Control Is Our God
Control is our God. When we see something that we like then we exercise control so as to enable us to obtain it. When we come across something that we don’t like, something that we don’t value, then we exercise control in order to avoid it. We don’t see any problem with this but there is a problem all the same, the problem being that exerting control locks us into a closed system. Exerting control plunges us into a morass of meaninglessness that we can’t see as such.
Control is our God, without any doubt, but the problem with this is that nothing that happens as the result of control is real. We control for one reason and one reason only, and that is to obtain the outcome we want, the outcome we have specified as being the ‘right’ one; to be told that nothing that happens as a result of control is real is completely incomprehensible to us, therefore. Rational thought — which is what gives rise to control — can’t make any sense of this.
When we exercise control then this activity inevitably locks us into a closed system, as we have just said, and ‘being locked into a closed system’ means that we can’t see out of it, it means we can’t see beyond it. When we can’t see what lies beyond the system then this means that we can no longer see it to be a system — instead we take it to be ‘the Whole of Everything’. Closed systems always misrepresent themselves as being ‘the Whole of Everything’. This is what being ‘closed’ means, after all — it means that nothing is acknowledged as existing outside of that system. It means nothing is acknowledged other than ‘what has already been defined as real’, or ‘what has already been stated as being the case’. Thought tells us what is real and so anything it doesn’t tell us simply doesn’t figure in our world view. We can’t know about it.
A closed system — by definition — is always going to be isolated from whatever lies outside of it. There simply is no outside as far as this closed VP is concerned — the outside doesn’t exist for us when we take up the viewpoint of the closed system and this is why statements that are made on this basis aren’t just seen as being ‘meaningful’ (when they aren’t) but absolutely meaningful (i.e., meaningful in such a way that they can’t ever be questioned). The statements we make on the basis of a logical system are meaningful only in relation to this viewpoint, but the thing about this is that the viewpoint itself is only valid because the system says that it is. The closed system is a loop of logic that feeds on itself.
There is a principle at work here that we know nothing of and this principle is clearly articulated in this verse taken from the Gospel of Thomas [Saying 61] –
I am the one who comes from what is whole. I was granted from the things of my father… For this reason I say, if one is whole one is full of the light, and if divided one is full of darkness.
In order to see anything that is true we have to be able to see the whole picture. In Wholeness there is light as the verse quoted above indicates. When the world is divided, on the other hand (and we don’t know that it is) then there is nothing but darkness.
Darkness — we might say — is ‘ignorance the existence of which we are ignorant’; darkness equates to false knowledge, in other words, and false knowledge is the only type of knowledge we’re ever going to have when we’re operating within a closed system. As we have said, a closed system — by its very nature — is always going to falsely represent is itself as being ‘the whole truth’ and for this reason we are never going to come across the light. Light is an alien concept to us. There is no light in the closed system, there is no light in the worlds that are created by thought.
When we’re looking at the world from the viewpoint of thought then there’s nothing but illusion. Because of our inability to see beyond the closed system that we’re trapped in arrogance arises. Thought is always arrogant. Hence, we read in the Gnostic text The Hypostasis of the Archons that the blind god Samael (otherwise known as the Demiurge) cries out — ‘It is I who am God; there is no one none apart from me.’
We can equate the blind god Samael with the ubiquitous thinking mind since the thinking mind operates by automatically excluding everything that doesn’t fit in with its own way of seeing things. The rational mind works on the basis of logic and logic is always ‘blind’ — logic is always blind because the only way it gets to work as logic is by: [1] Excluding everything that contradicts its basic axioms, and then [2] Ignoring the fact that it is doing this. Logic is the blind god we worship in everyday life.
‘Thought creates divisions within itself and then says that they were already there’, David Bohm observes. Thought creates divisions in the world therefore, and claims that they really are there (and not just ‘something that has been invented by itself for purposes of its own’). There are no divisions in the world however — that’s thought’s device. Thought cannot operate outside of the closed system that it (necessarily) assumes and yet there’s no such thing as ‘a closed system’. There’s no such thing as a ‘closed system’ in reality and that’s why thought has to invent it.
Because there are no divisions in the world (because there are no divisions in reality) when we fall for the story that there are these divisions, that there are these all-important boundaries, then we live ‘in shadow’ — we live in an artificial world in which there is no light. There is no light in the darkened world that thought creates for us to inhabit, and neither do we have any awareness that this is the case. To have awareness that there is such a thing as ‘the light’ is the light. To be aware of the absence of light is the light. Awareness is ‘the light’.
The possibility of having control over what’s going on is our only comfort when we exist within the limited world that thought has provided for us. Control is our mainstay, control is our ‘answer to everything’, control is ‘what it’s all about’, and yet the only thing that really matters in life (which is going beyond all artificial boundaries) is something that thought can never help us with. Thought can never help us go beyond the boundaries that it itself has put in place. It can never help us to ‘transcend the illusion’ because it itself is the illusion.
Psychology isn’t a new science, contrary to what we have been told. Ancient texts such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Hypostasis of the Archons are full of psychology, only this is psychology that contains wisdom rather than just reams of ‘empty cleverness’. Contemporary psychology seeks to erase everything that came before it in order to allow it to proceed unchallenged along its own dismally narrow lines. Contemporary psychology is based on thought and so it doesn’t have the capacity to go beyond thought. It doesn’t see the need to go beyond thought. It can’t show us the Big Picture — it can only show us the little picture, it can only show us the ‘fragmented view’ which is a faithful reflection of the arbitrary limitation that it takes for granted, the arbitrary limitation that it cannot ever question.
Because all we know is thought (because all we know is logic) we are as blind as thought is, as blind as logic is. This blindness (or ignorance) causes problems because we’re always acting on an incomplete basis that we don’t know to be incomplete. We’re not seeing the full picture and so everything we do rebounds on us. By trying to solve problems we create yet more problems. To quote Krishnamurti –
Thinking is limited because it is based on knowledge, on experience and so on memory, so knowledge can never be complete about anything. Right? And so our thinking is limited. And that thinking creates the problems and our brains are trained to solve the problems which thought has created and so it is caught in this cycle.
Since our rationally-orientated psychology never goes beyond thought, it cannot help us with the problems that have been created by thought, and — instead — it compounds them. We get into trouble — mental health-wise — by relying on control and ‘management’ instead of taking the risk (the risk which is life itself) — this is the very essence of neurosis. Instead of seeing this, we respond with yet more controlling, yet more ‘management’, and we take the position that this is the right thing to do, the scientific thing to do. Control is the answer to everything, we say — it’s even the answer to the problems that it itself has caused…
