A life that travels towards a goal is a narrow life – there is nothing but ‘the goal’ (and ‘how to get there’) in such a life and the goal is a very narrow thing. A goal isn’t actually anything – it belongs to the world of abstractions and abstractions are – as we might say – ‘too thin to be real’.

If we have a very specific idea of what we want, what our overall aim is, then we will have a very specific idea about who we are. The idea defines us and we define the idea so we can’t say which comes first – we belong to the mental construct just as much as the mental construct belongs to us. This isn’t a straight line of causation therefore (which is our perception the situation), it’s a loop of logic.

Everything’s a ‘loop of logic’, when it comes down to it. Its loops all the way and there’s nothing tangible (or measurable) that isn’t a logic loop (i.e., a loop that contains both ‘the measurements’ and ‘the measurer’). Anything that isn’t a loop is free, unconstrained, uncategorized, and for this reason we can’t talk about it. We can’t say anything at all about that aspect of the world which is free from constraint, free from determination.

It’s not really that ‘everything is a logic loop’ therefore, but rather that everything we know and can communicate about is a loop of thought. The whole Positive World is a water-tight loop of thinking with one thought supporting another, which in turn then supports (or gives rise to) another, and so on and so forth until we eventually get back where we started. This is the self-devouring snake.

We inevitably come back to where we started off from when it’s the System of Thought we’re talking about. Only there isn’t actually such a thing as ‘a starting-off point’ when we are travelling in a circle, obviously! Stopping and starting points on a circle are of course always going to be purely arbitrary. Any point on the circumference of a circle can be said to be ‘a starting-off point’, but – then again – so too can any other point we might wish to pick…

There’s no beginning and no end to a circle and that’s why linear causation isn’t really a thing, as we have just said. Linear causation is an illusion, albeit an illusion that we’re extremely attached to. We are attached to the illusion have linear causation just as a limpet is attached to its rock in the middle of the Atlantic. We’re totally dependent on it.

We are attached to the illusion of linear causation because we are attached to the illusion of the causer, because we are attached to the illusion of the glorified causal agent which is ‘the conditioned identity’. Naturally we’re attached to the notion of the causal agent, that’s who we think we are – we’re attached to the idea of who we think we are.

That’s not just who we think we are economists who we are convinced we are. We aren’t going to be told otherwise, no matter how sound the argument. Stubborn doesn’t come into it! The power of our conviction is very great indeed but that doesn’t change anything; just because I am honestly convinced in the veracity of a lie that doesn’t make it true – it just makes me very reactive, very touchy, very aggressive. We can’t not be aggressive – being biased is the basic human condition and to be biased is always to be violent.

If the idea of who we are were actually true (and not a ‘mere convention’, as Alan Watts puts it) then there would be harmony in the world (which there clearly isn’t). Discord comes from believing in lies and believing in lies is all we ever do – we know of no other way of life. To believe in our thoughts is to believe in lies. The basic human condition is  – we might say – to be absolutely, flatly convinced that we are ‘the causer’, ‘the doer’, ‘the actor’ (as it is said in the nondual literature) when the plain truth of the matter is that there is no ‘causer’ (that there is no ‘starting-off point’), only the ‘circle of causation’, only the mechanical process of causation itself.

The mechanical cycle of causation doesn’t itself have a cause; if there was something outside of the COC that was giving rise to it, then that ‘thing’ (whatever it was) would of course also be part of the circle of causation. As far as the COC is concerned there is no outside – it’s a world unto itself, a Closed World that is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging itself as being closed. The only way the Mechanical Circle of Causation gets to have the type of ‘pseudo-existence’ that it does have is by pretending that ‘nothing else exists’, by pretending that it itself is the Cosmos. The Lord thy God is a Jealous God (or – as we could also say – the Lord Thy Demiurge is a jealous god)

There is no ‘thing that is caused’ and – similarly – there is no ‘thing that causes the thing that is caused’ – there is only the turning circle, and the turning circle has no beginning and no end. All possible points on the circumference of a circle are equivalent, interchangeable, etc. What’s more, if we were to consider the matter in a non-superficial manner, we would see that ‘the circle’ (i.e., the Closed World) has no actual, real existence of own (since, as Spencer Brown tells us in his Laws of Form, ‘To cross twice is not to cross’).

Nothing can be said to be real unless it has some sort of relatedness with what’s ‘not it’, with what’s ‘outside of it’. ‘No relationship with anything that isn’t you’ means that you don’t really exist – things don’t exist ‘on their own’, that’s just our thinking, that’s just the way we can’t help thinking about things. Nothing exists on its own and when we imagine that it does (as we do imagine) then we are existing in a state of delusion, a state of hypnotic trance in which we perceive thoughts to be real, an enslaved state of being in which we are being controlled every inch of the way by the thinking mind.

To spend our lives travelling towards a goal is to ignore our relatedness to anything outside of that goal – we’re focused, our attention has been narrowed down so that all we care about is getting to the specific place that we have in mind. This is of course what makes a goal into a goal – the fact that it overrides (or takes precedence over) everything else. If we had equanimity with regard to outcomes – which is to say, if we’re not being driven by fear – then it wouldn’t be a goal in the sense that we generally mean the word. It would still be ‘a goal’ in a purely technical sense but it wouldn’t be a goal in the psychological/ subjective sense, it wouldn’t be a goal in the sense that we have some sort of non-negotiable attachment to it.

Being ‘psychologically attached to a goal’ means that we think that achieving it is going to solve more than it really will; we overvalue the goal – in our own minds – whether we like to acknowledge it or not – it’s going to be the answer that we’ve waiting for all our lives. And if it turns out not to be, then we place equal hope in the next one, and then the next one after that – ‘hope springs eternal to the mechanical heart’, as we might say.  The day we give up hoping that the attainment of our goals is going to transform our lives for the better is the day we stop trusting in the machinery of thought and – for most of us – this is a day that never seems to come!

Our goals in life are over-valent, in other words – they promise something that is way beyond their capacity to deliver. Rational goals are by their very nature superficial – they only have meaning on the level of description (they only have the meaning they seem to have when we understand them in their own terms. If we can’t describe it then we can’t make a goal of it, after all; we can’t make a goal to bring about something we can’t understand and yet everything that we do understand is merely ‘nominally true’, true only in terms of the game we’re playing (and not in any other way). The only stuff that it is ever possible for us to understand is petty stuff (stuff which doesn’t really matter one way or the other). The real significance of life will always elude us – if it doesn’t elude us then it isn’t life (it’s simply whatever banal private fantasy that we are running in place of life).

Ironically – and the word ‘irony’ doesn’t begin to cut it here – the only stuff that we can understand is stuff that we ourselves have invented, and because it’s ‘stuff that we ourselves have invented’, it’s nonsense, it’s banal, it’s trivial. ‘Stuff that we make up ourselves’ is by definition devoid of meaning – it’s only true because we say it is, after all. We can say anything and this is precisely why nothing we sayis true. The point we’re making here is that it’s not possible to ‘know stuff in a game’ because nothing in the game is ever going to be real and if it isn’t real ‘then there can be no ‘knowing’ of it.  There’s no knowing in a game, only pseudo-knowing, and pseudo-knowing is a very insubstantial kind of thing – who I know myself to be in a game isn’t real any more than the objects that I’m busy relating to are.

The implicit suggestion is that who I am pretending to be (but am not) can accumulate actual genuine knowledge regarding a whole bunch of mental objects, which I’m also pretending are real (but which aren’t). ‘Who I imagine myself to be’ supposedly has ‘positive knowledge’ about other things which ‘I wrongly imagine to exist when they don’t’ but since neither ‘the knower’ nor ‘the known’ have any existence whatsoever outside of the game that is being played, the idea that our so-called positive knowledge has an existence that is independent of us is clearly nonsensical. Despite this, however, positive knowing is everything to us, it is – in a literal not metaphorical way – the whole world to us…

This situation whereby we get ‘lost in the tautology of thought’ comes about every time we conceive a goal and then take whatever steps are necessary to bring it about. Conceiving a goal and then striving to achieve it is what we mainly do in life – anything else would be ‘random’ and we don’t generally do random. We do ‘purposeful’ – we proceed stepwise in incremental movements that are at all times carefully measured out by the thinking mind. We ‘proceed on a linear track’ and this linear track is a straightforward projection of our arbitrarily-selected logical viewpoint, which has no capacity to appreciate nuance (which is to say, it has no capacity to acknowledge anything that hasn’t been mapped out in advance, anything that can’t be accounted for within its own narrow terms).

Our perception of ourselves is of this tightly boundaried ego that is continually trying to advance itself, promote itself, develop itself; we need to have the perception of ourselves as ‘progressing in life’ in some sort of way if we are to feel OK about ourselves, which this is the same thing as saying that the conditioned identity – the ‘me’ – always has to be orientated towards some sort of goal with regard to bettering itself, with regard to improving our situation. This of course sounds great to us – more than just great, it is joyous music to our ears! ‘Making progress’ is about is what it’s all about – just as long as we’re busy trying to achieve a definable outcome of some sort or another then all is well with the world.

This is our perception, at any rate. When we perceive ourselves to be ‘moving in a positive direction’ (with regard to obtaining our aims) then this provides us with the euphoria we need in order to quench our ontological discomfort (which is always lurking in the background, waiting to pounce on us as soon as we stop protecting ourselves with our games). In the same way, the sense of dysphoria that afflicts us when we fail to make progress (or when we go backwards) also serves to insulate us from feeling any ontological insecurity – our attention is captivated by the thought of failure just as much as it is by the thought of success. What insulates us from ontological insecurity is ‘playing the game’ and ‘playing the game’ means saying that Position [A] is inherently superior to Position [B] and that we should be doing everything in our power to make sure that we wind up in the first location rather than the second. To not question this directive is to play a finite game.

In the absence of the polar orientation that insulates us everything starts to feel uncanny, everything starts to feel strange. The conditional self isn’t a big fan of this type of feeling and – given the chance – it will pull the plug on it as soon as it can, which it does, as we have just said, by playing games (which means seeing the world one-sidedly so that one outcome seems infinitely preferable to the other). The conditioned identity simply cannot exist outside of the asymmetrical situation, outside of the artificially created polarity. The conditioned self IS a polarity – as soon as equanimity (or ‘even-mindedness’) comes into the picture then it is no more. It dissolves without leaving a trace. We started off this discussion by stating that a life which is always orientated towards a goal is a narrow life; it’s not merely narrow either but self-referential and self-referentiality – we might say – is where narrowness gets to feed off itself and ignore everything else…

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