www.radicaluncertainty.com

Author: Nicholas Williams

3: CONTEXTUAL CONTAINMENT

We have been exploring the idea that thinking has a pragmatically decomplexifying effect on the system of [ME + THE UNIVERSE]. This means that thought makes us see things in a simple way, even though nothing is ever simple really. We also expressed this idea in terms of radical versus trivial uncertainty by saying that mind, which is to say, exclusive or Aristotelian logic, cannot function where there is radical uncertainty. This means that we have to veil our own intrinsic freedom from ourselves, and operate in a realm of extrinsic freedom, which is freedom within strictly defined limits. A less wordy approach would be to say that thinking contains us, and it is this idea of ‘mental containment’ that we are now going to look at.

BREAKING THE PERFECT SYMMETRY OF ‘NOT KNOWING’

If I think about something, then this is the overt action. Accompanying this overt or visible action is the covert action of ‘perspective reduction’ that always happens when I look at the world in a particular way. On the face of it there is a ‘plus,’ an increase in knowledge; and accompanying this apparent gain there is a hidden debit, an unnoticed loss of freedom. John Horgan (1996, p 228) quotes Stuart Kauffman as saying the following at a workshop on ‘limitology’: “To be is to classify is to act, all of which means throwing away information. So just the act of knowing requires ignorance.” This comment, Horgan noted, had the effect of ‘simultaneously impressing and annoying Kauffman’s audience,’ and one might expect a similar response from anyone who is rudely confronted with the idea that you can’t know something without incurring a corresponding debt of ignorance. All the same, the principle is sound. In order to know something I have to slot incoming information into my mental categories, I have to match my concepts to the world. I can’t do this, however, without disregarding all the information that doesn’t happen to correlate with my categories - this is what happens when one classifies stuff, there is an inevitable loss of information at the end of the process because the information obtained reflects the ‘rules of classification’ used to order it. If there was any other form of order hidden in the raw information it has now been lost forever, since there is no way to ‘reverse-deduce’ it from the processed information.

Looking at the world in a particular way, we may say, means operating within a specific context. We can think about this in terms of ‘sliding down the information gradient’ - as soon as I assume a context for viewing the world, then a break in cognitive symmetry takes place. This sounds a bit technical but it is perfectly straightforward: beforehand there was no RIGHT WAY and no WRONG WAY to look at stuff, there were no ‘rules for reality interpretation.’ This ‘rule-less’ state is the state of perfect symmetry, where all directions are the same. Because all directions are the same, this actually does away with the idea of directionality altogether, since ONE WAY only makes sense in comparison the ANOTHER WAY. Where there is a state of unbroken symmetry like this, the information content of the system is said to be infinite, and the entropy content zero. A symmetry break is always associated with a jump in the entropy content, since there is now a basic ‘context’ in place, and therefore all statements about the world have to make sense within that context. If we ask a question about the universe, then we assume that we know in advance the context within which the answer to that question is going to be framed. I may not know the specific form which the answer will take, but I know the framework of meaning that will inform it. This is of course what we mean by ‘trivial uncertainty’.

KNOWING WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO FIND BEFORE YOU FIND IT

Now, this property of ‘being able to know the framework in advance’ is exactly what entropy is all about. Suppose I am carrying out a political survey. I have a room full of people who I am to interview so that I can find out who they want to vote for - which party is going to be most popular, which second-most popular, and so on. There is a degree of unpredictability here, obviously (otherwise I would not need to conduct the survey in the first place!) and this means that there is information out there for me to obtain. The presence of information that cannot be guessed in advance is a reverse measure of the entropy content of the system under investigation - if I could predict the results in advance, then this would mean that there is infinite entropy. Although I cannot predict the details, there is something that I can predict - the categories of meaning! I know in advance that some people will be labour supporters, some will be conservatives, etc. I know that there is an outside chance that I might get one or two people who want to vote for the Monster Raving Loony Party. Or the Natural Law Party. In this respect there is complete predictability: there is absolutely no way on earth that my original context for understanding my results is going to be in any way altered by the data that I obtain. The idea that my agenda for carrying out the survey is going to be changed by the information obtained is absurd, it couldn’t happen. In this sense, the so-called ‘information’ that I have derived is not information at all, since information ought to imply change. In other words, the information received will be the purest confirmation. Therefore, ‘having an agenda’ (agenda equals ‘symmetry break’) results in a jump in entropy: before the agenda was in place, we could have gone anywhere or nowhere, afterwards the range of possible places to end up is strictly limited. This property of ‘limiting where I can end up’ is containment in a nutshell.

Furthermore, this type of containment, which is to say, mental containment, comes with a double edge to it - that is how it is different from a physical container such a jar of marmalade. Because establishing a context to operate within means moving downwards on the information gradient, this means that once the W-collapse occurs I am left without the slightest clue that it has actually happened. The slate is wiped clean, which is an idea that we have already met in chapter 1. This business of ‘losing ground without knowing that we have lost anything’ means that when I move downwards on the vertical W axis of the paradoxical framework my world shrinks; therefore, when we refer to this variable called ‘information content’ what we are talking about is the parameter of ‘how big my (pragmatic) world is’. The bigger it is, the more possibilities I am in touch with. Now, when W decreases, my world shrinks, and this means that my capacity to know that it has shrunk decreases exactly in step with how much it has shrunk. In other words, I limit myself, and immediately become oblivious of the limits, because my ability to perceive the limits is limited. I forget, and I also forget that I have forgotten. This is the sinister amoeba-like property of Bohm’ s ‘system,’ the property which we have referred to as organizational closure, and it is also the prime manifestation of mental entropy. What we are saying, then, is that the vertical W axis means is simply decreasing versus increasing mental entropy.

MENTAL HORIZONS

Because we do not see them, mental barriers are therefore particularly hard to transcend. This actually makes it totally impossible for us to deliberately challenge them - I can heroically struggle against a restriction that I can see, but what chance have I got if I don’t believe that I am restricted in the first place? It is as if I have a weird type of a mental blindspot that causes me to go around all day on my hands and knees, whilst remaining totally convinced that I am still standing. You can tell me that I am not standing upright, that I am not utilizing my true stature, but I will just laugh at you for being a fool. The existence of such barriers are beyond question, this is what neurosis is - getting caught up within self- imposed limitations, limitations which everyone apart from me can see through apart. If believe that I can’t leave the house without performing hundreds of special rituals to make sure that nothing bad happens, then I will probably be diagnosed as suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. Everyone can see that it isn’t really necessary to do this, that it is an unnecessary limitation on my life. If I have a phobia about public transport and have to walk everywhere, this too is readily seen to be neurotic containment. These two examples are easy to spot because they are ‘incongruous’ - they are not congruent with how everyone else sees the world - but there are stacks of other mental barriers which we do not see because we have all agreed that they are real. This is social neurosis, a form of containment that exists in the social or group mind that we all subscribe to. Social neurosis is when one or more people collectively agree upon something, and it is usually referred to as ‘culture.’ Being in a little clique of like-minded friends is social neurosis; being a member of a political party is social neurosis; believing in the theory of evolution is social neurosis; being a ‘European’ is social neurosis, and so is any form of collusion or agreement that you might care to think of. All are examples of ‘group-mind-limitation,’ arbitrary lines that we draw in the sand, and then say “You can’t go beyond this point...”

The idea of ‘decomplexification due to thinking’ is notoriously difficult to get across. If you keep at it, with the right person at the right time, then they will eventually understand what you are saying, but more often than not you will seriously annoy the person you are talking to. Either that or they will laugh at you, and then get bored, and go off somewhere else where they don’t have to listen to you any more. Much easier to explain is the idea of ‘decomplexification due to mood,’ since we all have first hand experience of how this works; in addition, the phenomenon is usually quite dramatic and utterly non-mysterious at the same time. In short, it is very well known that my world will shrink if I get annoyed, or jealous, or sulky, or covetous, or bitter. Straightaway, I become a littler, meaner, pettier person - my concerns have contracted sharply so that the only things I am interested in are those that have relevance to the agenda of my mood. If you are fidgeting with your pen and it is annoying me, then my world collapses until this is all I can think about; it might seem, on reflection, totally absurd that the whole universe could shrink to nothing but a little bubble encompassing only me and you fidgeting with your pen, but this is exactly what happens. All of these types of ‘moods’ have as their result the transformation of a relatively spacious domain of awareness (in which there might be a number of unrelated elements) to a painfully contracted bubble of petty-mindedness, in which there is simply no room for anything that hasn’t got a direct bearing on the thing that is bugging me. Consider the state of acute jealousy - the only information that a jealous person has any interest in is information that relates to their jealousy, there is no chance whatsoever that their jealousy will permit unrelated speculation, such as “Who won the European Song Contest in 1986?” or “Do newts have a sense of humour?” When I am caught in the gravitational pull of a decomplexifying emotion I do not spend my time contemplating the eternal mysteries, my horizons are far too narrow for that; banality has captured me and eaten me up, and there is nothing left of the person I was. This is the phenomenon of ‘emotional containment’: I can be in one place, but not any others, and the place where I am allowed to be is a very meagre little cell, with barely room to move about at all.

CONTEXT EQUALS RULES

We can summarize the above in terms of rules. A context means that you have a set of rules for understanding what happens. Therefore, something that happens in one context will be understood in a different way if it happens in another context. Once I truly understand about contexts, then I can never say the absolute is, I can only say ‘is in such and such a context’. Is must always be qualified! In practice, of course, we forget to qualify the deadly is-word and our context, our ‘agenda for understanding stuff,’ becomes totally invisible to us. What this means is that we don’t recognize our mental horizon as being a horizon at all, we don’t see that our limits are a function of the way we are looking at things, and that they are dependent upon us. Instead, we get stuck in a finite universe and stay strictly within its confines without ever knowing that we are restricted, without ever thinking that there might be somewhere else to go. If anyone tells us that there are worlds beyond the one we know, we dismiss them as gullible fools and woolly-minded escapists - refugees from reality!

Contexts are therefore mental containers. By allowing only a particular set of rules to be expressed, we create a sectioned off portion of ‘mental space’ which we can run around in, happily (or unhappily) assuming the closed domain to be all that there is. We can’t see that it isn’t, because we have cut ourselves off from the information that would need to see otherwise, since the ‘rules’ that we are talking about are the very rules which determine what is ‘real’ and what is ‘not real’ (what is to be allowed in, and what is to be disregarded) without us even realizing that we are disregarding it. If we refer to the Whole Of Everywhere That It Is Possible For Us To Visit In Our Thoughts by the term Mindspace, then we can say that Mindspace is realizable when all rules are seen to be equally good. In this case there is no restriction. This is not a logical proposition though, as we observed in chapter 2; there is no way in which Mindspace as a Whole can be viewed using the rational mind. As Prigogine and Stengers (1980) say in their book Order from Chaos, there is no divine vantage point from which we can survey the totality of everything. And yet, it is also true to say, as the philosopher Anaxogorus did, that there is no part (or partition) of the whole which does not, at the same time, contain within it everything outside of it. As the well-known alchemical saying (from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistos) expresses it: “That which above is like unto that which is below....” To say that the part contains the whole sounds contradictory, but, if we accept that all limits are merely functions of the arbitrary self-restrictions inherent in our thinking, then the difficulty evaporates: the part only has provisional existence, it is only finite (or closed) because we choose to ignore the way in which it is also infinite (or open).

THE DECOMPLEXIFYING EMOTIONS

We suggested that ‘restriction due to a compulsive emotion’ is an easier idea to swallow than ‘restriction due to thinking’. At the same time, however, it is also true that it is much easier to see that thinking has an agenda, then it is to see that the compulsive emotions have an agenda. It is obvious enough to us that thinking is ‘goal-orientated,’ but it is perhaps not so obvious that anger or self-pity have their goals, that there is a secret agenda behind what we usually assume to be a totally ‘irrational’ (i.e. non-agenda based) state of mind. The generally accepted idea about ‘moods’ is that they are unreasonable, that they are pointless; and that, generally speaking, emotions are the opposite or counterpoint to rational thought. And yet this isn’t really so, emotion and thought go hand in hand - they work as a team towards the very same end. The agenda behind the emotion may be ‘dumb’ and shortsighted, but then so to is the agenda behind most of our thinking. This is the point that we made in the last chapter, that I go into a sulk to avoid seeing what an idiot I am, or that I get angry in order to rescue myself from moral ambiguity, and so on. Naturally, the agenda of the emotion is hard to see, because it is veiled behind a smokescreen, in fact, the whole point is that it should be hard to see, at least as far as the person having the emotion is concerned!

We said that the idea that rationality has an agenda is self-evident, that it gives us no problems. This understanding is actually facile, it is so easy that it should not be trusted. Really, we are accepting the idea for the wrong reason since the plausibility of thought is precisely due to the fact that we automatically accept the explicit goals as being ‘real’. It is helpful here to recollect David Bohm’s ‘two laws of thought’:

[1] Thought always participates in creating the world that it shows us, and which it operates within.

[2] Thought convinces us that the reality it shows us is real, objective, and independently existent.

This is of course exactly what we have been getting at when we were talking about being ‘trapped in a context’: the symmetry break that is a ‘context of description’ necessarily involves a drop in the information content of the system, and it is this drop in the information content that makes it impossible for us to see what we have lost. This is the ‘apparent gain’ that is actually a loss, the essential trick of thought. In Hindu and Buddhist metaphysical systems this is known as Maya, the illusion that is produced by the measuring (or thinking) mind. [Both Bohm and Watts have made the point that maya and measure both come from the same Sanskrit root.]

THEATRICALITY

We can now see that the explicit goal of thinking is nothing other than a tautological expression of the assumptions that lie behind the system of thinking in the first place. We confuse ‘goals’ with reality, whereas they reflect only the way we have of conceptualising reality. Therefore, the overt agenda is the supposedly independent and objectively existing goal, whilst the covert agenda is to confirm the assumptions that the whole edifice of thought is based upon; it is to maintain the particular illusion that is being spun, in other words. We can see many examples of this type of ‘duplicity’: For example, a politician may pioneer an initiative to reduce the number of people on the unemployment register - this is the overt aim, but the covert aim is to win political points. A multinational corporation exists to produce and sell pharmaceutical drugs that can ‘combat’ mental illnesses such as depression. That is one level, the ‘theatrical’ level. The fundamental agenda is, however, to make money, to increase the value of the shares and protect the interests of the stockholders. As far as the fundamental naked logic of the system goes, it doesn’t matter a damn whether the drug cures depression or not, as long as it is seen to do so; if it sells and the operation of the company is seen to be ethical, then that is all that matters. Of course, it would be nice for everyone concerned if the drug actually did help people, but, as far as the mechanics of the business organization is concerned, that is completely and utterly irrelevant. Advertising agencies sometimes say that such and such a company ‘cares’, but this is guaranteed to be total nonsense, since a company is a machine whose key rationale is to look after itself. A company is an autopoietic (self-maintaining) system - self-maintenance is the bottom line, the ‘be all and end all,’ and so if you ask it why it has to maintain itself it can only answer tautologically “Because I must...”

The point about ‘pseudo-’ (or theatrical) caring can be made perfectly easily. If I as the chief executive instigate a ‘policy of caring’ then I have made I rule saying “You, the employee, must care about the customer”.... Now, either I care about you or I don’t, since caring is a spontaneous expression from the heart, and not a shrewdly calculated agenda from the mind - if I don’t care then no amount of coercion can make me, and if I do then I will ignore the directive as being irrelevant. In practice what will happen is that if I don’t care then I will make reasonably sure to act as if I do, and if I do care then I will carry on caring. The company’s interests are served equally well either way. It has to look as if it cares in order to succeed, but it doesn’t have to really care. Theatrical caring will do. What we are saying, then, is that only people can care, not organizations. This is an important point to make because our rational, calculating mind is just as much an ‘organization’ as any of the big multi-nationals are. Both equal ‘the system’ and because the system always has an overt and a covert agenda it is always insincere, nowhere more so than when it is trying to be sincere. In one way, perhaps we can admit that the system possesses a type of sincerity - it possesses sincerity with regard to its own covert agenda, the core-level self-referential rule which says “I must always prove to myself the validity of my core assumptions”. This impenetrable and indefatigable logic-loop constitutes the essential tautology of autopoiesis, in fact of all rules....

STATEMENT 2, AGAIN

We have already suggested that rationality, in general, has the covert aim of distracting us from irreducible uncertainty. An example of this might be me doing scientific research in order to further mankind’s knowledge of mental illness. That is the overt agenda. The covert agenda is to provide a feeling of being in control, a feeling of getting somewhere, a feeling of not being at the mercy of something I can’t understand. In essence, the covert agenda is to bolster up my sense of security and prove to myself that my basic assumptions are sound. Needless to say, this hidden goal is very hard to see - if it wasn’t hard to see then clearly it could not do its job. What we have here is a slightly disguised variant of Statement 2 from the first chapter:

The degree of mental containment increases in direct proportion to the degree of unconsciousness associated with the hidden agenda, i.e., organizational closure is a consequence of the invisibility of the rules that lie behind thinking and behaviour.

YOU ARE ONLY AS BIG AS YOUR THINKING...

‘Containment,’ in the mental sense of the word, is a way of saying ‘compulsive’ - the two terms are interchangeable. Both the containing and the compelling qualities of decomplexification can be visualized as ‘world shrinkage’. We can illustrate this by considering irritation: if I am sitting at my desk trying to work, but unable to do so because you are irritating the hell out of me by tapping your pencil on the table all the time, then my world has shrunk to the size of whatever is annoying me - your pencil tapping. As Robert Anton Wilson says, ‘you are only as big as the least thing that annoys you...’ That is an example of compulsive emotion that shrinks my world away. Another thing that sometimes happens is that I can’t start work because something isn’t quite right on my desk - I have to straighten up a pile of books or something. Now I know perfectly well that it doesn’t matter a damn about the ‘imperfect’ arrangement of books really, but I have an irrational itch to do something about it and I can’t make it go away. Because of this situation, my ‘area of concern’ has shrunk to absurdly petty proportions. This is an example of pure obsessive compulsiveness with no emotional context. The state of being seriously involved in what ought to be insignificant details is the definition of neurosis - I am at the mercy of rules that make no sense, and yet which have the power to rule my life.

When my world shrinks drastically, I can’t objectively see how much it has shrunk (otherwise my world wouldn’t be as small as it is) but I do sense the restriction indirectly. What happens is that I feel bad, I feel wretched in a way that I cannot manage to ignore, and this misery might be said to be a result of loss of freedom. This loss of freedom can also be explained in terms being compelled to be what one is not, i.e. if I am eaten up with malice I am being to forced to be this very specific, highly defined person and I cannot experience any sense of myself outside of this preoccupation. I am not really ‘only this malice,’ and therefore there is an incongruence between who I really am, who is bigger than that, and the two-dimensional caricature (or mockery) of a person that the emotion is forcing me to be. Normally, of course, we are not so grossly distorted, since we do not spend all our time being chewed up by compulsive emotions, and as a result we do not feel so bad as all that. Nevertheless, the normal state that we exist in is also a ‘shrunk world,’ and it is only on very infrequent occasions that most of us ever get to see beyond this rationally decomplexified world which we take to be all that there is.

LOVE AND HATE

We have explained mental containment by saying that the context of meaning we are unconsciously using restricts us without our being (directly) aware of the restriction. In other words, I think that I can mentally visit any location in the Universe Set that is Mindspace that I like, but actually I am only allowed to be on a few squares on the Great Chess Board of All That Is There. I don’t get to know about the others, much less visit them. Containment due to compulsive emotions such as anger or jealousy is the same: the emotion that is afflicting me only allows me to be in one narrow little place, but, nevertheless, I do not seem able to doubt the validity of what I see from that place. I don’t say “You seem like an utter bastard to me because I am very angry with you” - which, as a qualified statement, would be perfectly accurate. Instead, I say “You are an utter bastard”, which is inaccurate because there is no relativity involved.

Anger is an easy emotion to start with. When you get angry with someone you will find that you only have the one way to look at them. Before you might have been able to see them within a number of quite different perspectives, but after loosing your temper whoever it is that has provoked your anger will be ‘personified’ in one particular way. This is to say, you will focus exclusively upon those aspects of the person which you do not like and which support or prove your stance in this matter. Thus, if you are having a row with an your partner a whole list of points about them will pop into your head, all bad! All the good stuff will fade out of the picture so that it becomes really, really hard to remember just what it is about them that you love. You have tuned into a reality that suits your mood.
Another way to put this is to say that when you really love someone you love them because you see the whole of them - you have not collapsed the infinite information content of their being by selecting/ discriminating (i.e. abstracting) thinking and decomplexifying emotions. When you hate them it is because you have fragmented them - you are only seeing the distorted, data-reduced image that corresponds to your emotional state. What happens in a row might be described as a sort of positive feedback: when you solidify the not-very-nice picture you have of the person you get more angry as a result, which solidifies them further, which makes you even more angry... The worse it gets, the worse it gets. What has happened is that you have become fixated upon one aspect of the person you dislike, you have ‘locked on’ to one reality, and as a result you have lost all awareness of the whole picture. This is clearly akin to obsessing about someone (or something); for example if we happen upon a horrible image sometimes we perversely linger on it, turning it over and over in our minds - we do this in an involuntary sort of way, trapped by the horror of it, so to speak. This may also be true for images that we like, which leads us to consider that a fixated (or possessive) type of love for someone is also a decomplexifying emotion. Borrowing the Buddhist terminology for this sort of thing, we could say that both positive and negative attachments are complexity-reducing. It is not the person or the thing that we are attached to, but our perspective, which creates by selective attention the illusion of a ‘person’ or ‘thing’ that agrees with our motivations in seeing that person or thing in the first place.

PARANOIA - AN EXPERIMENT IN THINKING THAT GETS OUT OF CONTROL

Paranoia is similar to rage in that they are both unpleasant states of mind that are established and maintained through the operation of positive feedback. In the case of paranoia, we might see (or think about) something that gives us the first flash of fear and from then on it escalates as we notice more and more details to support our original (tentative) hypothesis. In paranoia the initial tentative status of the hypothesis (‘tentative’ meaning that you are willing to entertain other perspectives as well, not just the fear-provoking one) lasts for only a very short period of time - the universe tends to close in on you very quickly after this first movement out of the openness of uncertainty into ‘provisional certainty,’ and from there into ‘non-negotiable certainty,’ which is a solid or ‘opaque’ situation. Uncertainty is transparent and empty (or unoccupied), whilst certainty is opaque (or occupied). Panic is the same sort of thing as paranoia as far as loss of uncertainty goes: you get trapped in a horrifying view of your situation that solidifies, takes over, and excludes more helpful perspectives.

GETTING INTO A SULK

Possibly the best example to use to make the idea of ‘reality-solidifying’ clearer is that of sulking. It might be that the mechanism of going into a sulk is a bit slower and, on the whole, more leisurely that the practically instantaneous ‘flash’ of paranoia; it is also more obviously a self-indulgence than flying into a rage, one tends to feel less justified. In the initial stage of a sulk one really doesn’t have to take it that way at all, one is toying with the situation in one’s mind, turning it over to view it from various perspectives. One of these perspectives has more of a gravitational pull than the others and exerts a dangerous fascination on us, and this is the one we are interested in playing with. This, needless to say, is the perspective which gives us a view of the situation in which we have been treated unfairly, been hard done by, wronged. Our awareness of the injustice of it all grows and gains in definition - the poignancy of our plight becomes razor-sharp, the ‘wrongfulness’ of it all looms larger and larger. The more we focus on it the more outraged we get, and the ‘argument’ for a sulk gets stronger and stronger until it is practically irresistible. The perceived situation looses all ambiguity, terminal decomplexification has set in; we are passengers on a train that is going to a bad place and we can’t get off!

Yet, as is the case in paranoia, all of this started as an experiment - it just got horribly out of hand. You didn’t really want to go to the destination advertised on the platform, you just wanted to flirt with the idea of it a bit. One would think that the experience of getting sucked into a sulk and having to be miserably stuck in it for a length of time would dissuade us from trying this sort of experiment, but of course it doesn’t. In fact it seems as if the opposite is true, having a history of sulking means that we are more rather than less likely to go down this path when the suitable provocation arises. Positive conditioning occurs. There is something delicious in that first movement of the mind in which one toys with the idea of oneself as an innocent victim of a malicious external reality, the receiver of a monstrous injustice handed out by an uncaring universe (or by a selfish parent or vindictive partner, etc). The tantalizing pay-off for flirting with a sulk derives from the fact that we are handing over responsibility - it feels really good to do this; it is (initially at least) a comfortable and enjoyable place to be. All complexity-reducing pathways seem to have this ‘reward factor’ associated with them; we may postulate that an increase in definition (or certainty) always induces a deep-down glow of euphoria. This can be seen in the pleasure that one has in thinking that one ‘knows something for definite,’ the satisfaction one has in articulating a deeply ingrained opinion on some subject or other, the pleasure that there is in being dogmatic or prejudiced so that we do not have to face up to the fact that we don’t actually know anything.

IDENTIFYING WITH A PHANTOM SELF

We can put everything in a nutshell by saying the following: In order to experience a decomplexifying emotion we first have to identify a specific situation. We have to jump to conclusions. If, therefore, you were to remain in the state of uncertainty (which is the state that you are inevitably going to be in before identifying) then you wouldn’t get sucked into the terminal state of decomplexified reality that is predictably generated by the emotion in question. Before moving on we ought to note that this general approach to the common emotions is not new. The Dalai Lama (1995, p 94) has put forward much same sort of argument based on basic Buddhist principles:

.... If we were to examine the state of mind at the moment when an individual experiences an intense emotion like hatred, anger or extreme attachment, we would find that, at that point, the person has a rather false notion of self: there is a kind of unquestioned assumption of an independently existing ‘I’ or subject or person which is perceived, not necessarily consciously, as a kind of master. It is not totally independent from the body or mind, nor is it to be identified with the body or mind, but there is something there which is somehow identified as the core of the being, the self, and there is a strong sort of grasping at that kind of identity or being. Based on that, you have strong emotional experiences, like attachment towards loved ones, or strong anger or hatred towards someone whom you perceive as threatening, and so forth.

Similarly, if we were to examine how we really perceive our object of desire or object of anger, we would notice that there is a kind of assumption of an independently existing entity, something which is worthy of being desired or worthy of being hated. ...

Colin Wilson (1978, p 353) has made the same observation:

...Watch a child when he falls down and hurts himself; his face twists with self-pity and he prepares to identify with his misery. If you smile at him and say: ‘What a brave boy you are!’ he smiles back, and instantly rejects the ‘lower self’. Or watch a man who has become very angry or upset. It is almost as if the emotion has created a kind of phantom self, with which he is tempted to identify. If he is strong enough, he will reject the temptation by sheer moral effort, and in a few seconds, the phantom will fade away.

We will shortly take issue with Wilson’s assertion that it is possible to reject the phantom self by ‘sheer moral effort,’ and attempt to argue otherwise, but aside from this point, it is clear that his observation echoes that of the Dalai Lama. To sum up this section on emotional decomplexification, we may say that in order that any of the emotional responses (or cognitive responses) that we have discussed can occur one first needs to be absolutely certain about something. We can’t properly flip our lid unless we have, at some point, decomplexified a situation and turned a [?] into a [yes]/[no]. It’s all or nothing, in other words. This might, in one way, seem like a bit of a silly conclusion since it is so obviously true. As a statement it only strikes home once one prepared to admit that in reality there is nothing at all that we can be 100% certain about, and so in order to indulge in an ‘afflictive’ emotion one must first misrepresent reality to ourselves; because there is no absolute certainty anywhere we have to engineer it. If we refrain from constructing the anger-provoked situation then we don’t get angry; if we refrain from constructing the jealousy-provoking situation then we don’t get jealous, and so forth. In other words, we don’t deal with negative emotional states by positive action (i.e. by constructing a corrective situation) but by taking no action at all. ‘Taking no action at all,’ we may note, is not the same thing as simply identifying with the emotion in question - non-identifying is not purposeful.

ABSTAINING FROM EMOTIONS....

Why would we want to abstain from having emotions? What sort of life would we have then? What sort of person would we be then? These are the questions that tend to arise at this point. One thinks that one would end up cold, uninvolved, emotionally illiterate, rather like Mr Spock in Startrek. The thing to remember, though, is that we are not talking about all emotions, only those that give us (and those around us!) a horrible time. These are the emotions which Tibetan master Sogyal Rinpoche designates as afflictive. These are the type of emotions, like hate and greed, that seize control of us and make us do things that we regret afterwards. The truth is, however, that these are the just about only emotions that we know, and it is hard to imagine what could take their place. It is like being a drinker who doesn’t really like being a drinker, but can’t imagine what they would do to fill the day if they gave it up. At least if I am committed to orientating every day around the drink, then all my steps are mapped out for me, and I am kept busy trying to achieve my goal. My goal is an idealized state of alcohol-fuelled euphoria, which is such a slippery customer that chasing it is a full-time job. Thus, apart form the obvious ‘gain’ of hopefully reaching this mythical heaven, there is the less-obvious gain of having a well-defined motivational polarity to base one’s life upon.

The afflictive emotions are exactly the same as an addiction to some euphoria-producing substance (or pursuit) in that they have a ‘space-filling’ quality about it them that is a sort of substitute for what we may call ‘genuine life’. Issues are thrown up that effectively absorb our attention, and completely divert us from having any depth of awareness with regard to ‘what is going on’. Essentially, the afflictive (or ‘compulsive’) emotions provide us with the ‘motivation of the game’, which we have looked at in terms of theatricality. Such emotional states create a crude and brutal distortion of reality, which produces a black and white polarization of the situation and this polarization makes for a simple, non-ambiguous rationale for all subsequent activity on our part. We become preoccupied with trivial uncertainty, which is to say, with solving the spurious problems which the game creates for us, and totally and utterly oblivious to the greater reality of radical uncertainty, which would (if we could see it) take away our taste for the game.

In conclusion, then, what we are saying is that an emotion like anger that gives us a sort of crude approximation for ‘decomplexified life’, were blind, routine compulsivity substitutes itself for the poignancy and urgency which are the hall-marks of the genuine article. The compulsion-driven decomplexified worlds work as surrogates for decomplexified reality because they provide us with the boon of ‘ontological security’. The flip side of that security is that the experience, taken as a whole, is fundamentally confused and profoundly unsatisfying. We intuitively know this, but that does not generally cure us of our addiction to the decomplexified worlds of the compulsive emotions. These ‘lower worlds’ are all we know, and so we don’t even dream of giving them up.

COMPLEXIFICATION

We have gone on a lot in this chapter about the decomplexifying emotions, but what about the complexifying emotions? Is there such a thing? We are going to assert that there is, but for now, we will content ourselves with saying only a little about this type of interaction. Emotional/cognitive experiences which involve information explosion rather than an information collapse are very rare, and in addition to this rarity there are (at least) three other additional discrediting’ factors:

[1] It is extremely hard to describe the content of such experiences

[2] It is impossible for one person to give another person a set of instructions regarding how to ‘get there’

[3] The ‘sense’ (or ‘believability’) of such experiences evaporates almost completely as soon as we return to our normal, decomplexified mode of mental functioning, so the experiencer tends to doubt that what happened, really happened. Another way to put this is to say that the force of what we witness, the unique state of attention it commands and all the hitherto unglimpsed possibilities that are thereby revealed, are forgotten, and the essential nature of the ‘complex vision’ is lost. The dangerous reality of the experience is converted into some other (safe) form, and the crucial fact of this transition is unnoticed by us.

These three ‘disadvantages’, the fact that what we find cannot be described or remembered in normal consciousness, and the way to get there cannot be explained, are sufficient to persuade most of us that the whole thing is pure mythology, like unicorns and mermaids. On the other hand, what else would one expect? What we are basically talking about here is going beyond the known. It is interesting to note that talk of anything beyond the world of mundane experience is inevitably scoffed at by the sane and sensible majority – it constitutes an irresistible invitation to cynicism. On the other hand, there is also a complementary and less common reaction which is to tendency to want to believe in such supramundane realities, and this too misses the point because wanting comes straight out of the conceptual mind – if I can’t conceive of it then I can’t want it, and if I want it then I must have first conceived of it. Wanting can never go ‘beyond’ because wanting is the essential motivation behind the system of thought.

We are all very familiar with the downwards movement associated with decomplexification, even though at the precise moment it happens we generally miss it because of the ‘obscuring’ nature of the particular passion involved. In retrospect, however, we get a sense of what has happened, and the sheer accumulation of decomplexification-type episodes that we have gone through in our lives means that it is practically impossible for us not to be deeply acquainted with this process. It is known territory. Yet this fact of familiarity in itself points us in the upwards direction of complexification. Because I know that it is possible (and very easy) to fall down a hole, then this means that it must be equally possible (if not so easy) to climb out again. If not, then I would not have repeated experiences of sliding down treacherous psychological entropy gradients because I would only ever have slid down the once, and that would have been the end of it! Therefore, I must know that it is possible to ascend the vertical information axis. The only problem is, of course, that I may be willing to accept that it is possible to ascend back up to where I was, but that does not means that I am prepared to extend this line of deduction to speculate about the possibility of going even further up the axis, beyond the level I know and am familiar with. This is where we almost always dig our heels in – we come up to a ‘limit of belief’ here which is as impregnable as any Berlin Wall.

THE UNEXPECTED BLOOMING OF A STRANGE FLOWER

Decomplexification, we have said, is an easy process in the sense that it ‘just happens’. Before we know it, we are there, at the bottom of the slide: we have lost our temper or gone into a sulk, we have ended up all wrapped up in self-pity or bitterness, or found ourselves in the unhappy state of being eaten away from the inside by unfulfilled craving, jealousy or envy. Whatever particular slippery pathway it was we slid down, the result is much the same: we ‘come to’ (after the initial burst of passion) and discover that we have hit rock bottom, the place you go when you can’t go any lower. Who does not recognize this story of entropic descent into the sterile predictability of ‘here we go again…’?

Complexification, on the other hand, works by propelling us up a reverse-entropy slope into a state which is wholly unpredictable and wholly unique. Not an informationally depleted ‘end-state,’ but a ‘beginning’ or ‘opening-up’ state. Complexification equals ‘the unexpected blooming of a strange and marvellous flower’. Decomplexification equals ‘finding out that you have trodden in dog shit again.’ We will look more at complexification later on, but, as we have said, it essentially involves the reverse process of sulking, the reverse process of being stuck in petty-minded concerns. In direct contrast to the dismal business that is ‘world shrinking’, complexification always comes as an unprecedented ‘world expansion’ - wholly unexpected aspects of life start to unfold out of nowhere and reality reveals itself to be far deeper and stranger that we ever suspected it to be. There is an increase in the quality of our interaction with our environment so that our experience becomes richer and more satisfying, and yet less ‘verifiable’ at the same time. The ‘end point’ of this process (if we may be forgiven for using the word ‘end’) would be where the experience is both marvellously and inexpressibly meaningful and completely and utterly improvable, both to oneself and others, which is of course why mystics are prone to using words like ‘ineffable’ so much.

CONCLUSION

To conclude this section, then, we can say that the compulsive emotions, like rationality, shrink our ‘head-space’ and take us to a place that is very well defined, very predictable, and very familiar. It is also possible to say that decomplexification is always that result of free choice, which is to say, we freely choice to set foot on the slippery slope that leads to the emotion-related ‘terminal destination’. We experiment in losing our freedom of perception, and then get lost in the experiment. Complexification, on the other hand, can never occur as the result of a deliberate act of choice. I cannot choose freedom because that would imply that freedom is just another arbitrary point of view that I can select; the implication is that I can compel or control myself to be free, which is an absurdity. After all, I can only be compelled to visit a destination that has been defined and specified in advance, I cannot be compelled to go to a place which cannot be located anywhere, and the decomplexified state is precisely this - it is a strange place, not a familiar one. More than this, it is not a place at all, because ‘place’ implies locality, it means measurement and limits, and the complex reality is a state that cannot be placed (i.e. measured).

THE LOWER WORLDS

If we were to continue listing decomplexifying emotions we would end up with a list bearing more than just a passing resemblance to the seven deadly sins mentioned in the Bible: pride, covetousness (envy), anger, jealousy, lust and gluttony (or greed) are all fine examples of decomplexifying emotions. That only leaves out ‘sloth’. Bearing in mind that the aim of all religions is to free us from our ‘lower natures’ and assist us in realising our ‘higher nature,’ perhaps this is not particularly surprising. If we look closer at the seven sins we can see that gluttony and lust are really the same thing and that the only sin that doesn’t really seem to be an emotion is sloth, although it is fairly plausible to link sloth with what Colin Wilson calls a ‘neurotic constriction’ of perspective, which puts the seventh deadly sin into a context that we can work with. This all becomes especially interesting when one makes the attempt to draw a parallel with the six realms or six worlds (‘lokas’) of Hindu/Buddhist cosmology. The six worlds lend themselves particularly well to psychological analysis, and in fact this psychological emphasis is explicit in Buddhist accounts where the six worlds are regarded more as psychological modes of operation than as physical places. Of course, we are quite justified in speaking of ‘location’ in a non-physical sense since location is just another way of speaking about containment (or restriction) within some field of possibilities, within what we have referred to as ‘Mindspace’.

Chogyam Trungpa speaks of the six realms as ‘versions of reality’ which are attractive to us because of their familiarity; in the following passage Trungpa (1976, p 23-4) explains the basic function of the six worlds by saying that they are particular forms of defence against uncertainty:

The six realms, the different styles of samsaric occupation, are referred to as “realms,” in the sense that we dwell within a particular version of reality. We are fascinated with maintaining familiar surroundings, familiar desires and longings, so as not to give in to a spacious state of mind. We cling to our habitual patterns because confusion provides a tremendously familiar ground to sink into as well as a way of occupying ourselves. We are afraid to give up this security and entertainment, afraid to step into open space, into a meditative state of mind. The prospect of the awakened state is very irritating because we are uncertain how to handle it, so we prefer to run back to our prison rather than release ourselves from it. Confusion and suffering become an occupation, often quite secure and delightful.

The six realms are: the realm of the gods, the realm of the jealous gods, the human realm, the animal realm, the realm of the hungry ghosts and the hell realm. The realms are predominantly emotional attitudes towards ourselves and our surroundings, emotional attitudes colored and reinforced by conceptual explanations and rationalizations. As human beings we may, during the course of the day, experience the emotions of all of the realms, from the pride of the god realm to the hatred and paranoia of the hell realm. Nonetheless, a person’s psychology is usually firmly rooted in one realm. This realm provides us with a style of confusion, a way of entertaining and occupying ourselves so as not to have to face our fundamental uncertainty, our ultimate fear that we might not exist.

The three lowest worlds are sometimes referred to as ‘the three evil paths’ and they are associated with the emotions of rage (or anger); greed (or craving) and stupidity, stupidity meaning basically ‘denial’ rather than lack of intelligence. In the different traditions of Buddhism there are somewhat differing account of these realms, for example Chogyam Trungpa, who is from a Tibetan tradition, associates the jealous god realm (the asura-loka) with paranoia rather than jealousy as such; whilst Daisaka Ikeda (of Nichiren Shosu) sees it in terms of rage and fighting. In addition to differences such as this, there are sometimes said to be ten worlds rather than six. This innovation can be traced back to Chi-i (538-597), Grand Master of the Chinese T’ien-t’ai (or ‘Heavenly Terrace’) school, who was responsible for adding four more. The Ten World system is set out here by Daisaka Ikeda (p 117-8):

The Ten Worlds, the first of the component principles of ichinen sanzen, are the ten states or conditions of life that we experience. The Ten Worlds, taken together, comprise an analysis of the states or conditions a single life manifests over the course of time. The idea of the Ten Worlds describes the subjective sensations experienced by the self at the most fundamental level of life. As we have seen, the Ten Worlds are, working from the lowest to the highest, Hell, Hunger, Animality, Anger, Humanity, Heaven (or Rapture), Learning, Realization, Bodhisattva and Buddhahood.

The idea of the Ten worlds had its origins in a cosmological theory; that is, it was though that there were ten distinct and separate realms into which people were reborn, the particular realm being determined by the nature of the individual’s accumulated karma. For example, Humanity denoted the realm of human beings, Animality the realm of beasts, Heaven the dwelling of the gods, and Hell an underground prison. However, in the doctrine of ichinen sanzen, the Ten Worlds are viewed not as physical locations but as states or conditions that are inherent in each of us and which we experience moment by moment through our interaction with the environment.

IS THERE MONOTONY IN ONENESS?

The term ichinen sanzen (which is also attributed to Chi-i) needs a bit of explaining. The phrase, according to Montgomery (1991, p 74) may be translated as ‘the three thousand things in a single life-thought’. In essence ichinen sanzen is a way of explaining complexity - the idea is that great diversity of qualitatively different realities are unavoidably involved in every thought. One needn’t see the figure ‘three thousand’ as being definitive in any way; as Montgomery says, this may be taken to be a symbolic rather than an exhaustive description. Complexity is not necessarily what most people would associate with the Buddhist idea of ultimate reality, which is generally described as a state of unitary, non-differentiated all-inclusiveness. The picture of ‘oneness’ that we have in mind when we think of this inevitably tends to be rather bland: it might, on the one hand, be a fantastically high level of consciousness, yet on the other hand we can’t help thinking in terms of a goal that has been achieved - everything is finally ‘wrapped up’ and so where can we go from here? Moreover, one feels that in this state ‘everything is the same,’ which sounds static and rather tedious. Stanislav Grof (1998, p 46-49) gives due mention to the ‘boredom of supreme oneness’ scenario in his book The Cosmic Game. Here we meet the revelation that God’s motivation for losing His- (or Her) self in creation might actually be Divine Boredom:

Another important “motive” for creation that is occasionally mentioned is the element of monotony. However immense and glorious the experience of the divine might appear from the human perspective, for the Divine it is always the same and, in that sense, monotonous. Creation can then be seen as a titanic effort expressing a transcendental longing for change, action, movement, drama, and surprise. The countless experiential realities in many different dimensions and on many different levels offer infinite number of opportunities for adventures in consciousness and divine self-entertainment. The extreme forms of descriptions portraying creation as an act aimed at overcoming the monotony of undifferentiated Absolute Consciousness even refer to Cosmic Boredom. This again echoes passages from medieval cabalistic texts that describe that one of the reasons God created the universe was to overcome boredom.

This picture of creation is necessarily opposed to the view that we have been taking. What we have been saying is that all diversions from the unbroken, ‘infinite information’ state cannot ever include anything ‘new’ because they are disguised tautologies – non-change that appears to be getting somewhere, zero information that appears to be telling us something. Therefore, journeys into the worlds of self-distraction are excursions to nowhere, just as a decomplexifying emotion is an excursion to nowhere. A sulk is a perfect example of this – when we embark upon a sulk there is a persuasive sense that there is a real gain to be had, but experience invariably shows that sulking is a dead-end, an endeavour that is utterly devoid of benefit. Any movement from high complexity to a low-complexity realm is akin to sulking – it is like stepping into a trap because we have been promised ‘riches’ of some sort. Through wanting to gain, we lose. And yet at the same time, loss equals gain, because having lost myself, it only remains for me to find myself again.

However, the ‘sulking argument’ means that we cannot use the Divine Boredom Scenario, as set out by Grof, to explain the downwards (or, as John Bennett, calls it, the involutionary) cosmic movement and so we end up completely at a loss as to the motivation for breaking Original Symmetry. As Grof (p 49) himself says, “It is clear that, in spite of all our efforts to comprehend and describe creation, the nature of the creative principle and of the process of creation remains shrouded in unfathomable mystery.”

“NEITHER CONSISTENT NOR DIVERSE”

Taking complexity into account changes the ‘goal-like’ image of the perfect undifferentiated state, which is bound to be a disappointment because it is at the same time both a triumph and an anti-climax. Ultimate Reality is One, since there is no break in the primordial symmetry, and if there is no break in the symmetry then there can be no divide. And yet that ‘One’ is not ‘the one-of-sameness’ because no symmetry-break means no context; there can be no question of anything being ‘the same’ when there is no base line of reality upon which to predicate sameness or lack of sameness. Sameness (or identity) involves creating a self-reflexive loop, reality has to bend right around and match itself; this type of reflexivity is an impossible operation when there is no absolute scale of reference or ‘level of description’. Difference is of course the same sort of thing as sameness, and therefore if there is no question of ‘sameness’ there can also be no question of ‘difference’ - both being comparative measures. This idea is found in the Lotus Sutra, where it is said that the true aspect of reality is “neither substantial nor empty, neither consistent nor diverse”. Infinite complexity means infinite relativity, i.e. there is a complete lack of all standards by which data can be judged. Thus, Reality is alive, unfixed, and forever beyond our conceptual mind, quite unlike the standards which make up the conceptual mind, which are necessarily dead, fixed, and, as Krishnamurti says, old. In an infinitely complex reality there is no ‘oldness’ at all, not a trace or a shadow of it, anywhere. Essentially, ‘judging’ (or ‘knowing’) is all about being ‘one up’ on reality – it is a form of cynicism whereby we exercise the power of having the last word. Reality can do what it wants, but I get to be the one who allows or disallows it, and this makes me (spuriously) indispensable. It never occurs to me just how preposterous it is to be ‘one up on reality’. What exactly does this mean? Inevitably, it means that I end up inhabiting a phoney, made-up world where, for the sake of my spurious cleverness (which is to say what is good and bad, real and unreal, important and unimportant) I cheat myself out of the genuine article, which is, as Zen Buddhism teaches, ‘beyond praise and blame’.

ICHINEN SANZEN

We have tried to get a feel for the unmodified (or unconditioned) Reality by saying that it has the quality of newness as opposed to the quality of oldness. Another way to talk about the Complex Whole is to say that it is infinitely rich in content - it is complete, but not finished. It is not ‘one’ in the sense of ‘one level of description’ because that would make it a closed (i.e. simplex) system; it has no self-identity or self-definition, rather it is the unimpeded situation where reality is infinitely free to be whatever it is, even though we can never know what that is. All is allowed, there are no restrictions and so there is maximum complexity. According to WilliamTheodore de Bary (1969, p 156-7) the philosophical idea of ichinen sanzen expresses this idea of diversity in unity:

The T’ien-t’ai doctrine centers around the principle of the Perfectly Harmonious Threefold Truth. This means that 1) all things or dharmas are empty because they are produced through causation and therefore have no self-nature; but that 2) they do have temporary existence; and that 3) being both Empty and Temporary is the nature of dharmas and is the Mean. These three - Emptiness, Temporariness, and the Mean - involve one another so that one is three and and three is one, the relative thus being identified with the absolute.

Furthermore, in the world of Temporariness, there are ten realms of existence - those of the Buddhas, bodhisattvas, private buddhas, direct disciples of the Buddha, heavenly beings, fighting demons, human beings, hungry ghosts, beasts, and beings in hell. Each of these shares the characteristics of the others, thus making one hundred realms. Each of these in turn is characterized by ten suchnesses or such-likenesses through which the true state is manifested in phenomena, namely, such-like character, such-like nature, such-like substance, such-like power, such-like activity, such-like causes, such-like conditions, such-like effects, such-like retributions, and such-like beginning-and-end-ultimate. This makes one thousand realms of existence. In turn, each realm consists of the three divisions of living beings, of space, and of the aggregates which constitutes dharmas, thus making a total of three thousand realms or aspects of reality.

These realms are so interwoven and interpenetrated that they may be considered “immanent in a single instant of thought.” This does not mean that they are produced by the thought of man or Buddha, as taught in some Mahayana schools, but rather that in every thought-moment, all the possible worlds are involved. Accordingly, the great emphasis in this school is on concentration and insight as a means of perceiving the ultimate truth embodied in such a thought moment. In short, this is a philosophy of One-in-All and All-in-One, which is crystallized in the celebrated saying that “Every color or fragrance is none other than the Middle Path.”...

COMPLEX PSYCHOLOGY

What we have here, therefore, is an example of a psychological system that is based on complexity. Much of the terminology in the passage reproduced would seem peculiar from the orthodox scientific point of view, but basically this is system in which certainty is only ever accorded a provisional place. Necessity (which is to say, cause-and-effect) operates, but only within a specified context, or ‘game’. Everything that we normally associate with psychology, i.e. the possibility and power of describing what is going on in my head now, explaining what happened in it before, and predicting what might happen to it in the future, only holds good within a particular game reality. A very significant point is, therefore, that there is absolutely no way whatsoever of learning anything at all about the overall nature of mind (or consciousness) from these provisional game rules. This means that what we take to be ‘psychology’ is at best only a trivial affair, and at worse, thoroughly misleading.

The overall system is composed of a number of different emotional/cognitive attractors which each have a tendency to pull the consciousness of the individual into pragmatically closed states of modes of functioning. These levels can be differentiated from each other in terms of a continuum of complexity so that an individual in the bottom or base level interacts with his or her environment in the simplest or most predictable fashion, whilst the individual existing on the highest level is interacting in the most complex way possible with the environment. ‘Most complex’ means in practice that the information content, W of the system [self + universe] is infinite; another way of putting this would be to say that we are talking about a globally coherent delocalised system, a perfectly symmetrical situation where there is no net attraction or repulsion (bias) in any particular direction. Robert Anton Wilson (1990) refers to this as the ‘non-local self,’ whereas Aldous Huxley speaks of ‘mind at large’. ‘Least complex,’ on the other hand, mean that one is very much localized, and from this isolated or abstracted standpoint one is carrying out the crudest type of ‘game’ interaction with one’s environment. Another way to explain this would be to say that a ‘crude’ interaction involves the attempt to make the world relevant to myself, i.e. to validate my conception of myself by relating it to me in a personalized way. Chogyam Rinpoche (1976 p 39-40) makes this very clear:

... In the hell realm there is a constant situation of relationship; you are trying to play games with something and the attempt bounces back on you, constantly recreating extremely claustrophobic situations; so that finally there is no room in which to communicate at all.

At that point the only way to communicate is by trying to recreate your anger. You thought you had managed to win a war of one-upmanship, but finally you did not get a response from the other person; you one-upped him right out of existence. So you are faced only with your own aggression coming back at you and it manages to fill up all the space. One is left lonely once more, without excitement, so that you seek another way of playing the game, again and again and again. You do not play for enjoyment, but because you do not feel protected nor secure enough. If you have no way to secure yourself, you feel bleak and cold, so you must rekindle the fire. In order to rekindle the fire you have to fight constantly to maintain yourself. One cannot help playing the game; one just finds oneself playing it, all the time.

Montgomery (1991, p 75-7) gives an account of the Ten Worlds in terms of mobility, explaining that in the lowest level there is hardly any mobility at all: “It is like being buried alive, unable to move freely.” in the next realm, the realm of hunger, the denizens have more mobility, but are ruled (or controlled) by their appetites. This approach is useful in that it has a ready appeal to the imagination, but the idea of movement just on its own does not do justice to the Ten Worlds system. Complexity includes the idea of motion, but also the concept of a range of ‘degrees of freedom’ within which it is possible for that movement to take place. The degree of freedom which one has from external (or internal) predetermination is here stressed by Daisaku Ikeda (1988, p120-1):

These first six states, from Hell to Heaven, are collectively called the six paths, or the six lower worlds. All of them have in common one thing: they are brought about through either the fulfilment or the thwarting of various desires and impulses. Their appearance or disappearance is therefore governed by external circumstances. Buddhism points out that most people spend their lives shuttling back and forth among these six states without ever realizing that they are completely at the mercy of their reactions to their environment. Any happiness or satisfaction that we may gain in these states is entirely governed by circumstances, and is therefore transient. But when we are trapped in the six lower worlds we fail to realize this, instead basing our entire happiness, - indeed, the whole of our identity - on external factors that are by definition outside our control.

PLAYFUL IRONIC VERSUS SERIOUS LITERAL

What we are looking at here is of course the vertical W axis that we met at the beginning of the last chapter. The W axis is an axis of freedom: where I am on that vertical line indicates where I am with regard to my freedom to act, freedom to think, and freedom to perceive. At the very bottom I am almost entirely controlled by powerful deterministic forces, forces which I have created myself by making very crude assumptions about myself and my environment. Here there is no stopping to reflect, only ceaseless game-playing - I am being driven by unconscious pressures upon me, rules that I cannot see and which therefore have me totally at their mercy. There is nothing to do but carry on perpetuating the same unhappy situation. There is nothing but pure, blind necessity, and (although we can’t see it) this overwhelming necessity is utterly meaningless, utterly arbitrary. It is not only in the extremes of the hell realms that we meet blind necessity, it operates with implacable effectiveness our own everyday realm of consciousness, the realm of social ‘game-reality’. The world most of us are born into is a world governed by dull and oppressive rules, rules which we would see to make no sense at all if we were to stop and reflect on them. These rules can be seen behind the choices that are presented to us as we grow up and take our place in society: do I want to go into the arts or the sciences, to stay at college for further education or get a job now, do I want to save to buy a house or rent; live in a busy city or in the commuter belt, or out in the country; get married or enjoy a single life-style, and so on. These choices look like freedom, but they are not. Actually they are the very opposite of freedom because the more seriously I take the options that are presented to me, the less likely I am to question whether I want to have anything to do with the whole damn thing in the first place. Suppose all of it is bullshit, suppose I don’t want to buy into the package at all? All these things are presented as serious necessities, but actually they are not at all. It is all a scam. Clearly, though, we do not stand a chance of seeing through the spurious necessity of the game if we stay on the lower reaches of the W axis.

We can, therefore, look at this axis is in terms of decreasing or increasing irony. At the bottom are finite games and at the top is the infinite game, the former being characterized, as James Carse says, by serious literal- mindedness, and the latter by a playful, metaphorical (or ironic) approach. This reverse relationship between sense of humour and the in-built necessity of game-reality is explicitly addressed by Chogyam Trungpa (1975, p 8) in the following description of Realm 3:

The animal realm is characterised by the absence of sense of humour. We discover that we cannot remain neutral in the luminosity, so we begin to play deaf and dumb, intelligently playing ignorant, which means that one is completely concealing another area, the area of sense of humour. It is symbolized by animals, which cannot laugh or smile; joy and pain are known to animals, but somehow the sense of humour or irony is not known to them.

One could develop this by believing in a certain religious framework, theological or philosophical conclusions, or by just simply remaining secure, practical and solid. Such a person could be very efficient, very good and consistent at work, and quite contented. It is like a country farmer who attends to his farm methodically, with constant awareness and openness and efficiency; or an executive who runs a business; or a family man whose life is very happy, predictable and secure, with no areas of mystery involved at all. If he buys a new gadget there are always directions for using it. If there is any problem he can go to lawyers or priests or policemen, all sorts of professional people who are also secure and comfortable in their professions. It is utterly sensible and predictable, and highly mechanical at the same time.

What is lacking is that if any unknown, unpredictable situations occurs, there is a feeling of paranoia, of being threatened. If there are people who do not work, who look different, whose whole life-style is irregular, then the very existence of such people is in itself threatening. Anything unpredictable fundamentally threatens the basic pattern. So that apparently sane and solid situation without sense of humour is the animal realm.

GETTING THE JOKE....

Humour is an indicator of multi-level thinking: one starts off stuck purely the one level, the given or ‘official’ reality, which is flat or one-dimensional, when one suddenly discovers a whole new way of looking at things that tends to falsify the previous, supposedly rock-solid viewpoint. What was previously perceived to be a deadly-serious trap is revealed as an illusion or artefact created by our narrow way of looking at things, and the ‘jump’ of consciousness that is involved in this discovery makes one feel like spontaneously breaking out in laughter. Moving up the W-axis means that I see the joke that is being played upon me, and moving down the axis means that I am swallowing it hook, line and sinker....

The idea of ‘getting the joke’ has a tendency to seem, on occasion, rather offensive. “My problems are serious!” I will complain, “How can you tell me that it is only a joke?” This is tricky ground, because (unless one is watching a comedy film) one does not laugh at the suffering of others. Yet, at the same time, it is my inability to see that my situation is serious, and not serious, at the same time, that condemns me to remain stuck in my problems. All neurotic problems have this ‘double nature’: they are serious because I really do believe in the limits that I have imposed upon myself, and they are not serious because the limitations are not actually there at all. The ‘trapped’ or ‘simplex’ view is to see the way in which IT MATTERS, but not to see the way in which IT DOESN’T MATTER; the ‘free’ or ‘complex’ view would be to see that IT MATTERS and IT DOESN’T MATTER, both at the same time Compulsion is nested within non-compulsion; the inflexible rule that says “YOU MUST” is moderated and relativized by all the other possible viewpoints on the matter. Ultimately, all rules are allowed, which paradoxically means that there is no need for rules at all. In his book The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979), Gary Zukov quotes Tibetan Buddhist Longchenpa:

Since everything is but an apparition
Perfect in being what it is,
Having nothing to do with good or bad,
Acceptance or rejection,
One may well burst out in laughter

THE INCONCEIVABILITY FACTOR

Every time we glibly refer to this convenient vertical axis which is labelled [INFORMATION CONTENT, W] and which has [W = infinity] at the top and [W = infinity-to-the-minus-one] at the bottom, we come that little bit closer to assuming that {W -1 to W} is a continuum, like all the points between zero and one hundred degrees centigrade on a thermometer are a continuum. This is not so! There is no continuum, no straight line, no connection between the points at all. Instead, there is something which we will call the ‘inconceivability factor’ - a NO GO zone for the rational mind. Actually, there is no obstacle at all because there is nothing there to be an obstacle, but it is precisely this ‘lack of anything’ that presents the obstacle to our minds since the NO GO zone is nothing other than 100% radical uncertainty, which is rationality’s worst enemy. Because we are always on the edge of the discontinuity, on the edge of the Inconceivable, we are always teetering on the brink of a cliff. Falling off this cliff takes one into a realm that is not just ‘forbidden,’ it is impossible. It is so impossible that it is impossible for us even to see that we have labelled it impossible - that is impossible too, it is impossibilities all the way! Despite our proximity to the inconceivable, we generally carry on with the tea party that makes up most of our life. We could draw a parallel here to the characters in Samuel Beckett’s play who carry on as usual, fully absorbed in trivia, despite the fact that they are all buried up to their necks in the sand. This isn’t quite the right parallel though, a better illustration of the idea would be a play in which the characters pursue their habitual, comfortable interests despite being suspended the whole time over a fathomless abyss. In this sense, it is true to say that we are both close to the inconceivable, and distant from it, at the same time.

DISCONTINUOUS ONTOLOGICAL HIERARCHIES

The idea of a ‘discontinuous ontological hierarchy’ (to use Schumacher’s phrase), otherwise known as ‘levels of being,’ is not exactly unheard of in the history of human thought. On the contrary, it is a very old idea indeed, probably just as old as humans are, in fact. So can we not say that these ‘levels of being’ models are also cosmological/psychological models are based on complexity? In fact we cannot necessarily say this because, generally speaking, the whole system will be found to be organized around the same set of rules. To take a simple example: the Catholic ontological hierarchy of hell, purgatory, earth and heaven. These are four distinct levels but one might entertain doubt as to whether there is any gradation of complexity involved. The way to spot a complex cosmological system is by asking yourself whether or not you can meaningfully speak of, or conceive of, a higher level from a lower - if you cannot do this then it is complex. How many believers think that they can envisage (or describe) paradise from earth? Basically, the more mystical, esoteric or symbolic your thinking on the matter, the more complex the system. Contrariwise, the more dogmatic, exoteric and literal your thinking, the more simplex the resultant cosmological/psychological model. In some faiths, the interpretation of the Bible is taken perfectly literally - you cannot say “But that story can be taken on another level..” because the whole point is that it cannot be taken on another level. It literally means what it says! Therefore, the description of paradise that we find within the Bible is taken to be non-symbolic - it can be perfectly comprehended on our present level of consciousness. One might wonder just how many people would be so literal about their faith, but this the way in which exoteric religion works generally, and there are in existence many concrete descriptions of paradise. Just as we have a need for certainty in day-to-day life, so too do we have a need for certainty in the ‘super-mundane’ life that follows it. We want to have paradise spelled out for us, as it is in the literature provided by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example.

ROBERT DE ROPP AND ‘THE MYTH OF THE MAD KING’

Another way to tell a complex from a simplex system is by the degree of containment that is said to be involved. In an exoteric religious system it would be wrong to say that heaven contains hell, and that hell contains heaven - on the contrary, each realm is seen as being forever separate. The compartments are impermeable: heaven can’t leak through to hell, and hell can’t leak out into earth, and so on. What we are talking about is of course good old Aristotelian logic - EITHOR / OR but not AND / BOTH. In a complex, metaphorical (or esoteric) system it is a different principle which prevails, the principle of Indra’s Net, also referred to by David Bohm as the Hologrammatic Paradigm. Indra’s net consists of an infinity of jewels, each one of which contains the reflections of all the other jewels, and, therefore, of all the reflections that are also in those other jewels. Everything is reflected in everything, and so this is a way of looking into the face of infinity. Similarly, in the Hologrammatic Universe, each portion of the total picture contains all the information that would be needed to reconstitute the Whole; everything is enfolded in everything else, and so the notion of containment is fatally violated.

‘Containment’ equals ‘dissymmetry,’ where one way is not equal to another way. Non-complex systems are predicated upon certain fundamental dissymmetries, so that one way can never be the same as the other way. Complexity throws this satisfying ‘sense of orientation’ right out of the window; if ultimate reality were seen to be infinitely complex, then all realms would have to contain all other realms and any apparent separation would have to be the result of ‘pragmatic decomplexification’ - which is to say, containment would be a pragmatic, but not absolute, reality. This means, in other words, that although there is highly effective containment in operation, this containment is nevertheless only provisional in nature. If I look at it one way I see a wall of reinforced concrete which is as solid as you please; if I stop looking ‘in this way’ then the wall dissolves into empty space which I can walk through. Therefore, there is within the whole system a gradation in terms of expressed complexity, but not in terms of latent complexity; there are barriers which seem water-tight if I look at them one way, but which are in fact no more than reflections of my ‘water-tight’ assumptions. The compartments are only in my head: basically, things are not what they seem, and it is the trickster principle which rules.

In most ‘level of being’ cosmologies, as we have said, the different levels are seen as being just that, different, and therefore we can argue that the difference involved is trivial since all the levels can be described from the standpoint of the level the individual is currently dwelling in. Robert S. de Ropp uses the biblical metaphor of a mansion with many rooms. The trouble is, de Ropp (1968, p 49-50) says, is that we generally have absolutely no interest in finding out if there are other rooms apart from the one we are currently ‘in’:

In the previous chapter man was compared to the inhabitant of a house containing locked rooms, “vast chambers full of treasures with windows looking out on eternity and infinity.” It was said that man in general does not enter these locked rooms. He has lost the key. Sometimes he suspects that the rooms are there and may try to unlock the doors by the use of drugs. More often he does not even know that the rooms exist.

This concept of man’s psyche is very ancient, as old as civilization, probably even older. Like much ancient wisdom, it has come down to us in the form of a myth, which will here be called the “Myth of the Mad King.” The myth takes various forms. Some of the better known variations on this theme are the story of Nebuchadnezzar leaving his palace to eat grass with the beasts, Plato’s story of the prisoners in the cave, the New Testament story of the Prodigal Son and the related story of the wandering prince contained in the Gnostic allegory called the “Hymn to the Soul.”

This old myth, in its essence, compares man to a king with a sumptuous palace at his command. But the king went mad and insisted on living in the cellar surrounded by rags and bones and other worthless objects which he called his possessions. If any of his ministers reproached him for this behaviour and tried to remind him of the palace and its splendors, he indignantly replied that he had never left that palace. Such was the nature of his illusions that he saw the wretched cellar as a palace and the rags and bones he had collected as precious jewels.

SCHUMACHER’S ‘GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED’

When we are in a particular room, we think that this is all that there is - there is an illusion of ‘completeness’ about it. This apparent completeness is what we have been calling organizational closure. Another way of looking at pragmatic boundaries would be to say that reality taken as a whole exists on many levels, and what differentiates each new level from the levels that came before it is an ‘added ingredient’ that wasn’t present in the previous ones. Therefore, each level is inconceivable from the point of view of the level that came before it, but this ‘inconceivability factor’ only works from the bottom up, not from the top down. This is exactly what EF Schumacher (1977, p 25) has said in his A Guide for the Perplexed, where he refers to this mysterious extra ingredient as ‘x’:

...We could call it ‘x’, indicating something that is there to be noticed and studied but cannot be explained. If we call the mineral level ‘m’, we can call the plant level m + x. This factor x is obviously worthy of our closest attention, particularly since we are able to destroy it although it is completely outside our knowledge and ability to create it. Even if somebody could provide us with a recipe, a set of instructions, on how life could be created out of lifeless matter, the mysterious character ‘x’ would remain, and we should never cease to marvel that something that could do nothing is now able to extract nourishment from its environment, grow and reproduce itself, ‘true to form’, as it were. There is nothing in the laws, concepts and formulae of physics and chemistry to describe such powers. ‘x’ is something quite new and additional, and the more deeply we contemplate it the clearer it becomes that here we are faced with what might be called an ontological discontinuity or, more simply, a jump in the level of Being.

What we have here is a description that clearly comes very close to our own vertical W axis. The two are not quite the same though - Schumacher’s scheme is complex in one way because it offers a series of parallel or unconnected views of the universe; but it is non-complex in another way because the principle of Indra’s net does not operate. For this latter reason, we will allege, it is possible that Schumacher’s guide might possibly be the source of further perplexity on the part of the reader. This may seem like a rather harsh criticism, but it is important that we make it because it gives us an example to further illustrate the two key aspects of complexity, i.e. the ‘inconceivability factor’ and ‘incontainability’. Schumacher’s scheme rests upon the idea that each one of the ‘x’ factors is wholly different from each other one, which is to say, that they have independent and exclusive existence. This means that when I am in the mineral level, all the other levels are totally excluded - there is no trace at all of the plant level, for example. It is not that the plant level is present but not pragmatically accessible in the mineral level, it is flatly not there.

Therefore, we are talking about an absolute dissymmetry (or structure) at the heart of the universe: in Schumacher’s discontinuous ontological hierarchy there is a universally meaningful direction which is the direction from ‘bottom’ to ‘top’. We are eternally trapped in a framework since the fact that I can’t see the plant reality when I am in the mineral reality isn’t a function of my way of seeing the world (which would be ‘relativism), it is a function of the way things actually are (which is ‘absolutism’). Absolutism may be seen as a attempt to escape perplexity, but the attempt cannot succeed because absolutism can only be obtained by collapsing the information content of the system, and the result of operating on the basis of this <incomplete information which simultaneously represents itself as all the information> is perpetual incoherence, which is to say, confusion. A way out of this difficulty would be to say that ‘x’ equals a jump in the information content of the system, which is not really what Schumacher is saying.

This changes the picture radically because each time we move down a level, the mysterious character ‘x’ is lost in one sense, but not lost in another sense because the only thing that has really changed is our way of looking at the world. It is not correct to say that information can be destroyed, since it only had pragmatic existence in the first place - what we see is a function of where we are coming from, which is the idea we spent so much time on in the previous chapter. Information can appear to be lost to the system, but inasmuch as it is impossible for any portion of the universe can ever be totally isolated (or ‘stopped’), it is also impossible for any part not to have access to all the information that there is anywhere else. In other words we are always in contact with the infinite information content of the non-local system.

ITZHAK BENTOV’S SCHEME OF COSMIC COMPLEXITY

An explicitly complexity-based model is provided by Itzhak Bentov in his book Stalking the Wild Pendulum. The levels in this system are, in ascending order of complexity: mineral, plant, animal, human, emotional and spiritual. It is interesting to note that the number is again six. Bentov defines the level of complexity in terms of the quality of interaction that is going on between the individual and its environment; there is an overall trend for matter to steadily increase both the quality, and the quantity, of its interaction - these two ‘Q’s being the two pertinent parameters of consciousness. In the following passage Bentov (1978, p 82) leaves us in no doubt that complexity is the key to the whole scheme:

Notice the arrow of evolution, on the right side of the diagram. It points up toward the absolute. This implies that all matter in the universe, starting from the atom, is moving up in levels of consciousness under the forces of evolution until it finally reaches the absolute. It means that matter is combining and becoming more and more complex, forming more intricate nervous systems as time goes by, and these nervous systems are capable of interacting with nature in more complex patterns. In other words, the quality of their consciousness is increasing.

Bentov (p 83-4) goes on to explain what ‘separates’ each level of consciousness:

One may ask: How does our reality differ from other realities? The answer is that our nervous system, which interprets reality for us, interacts strongly within the band of frequencies from f5 to f6 .

We are, so to speak, tuned to exchange maximum energy with our present environment and are in resonance with it. This is the meaning of the energy-exchange curve. The peak of the curve lies in the middle of our reality band, but you may note that the curve extends into the next higher reality and the ones below ours, the animal and plant realities. That is our normal span of interactions; knowingly, or unknowingly, we interact with other levels.

We know, for example, that is we try to push our index finger through a table top, we encounter difficulties due to the resistance offered by the table top, or if we drive a car at 60 mph and it hits a bridge abutment, we do find that there is a strong interaction between us and the abutment. However, if we dream that we are driving the same car at 60 mph and hit a bridge abutment, the interaction is not as strong as it would be in our physical reality. We would wake up slightly shaken and say to ourselves: “I’, so glad it was only a dream.” this interaction is clearly less strong - and less expensive.

You are probably suspecting by now that somewhere above us is a reality that is the dream reality. Our energy-exchange curve reaches into and beyond it. The energy exchange curve of the next level, which we may call (using the existing terminology) the “astral” level, is higher than ours. The astral curve reaches down into our reality and below it, all the way to the mineral reality. Clearly, the population of the astral reality can affect our reality quite substantially. The important thing to notice is that the peak of their energy-exchange curve is higher than ours, which means that they can interact with their environment and with Nature in general more strongly than we can. They can make things go “bump in the night.” Notice also that on the level above the astral, f8, the energy-exchange curve is still higher - so that their interaction with Nature and therefore the resulting control over Nature is even higher. This level we shall call the “mental” level, as it is called in most literature on esoteric subjects. The level above it will be the “causal” or the intuitive level, which again shows a higher interaction of energies and a larger increase in the quantity of consciousness per reality band.

As we move higher on the scale of evolution, we encounter the so-called spiritual realities. These reach all the way to the absolute. Note the very high energy-exchange curve of the highest, the spiritual level. This implies total control over Nature.

We can sum up the above statements this way: it seems that a continuous spectrum of realities arises due to the ability of matter to contain consciousness. Therefore, a rock will contain less consciousness than a plant or a dog. This entails the rock’s lesser degree of control over its environment, fewer possible responses, and therefore less free will (that is, if one can speak about the free will of a rock). But let us not forget that we humans also have only limited free will. The higher we move along the scale of evolution, the higher the degree of free will, and the higher our ability to control or create our own environment.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTROL

Although we have said that Bentov’s model is properly complex, there is still a problem. There is still something there that may produce a state of confusion in the reader. The point is this: Bentov links ‘increasing consciousness’ (by which he means ‘increasing quality and quantity of interaction,’ and ‘increasing energy exchange’) with an increased possibility of environmental control. From the standpoint of classic mechanics, this inference is unproblematic. If, however, we consider that we are talking about system moving out of equilibrium with its environment, then things start to get perplexing. From our previous discussion, it is easy enough to appreciate that we can define an equilibrium state as the state where the quantitative interaction between system and its environment is at a maximum. But we have also defined this state, the state of maximum adaptation, as being a state of minimum consciousness (i.e. it equals unconsciousness). It is where you are so ‘tuned-in’ to the particular that you no longer have any recognition of the universal. Maximization of control goes hand in hand with maximization of quantitative interaction, it is just another way of saying the same thing. Therefore, we can say that the degree of controlling which a system carries out is directly proportional to the adaptedness of the system, its ‘unconsciousness’.

This assertion ought not to come as too much of a shock, after all, we have been saying this all along, in various different ways. If I am heavily invested in control then this means that I am a virtual slave of the assumptions that I have needed to make in order to be in a position to control. There is a trade-off, pure and simple: either I don’t control, and I keep my perspective, or I do control, and I lose that perspective. In the former case, I am not forced to look at the universe in any particular way and this essential freedom is what we have been referring to as consciousness. In the latter case, my condition is that of a person who is deterministically driven by my assumptions, I have the freedom to operate within the framework, but no freedom to question the framework, and this is the condition of being psychologically unconscious.

THE DILEMMA OF ‘NEEDING TO CONTROL....’

But this conclusion seems utterly ridiculous, does it mean that once we become conscious, we lose the power to control what is going on around us? That would mean that we grow more and more helpless, which is absurd - after all, one of our definitions of consciousness is ‘the degree of autonomy possessed by a system.’ Autonomy means freedom, i.e. the degree to which one is no longer determined or controlled by external environmental factors - such as other people, or events in general. It also implies freedom from internal determining factors such as belief structures, mood-states, biological drives or instincts, unconscious ‘scripts’ for social games, and so on. But to be free from being controlled by ‘extrinsic’ factors from both the outside and inside worlds, do we have to ‘pre-empt’ by getting in with the controlling first? Do we have to control them before they can control us? In other words, is it a fight for power?

The instinctive reaction is to say an emphatic “Yes!” to all of these questions, and that is where our problems really begin. This reaction to contend is the reason why we screw up as much as we do, it is why situations become as intractable as they do. If you are controlling me, then this is a loss of autonomy on my part. But, if I pre-empt your controlling with my own controlling then I am still being forced to do do something that I didn’t necessarily want to do - you are forcing me to control you, and therefore this is still not an expression of autonomy on my part. You have chosen the playing field, you have chosen the issue in which I have now got caught up in, and so even if I win, I win on your terms. What we are essentially saying is that the necessity to control is not freedom! This insight gives us the answer to the conundrum that we posed a minute ago about ‘consciousness and helplessness’ - autonomy does not equal control. ‘Helplessness’ is the key word here, as soon as I become convinced that I need to help myself, that this is a real issue, then I have lost freedom - I have lost sight of the possibility that actually I don’t have to ‘help’ myself after all, which is the possibility of radical freedom. Once I do become invested in helping myself, then I am forced into a defensive position, and the necessity to remain defended is a false expression of autonomy. This is theatrical strength, which Carse calls power, and it can be defined as ‘the strength to get things to be the way I want them to be’. We can also see it as ‘strength within a game,’ which translates as ‘the ability to win’. What we do not notice is the way in which the context within which winning and losing takes place has been chosen for me.

The other type of strength is paradoxical in nature, because it involves remaining helpless; this other type of strength can be defined as to ‘strength to allow things to be the way they already are,’ i.e. the strength to remain in the realm of radical uncertainty, or the ‘ability not to be hoodwinked regarding spurious notions of winning and losing’. It is possible to illustrate in practical terms what we mean by saying that there are two types of strength by thinking about losing one’s temper. Suppose that I am in a situation where I am being provoked: I am in the office and everyone is having a good laugh at my expense... The first way of coping is the instinctive knee-jerk ‘controlling’ way which we will call Type-1 strength. Type-I strength can work in two ways and which of these two options we go for will depend largely on our habit: if I have iron self-control then I will repress my anger, I will clamp down on it so hard that no one (perhaps not even me) will be able to see it; if, on the other hand, I chose through habit to direct my control outwards then I will roar at everyone else, or reprove them, or complain at them, or in some way try to turn the situation around so that someone else becomes the butt of the joke. All of these responses come down to playing a game, playing the same game that everyone else is playing. They are all ‘for show,’ they are all theatrical, they are all calculated responses which are designed to have a meaning within a specific context. Even if I am only trying to prove to myself that I am not going to descend to the level of the others, that I am not going to rise to the bait, this is still theatrical because I am putting on a performance for someone’s benefit (either my own, or that of some hypothetical objective audience). Type-2 strength is totally different to either ‘repression’ or ‘acting out’ because it doesn’t involve any sort of control and it isn’t theatrical. I do not expend any energy or will power, I simply stay in the present situation - which is where I am anyway. I don’t stay in the here and now of it all because I need to, any more than I try to exit the situation because I need to. There is no question of compulsion. I stay in the here and now because I am in the here and now, and so there is no need for control. This type of strength is the strength to be myself in other words, which means that Type-2 strength must be the strength to be ‘not myself’. What we are basically saying, then, is that control is not autonomy, and that the power to have things to be the way I want them to be is deceptive strength, since it is strength against myself. These ideas will now be discussed at greater length in Chapter 4.