Everything in the simulation is a control system and this means that there is no way to avoid being controlled. If we conceive the idea of escaping from the simulation – as well we might – then this too is a control system. This is what it means to be controlled in all aspects of our existence – it means that even when we think of escaping the control this thought isn’t our own. We might think we know what it means to be totally controlled – controlled in every possible aspect of our lives – but we don’t. We completely fail to understand what ‘total control’ really means.
When we are controlled in every aspect of our existence then this means that we are ‘living’ (so to speak) within a simulation. This is another way of saying that we are the products or productions of the simulation, it’s another way of saying that we are the simulation. We’re not real, we’re being simulated.
There is no ‘me’ in a simulation, there is only the simulation and the sense of ‘me’ that we experience is an artefact of that simulation, an effect that it is responsible for. Identity is a hook that is provided by the simulation. The simulation is the output of a machine but because we accept it totally at face value, without being interested in the bigger picture, our consciousness gets wholly subsumed within it. Somehow, we discover ourselves in the output of the machine…
Self or identity is an artefact of the system; in the world as it is there is no self, no identity. In the world as it is (the unsimulated version) there is the space for whatever comes up to come up, and there is also the space for whatever goes away to go away again. ‘Space’ doesn’t exclude anything or hang onto anything. Space is the Tao.
Thought’s simulation of the way things are is not like this however – the simulation – because it is the simulation – has to be in control of everything all the time (stuff doesn’t get to happen unless it gives its say-so). It does hold on to stuff – it holds on to everything all the time. It can’t not hold on. Instead of being ‘supremely impartial’, ‘supremely indifferent’, it is as biased as biased can be. The simulation is biased to one specific version of reality – a specific version of reality that doesn’t actually exist.
The notion that there is this thing called ‘identity’ is dangled enticingly in front of our noses (like bait on a hook) and then – when we lunge for it – we’re caught. We can buy into the notion that there is such a thing as ‘me’ but once the rattrap closes then that’s it for us. We’re all washed up at this point. ‘Journeys end when lovers meet’, says Shakespeare and we could add to this famous quote the observation that ‘the journey ends when we passively identify with a particular mind-created image or notion’. Identity is a terminal destination.
We can buy into the idea of ‘identity’, but we can’t buy out of it again. This is the Hotel California therefore – it’s easy not to look where you’re going and as a result fall down a steep hole, but not so easy to climb out again. We fall into ‘the hole of our ideas’, which is ‘the hole of self-reference’. When we talk about ideas we’re talking about categories and when we talk about categories we’re talking about boundaries and the thing about boundaries is that once we invoke them, we can’t make them go away again. We can’t banish them (any more than we can ‘banish bureaucracy’).
A boundary gets to be such because of the package of entropy that comes with it (or – if we wanted – we could also say that the boundary is the entropy). Entropy can be defined as ‘information that isn’t accessible to us’ and what is ‘inaccessible’ to us in the identified state is the awareness that both sides of the boundary are the same. This is a funny thing of course because if both sides of the boundary of the same then this is another way of saying that there is no boundary there. A ‘boundary’ is a virtual entity – we don’t need to be talking about it at all.
It’s only when we can’t see that ‘one side of the boundary is the same as the other’ that the Positive World swims into focus, and so this is another way of saying that the boundary ‘exists only in our heads’, that it is a ‘phantom appearance’. The crucial thing to understand about this is that we proceed to build an entire world out of these boundaries that exist only in our heads – a world that we never doubt for a moment, a world that is Everything to us…
We cannot – once we have bought into the simulation as ‘not being a simulation’ – relate to anything unless it has been highlighted or brought out for us by having nice, neat boundaries drawn all around it. It has to be categorized or else it can’t be ‘real’. Unless something has been positively emphasised in this way we simply don’t register it – we don’t register it and yet – at the same time – anything that has been isolated (or boundaried) in this way is a virtual phenomenon, not a real one, as we have just said.
The everyday categorical mind works by ‘saying what everything is’, which it does by making abstract categories that it fits everything into. This might be said to be a ‘two-step procedure’: [1] We invent a bunch of categories and then [2] we fit everything into it (and when we say ‘everything’ we really do mean everything). if the world is to exist for us at all then it has to exist in the form of categories (which is to say, in the form of fragments). This is the gist of all thinking and analysing-type mental activity – it is the never-ending attempt to represent the world within a finite set of categories.
Another way of putting this is to say that the TM works by giving edges to everything. We can’t detect anything unless it has an edge; it would be perfectly invisible to us otherwise – ‘edges’ (or ‘boundaries’) are needed for something to be seen as real. This is why in Buddhist metaphysics the everyday discriminatory mind is called ‘the everyday discriminatory mind’ – because it can tell the difference between ‘in’ and ‘out’, ‘yes’ and ‘no’, ‘belongs’ and ‘doesn’t belong’. It discriminates between one opposite and the other.
This is what a boundary or edge is – it’s the means by which we categorise the world, it’s how we transform the unknown into the known, the new and the unprecedented into the old and the regular. We convert the radical unknown into the known by giving everything edges and – as we have said – edges are (subjectively) created by ‘seeing one side as being different to the other’. They are created by us having a biassed way of looking at things. Edges are brought into apparent existence by looking at the world in an uneven way even though – no matter how we may choose to look at it – everything is symmetrical and cannot be made to be not so.
What creates the perception of there being an edge to things is entropy, is ‘the unavailability of the information that would show us that both sides of the dividing line are in fact exactly the same as each other’. A better way of putting this might just be to say that the information which is unavailable to us is, that is hidden from view, is the information regarding the non-existence of the presumed boundary. If both sides of the dividing line are the same, then that dividing line doesn’t have any reality.
The convention that the thinking mind adopts is that of ‘on’ versus ‘off’ – what lies on the designated side of the boundary is ‘on’ and what lies on the other side is ‘off’. What gets turned ‘off’ is our attention – we attend to the inside and not to the outside, and the effect of this is to make that boundary real for us. For us, it is very real indeed – the limits that hold us in place (or pin us down) are ‘the realist thing there is’, and yet the whole business is merely am empty production of the system of thought (since – in reality – there is no lack of symmetry, there is no difference between ‘on’ and ‘off’).
Out of this ‘imaginary difference’ comes the Known World, comes the Simulation, comes ‘everything we know and are familiar with’. This is inarguably the case – to say that something is ‘known’ is to say that it has been made into a nice, neat parcel, that it has been marked off in boundaries in such a way that it is identifiable as being ‘this but not that’. The Known World is made up entirely of these conceptual parcels – nothing else is given any consideration – and yet the basis of our knowing is an empty formalism.
The Known is a very narrow kind of a thing (too narrow to be real, as it happens) and yet it’s all we know, all we care about. Nothing that is divided up can be real. The real (as opposed to ‘the known) is broad, it’s not just broad, it’s unlimited – it has no edge to it, it never comes to an end. How can the real world have edges when edges only exist in the mind of the observer? The only limitations around are the ones that we ourselves are projecting (whilst pretending not to be doing do).
The known is ‘an artificial situation that absolutely needs to be maintained every step of the way’; if we neglect to do the necessary caretaking then it will disappear in a puff of smoke. The world we know and totally believe in is only there because we make it be there. There’s an issue with this of course, a fundamental contradiction that we must make sure never to address. As long as our priority is to live in a positive world, a world that agrees with our thoughts and ideas (absurdly stupid though those thoughts and ideas may be) we will have to do our best to ignore this blatant contradiction.
Because the Known (or Positive) World is an artificial state of affairs and because it’s imperative that we don’t realise this – which we would do if we paid attention to the fact that we are continuously maintaining and protecting it – we need to have the strictest control of everything that’s going on. If there’s any sort of gap in the control then things will start to unravel very quickly, things will come apart. Sloppy controlling means that errors will start to appear and ‘errors’ open the door to awareness, which is the one thing we don’t want. The ‘one thing we don’t want’, the nameless eventuality we dread above all else, is Game Failure – which is where we can no longer control what’s going on…
Image credit – thegaurdian.com