There is something inherently problematic about purposeful behaviour – we just can’t see it, that’s all. As far as we’re concerned, it’s the other way around – as far as we’re concerned purposeful behaviour is how we solve problems. If purposeful behaviour is the solution, then how can it also be the problem, we ask? It doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense to us to see the purposeful mode of mode of being to be the cause of our problems…

The thing about purposeful behaviour is that it is – by definition – narrow and from a psychological point of view this narrowness constitutes blindness, it constitutes short-sightedness. We’re not seeing the full picture and so no matter what we do, no matter how we play our cards, all that’s going to happen is that we’re going to keep on mechanically replicating the bias that is our ‘angle on things’. Our purposeful activity merely serves to perpetuate the status quo, therefore – it’s not ‘progressive’ at all (much as we like to say it is) but rather profoundly conservative – keeping busy all the time is a sign of fear, not virtue. When we make sure to keep ourselves busy all the time this is existential terror, not genuine ‘interested’ engagement.

The only thing that isn’t narrow is random activity, activity that isn’t part of some overall plan, activity that isn’t serving an established bias – if the activity in question isn’t serving some sort of bias (a bias that we have identified with so that it seems true) then it is of no interest to us whatsoever. We can equate this situation with the wider view, ‘the view which excludes nothing’: because there are no ‘limitations that we can’t see’ (because there is no ‘invisible biassing organising factor’) we aren’t locked into endlessly reiterating the limitation that we can’t see as such, we aren’t locked into reproducing the same old viewpoint over and over again as if it was the only one in town (because we don’t know that it’s just a viewpoint, because we think it’s the only way to see things). We aren’t locked into replicating the same framework, the same ‘worldview’, with every purposeful action we take, with every single rational thought we think. ‘Stop making sense’, the Talking Heads song tells us. Give up on the constant purposeful behaviour…

Instead of saying that we’re ‘replicating the same worldview with every deliberate action we make’ we could say that we’re ‘assuming a world which we’re in too much of a hurry to stop and examine. There’s no actual consciousness there, in other words. It’s impossible to engage in purposeful activity without assuming a context, without assuming a framework. Essentially, if I’m putting all my efforts into achieving some goal or other then I’m assuming rather a lot without realizing it – I’m assuming that the concept of the one who is to attend achieve the goal remains meaningful, and I’m also assuming that the notion of the goal as ‘something which is worthwhile trying to achieve’ remains valid. In purposeful activity, our attention is on what we want to happen (which we find euphorically exciting) and – as we do this – we automatically assume a context. We’re assuming these things in order that our goal can be ‘meaningful’, because it wouldn’t be otherwise.

It’s only because I’m ‘focusing on the foreground and taking the background for granted’ that the object of my attention gets reified, gets to seem like a real thing, and – similarly – that the viewpoint which I happen to be using gets to seem like ‘the right one’, ‘the only possible one’, etc, etc. Equivalently, we could say that it is only because I am neglecting the background (which means that I am also neglecting the fact that I’m neglecting) that I get to experience myself as a sovereign entity, a causal agent that has an existence all of its own, an existence that isn’t dependent upon a ‘framework that we assume without knowing it’. Every time we reach out from our position of strength to fix things (or to make them ‘better’, or make them be the way they’re ‘supposed’ to be) we are reinforcing and reiterating this same old worldview, this same old worldview that we will never actually pay any attention to, but which rules over us all the same. What we deny controls us.

There are two ways to look at this, therefore – from the point of view of the seeker or striver, life consists of a series of actions whereby we hope to acquire an advantage that will make all the trials and tribulations of the struggle worthwhile. Even when I don’t succeed I’m encouraged – all I need to do is keep on thinking about how great it would be if I were to finally succeed and I will experience renewed enthusiasm to play the game. Hope springs eternal. This is the viewpoint of the gambler, therefore – the gambler is never discouraged. We perceive the world in terms of tantalising possibilities which we naturally want to do our best to avail of. If we weren’t fixated upon ‘the show’, if we were if we were taking a wider view, then what would see wouldn’t be so inspirational at all; what we’d see is a system that exists in a state of permanent equilibrium, a contrived situation where change simply isn’t permitted. The seasons have stopped mid-turn – change has been artificially suspended, artificially postponed, artificially held pay, and the way this is done just to make the point once again is by keeping us busy grasping wildly at illusions, grasping wildly at outcomes that can never happen looking forward to outcomes that can never happen while crucially not noticing that we’re always training but never getting anywhere, we’re never actually achieving anything, always rushing the same time never arriving.

When the flow is stopped and this spells bad news. ‘Expected poison from standing water’, says Blake. Trouble starts here, from this point on, and there’s no way to escape from it. We could also say that when everything is defined by recourse to an official template then we end up with a world that is fixed, a world that has been frozen; when everything is determined via reference an unchanging measuring stick then we end up living in a world with no ‘flexibility’ in it and a world that has no flexibility in it can vibrate but it cannot flow. Crystals don’t flow. Vibration – we might say – is movement that takes place within strict limits – everything about an oscillation is straight out of mathematics, it’s the ‘logical working out of a mathematical function’, and what this means is that once everything has been set up then it can only ever work out in one way. There is precisely zero flexibility in this situation. Flow – on the other hand – is not worked out in advance, is not a mathematical function. Flow isn’t governed, and so we can say that flow isn’t following in the footsteps of the past.

We could try to approximate flow by calculated means, by digitalizing it, breaking it up into measurable bits or units – calculation can’t work otherwise – but no matter what lengths we go to we still can’t get any closer to it. We can’t get any closer to flow because flow is flow only when it happens all by itself, and no matter howgood we get at making it look as if it is happening all by itself, it’s still us that’s trying to make it look as if it’s happening naturally. It’s still us that’s behind it, and so what we’re talking about is a show, a production. No matter how good we get at making it look as if we aren’t an essential part of the picture, the basic underlying situation can’t ever change. We can never get so skilled at control that we reach the point where we don’t have to control any more (which is to say, we never get to the point where our production becomes the same thing as reality. This – we might say – is what we might (reasonably enough) call ‘a core Principle of Simulation’ – No matter how proficient at simulation we become we never get to the point at which ‘it all happens by itself’. Freedom can never occur as a result of following complicated rules (or any rules for that matter), which is another way of saying that indeterminacy can’t be described, which is of course nothing if not obvious! The thing about flow is therefore that it has to happen by itself; it has to happen by itself it – it can’t in any way be a reflection or echo of what’s going on in our heads, it can’t in any way reflect our own will, our own intentions or desires in the matter.

What we’re calling flow has nothing to do with any external authority therefore, it has nothing to do with any rules or regulations that might have been put in place, and this makes it fundamentally spooky to us – something moves, but nobody made it move. It happened all by itself, uncannily, freakily, as if by supernatural means. What we call purposeful or intentional action, on the other hand, always reflects the external authority, always echoes what we intend or desire. Purposeful action is the meaningless replication of a hard-wired bias which we are saying is not a hard-wired bias, which we are saying is ‘our choice’. The bias in question gets reproduced time and time again because we think it’s our choice, but it isn’t our choice at all. We say it’s the way things should be, the way things are meant to be, etc. We said earlier that every time we engage in a purposeful act (of whatever sort) we ‘assume a world’ – we are assuming that the bias we are treating as being unbiased (as being ‘right’) really is unbiased, which is completely and utterly untrue!  A world can only be ‘a world’ when it has actual freedom in it and so what we’re taking to be the ‘actual world’ is actually nothing more than a rigid construct of the thinking mind (and all constructs of the TM are ‘rigid’). Just as we assume freedom where there is none, so too we assume a whole world where there is none, and this means that we are completely cut off from reality. We are alienated from the ‘natural state of affairs’. This is an undeniably bizarre situation therefore – the price of being in Purposeful Mode is that we have to assume the existence of a world that couldn’t possibly exist, a world that wouldn’t / couldn’t work as a world because there’s no possibility of flexibility in it, no leeway for anything to happen it hasn’t been told to happen.

The price of being in Purposeful Mode is that we have to live our whole lives in a world without any space in it. We imagine that there’s space but there isn’t, we blithely imagine that there’s a world there, but there isn’t. In order that we might enjoy the feeling that we’re purposeful agents rather than mere cogs in a machine we have to assume something untrue, we have to assume that they could be such a thing as a universe that has zero flexibility in it, which would be a description of a world rather than ‘the thing itself’. ‘Flexibility’ equals content – a world with no possibility for random or ungoverned change – which is the only type of change there is – is a world that doesn’t have any actual content; it is a ghost world, a world that isn’t actually real. Instead of ‘flexibility’ we could talk about uncertainty and say that when all the uncertainty is taken away so is all the reality! If we were to eliminate all uncertainty then at the same time we would be eliminating all flow, all ungoverned change. The External Authority rules supreme in this case, and this is exactly the way that we want it.

When we are in Mechanical Mode – which, as we have just said, is the mode in which the EA rules supreme – then chasing after our goals seems like the ultimately meaningful thing to do, when in truth when the truth is that it is the ultimately meaningless thing to do. Never was anything more meaningless than this! When we chase goals then we nullify ourselves, when we chase goals then we align ourselves perfectly with the System of Thought and when we align ourselves with this System of Thought then all we ever do is run errands for the External Authority. These errands are all ‘tautological missions’ however since we never go beyond the picture of things that we started off with. Nothing’s happening. We’re playing a game, not living life; living life means doesn’t mean ‘making sure that we never go beyond ‘the picture of things that we started off with’ – it doesn’t mean never taking any ontological risk! Never taking a risk means – on the contrary – that we’re too frightened to live. It means that we are too frightened to make a move, too frightened to take a peek out of our box and see what’s out there. In our fear, we identify with the SOT, which means that the only movement we want to see in evidence is the official type of movement; it means that the only type of change we want to come across is the authorised type of change. If we see movement that isn’t validated by the EA (which is to say, if we see movement that ‘happens all by itself’) then that spooks the hell out of us…








Image credit – seroundtable.com