If a positive datum is to be an actual ‘positive datum’ (which is to say, if a stone-cold fact is to function as a ‘stone-cold fact’, with all that this entails) then it can’t partake in Universal Flux. It absolutely can’t do that – facts simply can’t exist in a reality that is ‘flux-like’ in nature. We don’t really need even to say this of course since facts only get to be facts because they always stay the same, because they are ‘constants’ not ‘variables’. In the case of Universal Flux, as Heraclitus points out, nothing stays the same. That’s the whole point. The only thing that is constant is ‘change’, we sometimes say, only this isn’t true because there isn’t a constant. Ungrounded (or radical) change is change that doesn’t obey any rules – if change occurs in accordance with rules then there is no change – there is only the surface-level appearance of it. There is only the description of change and descriptions are static, not fluid – language is static and so when we try to talk about change we’re freezing it, we’re converting into a static picture. We are creating a ‘contradiction in terms’. When we think about radical or ungrounded change then at the same time we are both misrepresenting it and making it pragmatically impossible for us to know that we are. This is why Madame Blavatsky says that we murder reality with our thoughts…

For a positive datum to be properly positive (in the philosophical sense of the word) it is necessary for whatever it is we’re investigating to stay obediently within the prescribed parameters at all times. There can’t be any exceptions – any participation in Universal Flux is a total deal breaker, as we have said. If a stone-cold fact is to be ‘a stone-cold fact’ then the universe can’t be a hologram either – that’salso a deal breaker. It’s a deal breaker because the Holographic Paradigm is completely incompatible with our cherished ‘Thing-Based Paradigm’ – they can’t be on the same page. ‘Facts’ (‘positive data) can’t exist in an Open-ended universe. The Holographic Paradigm (which we could also call ‘the Indra’s Net Paradigm’ if we wanted) is not just ‘incompatible’ – it’s the perfect antithesis of the TBP. It’s the ‘upside-down version’ – instead of an open field of possibilities there is something that we might call ‘inverted space’ and when we talk about inverted space we’re talking about rules, we’re talking about boundaries. We’re talking about the situation in which nothing can happen unless there is a properly approved pathway for it to happen within. In the Rule-Based Reality precedence is king, precedence is supreme, and this is what facilitates us being able to describe or model that reality. From our day-to-day ordinary perspective this is the great advantage of a rule-based reality – we can orientate ourselves within it down to the very last degree and this doesn’t just allow us to ‘know where we are’ (within the terms of the prescribed parameters), it allows us to know who we are. This is ‘the significant thing’, this is what we’re all so hung up on…

The validity of the TBP (or INP) relies 100% upon the sanctity of boundaries therefore – the ‘cut off points’ that we use to categorise the world. The essential point here however (the essential point that we never think of) is that boundaries don’t exist, that they aren’t real, that they are fictional or imaginary projections of the thinking mind. Indra’s net is made up of an infinite array of jewels, so it is said, and so we might argue that it too is a Thing-Based Paradigm, only instead only in this case instead of ‘things’ we’re talking about ‘Jewels’. So maybe – we might say – the Jewel-Based Paradigm isn’t thatdifferent from the TBP after all! The Jewels making up Indra’s net aren’t ‘things’, however; they are disqualified from being such because of their strange properties – namely, that each and every jewel in the net contains a reflection of each and every other jewel within it. To quote Indologist Charles Eliot –

In the heaven of Indra, there is said to be a network of pearls, so arranged that if you look at one you see all the other reflected in it. In the same way, each object in the world is not merely itself but involves every other object and in fact IS everything else.

When ‘everything is in everything’ then this of course means that there’s no such thing as exclusion criteria, no such thing as boundaries (and thus there can’t be any such thing as ‘whatever it is that is supposedly being bounded’). By ignoring the way in which rules or boundaries are ‘projections of thought’ we create the super-effective illusion of there being something that is being bounded, something that makes up the multitudinous ‘things’ with which we populate the Positive World. The classic example of the open-ended situation in which ‘everything is in everything’  might be said to be the Mandelbrot set, the ‘most complex object in mathematics’, which famously goes on forever and ever without there being any regularities whatsoever in it, without there being any ‘repeating patterns’, without there being any ‘rules’ that can be derived to enable us to describe it. The Mandelbrot set (or Indra’s Net) can’t be ‘compressed’ data-wise in other words, and so what we are looking at here is pure information with no redundancy. Thus, the jewels (or pearls) making up Indra’s Net are not ‘things’ – they don’t have any parameters to obediently stick within, which means they can’t be defined, which means in turn that they aren’t ‘things’. We can use the word but only in the loosest possible sense. What we have here therefore is what we might call a ‘Non-Thing-Based Paradigm’, which is a parameter within which absolutely nothing can be known(and about which absolutely nothing can be said). There’s no foundation for knowing anything, after all. There’s nothing solid to base our knowing on; there is no reliable platform to build on, and so there can’t be any ‘knowing’. Knowing relies on boundaries and we make them all up ourselves.

‘Not knowing’ is thus the bottom line when it’s the NTBP or INP (‘Indra’s Net Paradigm’) that we’re talking about. If the Positive (or Presented) World is made out of distinct units (or ‘objects’) then the Negative World (which is the world that the NTBP discloses to us) is comprised of space, which can facilitate any structure you could possibly imagine but which isn’t itself a building block. Space isn’t a structure and it doesn’t therefore need a ‘basis’. ‘Basis’ equals ‘arbitrary limitation’. Space is supreme, not any paltry production of thought. Space isn’t dependent upon anything – it doesn’t have a source or cause, and it doesn’t have any limits. It’s not just all-pervading’ – it itself is the All! Space is not going anywhere and neither is it coming from anywhere. Neither is it static (since it has nothing to be static in relation to). Space can’t get ‘stuck’ (it can’t get stuck because there’s nothing for it to be stuck to). It has no characteristics of its own whatsoever and this is why we are so spectacularly uninterested in it. Because space is without characteristics (because there is no ‘system’ to it’) we can’t exploit it, we can’t use it and this is the reason why we spend our lives completely disregarding it. We ignore space and insist that everything is part of a structure or system. We insist that the characteristics we are relating to (and orientating ourselves to) aren’t anything to do with us. We blindly and stubbornly insist on the absolute validity of the ‘Thing-Based Paradigm’, even as it suffocates the very life out of us…






Image credit – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCpLWbHVNhk