This is a far trickier notion than it might at first appear, and it already appears to be tricky enough. I might take this notion on board, perhaps – but what would I do with it then? How would I act on this information? What possible use would it be to me? What advantages might there by in understanding this point? We’re always looking for the advantage, after all.
It turns out that just having this as a concept in our heads doesn’t help at all. We might think that it will but it doesn’t, and the reason for this is that purposeful action depends on thought and thought – by its very nature – has to see everything in terms of problems and solutions, disadvantages and advantages. In trying to solve a problem, thought is also creating it, therefore.
Naturally enough, this doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense to us – when we’re busy trying to fix a problem no one’s going to come up to us and tell us that we’re actually creating it, that we’re making a problem for ourselves that we don’t need to make. We’re just not receptive to that kind of insight! Our logic – which is to say linear logic – is simple: if a problem comes along then we fix it, and then the problem isn’t there anymore. Then ‘Bob’s your uncle’ – ‘problem solved’, we say. We can then get on with whatever it was we were getting on with before the unwanted interruption, we can resume our routine (whatever that might have been). ‘Problem solved’ is music to our ears. This is the way we like it, needless to say – the only interest we have in ‘problems’ is in getting rid of them. The ‘good’ thing about this way of seeing things (the ‘fixing way’) is not only that it is ‘super-easy to understand’ but also that it promises relief from whatever difficulty it is that we are involved in. As far as ‘powerful selling points’ go, this simply can’t be beaten…
The ‘not-so-good thing’ however is that reality isn’t linear and so if we treat it as if it were then we just end up going around in circles. We ‘loop’, we ‘vibrate on the spot’, we ‘take one step forward and another step back’. In short, we get stuck in a big fat self-contradiction – the contradiction in question being that the solution equals the problem. Reality (or as David Bohm puts it, the ‘implicate order’) is always nonlinear – it can’t be neatly distributed (or arranged) around various abstract axes; it can’t be measured or compartmentalised, it can’t be understood in terms of a causal sequence of events. The physical aspect of the universe however (which Bohm calls the ‘explicate order’)is linear, is contained within a deterministic framework, and so this is what confuses us. The universe we find ourselves in has two radically different modalities that it exists in – the explicate and the implicate, the aspect where stuff is linear (or spread out along a number of axes), and the hidden aspect, which is where there is no separation of one thing from another, where nothing can be considered separately. The hidden aspect of reality is the higher the aspect where ‘everything is in everything’. This is the pleroma that Jung speaks of. The former aspect is therefore the ‘collapsed’ (or informationally degraded) version of the original.
What this means is that in everyday, ‘outwardly-directed’ life it is perfectly legitimate to fix those problems that we can (those problems that are fixable); hence, if my car breaks down then I’ll take it to a mechanic to get it fixed (which means that I will be able to then drive it again). Job done! This is linear paradigm. In the linear, everyday world I can’t sue the mechanic who fixed the problem with my car for having simultaneously created it. The case would be thrown out; I would be a laughing stock and I would also undoubtedly face a fine for wasting the court’s time. In the non-linear world however, things could not be more different – in the NLW purposeful or goal-driven activity rebounds instantaneously on us. We ‘get what we wanted the price of what we don’t want’, and this is the self-contradiction that we have been talking about, this is the paradox. This is the ‘contradictoriness of finite play’, as James Carse puts it.
The ancient alchemists – who were wise in the ways of paradox – used to say ‘Congratulations and condolences’. This was their greeting; this is what they had to say on the matter (baffling as this nuance inevitably will be to our poor ‘one-trick’ mind. All positive existence is duplex in this way; all PE folds back on itself in this way – all positive existence (which is to say, form) is a circle! All positive existence is an illusion and the only reason we don’t see it as such is because we can only be aware of one half of the circle at any one time. This is J.G. Bennett’s ‘opposite blindness’. We see a flat surface rather than a portion of positively curved space, which is what we would see if we weren’t ‘suffering from opposite blindness’, if we if we weren’t ‘functioning according to the bias of thought’.
‘Positively carved space’ isn’t space at all, of course – it doesn’t have any generosity to it, we might say; it isn’t generous inasmuch as whatever it appears to give it takes away again later on. PCS puts on a show for us, that’s all; nothing ever happens in it, but we get taken in all the same so that we think stuff can happen andis happening. Everything that is apparently happening in Positive Space is subject to the Law of Self-Cancellation, which is another way of saying that all events are predetermined (since all events follow the law and if an event is predetermined, determined in all aspects right from the very onset then there is no event). When we talk in terms of ‘an event’ then we’re talking about something different happening – if there isn’t anything new there (but merely the cheap trick of ‘repeating the old’) then how can we talk in terms of ‘events’?
The acting out of a rule is not an event. The enactment of a rule isn’t anything. Positive space is a rule (as we’ve just said) and so ‘the acting out of PS’ isn’t an event. The acting out of the rule (the rule which equals PS) is a virtual event, we might say; everything that happens in PS is a virtual event. Positive reality is like the capitalist system – we are given the opportunity to earn money only to have that money taken off us again shortly after with added interest. ‘Your money goes back to the rich,’ says Kevin Ayres. We think we’re ‘in with a chance to win’ (a chance to benefit ourselves) but this is a ridiculous delusion – ‘the house always wins’, after all. Our heroic efforts (in terms of ‘running the treadwheel’) benefits the system, not us. We’re the mugs here, we are the suckers…
We might perhaps imagine that if we can amass so much money so that we ourselves become the bank then all the money in the game will come back to us, but this doesn’t work either. This is the billionaire game, and this is more traditionally called ‘selling our soul to the devil’. The more successful we are in this game the more we become the system; the more we adapt to the game the less authentic (or real) we are in ourselves. For virtual currency to seem real (and afford us the satisfaction we want) we have to be subsumed by the system. Since not his sense in order to be able to perceive the currency as being something real, something that actually can benefit us we need to be blind to the fact that ex, and if we are blind to the fact that positively curved space isn’t a flat surface then we have set ourselves up to be hoodwinked by the mechanism on a permanent basis. We’ve opted to be the legitimate and rightful prey of the great predator. The coin we’re selling our soul for belongs to Caesar, not us.
The reason we see positively curved space as being ‘a flat plane surface stretching out forever in all directions’ is because we don’t have the necessary perspective to see the true picture. We don’t have access to that information. Entropy (i.e., ‘what we don’t know and don’t know that we don’t know’) is the secret ingredient here that keeps the wheel turning therefore entropy is why we perceive positively curved space as being a flat plain surface that stretches off equally in all directions. The difference between the two scenarios is not trivial – the difference between the two is the difference between what’s real and what’s not real, what’s true and what’s imagination!
When we talk about entropy we’re talking about one-sidedness – we focus on the striving part and all the stuff that goes with it the mindset, the hype, the conditioning, the various mechanisms to facilitate and optimize our striving, and by doing this we assume that the universe is going to somehow play ball with us. Our idea of the world overpowers the world itself, in other words. The action of grasping creates the illusion that there is something there to be grasped, something there whichcan be grasped. Because we are focused entirely on the logic of purposeful striving we can’t help thinking that the world in which has striving is taking place must be congruent to this paradigm and that it must necessarily reciprocate therefore. We are projecting our thinking out onto the world as if it naturally belongs there, as if there couldn’t possibly be any other way for things to be and we are as a result alienated from everything apart from this artificial scheme of things.
If I buy then the universe must be selling, in other words (and vice versa). The notion that there is neither buying nor setting never arises – if I am buying then the universe must be selling, and if I’m selling then it must be buying. It works just the same both ways. This makes perfect sense to us and so we never stop to look into it; if we did pause to examine our supposed premise then we’d see that buying create selling at the same time that selling creates buying. We’d see that the one is the perfect reflection of the other. This is deeply suspicious because what it implies is that we’re not ‘honestly looking out at the world’ in the way that we think we are, but that we’re seeing our own implicit expectations reflected back at us in such a way that we’re naively assume we’re seeing a view that is open rather than closed, in a way that isn’t our own unexamined expectations reflected mechanically back at us. We naively believe that we’re seeing something that is actually there, in other words (and not a projected reality, not a false reality that we assume without checking.
This closure is bound to happen just so long as we have any kind of expectation with regard with what there is to see. Any form of organisation (or system) we use to enable us to decipher incoming information will inevitably close down a world for us. Whenever we have an idea or belief or theory we will always have that idea / belief / theory reflected back at us to close us down, to put us in a box. If there’s any certainty inside us at all then that certainty will jinx us, trap us, delude us, lead us around in sterile circles. And yet we cannot abide the lack of certainty, we cannot deal with it. We have zero negative capacity, as Keats says. We cannot bear the challenge of openness. If there’s anything at all that we’re ‘sure about’ then this will collapse the whole show. The information content of our subjective world will instantly plummet to zero in this case. Every last trace of radical uncertainty has been eliminated from the picture, which means we are the ‘slaves of logic’ and logic – contrary to what we believe – never goes anywhere. Logic is the deadest thing there is…
Image credit – jigidi.com