a thing’…
So <yes> doesn’t mean anything without there being a <no> and <no> counts for nothing unless there’s a <yes> hanging around there somewhere; the two terms are ‘mutually dependent’, in other words. YES and NO together constitute a context within which meaning can be found, we might (provisionally) say. More than this, the ‘context of meeting’ that has been created by sandwiching everything between a pair of complementary opposites is – we might say – an absolute context – it’s an ‘absolute’ context since we’re now in a position to know absolutely everything about what goes on inside it. We’re now in a position to possess what is called ‘positive knowledge’, therefore. We can – in theory – know everything there is to know about stuff that’s happening within the context of [+] and [-] and so this – on the face of it – would appear to be a pretty cool thing. If we stick with just the one pair of opposites (which is of course the simplest thing to do) then we can say that we ‘know’ something by locating it on the axis that runs between +N at one end and -N at the other. The ‘context’ we’ keep talking about here is precisely this axis, therefore.
So <yes> doesn’t mean anything without there being a <no> and <no> counts for nothing unless there’s a <yes> hanging around there somewhere; the two terms are ‘mutually dependent’, in other words. YES and NO together constitute a context within which meaning can be found, we might (provisionally) say. More than this, the ‘context of meeting’ that has been created by sandwiching everything between a pair of complementary opposites is – we might say – an absolute context – it’s an ‘absolute’ context since we’re now in a position to know absolutely everything about what goes on inside it. We’re now in a position to possess what is called ‘positive knowledge’, therefore. We can – in theory – know everything there is to know about stuff that’s happening within the context of [+] and [-] and so this – on the face of it – would appear to be a pretty cool thing. If we stick with just the one pair of opposites (which is of course the simplest thing to do) then we can say that we ‘know’ something by locating it on the axis that runs between +N at one end and -N at the other. The ‘context’ we’ keep talking about here is precisely this axis, therefore.
This is where the characteristic that we’re calling ‘certainty’ comes from therefore – it comes from managing mapping ‘real-world stuff’ onto a linear axis. Every single point that goes to make up a linear axis is defined – that’s how it gets to be there in the first place. A straight line, like a point, is created by defining it, which is to say, it is its own definition. This might sound pretty watertight, ontologically speaking, but it’s all quite hollow; it is – as we have said – the mere appearance of certainty with nothing behind it. It’s ‘certainty within an unreal world’. The straight line with a big plus at one end and a big minus at the other only exists in our heads, only exists in our imaginations. What we’re doing here is that we’re subject in the real world (which is not founded upon self-reference) to our made-up rules or categories (which absolutely are based on self-reference), which means that we’re not really relating to the world but only to the world as it appears when it is organised according to our own rules. This therefore glitches us – it involves us in a loop of logic that we don’t see to be a loop (since we can only see it for what it is when get ‘outside the assumed context’).
When we make a definite statement – a big, bald ‘tell it like it is’ statement about how things are – our awareness is ‘split’, so to speak; we’re aware of the positive at the expense of not knowing about the corresponding negative which we have unknowingly (but inevitably) created at the same time. Subjectively, we are experiencing the type of certainty that comes from having a ‘plus without a minus’, a ‘yes without to no’, a ‘good without a bad’, which is the only the appearance of certainty since there is actually no such thing as a positive without a minus. J.G. Bennett refers to this as ‘opposite blindness’, which – he says – is the result of us only being able to be aware of ‘only one opposite at a time’. Our awareness has been split and the self we think we are (as a result of this one-sidedness, as a result of the entropy that’s got into the system) is what JG Bennett calls the Reactional Self.
The Reactional Self doesn’t act out of its own will, its own volition, but rather – as the name implies – it merely reacts, and what it reacts to are the illusions that are automatically created by its own one-sidedness. Its actions are always ‘compensated for’ in this way. Or as we could also say the RS reacts to its own projections if as if these projections really are out there, and not just a function of our constitutional inability to see both ends of the stick at the same time. As Bennett says,
When the reactional self controls, it reacts without reference to any factors that are not immediately present. It is ‘heedless’ of the consequences.
What’s essentially going on with us therefore is that we are being ‘controlled by our own ignorance’, which brings to mind Jung’s internet-friendly quote about unconsciousness and fate – ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate’. In J.G. Bennett’s terms, we can say that because we’re only able to have awareness of one opposite at a time (because we’re acting as if the existence of one pole without the other were an actual ‘fact’) our actions are automatically ‘compensated’ for – we don’t know that ‘for every plus that comes into being there is a minus to negate it’ but our awareness of this truth isn’t needed for reality to carry on doing its thing. Our impaired vision has absolutely no effect with regard to ‘the way things are’ but it does rebound on us to ensure that ‘the books are always balanced’, to ensure that ‘Cosmic Symmetry is never broken’…
Image – CCO Public Domain