Unreal Worlds
The worlds we create for ourselves with our thinking are unreal worlds. They have no depth to them; they are wholly superficial. However grand. however splendid it all might seem (and it can seem very grand, very imposing, very splendid) if there isn’t any depth to it then there isn’t anything to it. Depth is all, depth is everything. ‘Depth’ is reality itself.
If there isn’t any depth to the set-up that we are living within then that means that there isn’t anything beyond the bare description. It sounds rather bizarre — to say the least — to say that we live in ‘a superficial-type world that doesn’t run any deeper than the description we have of it’; it doesn’t even sound possible and yet this is exactly this case, this is exactly how it is we live in the Nominal World, the world that is made up of the name of things, the idea of things, the description of things. This is precisely our situation and if this sounds bizarre then that’s because it is.
We might ask why it is — if this is the case — we never become aware of this ridiculous hollowness? We might ask why we never spot it, why this particular awareness never comes along to ‘spoil our fun’, so to speak. We don’t notice the poverty of the peculiar two-dimensional situation that we’re caught up in; we pay no attention to perceptions that don’t fit into narrow parameters of what we would consider ‘right and proper’ and so we just don’t have any idea that there is (or could be) anything else but this. When we can’t disregard these unexpected perceptions then we will reinterpret them as being erroneous, aberrant, pathological, and so on. Anything rather than take them at full value, anything rather than take on board information that would necessitate us letting go of our nice secure worldview. When we are put in a situation where we have to deal with a view of our situation which is completely incongruent with our established understanding then we are obliged to categorise our experience as being psychotic, as being out of touch with reality, as being dangerously out of whack. The one thing that doesn’t occur to us is that it might be our current way of understanding the world that is out of work. This is the one thing that is never going to occur to us — we would do anything rather than let go of our habitual viewpoint — letting go of the way we have of looking at things is something that we have maximum resistance to.
So on the one hand we can say that we’re going to reject unconditionally any intimations that come our way regarding the profoundly distorted nature of our understanding of reality (and to say that our understanding is ‘distorted’ is putting it mildly), and on the other hand we need to make the point that for 99.99% of the time we won’t have any intimation whatsoever that our picture of the world is suspect. In terms of being fooled by some sort of cheap show, we can say that we are 100% fooled, completely fooled, absolutely fooled. The whole point is that we get completely fooled — the manoeuvre wouldn’t work otherwise. If depth is to be excluded at all then it has to be excluded completely — there can’t be any traces of it left. If there were any traces of this quality left then we would know that there is such a thing, we would know that depth exists, and if we knew this then we would no longer be able to take the fake worlds that thought produces seriously anymore. If there is such a thing as depth then there can’t be such a thing as ‘Positive Reality’ (Positive Reality being the type of reality that we can exhaustively describe, the type of reality which we are able to understand by using the instrument of the thinking mind). As soon as we admit to the existence of ‘irreducible mystery’ the nature of what we think we know changes irrevocably and we’re forced to admit that the world we thought we knew, we don’t actually know at all.
‘Depth’ simply means that there is some part of reality that is beyond our power to describe, beyond our power to model (or analogize) with thought. We have a description of whatever it is, and this description might seem to be complete, but what depth means is that it never is going to be complete. The description is never going to be equal to the thing and — this being the case — the knowledge we have (of whatever it is that is being investigated) is only ever going to be relatively true. The knowledge we have is true only to the extent that our models are valid (or complete) but the thing here is that they never can be — our descriptions never can be final and so we don’t actually know anything after all. Our knowledge isn’t really knowledge at all it’s only ‘provisional knowledge’ (which is to say, it’s knowledge we have to be prepared to unceremoniously let go of at any moment, without any advance notice, because there’s no guarantee that it’s true). To allow ourselves to get attached to what we think we know would be a disaster of the highest order therefore — the more intensely we might crave the feeling of ontological security that comes from believing in our own ideas, our own concepts, our own mental constructs, the more painful this is ultimately going to prove for us. The sense of security we so desperately want can only come about if our knowledge about things is final (which is to say, if we’re sure we won’t ever have to let go of our way of looking at the world). We need to believe that our picture of the world is absolutely true therefore — nothing else will do. For us to see our knowledge as being ‘merely provisional’ is no good to us (security-wise), and neither is it any good for us to see our models of the world as being quintessentially metaphorical in nature. There’s no ontological security to be found in metaphors…
When we live in a Positive Reality — which is a reality that can be understood completely from top-to-bottom, a reality that corresponds exactly to our descriptions of it — then there’s no depth, not even the tiniest hint of it. There can’t be (as we have just said) if there is any bit of depth in the Positive Reality then the illusion just won’t work. Thought can’t create depth, and neither can it operate when there is depth anywhere near it; thought can only function in ‘the world that it itself has made’ and this world (naturally enough!) has no real existence of its own, no independent existence outside of itself. To call the Thought-Created World superficial is to give it too much credit therefore — a better way of putting it would be to say that it has ‘no relationship whatsoever to actual reality’. The only type of reality that the Thought-Created World has is the self-referential type — thought’s positive statements are only ‘real’ in relation to the rules of interpretation that we ourselves have to put in place. Thought’s statements are real because the rules that we have put in place make them seem real and so when we forget (as we do forget) that the rules are our own gimmick then everything comes across as being totally genuine and above board. The Mind-Created Virtual Reality comes into existence as a result of us ‘having amnesia with regards to our own manoeuvre’, therefore. No matter how deeply immersed in the mind’s reality we might be however that doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to the fact that this is all is an exercise in self-referentiality, as we have said. The MCVR is a bucket full of holes — stuff falls through the bottom of the bucket just as soon as we put it in. No real events can happen in the Stated Reality, no matter how emphatically we might state that this is the case. Or — as we might also say — nothing real can ever happen in a simulation, no matter how ‘realistic’ that simulation might be.
We might quote Alan Watts here –
The greater part of human activities designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.
Only that which changes can be real, we might say. Or, in James Carse’s words,
Only that which can change can continue: this is the principle by which infinite players live.
Although no real events can occur in a formal system, we don’t appreciate this stark fact. Because of the way in which are completely contained within the formal system: [1] we can’t see beyond this containment, and [2] we can’t see that there actually is any containment going on. We have in other words no perspective on the matter and because we have no perspective on the matter we are compelled to accept whatever we’re being presented with as being unquestionably true. We started off this discussion by noting that ‘the nature of depth’ isn’t like ‘the nature of a two-dimensional appearance’ and we made the point that the former cannot be inferred by the latter. This means that if we live in a world that is made up of two-dimensional surfaces, (I.e., the Image World) then depth has no meaning to us. Because depth is a meaningless concept to us we don’t have any awareness of the lack of depth in the Mind-Created Virtual Reality — we simply don’t register this deficit (even though — as we keep saying — ‘lack of depth’ is the very same thing as ‘lack of reality’). Contrarywise, when we do have awareness of depth then ‘the worlds that have been made by thought’ no longer have the power to limit us — they no longer have the power to contain us within their unreal boundaries.
Another way to understand this is in terms of ‘transparency’ versus ‘opacity’ and state that no matter how diligently we may study the opaque, we will never gain any insight into the nature of transparency. The reason ‘opaque’ gets to be opaque is because it blocks out all the light, whereas ‘transparent’ gets to be transparent because it doesn’t do so, because it lets the light through, and so all we’re saying here is that ‘the absence of the phenomenon can’t tell us anything about the actual nature of the phenomenon’ (which is something no one’s going to argue about). What we do argue about — when we are ‘Denizens of the Darkened Realm’ — is the existence of light in the first place. Rationality doesn’t acknowledge the existence of light — it can only acknowledge what can be defined, what can be measured, what can be detected etc. It can only acknowledge the shadows which it itself has created. Rationality doesn’t (and can’t) acknowledge the existence of depth (‘depth’ indicating that there is something there that we can’t learn about with our trusty measuring stick) — it only recognises what we have been calling ‘the Opaque’ (which is to say, it only recognizes the light-blocking two-dimensional surfaces which it itself produces). To quote Marcus Aurelius –
What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.
Thought thus creates its own (darkened) Kingdom by ‘saying what things are’. If we didn’t have a nominated authority to say what things are then there would be no Kingdom, there would be no territory; instead, there would just be endlessness, there would be what was there before we started dividing things up, before we started slapping limits on everything. We can’t say anything about ‘what was there before we started interfering’ (before we started imposing our own game plan on reality) but we can say lots and lots about what came after (which is to say, we can say lots and lots about the two-dimensional worlds that we have created by allowing the thinking mind off the leash to ‘do its thing’). We have obtained exhaustive knowledge of the Stated Reality, but this so-called ‘knowledge’ doesn’t mean a damn because ‘knowing a reality that we ourselves have stated’ (or ‘created’) is just not a legitimate thing — it’s not an accomplishment to create a Formal World (which is a description of a world that passes itself off as a world) and then to claim ‘positive knowledge’ of it, as if we hadn’t created it. To talk in terms of having knowledge of a domain where ‘the description equals the thing’ is obviously redundant since ‘the describing of the Formal Realm’ is the same thing as ‘the knowing of it’; by saying that we ‘have knowledge of’ the domain instead of being upfront and admitting that it’s our own private construct and nothing more we are facilitated in making our escape from reality (which is what the conditioned life is really all about).
When we conveniently forget that the Formal Realm is our own construct (which means that there is therefore nothing in it that we ourselves haven’t put in it) then a false version of freedom is created. We’re ‘free to operate within an unreal world’ and the only way this is going to work is if we don’t see it to be unreal, if we don’t see that the world we’re relating to is our own construct (which is to say, ‘something that we ourselves have put in place’). I can’t enjoy the illusion of freedom and at the same time know that I am ‘wholly contained within a mental construct’ but when I sell myself the story that it isn’t a construct, that it isn’t ‘my own projection’ then the payoff is that I get to believe that I am indeed ‘free’, which makes my (conditioned) existence seem meaningful to me. My actions within the conditioned reality (within the game) seem real to me only for as long as I am able to avoid seeing that the conditioned reality is only a conditioned reality, only for as long as I am able to avoid seeing that the game is only a game… Illegitimately shrinking the universe down to the size of ‘a single specific viewpoint’ puts us in a position where we are now able to make statements that are ‘definitely true’ — this is — moreover — the ONLY way we can do this. If there were any other angles ‘out there’ that might also be valid then this means that there is the possibility of there being extra perspective out there which we don’t currently have access to, which would throw doubt on all the assumptions that we have happily been sitting on up to this point. Our neat-and-tidy view of things would then be thrown into total chaos and that’s not what we want. We want order, not chaos.
The setup where our angle on the world just happens to be ‘the one and only possible angle’ will allow me to come up with a definitely true statement (which is exactly what I want) but only at the price of there also being a statement which is every bit as definite, but which also totally contradicts the original statement. We now have a world that is made up of absolute values (which gives us all the ontological security we could ever possibly want) but — at the same time — it flatly contradicts that security, which isn’t what we want! We get ‘what we want’ and ‘what we don’t want’ at the same time therefore, and the only way out of this is to take the bit that we want and ignore the other bit. In order to continue with the game we have to turn a blind-eye to the paradox inherent in all logical assertions, and this is exactly what we do. This inability to see the paradoxicality that is inherent in all definite statements (and all purposeful actions) corresponds to Jung’s ‘one-sidedness’). Without this one-sidedness we wouldn’t be able to make any definite statements about the world; with it however everything we see is an illusion. One-sidedness means that we can only ever see one half of the picture at any one time (we can either see the [+] or the [-]). PLUS and MINUS don’t have any existence of their own, however — there is no isolated PLUS and no isolated MINUS, what we have in the real world is ‘PLUS/MINUS’ or ‘MINUS/PLUS’, which is a closed circuit that we can’t ever transcend.
Nothing is definite in an Open Universe — it’s not possible to make any sort of ‘objectively true’ statement. There are no ‘facts’ for us to grab hold of. In an Open Universe there is always the possibility of ‘extra perspective’ suddenly coming into the picture and so if we don’t want the uncertainty that comes with this then we are obliged to live in the Closed Universe instead (the ‘Closed Universe’ being the universe that is created by our one-sided thinking. In the Closed Universe what we have instead of ‘openness’ is a non-terminating sequence of absolutes (YES followed by NO followed by YES, etc) and although we think we’re getting somewhere (for the most part) we aren’t because the absolute we’re attached to, the absolute we’re so very fond of, is the very same thing as the absolute which we’re averse to, the absolute that we are always doing our best to get away from…
