False Perspective
We always think we have perspective on our situation but — as a rule — we don’t! When we think we have perspective (which is most of the time) we don’t; when — on the other hand — we see that we are lacking in perspective, then this perception is itself perspective. We’re only conscious when we ‘know that we don’t know’, therefore.
We could say the same in relation to freedom — if I believe myself to be free then this so-called freedom of mine is an illusion, a trick of the mind and nothing more, whilst if I’m aware that my perception of being free is only ‘a trick of the mind’ then this perception is itself a manifestation of freedom. In this case we are free from the pernicious illusion that we actually ‘know what’s going on’, which an illusion that is caused by lack of perspective, and can only by cured by the same.
To see the absence of freedom for what it is (to see our situation for what it is) is consciousness, we could say, and so consciousness is essentially the same thing as perspective, which is essentially the same thing as freedom. When we lose our perspective on things then we’re no longer to see the world as it really is — we no longer conscious, in other words. We’re disconnected. We’re caught up in a loop of thought without realizing it.
This isn’t just some vague ‘mystical’ concept, it’s a very particular thing, a very hard-edged technical thing. When we no longer have any perspective on things then the view which we end up with controls us — it determines everything about us, it determines us to the point where we know longer have any existence apart from it. The type of view of things that we have when we have no perspective is it ‘literal’ (or ‘flat’) view. The literal view means that there is only one right way to see the world; it means — as we could also say — that the description of the thing is functionally equivalent to the thing itself. We are never going to find anything in the tin that isn’t mentioned on the label; there are never going to be any surprises waiting for us when we open that tin, in other words. When we see the world without the benefit of perspective then this means that all we’re seeing are our own ideas, our own conceptual presumptions about what we’re looking at…
Saying that without perspective we can’t see beyond our models (since anything that disagrees with the theory or model automatically gets written off as error) is another way of saying that we are the prisoners of our theories, prisoners of our models, prisoners of our ideas, etc, and so we can make the link here between perspective and freedom and say that if we have no perspective on what we’re doing (or seeing) then we have no freedom. When we have zero freedom / perspective then we can’t see that we have no perspective, we can’t see that we have no freedom. Basically, without perspective we can’t see the difference between what is true and what isn’t — we’re completely at the mercy of whatever it presented to us. Or — as we could also say — when we have no perspective on the world then we simply can’t see that world. We’ll never see it. We’ll never see the truth because we’re too vulnerable to illusion; we’re never going to see the truth because we’re going to be swept off our feet by every bit of fake news going — that fake news is going to own us…
We could also talk about this blindness (or ‘gullibility’) of ours in terms of disguised tautology, which has to do with the way in which all sorts of different things are presented to us, or shown to us, that aren’t really different at all. We can’t see that the superficially-different scenarios which we are being presented to us are actually ‘the same old thing’, ‘the same old ding-dong’, being rehashed over and over again because we don’t have the perspective to see such a thing and we don’t have the perspective to see it because we’re only operating out of the one specified viewpoint, which doesn’t allow us to see the world in any different way ways. The whole point of the single VP (which is to say, ‘the External Authority’) is that it is exclusive rather than inclusive in nature, that doesn’t tolerate any other points of view. The EA doesn’t tolerate any competing POVs but it will all the same claim that it does (which is to say, it will claim to be non-judgemental and inclusive in nature) and this is where the ‘disguised tautology’ come is — the disguised tautology is what gives rise to the appearance of diversity where there is none. Because we think we are being presented with lots of different options, we take this to mean that we have freedom in the situation, when this isn’t at all the case. There’s no freedom if we only have the one choice, after all — there’s just the compelling illusion of it.
When we talk about the Literal World, the world that is made up entirely of concrete representations, the Decomplexified World, the consensus world that we all live in, then what we’re referring to here is simply the thinking mind’s idea of what the world is. The Literal World is thought’s projection and when we live in the LW then we’re living in the world that thought has made for us. The key thing to understand about this therefore is that there is no space between ‘the way that we have of looking at things’ and ‘the view that this viewpoint shows us’; ‘the viewpoint’ and ‘the view’ are one and the same thing, in other words. Similarly, our purposeful actions are prefigured by the outlook that gives rise to them. The concrete world, our purposeful actions within that world, and the fixed outlook that gave rise to both ‘our actions’ and ‘the environment within which these actions take place’ are all the same thing, so any naïve notion we might have of us being ‘free agents who are in charge of their own destiny’ is imagination pure and simple.
To say that our viewpoint, the actions that come out of this viewpoint, and the world that these purposeful actions take for granted are ‘one and the same thing’ has nothing to do with cosmic oneness which is another kettle of fish entirely. Cosmic Oneness — the alchemists’ unus mundus — is the situation we become aware of when all possible viewpoints are given equal validity. These viewpoints aren’t ‘in agreement’ with each other — they don’t follow on from the same premise — and so what we’re looking at here is an ‘infinitely complex situation’. It’s complex because it’s made up of innumerable unrelated facets, so to speak. We can’t collapse these facets without losing the Complex Whole; we can’t run them altogether (or stick them all under the same logical umbrella) without departing from reality itself. Either reality is seen in all its incomprehensible diversity (which is the situation where ‘everything is true and nothing is true’) or it is not seen at all. There are no half measures, no intermediate stages.
The strictly linear (or non-complex) situation that we were talking about (where the world only has the one facet, and everything does fall under the same umbrella of logic. The way this situation was produced was not by granting every possible VP equal significance, equal rating, but by randomly picking one and unceremoniously closing down all the rest. One vantage point is said to be ‘exclusively valid’ and all the others are automatically dismissed as being more mere noise, mere error. One way of looking at the world is compulsory whilst all other ways are forbidden, and this is how we produce the illusion of Positive Reality. We are attracted to the Literal or Concrete World just as a moth is attracted to a candle flame (or just as a fly is attracted to the inviting maw of the Venus Flytrap) precisely because of the great solidity and reliability that it seems to possess, and yet that very solidity which we are so enamoured of is nothing more than ‘redundancy in disguise’ as we have just said. It’s a predetermined situation — a situation in which stuff can only happen if it is ‘precedented’, only if it is ‘a faithful repeat of what has already occurred’. We can only think or say what we’re supposed to think, what we’re supposed to say.
In order for this setup to work for us — in order for us not to see through it — information has to be withheld. On the one hand we could say that we mustn’t be allowed to see that our viewpoint isn’t the only one (that there are actually no end of different VP‘s that would work every bit as well as the one that we are currently identified with) and on the other hand we could say that we can’t be allowed to know that the world we see and believe in so strongly is the result of whatever way we have of looking at it we have, and is not an independent reality. Both of these considerations come down to the same thing — to see that the concrete world which we derive so much reassurance from is the result of ‘a choice that we have randomly made’ is the same thing as seeing that ‘there are more possible viewpoints other the one that we happen to be currently utilising’. Perspective can never come from just having the one VP on things — in order to have this thing called ‘perspective’ we have to move away from just the one point of view, we have to depart from just the one belief system. We have to deviate from the norm, we have to rebel against the system, break the rules and — when it comes to how we see the world — this is something that we don’t even know to be possible. We don’t have the perspective to see that we don’t have any perspective and so we don’t even think of ‘rebelling’.
What we see when we don’t have any perspective has no relationship at all with what is actually there. It’s our own thing, our own construct, and has nothing to do with anything else. What we see as a result of our everyday, matter-of-fact view of the world is emphatically concrete, emphatically quantifiable, impractically tangible and this is misleading because reality as it is in itself is not concrete, is not quantifiable, is not in any way tangible. This is how we know stuff to be real — because of the presence of all of these parameters. We infer reality (or ‘the state of being real’) because of the lack of ambiguity in relation to what is being presented to us. We know something to be real because of its specificity (because ‘it is what it is and nothing else’), because of the fact that it fits so neatly into one evaluative category and not into any of the others. This lack of ambiguity tells us that the object under investigation must be a real thing and worthy of being taken seriously on this account.
These properties of being clearly defined, of being separate or distinct from everything else, of being what it is (or rather what it appears to be) and nothing else, has nothing to do with what is being investigated however but everything to do with our mode of investigation. We’re not seeing things ‘as they are’, but as our mode of perception presents them as being. What makes the world seem concrete and specific in the way that it does is our complete lack of perspective; it’s our lack of perspective that presents us from ever questioning anything, from ever examining anything — it is our grievous lack of perspective that keeps us prisoners in the mind’s simulation of reality, therefore. It makes the world we live in flat and literal — it makes it devoid of any intrinsic interest. Our LOP makes a blank world, a world that is nothing more than an echo of a bunch of second-hand thoughts (second-hand thoughts which are continually repeating themselves in our heads). The poverty of which we speak isn’t in the world itself but in our viewpoint; as we read in Saying 3 of the Gospel of Thomas — it’s not that we live in poverty, but rather that we are that poverty. We don’t see this impoverishment because we’ve nothing else to go on apart from our own ideas and the confirmation of these ideas in the outside world; we don’t miss what we have no conception of and so we can never see what the real ‘problem’ is. We haven’t a clue as to what the real problem is. We can’t see the utter impoverishment of the world we live in, the world that is made up of our endlessly recycled thoughts/images, because we ourselves are constructs of that world. This is what it means to have no perspective — it means we are trapped in illusion.
