www.radicaluncertainty.com

Author: Nicholas Williams

What trips most of us up, right from the word ‘GO,’ is that we are actually looking for an answer - we think that there really is such a thing. This is why we never learn anything new, we are far too keen on the idea of reaching a final conclusion; our insecurity is simply too over-powering for us to look around us without a secret agenda, i.e. the secret agenda of ‘not allowing ourselves to become aware of groundlessness.’ We aren’t poets, exploring beauty, we are escapists, burrowing ever deeper into a delusional system of false knowledge, and patting ourselves on the back as we do so for being so clever. What is driving us is unacknowledged anxiety, a fear so terrible that we dare not own up to it; our achievements, our society, our technology, are no more than skilful evasions of radical uncertainty. Our lives are masterpieces of distraction, this is the nature of the agreement that we all abide by: I distract you, and you distract me, and we all distract each other, and as a result no one need ever confront the truth.

It doesn’t sound stupid to want to have answers to our questions, but this is in itself an indicator of just how identified we are with our minds, with the system of our thinking. The problem is this: when I ask a question, what I am doing is sneakily excluding radical uncertainty, I am shutting the door on it so effectively that the act of shutting the door is also shut out. When I frame a question I automatically get trapped in the context within which that question was constructed. I am validating the assumptions that I have had to make in order to ask the question; by looking in a particular direction I am making it impossible for myself to ever learn that the answer can’t be found in a particular direction; it is not to be found in the particular, the local, at all. No direction is the right direction, and therefore to look for it is to miss it. A rough sort of an analogy would be a person who switches on the TV but can’t find anything worth watching. He hops from one channel to another in frustration, but the more he gets caught up in the technical manipulation of ‘channel jumping,’ the less likely it is to occur to him that the whole idea of watching TV is itself crap. The option of turning the thing off is forgotten.

LOSING PERSPECTIVE

This is not a particularly brilliant illustration of the idea because often (or at least sometimes!) we do just this - we press the off button, and we go and do something else. However, the general principle holds true in many situations - when we are pressurized we use our instrumentation more feverishly, we don’t take a step back and think about our choice of tools. Under stress we look for an answer within the frame of reference we started out with, and the more stressed out we get the more we forget about the big picture, and get involved in jiggling about with the details. We lose perspective, in other words. Perspective means ‘having sight of the relativity of the framework we are working under’, it means ‘remembering that my assumptions are only assumptions’. My assumptions are my unconsciousness, my ‘mental blindspot,’ and what I am basically wanting to do when I ask a question is to perpetuate and further my original unconsciousness. Maintaining unconsciousness is the hidden drive. What we are saying is that avoiding consciousness is the unacknowledged psychological gain that I am playing for, that this is my ultimate agenda. Therefore, we have here a psychological drive of primary importance, a fundamentally attractive ‘way to go’ in our psychic functioning, a gradient, a slope to slip down.

How do we go about supporting such an odd claim? Why on earth would there be such a thing as ‘a psychological drive to unconsciousness’? If it were true, then how could this be in any way ‘adaptive’? And anyway, aren’t all of these the ‘wrong questions’ too? Within the paradigm of uncertainty, it must be admitted that these are, ultimately speaking, meaningless questions, just like any others that we might ask. But we can ask them in a playful way, without becoming too attached to them, so that when the time comes we can drop them as irrelevant. In order to playfully explore them, we will develop in this chapter the idea of ‘decomplexification’. Once we understand decomplexification, then we can understand how unconsciousness can be adaptive! This, then, brings us to our first (provisional) statement, which goes as follows:

STATEMENT 1 - We can either interact with the universe in a complexity-decreasing way or in a complexity-increasing way.

EXPLANATION

Decomplexifying interactions have the result of making the system of [self + environment] seem more definite to us, whilst complexifying interactions have the effect of making things seem less definite. We could also say that decomplexification has the effect of producing a relatively simple, or ‘unambiguous’ pragmatic reality. By definition, one takes it as read that such a reality is accurately and effectively accounted for with an economy of descriptive terms; a simplified pragmatic reality is one that has been squeezed into a pre-existent set of descriptive or evaluative categories - your situation has been ‘nailed down’, in other words.

The sort of psychological ‘interactions’ that we are talking about can either be cognitive or emotional; for example, understanding a situation (or a thing, or a person) in accordance with a set of evaluative criteria is always a decomplexifying interaction. In his book Quantum Psychology Robert Anton Wilson (1990) explores the idea that, in order to function, we have to - at some point - make a gamble that ‘we know what something is’. At some point we have to jump to a specific and definite conclusion about what the object in question “is”. When we identify something in this way, he says, we leap to a state of premature certainty: we make an assumption regarding what we are seeing (or what we think is happening). Actually, Wilson suggests, the ‘world-stuff’ we interact with ought properly to be regarded as a stream of unidentified objects. You might grab a suitcase at the airport thinking that it is yours, only to find out later on that is not yours at all. Wilson relates the story of how he once encountered, in the kitchen of his house, in the early hours of the morning, a dark and mysterious shape. This he cites as an example of an UNFO, an Unidentified Non-Flying Object. There are many such UNFO’s - indeed, life is full of them, although this fact is not often remarked upon. The UNFO in this story subsequently turned out to be Wilson’s wife.

We can derive various other principles from Wilson’s example. We could suggest that even after you have been married to someone for thirty years, and you are at the stage when you think that you know him or her to perfection, you can still be surprised to discover that your partner was a complete stranger all along. The point of making this observation is to highlight the provisional nature of all identifications: you might, if you had a similar experience to Wilson, get a nasty shock as you bump into an unknown personage in the dark, but when you ‘find out’ who it is you will relax and think no more about it. Your question mark, the big [?] that is floating above your head to start off with, evaporates and does not reappear; you might even reproach yourself for being so silly, “Of course is it is just my wife/husband, who else would it be?” This encounter is a perfect example of a decomplexifying interaction between you and a mysterious, ambiguous, and distinctly threatening universe. The crucial point is, what most people would take to be an absolute or definitive identification, is still only provisional, i.e. it will do until we learn otherwise, but it isn’t the final judgment on the matter. This may seem like splitting hairs, but what we have here is a split between two totally different modes of understanding, two totally different psychologies - you couldn’t get a bigger split than this, actually! The first mode, the one based upon definitive identifications, we shall call simplex psychology. It is the second mode, which we shall refer to as complex psychology, which we will be concerned with in this book.

WIERDSVILLE, ARIZONA

The first thing that we need to do is to define the state of radical psychological uncertainty. As it happens, of course, we cannot define it in any meaningful way because if we did it wouldn’t be radical uncertainty. It wouldn’t actually be any sort of uncertainty! What we will do, therefore, is invoke the reader’s imagination in an attempt to conjure up a fog of psychological ‘not-knowingness’ - a state of ongoing irreducible perplexity. Let us go back to the situation where one partner bumps unexpectedly into the other in the kitchen at three o’clock in the morning. Imagine that this happens to you, but, this time, instead of recognition immediately following, it doesn’t...

This is hard to envisage because even if it isn’t your wife or husband that you have bumped into, it will obviously be someone, and you will identify that someone. Even if it is a person wearing a mask you will still be able to identify the unexpected and hitherto unidentified object as ‘a masked intruder’. All the same, just for the sake of the argument, we will say that you do not decomplexify the situation, you keep the [?] bubble floating over your head like a character in a cartoon. It is now a permanent feature of your cognition: for some reason or other, the cartoonist has decided not to remove it! This state of mind is highly unsettling, it is highly unnerving, but, in its favour, it is incredibly open. You are now completely unprejudiced, which is a very unusual way to be - you are prepared to believe in absolutely anything; another way to put this, of course, would be to say that you are not prepared at all. This state of affairs (unpreparedness) one automatically takes to be a bad thing: if you did end up this way then people would feel the need to take care of you, you might even end up in a special institution where you could be looked after all the time. In practice the big [?] tends to be a momentary feature of cognition: it is like an unstable chemical state, it is like a highly reactive free radical which exists only for a fraction of a second before it combines with something else to become a more stable type of chemical.

The split second of not knowing who is there when you bump into a strange body in the kitchen is, we will suggest, a fleeting experience of radical uncertainty. However, because it is such a fleeting experience this makes it hard to focus on. No sooner is it there, than it is gone, and this makes it very easy to disbelieve in the whole thing. In addition to the difficulty of the insubstantiality of the experience, there is also the possibility of confusing radical with trivial uncertainty. Maybe you are the sort of person who is not easily spooked. In this case, colliding with a UNFO might only induce uncertainty of the trivial variety - you might be unflappable, in other words. You just know there is nothing to get excited about. What we will do, therefore, is make the effort to shift our imaginations into a higher gear and try to invent a more startling, more ‘long-lasting’ uncertainty scenario to experiment with. We will call this scenario ‘The Visitation’.

You live alone and you are fast asleep in bed. You are not sleeping very well, however. Your dreams are restless and disturbed. Something wakes you up with a jolt - you have the distinct feeling that someone has entered your bedroom. You hear (or you think that you hear) the door creak ever so slightly open. It is inky dark, apart from a single shaft of moonlight that has found its way in past the curtains, and which lights up a portion of your duvet in a ghostly spotlight. A pool of extra-special darkness has gathered at the foot of your bed: it seems to be spinning fantastic shapes all around it; odd, highly intricate doodles that evaporate after a while. All that gets left behind are a host of tiny phosphorescent motes bobbing about. You can see little fuzzy atoms of coloured lights, rather like the visual activity you see when you screw your eyes tight shut, only now your eyes are wide open... There is a supernatural hush, an expectant, supercharged silence...

And then a trickle of electric energy travels up your spine as the thought suddenly enters your head that you can see someone there quietly looking at you. The quality of their presence is curiously unstated, but somehow you cannot go back to your previous detached state of mind, in which all these strange phenomena could have been written off simply as the remnants of a dream that haven’t yet faded away. In a state of horrified fascination, and against your better judgement, you play about with the idea that you can see a figure faintly silhouetted against the wardrobe, half there and half not there. You notice that it actually looks totally real when you don’t focus on it, and then when you look more directly all you can see is darkness and a faint suggestion of multi-levelled contours swirling in an ethereal dance in the darkness. It is as if the figure is wearing some kind of cloak that flows and unflows, rippling in dimensions that are incomprehensible to your mind, a cloak of unreality. Now and again the cloak parts to reveal startling vistas of open space, scattered here and there are patterns of light that look like vastly distant galaxies. The impression is of clear sky seen on a frosty December night; it is tranquil but frightening. When you look too long you lose orientation completely, you don’t know whether you are looking up or down or sideways, whether you are coming or going. You start to feel as if that you are falling into the sky.

Then, as you sit there, still not fully taking in what is happening, the figure moves closer and you can no longer play dumb - you have to deal with what is happening! You see in front of you a face that for some reason you feel scared to look at. Whoever it is, is waiting for you to understand a vital piece of information, they are silently telling you something. Somehow you feel as if you really ought to know this person, you are reminded, with a sickening jolt of deja vu, of some knowledge or memory buried deep inside you. Knowledge of some Great Event, some supremely important, archetypal occurrence. The awareness is starting to unfold within you. Two eyes stare into your own, they shine with unbearable meaning, they pierce you through and through, they hold you frozen in their uncanny, shockingly serene gaze...

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET

At this point the level of uncertainty that you are experiencing has gone right of the scale: you would have to be an android (or on largactil) not to be spooked. We will therefore take it that you are in that strange state where anything could be true - normal reality is on hold, the regular broadcast has been interrupted. This is what is commonly known as the ‘twilight zone’ or the ‘witching hour’; the curtains have been momentarily twitched apart and, for a split-second, you can stare in naked surprise into the face of the unknown. We have to admit that, as experiences go, this one is not exactly something that everyone can relate to, but then again it is the principle that counts, not the details. Cracks in the fabric of our pragmatic reality do occur; it is for example quite common to experience an uncertain state of mind upon waking in an unfamiliar location: for a second or two you are completely and utterly disorientated in space, you just don’t know where the hell you are. You could be anywhere or you could be nowhere.

Sometimes this feeling might persist longer than usual, and if this happens you will notice that your mind starts feverishly groping through all its possibilities, trying to establish via the application of reason some kind of ‘spatial sanity’. From this type of disorientation it is but a small step to total ‘reality disorientation’. This is what we might call a major gap in the reality broadcast, there is a serious reality failure, anything could be true, or nothing could be true. There is absolutely no certainty anywhere to grab hold of. “Reality...? ...What reality?” we ask in despair. Most of us would have a very predictable response to a ‘reality breakdown’ experience of this sort: the immediate reaction is going to be one of unmitigated terror, “Get me out of here!” would be our first thought. Although terrifying, this is a very real psychological state, even though it may seem a trifle odd to speak of a ‘real feeling of unreality’!

REINSTATING CERTAINTY

As we have said, gaps in the reality broadcast are almost always vanishingly short. The mind abhors a ‘reality vacuum,’ it replaces radical uncertainty with a reassuring positive reality, whatever the cost. Even a ‘bad’ or scary reality is preferable to continuing uncertainty. In the case of spatial disorientation (“Where am I?”) what usually happens is that we keep groping around until we grasp hold of a reality that sticks - we remember where we are. In the case of the visitation scenario, which we hoped would produce a moment of full-scale reality-disorientation (“What is going on?”, or even, if the shock was great enough “Who/what am I”) we work out what we think to be appropriate answers to these questions. Earlier, we mentioned very briefly what might be called ‘cognitive instability due to schizophrenia’ and at this point we should make it clear that a schizophrenic isn’t simply a person with a permanent question mark hanging over his or her head. It is NOT the case that people suffering from this type of acute mental distress go around with a perfect equanimity with regard to all frameworks of interpretations that might be brought to bear on the universe in which they find themselves. We have said that such a state of mind as this tends to be fleeting and it is, even in schizophrenia: if you ask someone suffering from active, positive-symptom schizophrenia the questions: “Who am I?”/ “Who are you?” / “What is going on?” they are very likely to have the answers at hand, or at the least suspicions concerning the shape which those answers are going to take. There is some kind of organizing principle at work which strives to rationalize the chaos.

In one way it could be said that what we call schizophrenia is merely what is bound to happen when the universe becomes too complex (which is to say when our pragmatic or ‘lived’ reality ceases to behave itself and overflows the logical channels which we use to process our experience of it) and we carry on trying to instigate order, at any cost. Our theories about the world become fantastic, bizarre, preposterous, convoluted - more trouble than they are worth really, since we have to live with these theories, i.e. we have to base all our purposeful activities upon them. Sometimes our theories are downright hellish and we scare ourselves big time, but we still stick to them; paranoia is of course a classic example of a ‘bad interpretation of reality’ which we get very attached to. This might seem contradictory, but it makes perfect sense if we go along with the idea that our primary psychological motivation is ‘fear of radical uncertainty’. In other words, it is better to be scared by an event which makes sense within a known frame of reference, than it is to be scared by an event that comes with no context for interpretation, and which is, therefore, the ultimate threat to our belief that ‘everything must make sense’.

In a sense, then, the frightening aspect of schizophrenia (which is a major component) can be seen in terms of an explosion of ‘super-anxiety,’ an anxiety that we all have hidden away in us somewhere. Normally we are anxious about the details all going wrong, but below this, there is a more fundamental anxiety about ‘groundlessness,’ an anxiety that there may be no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ at all. After all, in everyday anxiety, there is at least this basic orientation to hold onto to...

JUST SAY ‘NO’

We will leave schizophrenia for the time being and go back to the visitation scenario. There is no need to assume that there is any kind of brain-chemical imbalance going on with you, your neurochemistry is perfectly normal, you have not eaten any funny mushrooms before going to bed, your previous experiences have all been reasonably normal (you have no psychiatric history) - in fact the only ‘not normal’ component is the experience that you are having right now! Now after the first moment of ‘wide-open surprise,’ your experience and logic will start to assert itself, you will try to figure out what the hell is going on. There are any number of explanations that you could try out. Perhaps it is a trick - maybe some joker is having a laugh at your expense. Maybe you are on candid camera. The figure in front of you does not permit such an easy explanation, however; after all, you can see right though him, you can see star-clusters and alien galaxies in the folds of his sleeve, you can hear the supernatural hush of eternal night, you can feel the awesomeness of his presence. Okay, so that’s out, what next? It is a visitor from outer space, an emissary from another dimension, a highly evolved being who has chosen you to be the recipient of vital information, information that is essential for the survival of the human race....

Now, you could go for this, if you were inclined to this sort of thing, that is. The experience would then make perfect sense. But maybe science fiction and UFOlgy isn’t your bag, you might be happier with a religious interpretation: it is the devil and he has come to claim your soul.... Or maybe it is a spirit, a messenger from the higher spheres, who wishes to impart esoteric wisdom to you. Maybe it is a Jungian Archetype, and therefore this is an opportunity for you to get in touch with your Collective Unconscious. It is unlikely that the above interpretations are going to take root in your mind, though. Religion isn’t what it used to be, and spiritualist / alien life-form type scenarios are strictly minority interests, as is Jungian psychology. Most of us are scientific materialists, rationalists to the core, and there is, therefore, a much more appealing explanation that is available to us in times of reality-stress:

“Excuse me, but this just isn’t happening. It is scientifically impossible. What I am experiencing is a hallucination, a medical phenomenon and no more. It is an illness: please get me a psychiatrist who will give me a pill or an injection to make it go away...”

This is the correct rational reaction to the inexplicable - deny it! Rejecting your pragmatic (subjective) experience by saying “No” to it is a really basic way of instigating certainty, if all else fails you can always do this. We can see through this example how it is that psychiatry serves a crucial function in our culture in that it provides an ultimate bastion of rationality. Just as ‘closed thinking’ and ‘closed behaviour’ are psychological defences against radical uncertainty, so too is psychiatry a basic act of denial, the most basic way of saying ‘NO’ that we have. Psychiatry, in the form that it is usually taught and practiced, is all about being sure; it is all about having neat demarcations between what is sane and what is not sane, who is the doctor and who is the patient. The patient may not be sure, but you are - that is, after all, your job!

CERTAINTY EQUALS UNCONSCIOUSNESS

It is easy enough to see that ever single one of the reactions listed above is an evasion, not just that of the craven ‘scientific materialist’. They all equal CERTAINTY, and certainty is the automatic response of the mind, which would do anything, believe in anything, rather than just step aside or bow-out by allowing ‘what is happening to happen’. The traditional religionist, once they cop on that it is the Bad Fella Himself, will freeze on this, they will make like a clam with this reality and go into automatic mode from there on in. The UFO believer can handle exotic realities, sure, but there is still the need to impose the same tired old format on genuinely mysterious experiential material. The spiritualist also automatically projects a type of order - they already know ‘how things are’ and can’t wait to slot everything into this banal scheme. Even the Jungian (just in case you thought we were letting him/her of the hook) is missing the point. To identify an archetype as ‘an archetype’ is a classic, gold-plated action of the conceptual mind. “Oh, so you have matched reality with one of your evaluative categories, have you?” one feels like saying, “Fantastic, now you have really learned something...”

So what is the correct point of view to take, in the unlikely event of such an eventuality befalling us? Well, the answer of course is that there is no correct stance. Ever, not just when weird shit happens. To make this clearer, we might say that there are two ways to perceive stuff:

1/ We can compare incoming information to pre-existent evaluative criteria, in which case we never ever see anything new. This is seeing the unknown in terms of the known; it is active data processing, i.e. ‘reality manipulation’.

2/ We can just see it, as a ‘once off’, as something new, without trying to refer the experience to anything else. This is acceptance, not manipulation - you have no agenda behind your perception, no guidelines.

The former is an unconscious reaction, which means that it is easy but unproductive; the latter is not an automatic reaction at all, which is to say it involves s really paying attention to what is going, without having any agendas in your perception. The ‘consciousness alternative’ has the benefit that you actually learn something that you didn’t know before, it is a creative act. To talk about ‘creativity’ does not mean that you create what you see, it means that you have not relied on any tried-and-trusted procedures to make sense of it; you haven’t adopted a standardized view of things - only you are seeing this and you can’t expect anyone else to see the same thing, you can’t compare notes. You can’t hand over the responsibility to some higher authority, and ‘higher authority’ doesn’t necessarily mean an institution outside of yourself, it is more likely to mean your own memories, your own beliefs, your own tired-and-trusted thought processes. In fact, as David Bohm says, it is all the same thing: the internal biasing factors are reflections of the external biasing factors, and vice versa - in the end, we hand over to the authority of the system, to the authority of thought, which is to say, precedence. The unknown is swallowed by the known.

THE RATTRAP OF THE MIND

This line of reasoning isn’t going to satisfy anyone who ‘just wants to know’. “Never mind the crap,” says our impatient listener, “get to the point, cut to the chase, produce the goods - what the hell is going on with the freaky figure leaning over you in the early hours of the morning?” This is where we get seriously irritating: there is no point, there are no goods. We all tend to have minds like heavy-duty rattraps: something happens, the spring is sprung, and SNAP, the trap closes viciously. We want a solid lump of something to close our conceptual jaws on, but in the ultimate analysis there is nothing. Basically, we want the story to be over, we want a final, decisive reality, we don’t want any more gearshifts, any more surprises coming out of the bag. We want it all to end, we want the whole business just to stop, to terminate! We don’t want to have to think afresh anymore. And what is left after that? What is life apart from a never-ending journey? To want it to finish is to want to resign, to pack it all in. The urge to know, once and for all, is not a noble urge when it comes down to it, it is a manifestation of ‘oblivion-hunger’ - the craving for an end to everything. We want to discover the truth in order to say that we know the truth, so that we don’t have to look any more. This is no different really from hiding under the duvet, it is the same as burying your head under a pillow and moaning “Just leave me alone. Go away. I don’t want anything to do with it. Let me alone....”

NOTHING IS REAL

We have been trying to put forward the argument that uncertainty is a positive thing. We are saying that it is actually good news that we can’t know stuff for sure. Uncertainty means that the story is continuing to unfold, it is still going on, we haven’t got there yet. The iron bars of certainty haven’t come down to plunge us into unconsciousness, to rob us of our creative potential. We can also look at this in terms of reality versus unreality: the ‘rat-trap’ mind says that something must be real, it claims that here must be a basic story there somewhere, a fundamental level of description. What we are saying is that there just isn’t. It is not that there is no Reality so much as there is no ‘-thing’ and no ‘-where’ for it to be in; there are no real things because ‘things’ are not real, but that does not mean that there is no reality! Reality isn’t to be found in any particular location, and it doesn’t have any specific characteristics that you could write down in your notebook - basically, it isn’t an abstraction. For this reason, Reality and mind constitute an incompatible pair - you can have one but not the other. Reality, as an infinitely complex whole, is just too much for our minds to grasp, it cannot surround or contain it. The mind can only deal in abstractions, in convenient fictions - stuff within boundaries. One might even go so far as to say that the mind itself is ‘boundary’: it is a barrier, a wall, the very embodiment of resistance or denial. This statement probably sounds rather extreme, but as we go on the sense of it should become more apparent. For the time being we need only note that since the mind cannot contain Reality its inevitable conclusion has to be that there is no such a thing; it only grants reality to what it can describe, and thus radical uncertainty is seen as a negative thing. In actual fact those who have returned from a voluntary visit to the realm of deep uncertainty are unanimous that the experience was overwhelmingly, awesomely, staggeringly positive...

“Just what is so good about uncertainty?” the reader might want to ask. After all, if there is nothing definite to grab hold of or describe, then that doesn’t sound particularly satisfying. In addition, Ultimate Ambiguity tends to sound wishy-washy or vague and we feel that the emotional response to such a state would be similarly indecisive, sort of ‘nothing-in-particular’ feeling like the ‘existential blur’ that Ivan Illich says arises as a result of chronic painkiller consumption. One answer that it is possible for us to give is to point out that the normal condition of being is the condition where ‘we don’t want to know what we know’. This is a flat contradiction and it is obvious that to be in this state of being will always involve anxiety. This is naturally an inevitability - if we are addicted to certainty then anxiety will always be with us, gnawing away at our insides, attacking us on a very fundamental level. So when we surrender to the reality of uncertainty ...this insidious, omnipresent anxiety evaporates! Anxiety is such a life-long companion that when it leaves us the feeling is completely unprecedented - one doesn’t know whether to laugh out loud or cry with relief.

All the same, the above is a ‘negative description’ and it still doesn’t satisfy. We could also try to make the point that we are not alluding to a condition that is an undecided oscillation between several known possibilities, so that the end result is a meaningless blur, a mess where all the colours have run into each other. It is not that there is a blending of opposites - rather than this, the opposites have never arisen at all. Just to add one further perplexing twist to our so-called ‘explanation,’ we could say that uncertainty isn’t actually uncertain at all, when we get to know it - there is no ‘doubt’ involved at all. Things are naturally and effortlessly what they are and there is absolutely no problem with this. Uncertainty only looks negative because we are using the concept to erode the false solidity that surrounds us, it is the acid bath of the alchemist which takes the whole world apart at the seams. This acid can be used to dissolve any structure at all, but the point is not that I want to dissolve the world, but that I want to remove a ‘blocking factor’, so that what it hides can at last be seen.

HAVING A PINT WITH THE PRESIDENT

Practically speaking - who actually ever gets to see this so-called ‘hidden truth’? It is an undeniable fact that a sizeable minority of the world’s population of human beings would be very interested to meet someone who could give a straightforward, first-hand account of having seen what lies beyond the world of definite phenomena. It is also a fact that it is bafflingly hard to come across such a person - you would stand a better chance of being invited for tea and biscuits with the Queen of England, or enjoying a pint of lager with the president of the United States. Yet, at the same time, experience of profound uncertainty is quite commonplace, and we are not just talking about the fleeting variety. Some people spend a substantial portion of their waking hours in deep uncertainty, or ‘groundlessness’. Some of these people are what we would call schizophrenic and these people don’t generally want to be here; others are saints, mystics and meditation masters, and they are here voluntarily. One person’s ecstasy is another person’s terror!

The Beatles (if you are old enough to remember the Beatles) were visitors to the realm of deep uncertainty, which is how they came to write the lyrics “Nothing is real,” Lyrics such as these, and even more obscure ones, are readily dismissed as hippy gobbledygook; a rationalist is simultaneously irritated and vindicated by irrationality - we feel disgusted and smug at the same time! This is because we are heavily invested in certainty, basically we are running scared and we have turned our craven denial around so that it actually sounds like a virtue and not a vice. We see certainty as something which is sensible, rational, adult, mature, moral, responsible. This sort of responsibility is self-manufactured for the purpose of allowing us to feel good about ourselves, and the shoddy, distinctly unheroic choice that we have made as to what life should be about, and about what we should be about. We have, as Colin Wilson says, opted to be mental pygmies, and we hate to be reminded that we didn’t have to make this choice, no one forced us...

WHO AM I?

The ‘choice’ that we are talking about here is the choice to to subject oneself to a stupendously big downwards jump of decomplexification, a colossal information collapse. It is what students of esotericism would better recognize as the Fall. It is the situation were we hide from ourselves, where we make an alien of our true Self, and compulsively identify with a false self, a self based on spurious feeling of certainty. The Great Information Collapse, therefore, can be seen very straightforwardly in terms of the ‘re-instatement of certainty’: the indefinite or non-local Self (which is the Self of infinite complexity) is collapsed into the definite or local self (which is a simplex, one-level identity).

The classic question that the student of esotericism is asked to consider is “Who am I really?” or “What is my original face?” If one ponders long and hard enough on this question, the result is guaranteed to be unsettling. Our conventional or provisional identities are basically as shaky as hell and require constant propping up - they certainly don’t stand up to prolonged and remorseless scrutiny. If we persist in questioning our assumed identity we will eventually create for ourselves an ‘identity crisis’. Question anything long enough and it falls apart; think about your name long enough and it will become meaningless... Of course, it need hardly be said that such a crisis is the last thing most of us are looking for! Usually, as Sogyal Rinpoche (1992, p 116) says, our activity is geared towards supporting not undermining the solidity of our assumptions regarding ‘who we are really’:

Imagine a person who suddenly wakes up in hospital after a road accident to find she is suffering from total amnesia. Outwardly, everything is intact: she has the same face and form, her senses and her mind are there, but she doesn’t have any idea or trace of a memory of who she really is. In exactly the same way, we cannot remember our true identity, our original nature. Frantically, and in real dread, we cast around and improvise another identity, one we clutch onto with all the desperation of someone falling continuously into an abyss. This false and ignorantly assumed identity is “ego”.

So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence.

In Tibetan ego is called dak dzin, which means “grasping to a self.” Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of “I” and “mine,” self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction. Such a grasping is futile from the start and condemned to frustration, for there is no basis or truth in it, and what we are grasping at is by its very nature ungraspable. The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fear.

DODGY BUSINESS BEHIND THE SCENES...

There is clearly a sort of connection between ‘unreality’ and ‘uncertainty’ which we could put as follows: radical uncertainty = no relevance to our categories of thought = “it is unreal”. This isn’t so much a series of equivalences so much as a degenerate or faulty procedure of logic. Radical uncertainty is not conceptualizable, therefore we say it cannot exist, moreover it is not just that we say it is unreal - by saying that it is ‘unreal’ we have hijacked the whole notion, we have brought it into the realm of the mind, which is not a legitimate thing to do, so that the very flavour of radical uncertainty is completely lost. This manoeuvre removes the offending element from out of our mental horizon without us even realizing that something has been removed. This is a kind of a super-sneaky trick - it is as if the CIA had kidnapped us, held us prisoner for three weeks, and then induced total amnesia in us with regard to what had happened. Whatever that was! Moreover, just to make the experience completely undetectable, they implant a false set of memories in us so that we think we had been on holiday in Florida the whole time. Similarly, where radical uncertainty is concerned, there is no gap, no discontinuity. We forget that we chose to forget and the slate is wiped clean.

This sneaky manoeuvre is not, we should hasten to add, carried out by special agents, or by the mind police, or by aliens, but by ourselves, for the sake of neat book-keeping. This is basically a way in which we allow ourselves the ‘freedom’ to be able to unknow stuff that we just don’t want to know. In his book Finite and Infinite Games James Carse deals neatly with this idea, which he calls self-veiling. Before we can play a game, Carse says, it is essential that we experience a sense of necessity about it all. Necessity translates as ‘lack of freedom,’ and therefore in order to play a game we freely hand over our own freedom. We conceal from ourselves the awareness that there is not really any necessity. Here, Carse (1986, p 12-13) puts forward his argument:

To account for the large gap between the actual freedom of finite players to step off the field of play at any time and the experienced necessity to stay at the struggle, we can say that as finite players we somehow veil this freedom from ourselves.

Some self-veiling is present in all finite games. Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them.

From the outset of finite play each part or position must be taken up with a certain seriousness; players must see themselves as teacher, as light-heavyweight, as mother. In the proper exercise of such roles we positively believe we are in the persons those roles portray. Even more: we make the roles believable to others. It is in the nature of acting, Shaw said, that we are not to see this woman as Ophelia, but Ophelia as this woman.

RADICAL UNCERTAINTY AS ‘INTRINSIC FREEDOM’

What Carse means by finite games can be explained simply enough by saying that a finite game is one in which the desired outcome is known in advance. The rules are definite - they are absolute rather than provisional. Rules bestow meaning, and therefore everything that happens is given value only insofar as it contributes to the final, specified state. Basically, for the finite player winning is all that matters!

In infinite games it is surprise that one plays for and thus all goals, and all rules, are provisional - exploration is the thing, not consolidation. For the infinite player it is not the rules that are important, but the movement into the unknown. Who knows what is or is not important? Carse allows us to expand our conception of radical uncertainty since we can now relate it to the notion of intrinsic freedom. Intrinsic freedom is the freedom that is there all the time, it exists no matter what - it was not given and it cannot be taken away. It naturally belongs to us. So, we are now in the position to make another statement.

STATEMENT 2 - We have to suppress or inhibit our awareness of radical uncertainty in order to function within the domain of the mind, since mind only works within a framework of necessities or rules.

Mind is a basic requirement before there can be any goal-orientated behaviour, it is the context within which purposefulness makes sense. That ‘purposefulness,’ then, only makes sense because the mind has decided that it should, because the goals have already been put in place. ‘Goals’ equal compulsion, or ‘lack or freedom’; goals are you saying “such and such is definitely important”; they equal ‘imposed necessity’. This imposed necessity means that the two situations then possible for you (reaching the goal and not reaching it) are automatically seen as being worlds apart. They are seen as being not at all the same thing. Yet in reality they are only worlds apart because you have chosen to make an issue of it: it is your goal that has polarized the universe into [FAIL] and [SUCCEED]. Your imposed certainty has made a boundary, it has split what was previously whole. Take away the certainty generated by the goal (or by mind in general) and the whole rationale for purposeful activity falls away instantly. From this we can clearly see that radical uncertainty - which is the same thing as intrinsic freedom - is an enemy of the mind. This is confounding to say the least, since how can your own inalienable freedom be at the same time your enemy? One might as well say that you have made an enemy of yourself, and this, of course, is exactly what Carse is getting at in the passage given above.

BELIEVING IN YOUR OWN STORY

We implied earlier that there is no reason to think that the state of mind in which everything seems uncertain or unreal is not in fact a legitimate psychological mode-of-functioning. One ought to qualify this statement: our society sees the psychology of uncertainty in purely negative terms, as being undesirable, unadaptive, unhelpful. There are a number of conditions found in ‘mental illness’ that are basically states of uncertainty. Psychosis is roughly definable as a loss of contact with consensus reality; it is more commonly defined simply as ‘loss of contact with reality’ but to say this automatically implies that we know what true reality is, and that is a totally unwarranted assumption. This may seem like splitting hairs just for the sake of being politically correct with respect to some abstract philosophical principle, but there are important, practical consequences to our choice of language. If we say that psychosis is a complete break with what is reality, then there can be no question of learning from it - it is useless experience, it is just nonsense and that is that..... It would be, however, far more of a challenge if we could allow for the possiblity that we can actually learn something from our psychosis. It is precisely because being open to madness is such a challenge that we don’t actually do it - our culture doesn’t look very favourable upon that kind of challenge!

‘SPLITTING’ VERSUS INTEGRATING

If we believe that our experience is invalid then, as we have said, we do not feel the need to look any deeper. We know that the experience is meaningless so we shove it away, we put it into the compartment labelled ‘psychotic breakdown’ and from then on in that is the only level of description we are going to bother about. This equals rejecting experience or ‘splitting-off’. We can also say that it involves identifying, which is synonymous with ‘loss of perspective.’ If, on the other hand, we say that we don’t possess any final knowledge about what reality is, then we have to be a bit more open-minded in our approach to psychotic (or ‘non-normal’) experience. Maybe it is closer to the truth than our regular, everyday experience! Then again, maybe it isn’t - we don’t know, but the important thing is we don’t know enough to automatically assign the experience into oblivion, we can’t afford simply to write it off. Who knows what might not turn out to be useful at the end of the day? In the second case we always have the chance of actually learning something from it: maybe it will force us to rewrite our assumptions, or maybe it will even teach us to be more cautious altogether about trusting in any assumptions concerning what is real and important, and what is unreal and unimportant. This second approach equals integrating (or accepting) experience. We recognize what is going on, which means that we see it ‘in perspective.’

To say that it can be helpful or beneficial to integrate psychosis does not mean that we have to believe in it. Believing in stuff isn’t integrating it; on the contrary, believing in stuff is identifying, it is ‘closing off’. We submit our experience to the automatic editor in our heads who trims it and cuts it, adds a bit here and there, stresses the occasional passage to make a point, and tones down another in case it gives the ‘wrong’ impression... Generally speaking, we all go around trying as hard as we can to make our lives conform to our ‘personal narrative’ - our own personal story of who we are and what we are about, and why it is that we did do this, and why it is that we didn’t do that. Each one of us is his or her own spin-doctor and we are all pretty damn good at it. What is important above all else is the integrity of our personal narrative, it must not be compromised by bits that don’t fit in. Generally speaking, everything does fit in - our experience is obedient to our powers of interpretation. Psychotic illness starts when the ‘stuff’ of our experience starts to have a life of its own, when it starts to get unruly on us...

The first manifestation of psychosis, therefore, tends to be an uncomfortable feeling of over-valency in our comprehension of our experience: one gets the eerie feeling that all sorts of things could be true. This is an acutely uncomfortable feeling for most of us - it upsets the apple cart, we liked things the way they were. Even if we didn’t think that we liked it at the time, with the benefit of hindsight we realize that we did! There is another consideration too, we almost always start to get suspicious: after all, if there is something strange going on behind the scenes, then it is probably bad news. It is very likely that we will latch onto an interpretation that confirms our suspicions, we will believe in our own story in other words. We become pessimistically suspicious: if something peculiar is afoot then that must spell bad news for yours truly! Believing wholeheartedly in one’s own story (or anyone else’s, for that matter) means that you are closed off to any other interpretations, you are also closed off to the idea that there may be other valid interpretations available to you. You can no longer learn. You are shut down. “Hang on though,” you say, “suppose I am psychotic and I latch onto a positive interpretation. Am I learning something then?” The answer we would give would have to be the same. If you believe in your story then you have ceased to learn.

There is a way in which one can feel positive and yet not construct a story, but this possibility is improbable because not only would that go against all our negative expectations (our paranoid inclinations) it also goes against the deeply ingrained tendencies of the ‘rat-trap’ nature of our minds. Perhaps if we felt good enough about ourselves we would think that we are about to witness a marvellous surprise, a conspiracy of blessings. We would feel suspicious that something marvellous is about to happen! This would be metanoia - a positive approach to uncertainty. Metanoia occurs naturally from time to time, it can sometimes occur as a result of taking hallucinogenic drugs. This ‘positive open’ state usually collapses into a fixed interpretation though: a common one is the belief that one is Jesus Christ. If this were to be understood symbolically, then this would be an open state of consciousness; in most cases though the understanding is a literal or closed one. Literalism equals certainty, or unconsciousness.

Certain religious cults may be usefully considered as instances of ‘group psychosis’. There is a very potent ‘group-narrative’ (or ‘reality-description’) that everyone conforms to. This is like a powerful magnetic field which polarizes the thinking of each group member so that there is no ‘incongruent’ mental activity taking place. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not so much a cult-member’s gullibility that is the problem - if a person’s gullibility were to be on-going they would be in no danger of being sucked into anything. The problem is not their open-mindedness, but their lack of open-mindedness once they have swallowed a particular story. The problem is the craving for certainty, the desire to be part of a known, officially verified story. Of course, we should not feel too superior at this point since we are all (almost all anyway) part of the biggest, most official story of all - mainstream society! It is precisely because mainstream society is so big, so dominant, and so all pervasive, that we don’t think of it as a cult, although that is exactly what it is.

TWO TYPES OF DEREALISATION

‘Feelings of unreality’ are medically recognized, but, as we have already said, they are not recognized as valid ways to see the world. Psychiatrists contend not infrequently with states of derealization, or depersonalization, and they tend either to be seen as examples of reality avoidance, or as instances of brain malfunction/chemical imbalance of some sort. Both of these come down to the same thing - unreality is unreal, obvious, isn’t it? How can unreality be a good thing? How can unreality be valid? This is the view from the paradigm of certainty. From our point of view, of course, it is normality that is the evasion. All the same, this is not to say that one cannot deliberately induce a sense of unreality in order to avoid what is going on, because one can. Trauma can actually cause derealisation of two very different types:

TYPE-1 If I make everything seem unreal because I want to escape from something that I think is real (this would obviously be the case since if I didn’t think it was real then I wouldn’t bother trying to escape from it!), then the experienced unreality is closed. It serves a specific purpose, it is there for a reason. My problem is hidden away, it is blocked out by the over-powering feeling of unreality that I have conjured up, but because I know on some level that I have had to block it out, that fact in itself solidifies (or validates) the original assumption that the experience I was having was not handleable, not ‘permissible’. All that has happened is that my feeling that something ‘bad’ is going on has been diverted and made unconscious.

TYPE-2 If I have a traumatic experience, and then I find myself in a state where the original trauma (or pain) no longer seems important, but I didn’t deliberately (or unconsciously) engineer this state, then the feeling of unreality is open. I am not rejecting or escaping my experience - after all, why would I want to reject or escape something that I don’t actually believe in? There is no ‘reason’ for this state, it is irrelevant to my predicament, and when I am in it all my problems seem just this - irrelevant.

Type-1 derealisation is a double evasion, an evasion within an evasion; Type-2 is actually the perception of a greater reality, it results from an increase in perspective, not a decrease. We can also put this another way: Type-2 derealisation is based upon equanimity, it is a very ‘easy-going’ or unbiased approach; basically it is a profound state of ‘not-caring’ where you don’t actually care if you ‘don’t care’ or not! It is unconstructed situation that you don’t need to worry about, in other words. Type-1 derealisation is, in direct contrast, extremely partisan - it is up-tight and totally biased; it is based on a categorical rejection of the circumstances. It is a pretending or counterfeit state of ‘not-caring’ which is actually only there because you care so very much.

EXTRINSIC AND INTRINSIC MEANING

We are exploring in this book the idea that the default reality is the reality of uncertainty. ‘Normality,’ we are saying, is conditioned or manipulated uncertainty - it is manipulated so that it appears dependable and consistent. The idea that normality needs to be actively maintained is not one that automatically springs to mind - if it did, then we would obviously have our doubts about it, and we don’t. The reason we don’t doubt is because we are adapted to a particular reality, and in fact adaptation itself may be defined as the process whereby doubt is suppressed, as we can see from the following passage taken from Jung’s ‘On Psychic Energy’ (Vol. 7 of the Collected Works):

...The process of adaption requires a directed conscious function characterized by inner consistency and logical coherence. Because it is directed, everything unsuitable must be excluded in order to maintain the integrity of direction. The unsuitable elements are subjected to inhibition and thereby escape attention.

Once you stop excluding the inappropriate, then the conditioned reality instantly disappears, and therefore its existence may be said to be a kind of illusion. It is for this reason that normality (and the constructed self) always feels under threat; the great thing about unconditioned reality, on the other hand, is that we don’t have to be anxious about it! A helpful way to approach this is to think in terms of signal versus medium. A signal is a transient disturbance which travels upon the underlying medium, one can think of a ripple on a pond. Both are the same thing really, but the odd thing is that we have difficulty focussing on both at the same time. We either see one or the other. The idea of signal versus medium with regard to consciousness and its objects has been well expressed by Itzhak Bentov (1978, p 89) in his book Stalking the Wild Pendulum:

When we know that reality is made up of two components, one, an immutable reference line or background, and the other a dynamic, vibrating aspect of the same thing, then we know that both mind and matter are made of the same basic stuff. The difference between them is that we may look at the solid matter as being made up of larger, slower waves or ripples, which implies that it possesses less energy of the absolute and that mind is made up of much finer ripples, which implies that it possesses more of this energy. A good analogy for this would be the different states in which matter is found in Nature: We could compare solid matter to ice and mind or consciousness to steam or vapor, all being the same basic stuff in different form. Both of them are manifest only because they are changing, and this change can be measured against the basic sea of the absolute, which makes up both the ripples and the background. We don’t need to wonder now about feats of mind over matter - it is not so much mind “over” matter as mind “over” a different aspect of itself.

Although ephemeral, and non-existent in itself, signal is definite in a way that the medium is not. It stands out and is visible because it is based on the contrast of [+] with [-]; and as a result we end up investing the message with an independent (or absolute) meaning that it does not and cannot possess. At the same time as we exalt the one we cast down the other: by the act of investing the signal with meaning we lose our awareness of the medium’s independent meaning. At this point we will introduce (just for good luck) a few more definitions: Meaning that we have invested ourselves we will call extrinsic meaning, whilst meaning that was there already, we will call intrinsic. Extrinsic meaning is built on contrasts, which means that we have had to split the original intrinsic meaning in two, we have had to ‘turn it against itself’ by means of some reflexive ‘doubling back’ type of action. Intrinsic meaning, being naturally undivided, has no contrasts, and therefore no ‘character’. Because it has no character, no duality to it, there is a tendency to say that intrinsic meaning does not exist.

SUMMARY

We can tie all of this diverse terminology together in the following way. Extrinsic meaning is another way of saying ‘signal’ or ‘message,’ whilst intrinsic meaning equals ‘medium’. Thus, it is the signal that we call reality; the medium, on the other hand, we dismiss entirely, not even giving it the time of day. We might also say that the message is the mind, which is equivalent to ‘trivial uncertainty’, whilst the medium is consciousness, or ‘radical uncertainty’. Also, we could say (if we wanted) that the former is a game, and that the latter is not a game.

PRE-EMPTING

One aspect of decomplexification is ‘pre-empting,’ by which we mean the act of ‘projecting a spurious certainty into the future’. We leap to a premature state of certainty, we think we already know the score, that we know where things are leading. In a nutshell, pre-empting means that we predict the future on the basis of our everyday mind. There is a real urge to do this, it is like an itch that one just has to scratch. This overwhelming temptation arises out of the fact that we just can’t stand not knowing, we don’t have any tolerance for it! We feel that we just can’t afford to see situations and objects as being ambiguous, capable of more than one interpretation, and so we ‘jump the gun’ - we make a snap decision in order to be able to rapidly describe the situation or object to ourselves in black and white terms. What started off as ‘uncertainty’ gets processed according to our internal book of rules and comes out as ‘certainty’.

Now, we are coming at this from a funny angle, as usual. We are making pre-empting sound like a stupid, self-defeating waste of time. In a lot of ways this is actually contrary to the reality of the commonsense logic which operates in the everyday world that we live in. In this world pre-empting is a requirement of the game. Let us say that you are returning home after a night out in town with your friends; it is early morning and all you friends have gone off their separate ways. Suddenly something catches your eye, you look to one side and see a shadowy figure in a side alley moving towards you. What are you going to do? The chances are, of course, that you won’t stick around to find out for sure what is happening. On the contrary, you will in all probability just get the hell out of there. When in doubt, just get out! We can see from this example that pre-empting reality can be useful - it would seem to have the potential to be distinctly advantageous in survival terms. Exploring all the alternative interpretations that are possible is just not good survivor-type behaviour. When it is the case that our environment has been designed to be read in a particular way, then the argument for pre-empting becomes even more persuasive: there is already in existence an understood level of description, a previously-decided perspective for interpreting phenomena. The biological realm is designed to be read in a particular way, just like the social realm is - coral snakes don’t have all those pretty bands of colour for nothing, the colours are there to tell us how dangerous they are. Similarly, men wearing expensive suits aren’t doing this just on a whim - they are trying to tell us something about the social status they are aspiring to. Furthermore, life, both in nature and society, is competitive, and the first one to press the button usually gets the prize. In this respect, life is like a TV quiz game - the faster you can accurately pre-empt the better you will do!

To say that these situations are like games is misleading - they are games. One definition of a game is a situation where the preferred perspective or level of description has been decided in advance, another would be to say that games are interactions that take place on the basis of a known set of rules. When one is playing a game pre-empting is advantageous in terms of efficiency, it is advantageous because it works: if you make clever guesses about what is going to happen there is every reason to suppose that these guesses will pay off. This is, of course, because there is no radical uncertainty involved, only the trivial variety, and the trivial we can work with. We may have to take chances every now and again as to how the dice falls, but at least we can always evaluate the odds to see if the risk is worth it. So a good game-player is someone who is beautifully tuned into a particular perspective, they are perfectly adapted to a given reality. They are sharks, hustlers, cardsharps; they are the experts. But perhaps there is more to life than being an expert?

ADAPTATION EQUALS UNCONSCIOUSNESS

So far we have been looking at the ways in which pre-empting is good. It is a way of maximizing efficient adaptive behaviour. But there is of course a serious drawback, and that drawback is always going to be there just as long as there are other valid perspectives floating around. What we need to get our heads around is this: your level of description is not the only one! You might be getting pretty damn good at playing the game with the perspective you are adapted to, but what if reality hits you with something else, something that was not on your menu? The problem can be stated quite simply by saying that the more adapted you are to one level of description, the more unconscious you become with regard to all other levels of description. Furthermore, if it is true that we live in a universe which has an infinite number of equally valid ‘levels of description,’ (i.e. it is an open universe) then you are unconscious full stop. Adaptation means ‘having an agenda’ - which is fine for as long as the universe plays ball. If it doesn’t (and we are going to suggest in the strongest terms that it never really does) then you are in trouble. Because you are so busy concentrating on what you already know about, so pre-occupied with your model of what is going on, you will miss the action. This phenomenon is sometimes known as ‘model-blindness’ and it is something that all mechanisms are prone to - they only can recognize stuff that corresponds to their internal specifications, their evaluative rules. Therefore, when the universe hits a mechanism (even the most advanced brand of twenty-first century mechanism) with a occurrence that they aren’t programmed to recognize, they don’t recognize it. They just can’t see it. In Pragmatic Information Theory, when a system is unable to relate to those elements in its environment which are organized along different lines to itself (and which, therefore, it does not have a description for) then that system is said to be organizationally closed. When a system has the property of organizational closure the only information it receives from its environment is the type of information known as confirmation.

ORGANIZATIONAL CLOSURE

The model of Pragmatic Information is a neat approach to the question of how information is involved in change. It was devised by Ernst and Christine von Weiszacker (1974), and was used to good effect by Erich Jantsch in his ground-breaking (1980) book on systems theory, The Self-Organizing Universe. One reason why the Model of Pragmatic Information never attracted much attention was because Chaos Theory overtook it, having the advantage of being the more mathematically powerful approach. And yet, despite the impact that chaos theory has had, it still doesn’t seem to be as vividly evocative as pragmatic information theory, at least for those of us who aren’t so fluent in non-linear equations. Pragmatic information is so defined in relation to its capability to effect change in the system receiving it. It has two components, confirmation and novelty - the first type of information agrees with the organizational bias of the receiving system, and has the effect of stabilizing the structure, and the second type of information has no logical relation to the receiving system, therefore falsifying and destabilizing it. Novelty therefore leads to radical change, and confirmation to ‘no change’.

When a system receives only information that agrees with its own biases we have the situation that in pragmatic information terminology is called organizational closure. This situation, the mode of interaction where all the possible types of interaction are already known in advance, is of course familiar to us either as the domain of trivial uncertainty or as Carse’s finite games. In an organizationally closed system everything that happens is categorizable, all events take place on the map and a grid reference can be read off as soon as it happens. Organizational closure means that there are NO new ways of doing stuff, there is only the way that the system knows and everything that happens in the big, wide universe is understood in terms of this agenda. Everything else is invisible, ignored and excluded. A system that is capable of interacting with its environment in ways that were previously unknown to it is an organizationally open system, its behaviour is, therefore, not restricted and it can disappear of the map at any time. The reason an O.O.S. can do this is because the system is vulnerable to ‘random’ environmental fluctuations - meaningless static, in other words. Irrelevant stuff can penetrate the mechanism and completely change the way everything is organized. This sounds inherently dangerous to us because randomness is seen as the enemy of order, the point that we automatically miss is that what seems ‘random information’ to an organizationally closed system could actually be part of a higher level (more complex) set-up - there is, after all, meaning that lies outside the narrow remit of our closed agenda. An organizationally closed system, therefore, has trivial freedom whilst an organizationally open system has profound freedom - the freedom to undergo radical (or rule-less) change. Systems of the first type are said to be determinate because they exhibit only linear change, whilst those of the second type are indeterminate and can exhibit unpredictable, spontaneous change.

THE STATE OF HERMETICALLY SEALED IGNORANCE

So far this sounds all very technical and far removed from everyday life, and yet states of mind that are characterized by organizational closure are highly familiar to all of us. A classic example would be two people who have taken opposing points of view in an argument – I cannot see your point of view and you cannot see mine. Naturally, I find your stubborn incapacity to see things from my perspective intensely annoying. Somehow, I know that there is no good reason why you cannot see my point; it is plain to me that you could just as easily taken my side but for the sake of sheer bloody-mindedness you have rendered yourself blind to the validity of my arguments, and it is this deliberate ignorance that is so infuriating. Now, when we say ‘deliberate ignorance’ it is not being implied that you are purposefully pretending not to be able to understand me, but rather that you have made a decision in secret, a decision that is concealed even from yourself, and as a result of this decision you are able to say, in apparent good faith, “I do not know what you are talking about…” Somehow, you have invoked the power to have things whatever way you want them to be, and at the same time remain blissfully unaware of your own complicity in this! Needless to say, what is true for you is also true for me (which is to say, I too am covertly manipulating reality in order to believe what I want) but of course I cannot see this. It is this ‘hermetically sealed ignorance’ (which is ignorance that is ignorant of the fact of its own ignorance) that we are referring to as organizational closure.

We have said that the type of polarization of viewpoints that occurs in an argument is an example of organizational closure. Mood states such as depression, bitterness, anger, jealousy and ‘sulking’ are also examples of ‘wilful but unacknowledged ignorance’. It is very easy to see that someone who is in a depressed state of mind only perceives (or remembers) data that supports their depressed viewpoint. He or she sees (and recalls) all the bad stuff, but will completely fail to see anything else. This is not due to the deliberate screening of evidence, but unconscious screening, which is why it so frustrating to those concerned people who are ‘on the outside of the closed system’, so to speak. If I am not part of the closed system then I can see the folly of what is going on but I cannot communicate my awareness to the person concerned. It can be argued that all ‘strong beliefs’ come into this category because a person who has a strong belief (i.e. who is psychologically invested in seeing things in a particular way) invariably sees and hears only what they want to, and invariably finds their belief proved correct – even if nobody else can see the logic. Robert Anton Wilson refers to this as ‘Orr’s law’ – “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves”.

UNACNOWLEDGED COLLUSION WITHN A GROUP OF PEOPLE

We can tie up the above by saying that organization closure is essentially a case of ‘conspiracy against the truth’. It may be the case in law that a conspiracy has to involve more than one person, but with regard to organization closure the conspiracy may include any number of people from one upwards. The sinister nature of this conspiracy against truth comes out most clearly where there is a group of people however. A good example is provided by R.D. Laing and A. Esterson in their study Sanity, Madness and the Family (Penguin, 1964). Probably the most chilling aspect of this study is the way in which it emerges that within the most normal families there exists a ‘unacknowledged collusion’ where family members, apparently unconsciously, agree to support the same wilfully distorted version of reality in order to secure some sort of psychological advantage. The advantage, in general terms, would seem to be that one obtains a form of immunity from anything that may draw into question one’s own integrity. A crude but well-known example of this is the way in which one person (or one group of people) can be scapegoated in order to allow the majority group to feel better (i.e. more secure) about themselves. Clearly, there is a parallel here to ‘throwing a sulk’ because in throwing a sulk we engineer a perspective in which we emerge as being the justified one who has been unfairly wronged. We get to feel better - for a while at least – but there has to be a victim and the victim is the truth. The same is true with scapegoating, and here it is obviously the scapegoat (or the scapegoated group) who is the victim.

It is arguable that one of the scariest things that have come out of the discipline of sociology is the technically defined notion of ideology. This term is used not in the accepted general sense (where it means merely ‘values or beliefs that a nation or movement adhere to’), but in the sinister sense of ‘a conspiracy against the truth which is unknowingly instigated against the individual by society as a whole’. To put it another way, ideology means the manipulation of meaning. What this comes down to is the notion that we all have implanted invisible software within our heads that ‘forces’ us to perceive things a certain way, and which ensures that we do not ever question the authenticity of what we think and see. Ivan Illich refers to this as heteronomy, which we may crudely define as ‘the state of not being able to think for yourself’. The point made by Illich and some other sociologists is that not only can we not think for ourselves, we cannot know that we cannot think for ourselves, and so we act out the biases of the social meaning system in the fond belief that we are being truly ourselves the whole time. As we shall see, this unpleasant idea emerges from many other sources than just sociology – it would appear to be more of the nature of an archetypal idea, being found in such diverse areas as the medieval theology of the Gnostics and in contemporary culture (to give just one example, the film The Matrix.)

THE ISLAND OF THE TONAL

Organizational closure is what the everyday mind is all about - the rational-conceptual mind is itself a most excellent example of an organizationally closed system. Our concepts, and the rational world within which we arrange these concepts, only make sense in the way that they do because we are colluding against the truth of uncertainty, in other words, because we rigorously exclude any awareness of other perspectives on the matter, and rigorously exclude awareness that we are doing this. The result of this is that we gain the psychological benefit (or ‘short-term gain’) of having a secure world of positive objects to live in (positive in the philosophical sense, meaning that the object-hood of the objects is unquestionable), and simultaneously incur the cost (or ‘long-term disadvantage’) of ‘gaining’ a psychological blind-spot which we do not know is there! This mental blind-spot is another way of talking about Jung’s principle of the Shadow, which follows one-sided rationality wherever it goes, sabotaging its efforts, and generally acting as a sort of implacable nemesis that cannot ever be shaken off.

The following passage, taken from Carlos Castaneda’s Tales Of Power (1974, p 123,125) perfectly illustrates the idea of organizational closure, as applied to the domain of the mind. In the story don Juan has just introduced the Sorcerers’ tonal/nagual model of reality, and is trying to explain what the tonal is. Castaneda is having problems with this since the tonal, as a concept, seems to have no boundaries at all....

‘I still cannot understand, don Juan, what you mean by the statement that the tonal is everything,’ I said after a moment’s pause.
‘The tonal is what makes the world.’
‘Is the tonal the creator of the world?’
Don Juan scratched his temples.
‘The tonal makes the world only in a manner of speaking. It cannot create or change anything, and yet it makes the world because its function is to judge, and assess, and witness. I say that the tonal makes the world because it witnesses and assesses it according to tonal rules. In a very strange manner the tonal is a creator that doesn’t create a thing. In other words, the tonal makes up the rules by which it apprehends the world. So, in a manner of speaking, it creates the world.’
He hummed a popular tune, beating the rhythm with his fingers on the side of his chair. His eyes were shining; they seemed to sparkle. He chuckled, shaking his head.
‘You’re not following me,’ he said, smiling.
‘I am. I have no problems,’ I said, but I did not sound very convincing.
‘The tonal is an island,’ he explained. ‘The best way of describing it is to say that the tonal is this.’
He ran his hand over the table top.
‘We can say that the tonal is like the top of this table. An island. And on this island we have everything. This island is, in fact, the world.
‘There is a personal tonal for every one of us, and there is a collective one for all of us at any given time, which we can call the tonal of the times.’
He pointed to the rows of tables in the restaurant.
‘Look! Every table has the same configuration. Certain items are present on all of them. They are, however, individually different from each other; some tables are more crowded than others; they have different food on them, different plates, different atmosphere, yet we have to admit that all the tables in this restaurant are very alike. The same thing happens with the tonal. We can say that the tonal of the times is what makes us alike, in the same way it makes all the tables in this restaurant alike. Each table separately, nevertheless, is an individual case, just like the personal tonal of each of us. But the important factor to keep in mind is that everything we know about ourselves and about our world is on the island of the tonal. See what I mean?’
‘If the tonal is everything we know about ourselves and the world, what, then, is the nagual?’
‘The nagual is the part of us which we do not deal with at all.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The nagual is the part of us for which there is no description - no words, no names, no feelings, no knowledge.’
‘That’s a contradiction, Don Juan. In my opinion if it can’t be felt or described or named, it cannot exist.’
‘Its a contradiction only in your opinion. I warned you before, don’t knock yourself out trying to understand this.’
‘Would you say that the nagual is the mind?’
‘No. The mind is an item on the table. The mind is part of the tonal. Let’s say that the mind is the chili sauce.’
He took a bottle of sauce and placed it in front of me.
‘Is the nagual the soul?’
‘No. The soul is also on the table. Let’s say that the soul is the ashtray.’
‘Is it the thoughts of men?’
‘No. Thoughts are also on the table. Thoughts are like the silverware.’
He picked up a fork and placed it next to the chili sauce and the ashtray.
‘Is it a state of grace? Heaven?’
‘Not that either. That, whatever it might be, is also part of the tonal. It is, let’s say, the napkin.’
I went on giving possible ways of describing what he was alluding to: pure intellect, vital force, immortality, life principle. For each thing I named he found an item on the table to serve as a counterpart and shoved it in front of me, until he had all the objects on the table stashed in one pile.
Don Juan seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. He giggled and rubbed his hands every time I named another possibility.
‘Is the nagual the Supreme Being, the Almighty, God?’ I asked.
‘No. God is also on the table. Let’s say that God is the tablecloth.’
He made a joking gesture of pulling the tablecloth in order to stack it up with the rest of the items he had put in front of me.
‘But, are you saying that God does not exist?’
‘No. God is only everything you can think of, therefore, properly speaking, he is only another item on the island. God cannot be witnessed at will, he an only be talked about. The nagual, on the other hand, is at the service of the warrior. It can be witnessed, but it cannot be talked about.’
‘If the nagual is not any of the things I have mentioned,’ I said, ‘perhaps you can tell me about its location. Where is it?’
Don Juan made a sweeping gesture and pointed to the area beyond the boundaries of the table. He swept his hand, as if with the back of it he were cleaning an imaginary surface that went beyond the edges of the table.
‘The nagual is there,’ he said. ‘There, surrounding the island. The nagual is there, where power hovers. ...’

There are two ways to react to this passage:

[1] The first possibility is that we experience utter incomprehension - we completely fail to see what Don Juan is getting at, and for this reason we would find ourselves in the position of sympathizing with Castaneda in his confusion.

[2] The second possibility is that we see perfectly well what Don Juan is saying, and so instead of being in sympathy with Castaneda, we find ourselves being frustrated at his lack of understanding.

Taken together, these two alternatives illustrate the nature of cognitive organizational closure - it is the situation where something is both perfectly clear, and totally obscure, depending upon how you choose to look at it. What don Juan is saying is straightforward enough, indeed, it is as plain as day if only we could see it. But if we can’t see it, then it couldn’t be more difficult. In the terms which we have been using, the island of the tonal is the realm of trivial uncertainty, which seems like the whole world to us, because we automatically assume that our rational-conceptual inventory (our thinking mind) encompasses the whole of everything. As Robert Anton Wilson says, we take the map for the territory. The Nagual, on the other hand, is the territory, and the Nagual is nothing other than radical uncertainty. It is the Buddhist Void, which is void not because it is nothing, but because it is forever beyond our attempts to name it, eternally beyond our attempts to claim it as known territory. We may not be able to define the Nagual, but we ought not to take it lightly on that account, for it is the true master, and not our over-valued rational mind.

There is an unequal battle here, in a sense, because the map and the territory cannot compete. The territory is reality, and the map merely an abstraction. Yet there is a quality of indefatigable obstinacy involved in mental closure that has the capacity to confound anyone who is brave enough to try to ‘crack it’. One might almost say that it has the capacity to confound Reality itself, if it were not for the fact that Truth, by virtue of it being true, cannot ever lose. But if you or I do not wish to see the truth, then no power can make me do so, because I can always invoke my own personal power to ‘not see’ something, and then ‘not see’ that I am not seeing. If I do not wish to be free, then no one can force freedom upon me.

THE MIND AMOEBA

In the passage that follows, David Bohm (1994 p 18-19) develops his own approach to organizational closure:

I would say that thought makes what is often called in modern language a system. A system means a set of connected things or parts. But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.

A corporation is organized as a system - it has this department, that department, that department. They don’t have any meaning separately; they can only function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.

Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thoughts, ‘felts’ and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.

A system is constantly engaged in a process of development, change, evolution and structure changes, and so forth, although there are certain features of the system which become relatively fixed. We call this the structure. You can see that in an organization there’s a certain structure. Then sometimes that structure begins to break up because it doesn’t work, and people may have to change it.

We have some structure in thought as well - some relatively fixed features. Thought has been constantly evolving and we can’t say when that structure began. But with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal. It was probably very simple thought before civilization, and now it has become very complex and ramified and has much more incoherence than before.

So we have this system of thought. Now I say that this system has a fault in it - a systematic fault. It’s not a fault here, there or there, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system. Can you picture that? Its everywhere and nowhere. You may say ‘I see a problem here, so I will my thought to bear on this problem’. But ‘my’ thought is part of the system. It has the same fault as the fault I’m trying to look at, or a similar fault.

The system may be imagined as a sort of amoeba, an amoeba which thinks it is the whole universe! Everything it comes across it automatically engulfs, and by engulfing these elements it neatly avoids becoming aware that what it engulfed actually originated from outside itself. To put this another way, the system ‘knows’ stuff by becoming it, by interpreting it within its own terms. A subtle but all-important turn-about is effected - the unknown is neutralized, novelty is (as Erich Jantsch said) transformed into confirmation. Dangerous creativity is co-opted into orthodoxy, copied, and made into a talisman to strengthen and protect the jealous pretender to the throne. Rebellion from within is defused effortlessly as the system identifies itself with the rebels and thereby makes their glory its own. Bohm (p 22) explains this property of the system in a somewhat more moderate tone:

...As we’ve said, to a certain extent the system is necessary. We need this system of thought for all sorts of purposes. But it has developed a fault. Now there is, I say, an intelligence or a perception which goes beyond memory. There’s a lot beyond this system. The system is actually only a very tiny part of reality; but it looms very large. Unless you actually see the thing I’m talking about, what I say will be incorporated into the system as an image. Is it clear what the problem is? This system tends to incorporate everything. Anything repeated several times becomes part of the system. Also, somebody may have an insight and then that may easily become part of the system.

FALSIFIABILITY

Karl Popper spoke of something that he called ‘the principle of falsifiability’ - if a system of knowledge does not contain within itself the possibility of testing its own basic assumptions, then it is incapabable of being proven wrong and therefore cannot be said to be in any way ‘scientific’. The knowledge obtained and verified by the system in question is, in the final analysis, without meaning. An example that is given is classical Freudian psychoanalysis - once one adopts the psychodynamic framework and uses it to view the world, everything you see proves just how right you are to see things this way. Thus, if you are a client of a Freudian analyst and you object to his (or her) interpretation, your objections, for that analyst, constitutes proof positive that he (or she) is on the right track. Objections, in psychodynamic parlance, equal resistance, which is evidence that the analyst has touched upon repressed psychological material. There is absolutely no chance of any ‘psychological material’ arising that could ever force a Freudian to doubt his or her grounds for subscribing to the system which they do. It is simply not possible...

One wonders, however, just how possible it is for any system of knowledge, even the most rigorously ‘scientific’ to escape the trap of organizational closure. Colin Wilson (1978, p 621) argues that science is, in fact, as bad as any other system:

Essentially, the power to create is the power to grasp the world in concepts; but we end up by viewing the world through our concepts, as through the bars of a cage. They colour everything we see, as the world of a bad-tempered man is coloured by his anger. This is as true of men of genius as it is of idiots. Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, were men enslaved by concepts. Dante’s cage, admittedly, was a large one, as large as the Catholic Church. But Shakespeare, for all his creative genius, was a slave to a pessimism that regarded human existence as meaningless, a tale told by an idiot. We find the same contradiction in Balzac: a vast world, seething with vitality, yet poisoned by a philosophy of despair, in which the greatest men are doomed to the same defeat as the stupidest.

The same thing applies to our science and the philosophy we have modelled upon it. Concepts have made us master of the atom; they have also reduced us to a bundle of conditioned reflexes. Science shows us a meaningless world of mechanical forces.

This explains the ‘existential dread’ that has haunted the Western mind for the past two centuries. Trapped in a dark universe of his own creation, man’s evolutionary drive is reduced to a hunger for security. This world around us may be meaningless, but at least it seems to be solid and stable. Perhaps death will snuff us out as if we had never existed, but we can bury our heads in the triviality of everydayness.

REIFICATION

There is another way to approach the issue of ‘blindness caused by concepts’. Steven Jay Gould, in his exploration of scientific delusions The Mismeasure of Man, points out (as did Colin Wilson) that concepts are fine are long as we remember that they are only concepts, and treat them accordingly. If, however, we lose sight of the provisional nature of our assumptions and start to use our ideas as ‘hard currency,’ so to speak, then we have fallen into error. When we unthinkingly take it that our ideas exactly correspond to definite, concrete ‘things’ in the external world we have reified our concepts. The concept is now a literal description of some aspect of reality: the ‘thought’ equals the ‘thing’. The problem then (as Jung notes in Modern Man in Search of a Soul) is that we have totally lost track of reality. This situation ought to be familiar to us by now - ‘one-level’ descriptions of reality, are, of course, a manifestation of ‘simplex psychology’; they are the currency of ‘the paradigm of certainty’.

COGNITIVE EQUILIBRIA STATES

It is plain that this tendency to ‘fall into error’ is not merely mankind’s foolishness; to say that it is just stupidity would be to detract from the diabolically majestic force of the Law of Increase of Psychological Entropy. What we are talking about is the lawful operation of a universal principle which we may define in terms of the tendency to identify. ‘Identification’ involves the process of coming into agreement (or maximizing confirmation) and therefore the loss of distinction between idea and reality. In the totally identified state the two are the same thing, and due to the huge increase of entropy associated with the totally identified state, this state is an attractor - like a black hole which bends everything around back to itself by the sheer force of its gravitational pull. Just as an intense gravitational field effects closure in space, so too does the ‘gravity’ of the system create a closure (or tautology) in meaning, which is to say, an ‘information free zone,’ a perfectly convincing, but perfectly empty, ‘illusion’.

Tautology means that I look as if I am saying something, but really I am saying nothing. Through the deft use of quantitative transformation (i.e. linear change, or ‘trivial uncertainty’) I produce the illusion of a genuine development. In actual fact there is no development at all, only the semblance of a development, the superficial appearance of a development. A good example of this would be the expansion of a mathematical statement. Because nothing new is being said, there is no information content, and this of course is how we go about defining entropy, in terms of the absence of information. Reification means turning the abstract into the concrete, creating a res, or ‘thing,’ where in fact there is no thing at all, only an idea. Entropy is synonymous with stability, or equilibrium, since the possibility of error in prediction has been reduced to zero. Obviously, if I cannot accurately predict a situation, there is a degree of ‘fuzziness’ or indeterminacy there, and I will need many alternative superimposed descriptions in order to get a handle on what is going on (or what might be going on). Zero entropy would be where I need to list an infinite number of descriptions to ‘capture’ the situation, and this, needless to say, is the same as saying that the reality of what is going on cannot be captured...

Circular (or self-referential) logic results in reification - stability is achieved. ‘Things’ are produced. Yet res equals ‘illusion’ precisely because it is only possible to arrive at ‘things’ through circular logic. Certainty is possible only in a game, in other words, because it is only in a game that radical uncertainty can be excluded. In the physical universe an increase in entropy results in the formation of matter, in the psychic domain an increase in entropy produces concepts, thoughts and beliefs. We may also say that an increase in entropy produces the cognitive equilibrium state which we have referred to as ‘the system’.

TUNING IN

There is another, more down-to-earth way to understand the process of entering into a reified ‘idea world,’ or ‘reality tunnel’ as Robert Anton Wilson calls it. Really, all that we are talking about is the highly familiar process whereby I become adapted to a certain set of rules. A ‘set of rules’ may equally well mean ‘a physical environment,’ or ‘a social environment,’ the latter being a non-material, i.e. abstract environment, much like the notion of cyberspace (society is no more than a form of cyberspace - a virtual reality environment - when it comes down to it). In terms of adaptation, then, we can say that when I become adapted to my environment all of those elements which properly pertain to that level of adaptation immediately swim into focus and become ‘real.’ Beforehand they had no relevance to me, now they do. If I develop an interest in playing poker then a whole world of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’t’s’ become highly pertinent to me, they will exercise a definite and unambiguous effect upon my thinking and behaviour. These rules are now real to me, and I take them very seriously, as indeed one does take things that are ‘real’. But let us suppose that I get sick and tired of playing poker, and give up the whole thing. Perhaps I ‘get into’ horse racing instead. When this happens the world of poker swims out of focus again, it has become irrelevant to me.

It is clear that that this reification-process is no more than a sort of ‘tuning in’: when I tune in to a specific pragmatic reality I enter a world where thoughts do, indeed, equal things. When I become adapted to the rules of the game in question, then all sorts of ‘things’ immediately pop into existence - they become solid, definite, heavy and opaque to my vision. Furthermore, because they are opaque, they block out my vision of anything else. When I move out of focus, when I become unadapted, then the reverse happens. All of those reassuringly solid ‘things’ start to go fuzzy around the edges - they become transparent, insubstantial, I start to ‘see through’ them. This is the tricky bit though, because, as we will remember from our discussion of organizational closure, it is not so easy to ‘see through’ a world once you have tuned into it. Adaptation is the state of being in agreement with a fixed view of things, one is in a state of ‘rest’ or balance’ and this state of balance is not so easily disturbed. The reason this particular virtual reality world is stable is because the freedom to question it has been lost. That is the whole point abut rules, a rule isn’t the same both ways, it has to be one way, and not the other. Rules are definite! Any information that might throw a new light on the established picture has been automatically excluded the moment you tuned in, it had to be excluded to allow you to focus so as to bring everything crisply and cleanly into definition.

REIFYING THE SELF

From one point of view, that is great - being defined is the whole idea, after all. But there are problems, as Robert Anton Wilson (1983, p 39) explains:

“Before the first imprint, the consciousness of the infant is “formless and void” - like the universe at the beginning of Genesis, or the descriptions of unconditioned (“enlightened” i.e., exploded) consciousness in the mystic traditions. As soon as the first imprint is made, structure emerges out of the creative void. The growing mind, alas, becomes trapped within this structure. It identifies with the structure; in a sense, it becomes the structure.”

There is satisfaction and pleasure in taking form, the particular type of pleasure that is associated with increased security. However, from another point of view, things are not so great after all because you are now identified with the system, and, as Bohm says, there are inevitable problems associated with this state of identification (which is to say, organizational closure), problems that derive from the ignored internal contradictions. Essentially, there is conflict within the system that cannot be ever ironed out - irreducible conflict, endless conflict. So the apparent security of form turns out to be rather deceptive: just as you no longer have the means to question (and thus de-reify) the reality of the conflict that arises from organizational closure, so too there is no way for you to solve the inherent problems associated with reified self-hood. You asked for it, and so now you have to have it. The game has become real...