The basic unit of polarity is akin to a sort of chemical polymer that can be cheaply manufactured in order to produce artificial worlds in industrial quantities. The process of polymerisation is where we start off with a single generic unit that can be readily conjoined in order to make products on an industrial scale; diversity (or uniqueness, we might say) is sacrificed for the sake of ‘ease of manufacture’. Quality is neglected for the sake of quantity.

In the case of polarity, it’s not just that the cost of manufacturing it is low, but rather that there is no cost to the process at all. The cost is zero. This might sound strange, but no law is being violated here – we’re not getting something out of nothing, no matter what it might look like. We can explain this by borrowing Stephen Hawking’s metaphor of ‘building a hill’; to build a hill is to dig a hole at the same time, it is the very same act that we are carrying out. When we look at this statement in a superficial way it comes across as being paradoxical since ‘a hill’ and ‘an anti-hill’ are two completely opposite things; despite our evident perplexity however, when we look a bit more deeply into the matter we can very clearly see that this is the indeed the case. We were looking at things in only one way when – in actuality – there are two ways to look at what’s going on here not just the one.

Hawking uses this example to argue that their physical energetic universe can be produced not just cheaply, but at no cost at all, which is also something we just can’t comprehend just so long as we continue to see things in the rigidly superficial way that we usually do see them. Instead, we cannot help saying the creation of the universe as an incomprehensibly stupendous feat – the ‘miracle of all miracles’, in fact. The mystery of ‘why there is such a thing as the universe’ and ‘how it got to be there’ has long been explained away by orthodox Christianity by saying that it was created by The Deity, by Almighty God (which means of course that it is no longer a mystery but simply an article of faith, to be drilled into the heads of each successive generation at an early age, thereby crushing underfoot any questions they might have). If the physical universe is no more than a kind of conjuring trick however then this of course that would put a very different complexion on things. This would take the wind out of orthodox Christianity’s sails in a big way – its proponents wouldn’t have the Miracle of Creation to beat us over the head with anymore.


This isn’t just another example of science debunking religion, however — the Gnostics have of course beaten science to this conclusion by almost 2000 years. The understanding that this universe in which we live is an ‘inferior production’, a ‘degraded state of being’, a ‘cosmic deception’, is common to all forms of Gnosticism (which is why — needless to say — orthodox Christianity has always been so keen to do away with the Gnostics and their heretical teachings). As we read in Gnosticismexplained.org. –

John is adamant that the world is ruled by such a being, even though, of course, he doesn’t identify the cosmic tyrant with the Hebrew god. So he says in 1 John 5:19, “We know that we are God’s children, and that the whole world lies under the power of the evil one.”[39] In three places (John 12:31, 14:30, and 16:11), John specifically calls this being “the archon of this world.”[40] Paul, too, repeatedly uses the term “archon,” and other similar terms, to refer to nefarious beings who rule the world from the part of the sky below the highest heaven.[41]

The Christianity of the late first century is also the only plausible origin of another one of the Gnostics’ central doctrines: the idea that the god of the Hebrew scriptures, who had created this awful world and continued to rule it, was a malevolent, ignorant being who was inferior to the true God who sent Jesus. The creator god — the “demiurge” — had a host of minions called “archons” (from a Greek word for “ruler”[38]) who helped him administer his horrible rule.

We’re not going to concern ourselves particularly with the physical universe here, what we’re going to look at in this article is the mental universe (or – as we could also say – the world that has been created by thought). Applying what we have been saying to the operation of thought, we can say that the conceptual universe (i.e., the universe that is made up of our ideas and beliefs) is an inferior production, a degraded state of being, we can say that it’s represents a degraded state of being, an exercise in deception, and so on and so forth. This isn’t a new idea either, any more than the suggestion that the physical universe is something of a hoax or trick is new. To say that the reality which is put together by our thoughts isn’t ‘real in its own right’(but only a kind of virtual production or simulation) is no different to what philosophers and mystics have been saying for many thousands of years. This viewpoint will still be radically unacceptable to most of us of course – those of us who are not keen to have our naive sense of security being stripped away in such a drastic fashion – but the hypothesis itself is by no means unheard of. It might find expression in a new language but it’s the same basic principle – instead of Maya, we might speak in terms of Hyperreality; instead of Emptiness we might talk about the Holographic Universe, the universe in which ‘solidity’ is an illusion.

Sticking with our mental representation of reality therefore, we can say that the entire show is made-up of generic YES / NO units. This is the basic monomer. In order to understand the whole show all we need to do is grasp what’s happening in the monomer, in a single YES / NO flip-flop switch, and this turns out to be not so hard to do. This isn’t the least bit hard to grasp because all that happens with a binary YES / NO switch is that it keeps on flipping from one position back to the other. There’s no more to it than this! This flip-flopping might be thought of as a very rudimentary form of movement but – actually – it’s no form of movement at all. It’s a trick, a cheap gimmick. What we have here is one state of a binary system followed by the other, repeated over and over again with no end to it, but no matter how long the cycle is repeated it’s never going to get any further. The cycle never does anything other than just keep flipping- over, it never gets any further on from its starting-off point because it’s the same old thing being repeated over and over. There’s only the illusion of ‘moving forward’, the illusion of ‘extension or progression’.

It’s not even that there is only the one ‘flip/flop switch’, the one basic ‘monomer’, only one ‘cycle’ taking place because the cycle – as we keep saying – is a self-cancelling action. ‘To cross twice is not to cross’, says George Spencer-Brown in his Laws of Form. It’s not even ‘the one event’ because it cancels itself out. What’s going on in an on/off (flip/flop) switch isn’t in the least bit hard to understand, therefore – it’s not hard to understand because there is nothing going on. There is nothing there to understand – what’s to understand about a null event, after all? Where we go wrong is by trying to understand it because the harder we try to understand an event that didn’t happen the more confused we get! Null events can’t be analysed – we can’t construct any useful hypotheses in relation to them, etc. The very attempt to analyse a null situation perpetuates it, causes it to proliferate, to multiply. There are – we might say – two things we can never do in relation to a null event – we can either try to approach it, or we can try to run away from it. We can either approach illusion or try to escape from it but no matter which option we choose it turns out to be the same thing – we get firmly ‘stuck to the illusion’ either way.

Whether we avoid or whether we retreat, whether we say <YES> or whether we say <NO>, we nevertheless do so in accordance with the same framework, which is to say, ‘going forward’ only means anything in terms of the framework, and the same is true for ‘going backwards’. <YES> equals ‘the framework’ just as much as <NO> does, and so no matter what we do (no matter where we go) we’re bringing that same old framework with us. <UP> only means something in relation to the FW that I’m carrying around with me, as does <DOWN>, and that FW which I am perambulating around with is an entirely arbitrary conjecture. It’s a ‘baseless assumption’. In terms of the game that’s being played <POSITIVE> and <NEGATIVE> have totally different meanings but outside of this randomly selected frame of reference they’re not different at all – if I say <YES> this takes me to <NO> and if I say <NO> that takes me straight to <YES>. It’s the same thing when I go up as when I go down, despite the overwhelming impression I have that these are two totally different propositions. In short, when thought builds the world on the basis of bias – on the basis of <UP> not being the same as <DOWN> – then what we have as a result is ‘a game that we can’t see to be a game’. We’re locked into a null world but – within the terms of that world – there’s absolutely no way for us to know it.

Essentially therefore, were trapped in the World That Thought Made, trapped in the MCVR, and it’s only because we’re trapped liked this that the stuff which seem to be going on in that world, the stuff that seems to be going on in the MCVR, seems to be genuine, seems to be real. If we weren’t imprisoned in this virtual world and its virtual boundaries then we’d see that nothing ever happens here – we’d see the only null events can happen in a null world. The Continuum of Logic is like a kind of hammock strung between the two complementary opposites of [PLUS] and [MINUS] and every element in the continuum is made up of this same polarity, no matter what scale we look on; there is nothing in the COT apart from the artificial gradient that is made-up of ‘more of’ in one direction and ‘less of’ in the other. This is of course what polarity means. To say that the only thing we can find in the Continuum of Thought is ‘more’ of versus ‘less of’ is the same as saying that all there is in it is a rule. A rule splits the world into <RIGHT> and <WRONG> and so when we’re acting rationally we try to obey this rule by trying to get more of ‘what is right’ and less of ‘what is wrong’. This is all very well in one way (because it’s so clear cut and ambiguous, and all we need to do is to unfailingly do what the authority tells us to) but it’s not ‘all very well’ in another way however because ‘the way up is the way down’ and ‘the way out is the way in’, and so on.

The COT is a closed world and this is what it means to be trapped in a closed world – it means that up and down, right and wrong, are the same thing but that we can’t see this. We don’t go around in a closed world thinking that ‘Oh look, we’re living in a closed world’, we go around in a CW thinking that we’re actually getting somewhere (or at least that there is the valid possibility of this happening). The belief that it is possible for us to get somewhere is what both lures us into the game and what keeps us stuck there. Unbeknownst to us, linear space (or linear time) is actually a circle. To clearly see that there is no such possibility (since YES = NO) is to lose all motivation to play the game, naturally enough. The way the system presents it is to say that there are these two, very different types of movement (or change) – there is ‘moving towards one pole’ or ‘movement towards the other pole’ and so because we are 100% immersed in the game this type of movement is all we ever care about. All we ever care about is ‘doing better rather than doing worse’ (‘winning’ rather than ‘losing’, in accordance with the rules of the game) and it is because that is all we ever care about that we’re stuck. This is how polarity – which is so cheaply produced – gets to be ‘a Prison for Consciousness’. The prison in question might be very cheap to construct – any number of new wings can be built on at no cost whatsoever – but it is nevertheless very nearly 100% effective as a prison – to escape would require something nothing sort of a miracle. The prison propagates endlessly ahead of us with every turn we take, with every thought we have, and so the more we try to escape the more enmeshed in illusion we become.

Image credit – reddit.com