When we are not equal to the image of us, the description of us, the idea of us, then we are free. This is our true nature – our true nature is to not fit in the category that has been allocated for us to fit in. Our true nature – our only nature – is to be undefined or uncategorised, in other words; we’re only being true to ourselves when we’re not coming out of some kind of standardized idea or conception of who we are. ‘Once you label me you negate me’ says Kierkegaard, but he might as well have said ‘When you define me you negate me’. It’s the same principle – to say what something is (or think that you know what something is) is to become alienated from it.
We can take another angle on this and say that ‘we’re only conscious when we are not acting out of some definite or rational picture of the world’. When we’re operating on the basis of the formal world that has been created by our thoughts, by our ideas and theories, then we have zero consciousness (which is another way of saying that we are functioning as a machine). Or -as we could equivalently say – when we are operating within the remit of the Mind-Created Simulation of Reality then the only consciousness we have is consciousness of the ‘simulated’ (or ‘artificial’) variety, and consciousness of the simulated or artificial variety is not consciousness (of course). It’s just a trick, it’s just a sham.
To mistake a formal representation of reality for what it is representing is not the same as ‘being aware’, for the simple reason that we’re not being aware of anything real – we’re ‘relating to our own projections, our own constructs, without realising it’. Being aware of something that isn’t real (without actually realizing that it isn’t real) is called ‘being deluded’, and this is hardly the same thing! When I automatically accept the positive representation of who I am (as displayed to me by the conceptual mind) as being the real thing, as being the real deal, then this means that I am ‘unconscious’ therefore – it means that I am ‘fully adapted to a phoney reality’, it means that I am ‘totally deluded’…
Imagining that we are the same thing as thought’s image of us is what we might call a ‘null’ state of affairs – it’s a ‘null’ state of affairs because there are no possibilities in it, because nothing’s ever going to come of it. It’s a ‘mistaken beginning’, it’s a ‘false start’. We have accommodated ourselves to a manufactured reality that is so narrow in its remit that there’s simply no room for anything in it; there’s no actual space in it and if there’s no space in it (if there’s nothing there that hasn’t already been defined, nothing that hasn’t been determined in advance) then that means that nothing new can ever happen there. To say that ‘nothing new can ever happen’ is the same as saying that ‘nothing at all can ever happen’ since unless an event is new or unique it simply isn’t ‘an event’.
When we reproduce or copy a unique event (where the rule is <Repeat whatever it was that just happened>) then we aren’t ‘reproducing a unique event’ – unique events can’t be ‘repeated’, can’t be ‘rolled out again’, clearly! Unique events can’t be ‘produced to order’, they can’t be ‘fitted into a system’. A unique event (which is the only type of event there is) can’t be caused, it can’t follow on logically from something else that was already there – if it does ‘follow on from something that was already there’ then this means that it is that ‘something else’, this means that it is ‘the same old thing being extended indefinitely’ (as if this actually meant something). When we talk about ‘the same old thing being endlessly extended or projected’ then this constitutes a somewhat careless use of language, we might say – it constitutes a ‘careless use of language’ because the inevitable implication is that there actually is something there that is being reproduced, that’s being copied, that is being extended or projected and the whole point is that this just isn’t so.
Unless something is spontaneously happening then it’s not happening at all – ‘forced events are not events’. Nothing real can be extended (or – as we could also say – ‘extension in time isn’t actually a real thing’). We don’t see things like this of course, we don’t see things like this because we have, without knowing it, adopted a convention that reverses our way of understanding the world. For us therefore if something has what Wei Wu Wei calls ‘serial existence’ (i.e., if something has ‘extension in time’) then we say that it’s real, and if it doesn’t have extension – if it’s not reproducible or replicable – then we say it isn’t. Not having an extension in time (or not being replicable) is incontestable proof that something doesn’t exist, as far as we’re concerned. This is the convention we’re using.
This is fine as a convention, of course – we are free to adopt any convention we so wish. The point is however that we’re adopting a reverse perspective on matters without realising that we are, and this – therefore – creates all kinds of unexpected problems. Life doesn’t unfold in the way we think it should – it goes against us! Going back to the tack we started off with in this discussion, we can say that we’re adopting the convention which says ‘When something equals the image (or idea) we have for it then that something is real’, and – contrary-wise – ‘when it doesn’t match our idea or image of it, then it isn’t real, then it doesn’t exist’. Thus, the convention that we’re adopting (without seeing that we are) is simply ‘If something can’t be defined then it doesn’t exist’. The convention is that ‘If something can’t be modelled (if it can’t be predicted / represented by thought) then it doesn’t exist’. Logic is the authority that says whether something is real or unreal, in other words.
Saying that ‘logic is the authority which decides what’s real or not’ is the same as saying that it’s continuity that is the authority, it’s the same as saying that continuity is the ‘deciding factor’ that lets us determine whether something exists or not. Logic is continuity and continuity is logic. Continuity – we might say – means ‘I’ve started so I will carry on…’ Starting is the ‘all-important thing’ here, therefore; everything hinges upon this – if there’s no ‘starting’ then there can’t be any ‘carrying on’, obviously! If there is the authority of some sort of precedence, some kind of prior structure, then proceeding from this basis is no problem. Far from being a problem, once there is some kind of precedence then everything proceeds automatically from here; what we’re looking at here is a deterministic situation, in other words – once there is a rule then everything that follows has to obey that rule (this being how rules work, of course) whilst if it happens to be the case that there was no prior structure, no precedence of any sort, then there is also no rule. If there’s no hook, nothing can be hung on it.
We may say that the rule has to do with ‘the repeating of what was already there’, therefore. The repeating of what was already there is not ‘optional’, we might say – there’s absolutely no choice in it whatsoever. The prior situation hasto be reproduced. Once the structure or bias is there to start off with (or to follow through from) then repeating that structure (or ‘acting out the bias’) is compulsory – there’s no escape from the task of perpetually repeating the prejudice we started off with. Once the system is in place, is ‘up and running’, then there’s no more freedom to do otherwise. Everything has been locked down. Systems don’t have freedom in them; logical systems have absolutely nothing to do with freedom – this thing called ‘freedom’ is a profoundly alien concept to the systematic mind. ‘Repeating the known’ has nothing to do with freedom, ‘seriality’ has nothing to do with freedom, ‘acting out the image or the idea of what or who thought says we are’ has nothing to do with freedom. ‘Obeying the rule’ has nothing to do with freedom. The everyday ‘ego’ or ‘self-image’ has nothing to do with freedom.
What we’re talking about here is Philip K Dick’s Black Iron Prison, therefore – we’re talking about mechanical existence, which PKD calls ‘astral determinism’. This – we might say – is the inverted analogue of reality that thought provides us with in place of the original. It’s the ‘Trick World’, it’s an Illusion World where everything works backwards. All this talk of determinism – which is to say, ‘the mechanical compulsion to keep on repeating the given pattern’ is a trick, is a deception. It’s a trick or deception because – as we said earlier – everything hangs on the All-Determining bias (or prejudice) being there in the first place, and it wasn’t. There’s no problem with the ‘carrying on part’ – all that happens automatically, all that’s a ‘foregone conclusion’ – but there most definitely IS a problem with the ‘starting off’ part of it. There’s a problem with the starting off bit of it because unless we’ve already got a basis there to start off from then it’s a big ‘No Go’, it’s just not going to happen. We can’t copy or reproduce something if there’s no ‘something’ there to copy or reproduce; we can’t obey the authority of the prior structure if there was no ‘prior structure’. There’s nothing to obey! There’s no authority! We can’t echo a bias or prejudice unless there’s one there already, and there isn’t. If we want some kind of authority to obey then we’re flat out of luck – we’re flat out of luck because in freedom there is no authority.
Image credit – pixabay.com