If there is any continuity at all then that means there’s nothing happening – if there’s a logical continuity then this means that reality itself has collapsed into its inverse. ‘Space’ has collapsed into ‘rules’, the ‘meal’ has turned into the ‘menu’, the ‘real thing’ has turned into ‘the token’. This is what continuity always means – it means this and nothing else.

There’s no continuity to anything and there never was. Nothing continues, even though we are very much subject to the illusion that stuff persists. The appearance of persistence doesn’t mean that there actually is something that persists – what could that be, after all? There is no evidence of there being something there that has extension in time, and it is actually unnecessary to hypothesize that there is.

There are only appearances and nothing else. It’s not that there is some concrete phenomenon of one sort or another which can then appear one way or another but rather that they are appearances and that there is never anything behind them. We could also talk in terms of regularity and unique events, in which case we would say that regularity is an appearance that has nothing behind it. Regularity as a phenomenon seems to exist, but it doesn’t. Seriality doesn’t exist and yet – as Wei Wu Wei says here – it’s all we care about –

All our actions are serial, all our thoughts are serial, all our functions function in seriality; we neither know nor do anything that is not subject to the sequence of time. Even God, although called ‘Eternal’, is seen as everlasting.

Our normal way of envisaging things is to say that there are both unique events and regular (or ‘repetitive’) events and that if a unique event is reproduced it then straightaway becomes a regularity. This is the conventional viewpoint on the matter. What we’re saying here however is that the original unique event can’t be transformed into regularities because regularity doesn’t exist. Regularity, obviously enough, is nothing more than informational redundancy. Reality doesn’t operate by dint of copying itself, it doesn’t get to exist by extending itself, reproducing itself. Reality – Krishnamurti tells us – is always new. It can’t be ‘not new’ and yet still be real. Copies or duplicates exist only in the world of illusion.

Repetition, which is to say – the extension or projection of some ‘thing’ that is already there – isn’t how reality works; it’s not that there is this ‘thing’ that gets to carry on, and that this ‘thing’ has to be in some way maintained, but rather that reality isn’t any sort of ‘thing’ at all. We can understand this ‘lack of thingness’ more clearly by considering space – space (we might say) is a situation where there is a total lack of prejudice or expectation with regard to that is going to happen next! Precedents doesn’t exist in space, in other words…

We are looking at two paradigms here, therefore. The paradigm we are familiar with – familiar to the point of not knowing that there is or could be anything else – is the positive one, which is all about maintaining and promoting what we already have (or rather what we think we already have). We push the positive paradigm into service for all aspects of life, we apply it across the board for the simple reason that we have no comprehension whatsoever of the negative. This attitude is a function of what Jung calls our ‘one-sidedness’.

The positive paradigm has to do with ‘holding on’, therefore – we hold on to whatever it is we think we have so that we can keep on repeating it, which we will do for ever and ever if we can get away with it. We can relate this to the ‘coagulation’ phase of the alchemical process, which in terms of psychological orientation can be handily referred to as ‘Conservative Mode’. It’s Conservative Mode because we’ve got something that we think is worth conserving! We could also say that this situation corresponds to the everyday state of ‘egoic’ or ‘identity-centric’ existence, where we very much feel that we do have something that is worth conserving (or at least, something that we are very frightened of not conserving).

As we have said, we are so very used to this modality of existence, this mode of being, that we can’t imagine there could be anything else. We all believe that egoic existence is the only type of existence there is. We can refer to the state of affairs as ‘the continuum of self’, therefore – in this modality all we can look back on is the self, all we can envisage ahead of us is the self, and everything we perceive in the present is also perceived in terms of the self. This is the continuum of self, which is also the continuum of thought, and this is the only type of existence we know…
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We will of course assert, with absolute crushing conviction, that this is the only type of existence there is (we won’t even bother to say this because it’s just too obvious a thing to say) and we will hang on to it on this account. We will hang onto it for dear life – why wouldn’t we hang onto it, after all, given that this is our perception? This is where the ‘twist in the tale’ comes in however – this is where the twist in the tale comes in because we’ve got it all backwards. The ‘twist’ is of course that continuum of thought isn’t a real thing and so what we’re clinging to so very stubbornly isn’t actually there. What’s ‘real’ isn’t anything we think or have thought, what’s real is the unexpected, the unpredictable, the unforeshadowed, the uncaused…

This is incomprehensible to us from our usual way of looking at things; it just doesn’t make any sense to us and the reason it doesn’t make any sense is because we’re looking at everything from the point of view of thought, which can only see the world in terms of regularities. We very rarely appreciate this about the thinking process, but the point here is that unless there is a category for something then we can’t think about it, and categories by their very nature are a generic type of thing. Thought is therefore ‘a machine for turning everything into regularity’ – it ‘minces’ everything, we could say. Anything non-generic will be screened out because it won’t fit into any of the slots that we insist it should fit into. The only world we see is the Generic World therefore, the GW being the world that is organised by our concepts, by our categories, our thoughts.

What this means is that we exist in a world that is strictly second-hand, a world that is made up entirely of repeats or copies. The same basic organising framework is put into action time and time again, anything that can’t be fit into the framework won’t get through, and the result of this is that the world we live in is a logical continuity, which is something – as we started off this discussion by saying – is something which isn’t actually real. It’s only an artefact. The world of regularities – the Generic World – is easy to get the hang of – we are able to adapt to it or adjust to it without any apparent problem, but the twist here is that this process of adaption, helpful as it may seem in the short term (as Jung says), is also the process of disengaging from reality.

When we say that the world we subjectively seem to live in is ‘a logical continuity’ then what we are saying is that it’s a world which is formed from the output of rules. With regard to the thinking mind, and the world which it creates for us, we can say that we will never, in this closed domain, encounter anything that is not the output of certain rules, and this is just another way of saying that the whole shebang is nothing but one big fat tautology – hard though it is for us to grasp this. It’s an insubstantial soap bubble that made up of mind-produced abstractions. The material universe also obeys laws of course – as we know – so does this mean that the physical world is a big fat tautology too? Is everything a ‘soap bubble’?

Going back one hundred and fifty years or so years most (if not all) physicists would have said that the physical universe is purely ‘the output of rules’; this being what the Mechanistic Worldview is all about. The Newtonian Universe runs on rules, of course. Now – however – we know that Newton’s laws are valid only for a subset of the whole, not the whole itself, and this puts a very different complexion on matters. We move into an altogether more mysterious universe, which is the relativistic one. Rule-based processes occur in the world run on rules but underlying this rule-based activity there are no rules. Rules are always contained within the greater context of ‘rule-lessness’. ‘There is no rule saying that there has to be a rule’, as James Carse says.

Rulelessness is something we can’t even think about – there’s no way to think about a world that doesn’t run on rules (there’s no way to think about that because rules are the only thing that thought can understand). The rational mind has exactly zero capacity to relate to anything that isn’t the output of a rule based-process; the lack of rules is an evil that we call chaos, an evil that the ancient Greeks knew as apeiron. This is looking at things from the point of view of the thinking mind of course – what the lack of rules actually means is simply freedom. We can’t know what freedom ‘is’ (even though we fondly imagine that we can), we can only say what it isn’t, and what it isn’t is ‘anything to do with rules’.

The most famous regularity is of course that rule-based phenomenon which we call the self and this is why we are so devoted to the linearity. This is why we are constantly either ‘planning’ or ‘looking back over the past’ – because that’s the only way we can maintain this most important of all illusions! We’re bound up in the straitjacket of the continuum of thought and – as cramped and suffocating as this might be – it is not a garment that we can ever divest ourselves of. We’re bound to wear it – what we have here is ‘a dress code that we simply can’t break’! Unless we are constantly dwelling upon the past (either euphorically or dysphorically), anticipating the future (either excitedly or anxiously) and ‘seeing the present moment in terms of who we think we are’ (in terms of either ‘good’ or ‘bad’), then there will be no more perception of this thing we call ‘the self’. Reviewing the past and anticipating the future are both ways of projecting a sense of familiarity on the world, a sense of familiarity that isn’t really there. Projecting our thinking (which is based exclusively on self-reference) onto the screen of the present does exactly this, of course. By constantly ‘projecting’ we create a cosy, familiar situation for ourselves – a cosy, familiar situation that exists nowhere outside of the mind-created simulation…



Art – pinterest.ie