Author: Nicholas Williams
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2: THE PARADOXICAL FRAMEWORK
In the first chapter we jumped straight into the heart of uncertainty, without any messing about. But now we need to think about finding a reasonably innoffensive way to present what is actually a perplexingly ‘backwards’ approach to psychology - instead of working from what we know, and building upon it, we are starting off from what we don’t know, and using the perception of radical uncertainty to throw new light on all the old stuff that we thought we knew. We have also got to be very careful that we don’t fall back into the error of believing in ‘a system,’ which means that we have the difficult task ahead of us of talking about something without losing our newly found perspective in the process, which is what tends to happen. Usually people talk about constructing a new ‘model’ to help conceptualize what is going on out there, but in this case we are going to need a pretty peculiar model. Models are theoretical frameworks and their job is to contain stuff, to encompass experimental data and put it into ‘meaningful divisions’. What we want, however, is a model that, in some way, also possesses the capability of not-containing, and not-organizing stuff - of allowing the data to ‘stay strange’. We want something that is a model and not a model at the same time.
What we want is a framework that contains an escape clause somewhere, so that we don’t get caught in it. This framework must contain the possibility of non-containment, so that we can be both inside and outside of it at the same time. This sounds crazy, and of course it is - in fact it is so crazy that the alchemists of old, the ‘sons of Hermes’, have already thought of it. They got there first, as usual. The alchemist knew that they required a paradoxical vessel to carry out their work in, because they realized that what they were working with was the prima materia, the ‘primordial chaos’. Because original chaos cannot be contained they needed a vessel that is open and closed at the same time, a vessel that is inside itself at the same time as being outside itself. In his commentary on the seventeenth century alchemist Sir George Ripley’s Cantilena, Jung (Vol. 14, par. 373) provides the following explanation of the hermetic vessel:
The “house of the sphere” is the vas rotundum, whose roundness represents the cosmos and, at the same time, the world-soul, which in Plato surrounds the physical universe from outside. The secret content of the Hermetic vessel is the original chaos from which the world was created. As the filius Macrocosmi and the first man the King is destined for “rotundity,” i.e., wholeness, but is prevented from achieving it by his original defect.
In alchemical thinking there is a correspondence between the macrocosm and microcosm which makes it perfectly easy for the practitioner to switch from thinking about the Cosmic vessel to the humble vessel in his laboratory. We can also point to a correspondence between the ‘theoretical framework’ that we began by discussing, and any sort of physical container, like a saucepan or teapot. Both are vessels, whether they are to be found in my head, or in my kitchen. Both have an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’, and the thing with normal physical or mental containers is that we are very interested in what is on the inside, but not at all interested in what is on the outside; our interest (or awareness) is uneven therefore. What makes our interest uneven are our assumptions about what is ‘important’ and ‘not-important’ - our assumptions are the ‘original defect’. So, taking inspiration from the Hermetic scientists who came before us, we will now set out in search of our own paradoxical vessel, and see how successful we are in escaping from the ‘original defect’ of our unconscious assumptions.
THE INFORMATION GRADIENT
This framework is, surprisingly enough, quite easy to describe - all that we need is a central vertical axis with an arrow at both ends. The top arrow is labelled “Decreasing relevence of experiential data to model,” whilst the bottom arrow has written next to it “Increasing relevance of experiential data to model.” The very top point on the axis would therefore be the situation where what you perceive with your senses has absolutely no relevance at all to any type of theory or model that you might have going about what you are perceiving. Reality is not connected with your thinking, in other words. The Thought does not equal the Thing. Expected does not equal actual. What we have here is total openness, total disequilibrium, complete lack of self-referentiality, ‘circularity’ or tautology. Since ‘relevence’ corresponds to ‘containment,’ we can also explain the top of the axis by saying that it is the uncontained situation - stuff happens (possibly!), but there is no conceptual ‘pot’ to put it in. All we have is [?], or radical uncertainty.
The bottom of the axis would be the situation where the data is explained by the theory. You can predict what you see with your thinking, the Thought is the Thing. Expected does equal Actual. The bottom of the axis, therefore, denotes a type of reality which fits perfectly well within its description, where there is equilibrium between description and described. What we have here is pure self-referentiality: the reality is wholy contained within the conceptual pot, so that the container defines the contents, and the contents define the container. Actually, we never go beyond either, which are both the same thing anyway, and that ‘thing’ isn’t really anything at all - it is just an artefact, the result of an arbitrary restriction of consciousness, the result of our ‘original defect’.
There is only one problem with our framework, which is that we are trying to bring two things together that do not ever meet: the continuum that is represented by the vertical line of the axis isn’t actually continuous because the gradient that it is supposed to show is the gradient of changing (increasing or decreasing) information. What this means is that each point on the axis that is above another point on the axis cannot be reached using the information that is available at that lower point. Therefore, it cannot be described, predicted, imagined, or in any way ‘reached’ by procedural means. This crucial ‘gap’ (which exists between every point on the axis, and the corresponding point immediately above or below it) is absolutely insurmountable by logic or thinking, and it represents an absolute discontinuity. All the same, as long as we overlook this central conceptual head-ache, we will find that we are able to get on just fine!
NOVELTY VERSUS CONFIRMATION
If the above perambulation seems a bit obscure, there is no need to worry, since we can take an easier route. The first thing we can usefully do in order to make things clearer is to relate paradoxicality
to complexity, and we can do this by saying that a paradoxical framework is one which can accomodate a number of non-congruent statements. An example of this would be “I am wearing a hat” and “I am not wearing a hat”. Normally (in what is called Aristotelian logic) these two statements exclude each other - they cannot both be true, in other words. Aristotelian logic would in fact have no trouble throwing this pair of conflicting assertions straight into the rubbish bin, and it is for this reason that we cannot use A.L. to explore complexity. So what can we use? Well, at the end of the last chapter we briefly discussed something called the Model of Pragmatic Information, which we said had been made more or less redundant by more mathematical approaches. The good thing about Ernst and Christine Weiszacker’s pragmatic information theory is, however, that it offers a quick, intuitive root to understanding multiple truths. Erich Jantsch, at the beginning of his (1980) book The Self-Organizing Universe, opens by explaining that pragmatic information is information that has two components: confirmation and novelty. He also explains that pragmatic information is information that has the potential to cause qualitative change. It has the potential to change the receiver (and, strangely enough, to change the sender, which is something we will come to later on). Of these two components, we can say that confirmation is information which agrees with the framework that is already in place, whilst novelty represents the introduction of a additional point of view that throws a new light on the old question.
THE TROJAN HORSE
We can explain all of this in the following way: If you give me a list of sites on the internet where I can obtain data that is relevent to my research project, then that list constitutes information that has the potential to cause quantitative change only. In other words, I may be able to do better research, I may be able to ‘fine tune’ or perfect my research. Because the type of change involved is entirely trivial (we can refer to it simply as ‘adjustment,’ or ‘optimization’) we know that the information is 100% confirmation. But suppose you give me a list of sites to check out which are largely congruent with my agenda, but which also contain one or two sites that have nothing to do with what I am researching. Suppose that one of the sites contains information about medieval heretics which I find particularly fascinating, and as a result of locating this page I get totally sidetracked into reading up about the Cathars and what happened to them. My project goes to the dogs! Well, what we have here is qualitative change, which indicates the presence of novelty.
Pragmatic information is therefore a bit like the Trojan Horse: the visible wooden horse represents confirmation, there is enough familiarity in the information to induce us to take the idea on board; the soldiers inside, on the other hand, represent the novelty component, which is unfamiliar, and which we would have rejected if we had seen it at first. This analogy is apt because it illustrates the way in which novelty is ‘dangerous’: like the Greek soldiers, novelty threatens to sneak out and overthrow us the moment we relax and drop our defences.
NOVELTY IS DANGEROUS
Beforehand, the only ‘truth’ that I was interested in was truth that had to do with my pet project. The world is full of ‘truths’ that have nothing to do with my area of interest, and which are, therefore, unacknowledged and ignored, since I have no time for them (‘truth,’ in this case, means stuff which is relevent to my way of looking at things). After I get knocked out of my groove, what used to be ‘true,’ is no longer true, because I am no longer interested in my boring old research project. ‘Dangerous’ doesn’t mean, therefore, that I am myself at risk, but merely that the ascendency of my agenda is at risk. I myself might possibly be quite happy that I discovered the Cathars, and therefore consider (with hindsight) what happened to be a fortunate accident. Looking back on it, I now know that I needed ‘tricking’ to get out of my groove, and so I will (probably) not blame you for what you did. Trickery is needed, because, as a rule, our agendas (or goals) are total tyrants, they don’t allow irrelevant considerations to enter the picture; the moment an agenda comes into the picture the world is henceforth divided into stuff that important (or meaningful), and stuff that is unimportant (and meaningless). The point is not that goals and agendas are ‘wrong’ in some way, we are not saying that. It is simply in the nature of goals to be exclusive, that is what a ‘goal’ is - it is an act of exclusion. Goals and agendas are a function of Aristotelian logic, and Aristotelian logic is how our everyday minds work; rationality works, as Jung says, by the principle of ‘the exclusion of the inappropriate’.
What we are basically saying is that our minds run in tracks, or grooves; the groove is the confirmation, whilst novelty is what exists outside those grooves (alternatively, we could simply say that “confirmation = important / novelty = unimportant”). We can see now how novelty is actually incredibly useful through being dangerous, because it is novelty (and novelty alone) that is able to propel us across the absolute discontinuity of the ‘logic gap’ on the vertical axis which we talked about in the introduction to this chapter. To say that novelty is ‘useful’ is an understatement - it is essential. Novelty gets us over the ‘information contour lines’ that exist in mind-space. Without novelty we would be stranded in limbo; without novelty we would be invisibly restrained from all movement, and end up isolated from life itself. We would miss the party entirely, and what is more, we would never even know that we were missing - we would never know that there was a party. The alchemical literature speaks of the periodic necessity to murder and dismember the Old King, who has become despotic, rigid, and even evil. This sounds horrible, but it is all for the good, since the King is reborn, and so the Work can continue. Murdering the King for his own good is a totally illogical act, since no one can expect a good outcome from throwing away what you value, yet this is the only way to move up the Information Gradient. This is the only way to jump over the ‘thinking gap,’ the only way through the logic discontinuity. In order to live (i.e. ‘move on’) I must die. As Margaret Isherwood (1964, p 43) says:
.....All this is but another way of expressing the Gospel teaching that we must lose ourselves to find them, a puzzling concept if our concept of the self is of a single static entity rather than as a life which is growing from one level of being to another. The bewildered Peer Gynt, finally realizing that there is no escape from the casting ladle, asks in his perplexity, ‘What is it at bottom, this being oneself?’ The answer Death gave, ‘To be oneself is to slay oneself’, was as lost on Peer as it has been lost on most men who have not understood that the goal of life is the evolution of greater consciousness.
THE SACRIFICE OF THE KNOWN
Novelty therefore involves the ‘sacrifice of the known,’ and this, although it sounds simple, is actually rather fiendishly difficult in practice. The known, obviously enough, is all we know! Even if it isn’t perfect, we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath-water; we know that there’s good in there somewhere, and we don’t want to let go. As a result of our massive reluctance to sacrifice what we have obtained, what we have obtained goes bad, and drags us down. We persist to the bitter end in thinking that we can travel up the information gradient under our own steam, through the dedicated application of purposeful activity, and we seem totally unable to understand why we can’t do this. We ought to be able to understand, though. The impossiblity of crossing the discontinuity on purpose is due to the cybernetic paradox which we met in the introductory section. Only [?] can get us across, not [+] or [-], where [?] means openness, or ‘the state of having no agenda’. This principle finds an analogy in Dynamical Systems Theory, where the discontinuity is referred to as the instability phase, which a system can only pass through with the chance input of a random fluctuation. In Buddhism, we may note, what we have been referring to as a ‘discontinuity of logic’ is called emptiness, or the void; and as a result of the primary nature of ‘alogicality’ it follows that rational action (i.e. activity that is based upon a literal or naive belief in my mind and senses) does not ever get me anywhere. All such ignorant behaviour does is to spin illusion worlds - it enmeshes me in samsara, it sews me in ever deeper into the realm of misleading appearances. There is nothing new happening, only a rehashing of the old - which is to say, all there is on the menu is ‘mutton dressed up as lamb’.
WHEN IS A GOAL NOT A GOAL?
From the point of view of the Tyrant Agenda, it is simply impossible for its tyranny to operate in a world where there are ‘many truths’; if there are many truths, then the agenda has no meaning, no application. For this reason, goal-orientated thinking cannot afford to know about complexity, it cannot afford to live in a complex universe. Complexity means ‘many truths,’ it means BOTH/AND logic rather than exclusive EITHOR/OR logic. How can I have a goal when I know that that goal is simultaneously important, and unimportant? Even more to the point, how can I have a goal when there are no lines of demarkation, when there is nothing that definitely is not the goal? If everything is potentially a goal, if I can’t rule out the possiblity that anything at all might be a goal, then the meaning of ‘goal’ is utterly lost. If ‘everything is the goal’, then there no longer is a goal, just like if ‘everything is true’, then there no longer is anything that is true. What happens then is that my dualistic (+/-) mind goes spinning off into the ‘golden void’ of infinite relativity, like a coin that has been flipped up into the air. This realm of infinite relativity is the state of ‘goal-lessness’ or ‘agenda-lessness’ which the measuring, agenda-based mind cannot enter into, any more than a camel can pass through the eye of a needle. The rational mind works by containment (i.e. closure), which means finitude, whilst the discontinuity of goal-lessness works by non-containment (i.e. organizational openness), which means beginninglessness and endlessness. The two are mutually exclusive (or ‘irreconcilable’) since the finite always has to deny the infinite, and infinity by its very nature does not recognize limitation.
There is a another way in which to approach the issue of unresolvable difference between the state of being limited, and the state of being unlimited. We can say that the rational mind is itself a limit, but, crucially, that it is a limit that cannot see itself. The limit in question is the boundary between what is true and what is not true, or, what is a goal and what is not a goal. This split between important and unimportant is actually the split between what we are conscious of, and what we are unconscious of. The reason for this is that what the mind regards as unimportant, it does not see. It is not that the mind becomes conscious of a datum and puts it in a mental category marked ‘unimportant,’ because for it to process the information in the first place would have meant that the datum must have had some importance! ‘Unimportant’ or ‘irrelevant’ means that the information simply does not come into the accounting system at all..... We don’t know that we have missed it out. Obviously, if we noted its absence, then that would mean that we knew about it to start off with, and we didn’t! Therefore, we come back here to idea of organizational closure which we looked at in the previous chapter.
_ THE TONAL - NAGUAL MODEL OF REALITY
In Chapter 1 we tried to illustrate the concept of organizational closure by quoting from Carlos Castaneda. That may or may not have made any sense at the time, but we are in a better position to appreciate it now. Carlos Castaneda’s books tend to be regarded as a bit ‘cultist,’ that is, some people believe that what he has written about is highly significant, some think that it is all utter nonsense, whilst for the majority of people there is no issue at all, since thay have never heard of the books in the first place. When he died, a few years ago, most of the obituaries made the point that he had been very popular with the hippies back in the sixties and seventies, and that he was fortunate enough to have been taken up by the ‘New Age’ movement in the nineties as well. No scientific value was seen in his work. Yet there have been at least two respected scientists who have shown an interest in Castaneda’s ideas: systems theorist Erich Jantsch notes that a certain Brian Josephson, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, presented a paper entitled ‘The Tonal - Nagual Model of Reality’ at the first International Conference on Science and Consciousness in Fairfield, Iowa in 1975. Jantsch himself (1980, p 228-9) goes on to draw attention to the parallel between the system Castaneda is expounding and the Weiszacker Model of Pragmatic Information:
In the fourth of the books in which Carlos Castaneda (1975) transmits the world view of shaman Don Juan of the Mexican Yaqui Indians, there is a striking parallel and generalization of this principle. According to Don Juan, reality is divided into two aspects, one of which (the tonal) comprises the regularities of a world ordered by our concepts, whereas the other (the nagual) represents the unexpected. The latter aspect may be mastered by creative thought and action and by spontaneous decisions (i.e. by free will).
In the terms which we have been developing, we can reformulate this and say that the universe contains two mutually exclusive aspects: continuity, and discontinuity. The former is the realm of trivial uncertainty, the latter the realm of radical uncertainty. The rational mind operates in the former, and it neither operates in nor acknowledges the latter. According to rationality there is no other reality other than the reality of trivial uncertainty; furthermore, reason regards the very question as to ‘whether there is another reality’ as being entirely meaningless, and for this reason it does not ask it. From the ‘ungrounded’ (or ‘unconditioned’) point of view, on the other hand, we can see that radical uncertainty can only be excluded when we restrict our consciousness, when we play a game, in other words. We have brought both realms together within the ‘paradoxical framework’: containment means confirmation, and there is continuity of mind here; non-containment means novelty, and here there is only discontinuity. Alternatively, we can say that the former is the situation where we rely upon a context of meaning which has been provided by an extrinsic frame of reference (i.e. a fixed set of rules) to experience the world, whilst the latter is the conceptless situation where there is no ‘split’ between the experiencer and the experienced, because there is no extrinsically originated context of meaning, i.e. no containing framework.
_ TWO GREEKS
Once one gets the hang of this nagual / tonal business, it is entirely satifisfactory, both aesthetically and intellectually (if we define ‘intellect’ in a non-Aristotelian sense, that is). But is it just a pseudo-mystical theory, or is it more than that? Does the theory go back any further than the sixties, and was there ever anyone who believed it who hadn’t first taken a dose of mescalin? It doesn’t take much research to show that this is in fact a perennial question; what we are trying to get to grips with here is actually a profound philosophical consideration that has been debated on and off for thousands of years. The question is: “Is the universe which we live in the sort of universe that can be exhaustively described, or is it not?” Some people would say “Yes it is,” and some would say “No it isn’t,” and this has been the position for a long time now. We will call a universe that can be (meaningfully) reduced to one level of description a Parmenidian Universe, in honour of the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides. Paul Davies (1987, p 4) provides us with a description of the Parmenidian Universe in his book The Cosmic Blueprint:
The philosopher Parmenides, who lived 1500 years before Christ, taught that ‘nothing can come out of nothing’. It is a dictum that has been echoed many times since, and it forms the basis of the approach to creation in many of the world’s religions, such as Judaism and Christianity. Parmenides’ followers went much farther, to conclude that there can be no real change in the physical world. All apparent change, they asserted, is an illusion. Theirs is a dismally sterile universe, incapable of bringing forth anything fundamentally new.
The latter species of universe we may term Heraclitian after another Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. Fritjof Capra (1975, p 19) contrasts Parmenides’ principle of ‘Being’ with Heraclitus’ principle of ‘Becoming,’ which he explains as follows:
.....Heraclitus believed in a world of perpetual change, of eternal ‘Becoming’. For him, all static Being was based on deception and his universal principle was fire, a symbol for the continuous flow a change of all things.
Heraclitian thinking has undergone a revival in recent decades, whilst the Parmenidian view would seem to be steadily losing credibility. As Davies (1987, p 5) goes on to say:
An increasing number of scientists and writers have come to realize that the ability of the physical world to organize itself constitutes a fundamental, and deeply mysterious, property of the universe. The fact that nature has creative power, and is able to produce a progressively richer variety of complex forms and structures, challenges the very foundation of contemporary science. ‘The greatest riddle of cosmology,’ writes Karl Popper, the well-known philosopher, ‘may well be....... that the universe is, in a sense, creative.’
We can define both universes by using very basic mathematics. A Parmenidean universe, we can say, is based on ‘knowing’. That may not sound very mathematical, but what we mean by knowing is discriminating, i.e. dividing. Knowing what is, is synonymous with knowing what isn’t. Therefore, if I know what is in a Parmenidean universe, that necessarily means that I know what is not in it. What we are saying here is that knowing is a function of exclusivity, which is to say, of EITHOR/OR logic. This is the type of logic that draws definite lines, firm boundaries and which makes unequivocal statements. Equally, we can say that a Parmenidean universe is essentially a summation, which is to say, it can be arrived at in a straightforward way by adding up a finite list of known ingredients. It can, in short, be specified. Because all the elements in a Parmenidean universe can be specified, this means that there must be some sort of over-all relationship between them - they must form a logical group or system since each and ever element is ‘relevant’. After all, if an element wasn’t relevant to the over-all scheme, it couldn’t be there!
The Heraclitian universe has to be understood in a totally different way. Instead of the arithmetical ‘sum of,’ which automatically excludes everything that isn’t specified, we need to use something all-inclusive and non-specific, a sort of “whatever....... ” term. This corresponds to the mathematical notion of the Universal Set, which is the ‘Set of Everything’ - I don’t need to know what exactly the ingredients are, because I have aready specified that ‘EVERYTHING’ is in this set. Everything makes up a Whole, which means that the elements of a Whole are not there because they are relevant to some sort of scheme or plan, on the contrary - they are just there! Mathematically, we can say that the only ‘over-all’ connection between the parts that go to make up the Whole is a random connection, and a random connection is not a connection at all in the usual sense which we understand the word. The Parmenidean universe, as we have said, is based on drawing lines, upon applying criteria, but in the Heraclitian universe the only criterion is ‘there shall be no criteria’. This is the ‘paradoxical rule’ - the rule that says ‘there shall be no rules’. ‘Everything’ means infinity, it means open-endedness, and yet, at the same time, as far as normal (exclusive) logic is concerned it doesn’t mean anything at all; rationality cannot help but view all-inclusivity as an absurdity, a mathematical operation that is no operation. We may imagine the Parmenidean universe as a sort of exclusive nightclub where only a certain type of person is allowed entrance. The Heraclitian universe, on the other hand, is a nightclub where the doorman is under strict instructions to let anyone and anything in, with no exceptions whatsoever.
What this means is that we can explain the difference between a closed (P-Type) universe and the open (H-Type) universe by saying that there is no such thing as radical uncertainty in the first type, whilst in the second type, there is. Now, it might be objected that nobody so far has ever ‘proved’ which sort of universe we live in, but we won’t worry about that. The reason that we do not need to worry about questions of ‘proof’ is because the whole notion of ‘proof’ is a classic tautological trick of the organizationally closed system. Basically, I will accept what you say if you can get it to make sense within the immutable and unquestionable framework of my assumptions. The trick is, of course, that if you do bend over backwards to make yourself understandable and verifiable within my framework, then you have actually become my framework, and so of course I will ‘verify’ you since you are now myself, and all the organizationally closed system ever does is verify and validate its own self! One does not get anywhere by trying to teach the ‘mind ameoba’ anything new, since all the mind ameoba ever does is to absorb novelty, and turn it into confirmation, and then use that confirmation to prove that it was right all along. In other words “Never play cards with a psychopath...” To get back to the point: ‘proving things’ is an utterly absurd pseudo-endeavour since nothing that is true can ever be proved and, contrary-wise, all the things that we do know for sure are fictions that it suits us to believe in, they are certainty-myths, wraiths of swirling mist that we chose to see as solid walls.
_ THE VALUE OF BEING ODD.....
“Perhaps,” I may ask, “it is not really necessary for us to relate to radical uncertainty in our day-to-day lives?” In other words, perhaps the principle of groundlessness is like Einstein’s special theory of relativity in that it may well be true in ‘extreme’ situations, but not noticeably significant in everyday situations. After all, it doesn’t sound as if it has much application in the practicalities of living. We know that the mass of objects increases to near infinity close to light speed, but this odd fact does not really upset the mechanics of daily life very much. So maybe we can get away with ignoring radical uncertainty, just as we get away with ignoring relativistic-type phenomena? This is an important question, and in answer to it the first thing to say is that ‘ignoring uncertainty’ is what almost all of us do, almost all of the time, anyway. So what we really need to do is ask ourselves “Does ignoring uncertainty work?”
On the face of things, we seem to be managing well enough. The usual conception is that we are managing better now, in terms of technical manipulation, than we as a species have ever managed - we are great managers! The point of management is to ensure a ‘surprise-free’ existence; this, in a nut-shell, is what it all boils down to, and therefore the measure of our success in management is how well regulated and predictable our environment is. When our environment is successfully managed (so that all the variables in it are reducible to the one level of description) then there is simply no need to worry about uncertainty, for the simple reason that uncertainty has been eliminated! This type of surprise-free environment is in fact the very reality that most of us live in. If you live in a typical English suburb you are surrounded and cushioned by precisely this type of ‘uncertainty insulation’: everything seems bland and safe and predictable, the only type of unpredictability is of the trivial type, i.e. will the bus be late, will there be a conservative government or a labour one? The message that one receives in a well regulated English town or suburb is unequivocal: “That sort of thing doesn’t happen here...” Radical uncertainty isn’t named directly, to refer directly to it would of course be an unforgivable violation of propriety. The stifling blandness of suburbia is the face of the civilization which we have worked so hard for, and within this managed reality we seem to have very nearly succeeded in eradicating all novelty. But, is this novelty-eradicating strategy a good one? Is there a biological-evolutionary precedent for it? Are we smart or or are we stupid?
Evolutionarily speaking, we have to say that it was never the case that organisms survive and increase ‘fitness’ to survive by eliminating surprise; life has always had to cope with the unexpected and it has done this, as Erich Jantsch (1980, p 196) says, by staying a bit unstable (or unexpected) itself:
Evolution is never total adaptation. It always requires destablization, the reaching out, the self-presentation which offers new symbiotic relations, this risk accompanying all innovation.
Balance, perfection, 100% adaptation, ...all lead to stagnation, a dead-end, an evolutionary cul-de-sac. In thermodynamic terms, systems that only move in the direction of increasing equilibrium become ever more defined; their entropy content tends to a maximum. As we have already said, a strange thing comes to pass in the ‘equilibrium world’ - there is a peculiar principle that becomes operative. In the equilibrium world thoughts equal things, and things are what you expect them to be. This is the consequence of maximum definition. That is what ‘definition’ means. An exact agreement between expectation and reality equals 100% S, maximum conformation, total stasis. Systems that possess the complementary movement in the direction of increasing imbalance (which move up the W gradient) are forever pushing out into new realms of order (or unpredictability). Their entropy content is tending to decrease, and, contrariwise, the level of their complexity (and indeterminacy) is tending to increase so that thoughts do not equal things, and expectations are never met.
LIVING IN A CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT
If we could be sure that we were so good at manipulating our environment that we would never have to cope with the unexpected, then we could afford to be 100% adapted. However, if we actually thought about it, we might realize that this possibility doesn’t exactly sound like a bundle of laughs. On a superficial level, we can see how we would stand to benefit from eradicating novelty, since we could get on with what we wanted to do without disturbance; we could pursue our goals in peace, and this constitutes a naive view of freedom. If we look a little deeper, however, we can see that there is something ghastly about the idea, because there is a kind of ‘redundancy factor’ which sneakily comes into the picture. This redundancy factor means that there is no value in anything we do, no meaning to it. ‘No surprises’ translates as ‘no meaning’ - to live with no possibility of any form of radical surprise ever happening would actually be a uniquely unpleasant form of suffering or torture. This is the ‘torture’ of the totally confirmed state, which is when you discover that nothing is honest, that everyone had been humouring you the whole time.
100% adaptation equals solipsism, and the solipsistic state is only bearable when we do not see it. When we do see it, then the horror of it strikes home and we realize that we have been the victim of a cruel joke which we have somehow played upon ourselves. However, it is this realization that spells the end of the totally closed state, since the suffering turns into surprise as we find out that there is more to life than just ‘me’. In a similar way, when we discover that we have to drop our agendas this is indeed suffering, but it is suffering with a hidden sense of humour in it because we are surprised by the pleasure of an unexpected discovery, an unforeseen blossoming of possibilities. Therefore, the pain of ‘facing up to the worst’ is ultimately liberating, whereas the pain of ‘avoiding seeing the worst’ has no hidden sense of humour, no redemptive side to it. What we are talking about here is ‘conscious’ versus ‘unconscious’ suffering, where ‘unconscious suffering’ can be defined as the pain of unconsciously suspecting that everything I do is futile, the pain of redundancy that carries no reward with it because it doesn’t ever escape itself. In other words, unconscious suffering is when I refuse to see the way in which I am being humoured. I do not altogether escape the awareness, but I do not acknowledge it to myself, and it is through ignoring novelty that I succeed in perpetuating this unhappy state of affairs.
IRONING OUT NOVELTY
Our immoderate love of control brings nightmares in its wake; a neat definition of civilization is to say it is our attempt to achieve total control over our environment, and by this definition we can rejoice in the knowledge that we are probably the most civilized people ever to walk this earth. It is not just our environment we wish to control, of course - we are equally keen on controlling ourselves. The two actually go together: controlled people in a controlled environment..... The most obvious aspect of environmental control is that external processes are managed so that there are no unexpected or unprogrammed fluctuations; what is less obvious is the way in which our expectations themselves also become conditioned and managed. ‘Expectations’ basically boils down to the notion of ‘rules for thinking,’ which can also be seen in terms of subscribing to a consensus reality, a common ‘reality tunnel,’ as Robert Anton Wilson would call it. This equals ‘control of meaning,’ which sociologists have referred to as ‘ideology’.
When the world that we live in is highly controlled and regulated what we end up with is a system at equilibrium. Rules are absolutely important and the ‘things’ or ‘artefacts’ that are thrown up as a result of the perspective that is being used become completely solid, completely opaque. Our thoughts are similarly concrete, similarly impermeable, similarly unquestionable.
In such a world the ‘odd’ person has absolutely no place, there is no use for him or her and, furthermore, no possible justification for him or her to carry on being odd. The only decent thing to do would be to subject such a person to corrective therapy so that they could become normal or regular like everyone else; this might sound like an idea for a science fiction film, but what we don’t tend to see is that it is already true - I am your ‘adjustment therapist’ and you are mine. We are all each other’s therapists, working ceaselessly everyday to ease each other more exactly into the social niche. We all carry within our conceptual minds the blueprint, the specification of ‘what it is to be a person,’ and what the negative feedback mechanism of mutual control (vaguely familiar to us as peer-pressure) operates to spot novelty and iron it out before it gets anywhere......
CONCLUSION
How do we resolve the two requirements - the requirement to be adapted, and the requirement to be non-adapted? Well, to start off with, we would have to point out that there is no ‘requirement’ to be odd as such. This would tend to infer that there should be a specification of some sort, a preferred direction; the existence of a ‘hard’ necessity must involve some element of definition - how can there be a compulsion to do ‘nothing in particular,’ or to do ‘something’ that we can’t talk about or even imagine? If one became convinced that disequilibrium held some sort of advantage then the next thing would be to ask for a few hints as to the best way to be odd. But that of course is totally ridiculous: there can be no such thing as ‘standardized oddness.’ That would be the same thing as ‘specifying a random number through a mathematical procedure’, which is impossible. The essence of non-adaption is that it really is totally useless, at least from the point of view of the given context. From where we stand it appears there is no rational purpose for it at all, and therefore there can be no question of wondering about which type of oddness is ‘best’; there are no rules to go on, no clues to be had, and so all cogitation is in vain. If I am identified with rationality then this will seem like a truly terrible dilemma to be in, it will appear to be utterly impossible. If I look at it another way, however, I will be struck by the singular beauty and simplicity of my situation....
The answer to the question that we asked earlier is that the two movements (the one in the direction of increasing adaptation and the one in the direction of decreasing adaptation) are not opposites, they are complementary. Adaptation and non-adaptation are not different points on the same linear scale since the latter cannot be inferred from the former; because they are complementary this means that we cannot judge the two in the same way. Basically, there is no comparison between them - they exclude each other like oil and water, and for this reason they cannot be conveniently arranged within a unifying theoretical framework. This means that there cannot be a ‘resolution,’ which is what our rational minds always hope to arrive at; instead, there is an irreducible tension, a ‘dynamic’ that we cannot get away from.
Although we can’t succeed at getting away from the dynamic tension, this is what we are trying to do when we seek to maximize control, either in our heads or in society, which is our bigger head. The problem is that it is the tension, the complexity, that makes life worth living. It is the tension or complexity that is life in fact, so when we eradicate it we lose the sense of what life is.
‘Tension’ is another way of saying that there is a degree of novelty in my experience of life, that there is an unsettling edge to it, that there is some unacountable demand that is being made upon me. I know that something is required of me, but the difficult thing is that I haven’t a clue what that ‘something’ is. This is not a small difficulty, but a total challenge to my being, and for this reason it ought to come as no surprise to learn that rising to this challenge is not usually what I end up doing - what I end up doing is distracting myself with spurious necessities. I end up absorbing myself in things that I ‘have to do’, I end up becoming wholly concerned with the realm of trivial uncertainty. Trivial uncertainty engages me, and the ‘work’ that I have to do in order to sort it out can be arduous enough, but it is not Work-with-a-capital-W, it is not a demand on my total being. Radical uncertainty, on the other hand, is just such a demand. Novelty basically means there is no ‘right way’ to look at the world, and so I cannot settle into a comfortable groove. To rise to the challenge means going beyond our comfortable way of looking at things, whilst the ignoble alternative is to convince ourselves that the way in which we see the world is the one and only true way to see it, which means that we put all our efforts into solving our problems as they appear to us on the basis of this one-level perspective. This is treating life theatrically - evading Work forces us into the position where we have to enter into a false or ‘decoy’ world, a ‘game’ which we proceed to immerse ourselves in in a very serious fashion. This make-believe world has the advantage that I always know what is required of me, but it has the disadvantage that it is actually unreal, so all my neat solutions will be revealed to be meaningless in the end. If I do not evade Work, then life becomes dramatic in nature rather than theatrical, since we are neither able to foresee what is going to happen next in the process of living, nor know what our role is to be in it.
_ ‘CLOSED’ CANNOT CONTAIN ‘OPEN’....
We can summarize what we have been saying in the previous section about the mutually irreconcilable nature of adaptation and non-adaptation by saying that in closed or ‘P-Type’ universe the necessity that is imposed upon us is the necessity to become adapted to a specific set of rules. In this universe having a ‘game-plan’ is not just useful, it is essential if I am to survive. If we take complexity (i.e. ‘relativity’) into account, then this means that the P-Type universe must be pragmatically closed only, since complexity (or relativity’) means that there is no fundamental or primary level of description. This means that sooner or later we will inevitably have to encounter novelty, i.e. stuff that doesn’t make sense within our existing framework of understanding. Thus, encountering novelty forces us to realize that having an agenda is no help at all. An ‘H-Type’ or open universe reserves the right to surprise us at any time, day or night, without any warning whatsoever. If we bring all this together, we see that we are faced with a paradox - somehow we have to live in a closed universe and an open universe simultaneously. We have to live in two worlds at once! We cannot afford to ignore the universe of fixed rules if we want to survive, but, then again, if we ignore the Universe-with-no-rules (i.e. the Symmetrical or ‘Invisible’ Universe) then we cut ourselves off from the meaning of our lives, and reduce ourselves to mechanical or ‘routinized’ existence. Margaret Isherwood makes the point that this is the symbolic meaning of the Egyptian Cross, the ankh, which has a cross and a circle superimposed - the first representing the particular case (i.e. locality), and the second representing Universality (i.e. non-locality). The infinite is impaled upon the finite, the Endless made to have an end....
Although we have said that there can be no real comparison between the two worlds, there is a sort of a relationship between them, an ‘asymmetrical’ type of relationship that can be stated in the following manner: There is nothing to say that an open universe cannot contain a closed one, but it is by definition impossible to have it the other way around. As James Carse says, you can play a finite game within the context of an infinite game, but not vice versa.
FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES
Let us consider ‘closed’ versus ‘open’ in terms of Carse’s ‘finite versus infinite games’. ‘Closed’ is where there is a definite bedrock to reality, a fixed Ultimate Truth. In this case everything hinges upon whether you have the correct key or not: the adapted person has the correct key to unlock his or her environment, whereas the unadapted person has the wrong key or no key at all. If you have the right technique, the right theory, the right dogma, the right plan, then you have hit the jack pot. “Bingo”.... That is all there is to it. End of story. Life? The universe? “Been there, done it.....” you reply smugly. This, according to James Carse (1986, p 17) is the terminal situation of a ‘master player’ in a ‘finite game’:
.......It is the desire of all finite players to be Master Players, to be so perfectly skilled in their play that nothing can surprise them, so perfectly trained that every move in the game is foreseen at the beginning. A true Master Player plays as though the game is already in the past, according to a script whose every detail is known prior to the play itself.
Now we take ‘open,’ which is more fun. If the environment has high complexity, then keys are not the point at all: there is no ‘correct key,’ there is no ‘right way’ to understand the universe and there is no ‘right way’ to live life. I cannot remain in the safe and defended position of a technician, a strategist, an expert, or a ‘master game-player’. Instead I have to admit that I am a rookie. It is my ‘first time,’ and, what is more, it will always be my first time. Life is always new, it is always infinitely strange, it always without precedence. “What is this ‘expert’ business, anyway?” you ask. “How can I be ‘a professional’ at living life?” There are no professionals since the story is only just starting; what is more, it is always ‘only just starting’...... A ‘finite game’, says Carse (p 18-19), represents the triumph of the known past over an uncertain future; whilst in an ‘infinite game’ it is the other way around, the unknown future triumphs over a known past. Furthermore, he says, finite play can be equated to training; whilst infinite play is a process of education:
.......A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future possibility, but to control the future, to prevent it from altering the past. This is the finite player in the mode of seriousness with its dread of unpredictable consequence.
Infinite players, on the other hand, continue their play in the expectation of being surprised. If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases.
Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.
Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has begun there. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing.
Because finite players are trained to prevent the future from altering the past, they must hide their future moves. The unprepeared opponent must be kept unprepared. Finite players must appear to be something other than what they are. Everything about their appearance must be concealing. To appear is not to appear. All the moves of a finite player must be deceptive: feints, distractions, falsifications, misdirections, mystifications.
Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness. It is not an openness as in candour, but an openness as in vulnerability. It is not a matter of exposing one’s unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one’s ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be. The infinite player does not expect only to be amused by surprise, but to be transformed by it, for surprise does not alter some abstract past, but one’s own personal past.
To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.
Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.
Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future.
_ THE BATTLE TO BE NORMAL
We can restate (yet again) the basic argument for oddness as follows. The universe, taken as a whole, is itself completely and utterly idiosyncratic. Taken as a whole, all we can definitely say about it is that “Everything Changes.” Now, adaption is just another way of saying ‘staying the same’ - if you are adapted to a fixed reality you are yourself fixed. So then, unavoidably, you are at odds with the universe. Life becomes one big struggle - we are talking Stress City here. Gigawatts of anxiety are generated as we engage ourselves more and more completely in the ‘impossible task’ of trying to predict and control a universe that is always beyond our ability to model. One of the definitions that we started out with earlier is that not only is the universe best described as an infinitely complex object (which is the same as saying that the universe equals ‘groundless flux’ / ‘criterionless change’ / ‘infinite instability’ / ‘infinite relativity’), but human beings too, we said, are infinitely complex, infinitely unstable, groundless flux, etc. The universe equals ‘pure uncertainty’, and so do you. Therefore, if I am adapted to an abstract set of ideas concerning who or what I am, then I am at odds with myself. There is conflict because I AM NOT BEING MYSELF. I am being something unreal, something that doesn’t actually exist. I am trying to be who I want to be, and the very act of ‘trying’ guarantees that I am divorced from who I really am.
THE EXCLUSIVE VERSUS THE INCLUSIVE SELF
The idea that I am not who I think I am is a startling one. The idea that I am busily being somebody who isn’t me, someone who doesn’t in fact exist at all, isn’t just startling, it is outrageous. If I took this idea seriously I would, surely, be completely sabotaged - what would I do then, what would I think? What is most likely to happen, however, is that I will rationalize this initially shocking suggestion, and proceed to make it more reasonable. When I think about the proposition a bit I start to feel that I can understand it, and so I can relax again - after all, the principle that we do not know stuff perfectly is not particularly radical, and so I can work with the idea that <I am not who I think I am> by saying that it is a learning curve, that obviously I don’t know the full story, but as I get older and wiser I deepen my knowledge of myself. So then I can accept the idea that I don’t know myself, because it isn’t such a challenge to me. But that isn’t it at all, though - my first reaction was closer to the mark. The point is that the very basis which I am using for understanding my self is in itself totally and utterly wrong, so gradually improving the picture within the old framework of reference isn’t getting closer to the truth, its getting further away! All I am doing is ‘perfecting the illusion’. If my starting off point is unreal (the false self), then any destination that I purposefully reach from that basis will also be unreal. If I was under a fundamental misapprehension when I started my so-called journey of self-discovery or self-development, then all I am doing when I engage in positive (or purposeful) action is taking that misapprehension even more for granted. This is a vicious circle of ignorance and confusion, not an advancement of self-knowledge.
Perfecting the illusion means that I am getting better at constructing my idea of myself. This usually takes the form of ‘addition’ - I go on adding modules or units of knowledge to the existing framework, getting closer and closer to the goal of a ‘total description’. Because there is a definite idea behind it all, the operating principle is EITHOR/OR, in or out, right and wrong, picking and choosing. The discriminating function of mind is given full licence to do its thing, and the end result of this process is the creation of the Exclusive Self, the additive self, the self-of-boundaries, the self which says ‘I am this / but I am not that’. We may make a point here in relation to what is generally called ‘self-development’: the vast majority of self-development courses are based upon exclusivity, i.e. mind, and the process involved is ‘perfecting an illusion,’ which is to say, I identify values and try to incorporate them, I add things on to my list. Of course, there is also the reverse process of ‘subtraction’ - I identify things that I don’t like about myself and try to cross them off the list. This is still ‘perfecting’ because I am still approaching an ideal, a projection of the mind. Trying to exclude stuff I don’t like is still part of The Battle To Be Normal, and so is everything that I think - everything that I do on purpose in fact. In this sense anything that is related in some way to a mental projection of ‘the way things ought to be’ is ‘normal’ since all I am ever doing is agreeing with my own assumptions, i.e. I am trying to conform to some sort of base-line or standard. Multiplying and division are no different: even if we get fancy and start taking cube roots of X to the power e, its all the same: it is all mental manipulation, it is all trivial. Any change that is based on mind and rationality is self-trickery: I don’t get to be anywhere different, all I get is the illusion of progression.
YOU CANNOT BE YOUR (TRUE) SELF ON PURPOSE.....
Now, at this point it is important that we look at the other side to the ‘battle to be normal’, which is the Battle to be Different. Along with the need to fit in, there is of course the need to be special, the need to feel that one is not just another face in the crowd, and for this reason a lot of effort goes into the struggle of trying to define ourselves as individuals. This struggle, however, is still adaptation. Wanting to be different is exactly the same thing as wanting to be the same: the set of criteria that I use to determine ‘sameness’ is the same set of criteria that I use to determine ‘difference’, and so no matter what I do, I cannot escape my mind. The more I try to ‘advantageously alter’ my situation, the more I take my limiting assumptions for granted, and the more I get sewn into the system of thought.
There is no operation that can allow us to develop our True Self, or rather there is only one operation, and that is the ‘non-operation’ of all-accepting. It is important to stress that all-accepting is not a positive thing that you can do on purpose. It is not about choosing one alternative over another, it is not about getting things to be the way you think they should be. The whole idea of ‘doing’ (i.e. purposeful involvment) is utterly redundant; through including everything on an equal basis, without prejudice, as and when it arises, we arrive at the Inclusive Self, which, when we think about it, is no more than another way of talking about the idea of ‘criterionless change’. Who I really am is an open question; I am consiousness, and consciousness is being open to whatever is there, without having any assumptions about what it is that is there. Consciousness, in the way we are defining it, is the absence of prejudice, the absence of frameworks, the absence of purposefulness, the absence of ‘rules’.
THE ARGUMENT FOR BEING STRANGE
We may say that because the Cosmos (which is none other than the Cosmic Self, really) is odd - or, one might say, infinitely strange - then I too have to be infinitely strange. If I am not infinitely strange, then I am not doing justice to myself; I am selling myself short, limiting myself. By trying to conform or adapt (or perfect) we are fighting our own true selves, we are imprisoning ourselves by taking part in the doomed battle to be normal, since ‘normal’ is an unreal thing, a fiction. By defining myself, I lose myself. It is no good, in the long run, being a ‘regular guy’; ‘one of the lads’, a ‘good old boy’, etc, because if you are just a regular guy then the joke is actually on you, because you have lost out. By trying to obtain what everyone else thinks is worthwhile, you have lost the ‘worthwhileness’ that you already had, but which you didn’t recognize. You become the loser by trying to win, and then you join the club of losers who spend all their time trying to convince themselves that they have got something good there. They present each other awards, and bestow honours and titles. Yet all the time, the universe remains deeply strange.
It is true that the stuff that we see and react to doesn’t usually seem that strange, but this apparent normality is purely a result of the decomplexifying property of the rational mind. So, whilst adaptation can be advantageous in the short term, from the point of view of getting on well in a low-complexity (or ‘relatively stable’) environment, it doesn’t stand for anything once you go out into the big, wide world. If I make a major investment in being ‘cool’, so that I can be accepted within my peer group, this is going to be disadvantageous for me in the long run because in order to conform I have had to forsake my uniqueness, and, in the end, my uniqueness is the only authentic thing about me. When it comes down to it, I find that I simply can’t have the security of being like everyone else - the security of adaptation to a fixed reality is illusory. Because the ultimate reality is the ungrounded instability of the whole, there is actually nothing to conform to. I can adapt myself to the ‘world of reified ghosts’ which my rational mind has convincingly generated and which it continually projects outwards, but what use, ultimately, can this be? This is being ‘adapted to the unreal,’ being adapted to a fantasy. I might as well just face it - I am odd.
_ MR “I CAN’T DO THAT”: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN
So far in this section we have been concerned with counteracting the prevailing assumptions regarding the value of being adapted. To be in this society is like standing in a field where there are thousands and thousands of people all shouting the same message. That message is “Its good to be adapted”, “Its good to be adapted”, “Its good to be adapted” , “Its good to be adapted”, “Its good to be adapted”, ..... and so on ad infinitum. Of course, the message comes in subtle variety of forms, nothing as crude as “Be like us and you will be happy”, but this is the gist of it. The information which we daily absorb from our environment, from the 24 hours-a-day media-bath which we contentedly immerse ourselves, in is pure confirmation, pure ‘unconsciousness juice’. Because of this, it is not so easy to start putting across the other side of the story, to point at the essential absurdity, not to say horror, of living a life based entirely on confirmation.
This is not to say that the harmful aspect of adaptation does not become evident in time anyway. At first it feels good to be defined, to have a clear sense of what is right and wrong, true and untrue. There is a powerful psychological pay-off for a movement in this direction, the direction of increasing adaptation to an extrinsic set of rules. These rules, however, end up because of the built-in irreversibility of the information-collapse process (i.e. because of the increasing entropy content) getting tighter and tighter, more and more restrictive, until they are like cords cutting into our flesh. This is a principle which is very well known to all sufferers of anxiety: my comfort zone ends up becoming my prison. Conforming or adapting means embracing a set of rules, these rules are our passport to the world we want to live in, our passport to ‘conditioned freedom’, but another way of looking at these same rules is to say that they are our conditioning, our chains. Gregory Bateson was getting at the same thing when he said that adaptation is not really any different from addiction. What is it that drives us to seek to lose our freedom, then? Why are we so keen to wear chains? The most straightforward way to explain this is to say that the motivation is two-sided: on the one hand there is the desire to be accepted, to ‘do well’ within the equilibrium world that we are wanting to enter, and on the other hand there is the fear of being rejected, of being a failure.
It is this dual motivation which makes us not want to be odd, and which makes us blind to the unpleasant consequences to adaptation.
EMBRACING BOUNDARIES
‘Odd’ holds the connotation of being awkward, of ‘not fitting in,’ of being ‘out of place’. As a consequence we don’t really want to be odd, we’d rather be regular. This fact demonstrates our bias against complexity, as we can readily see as soon as we realise that that ‘odd’ means complex. ‘Regular’ means simplex, since all regularities are succeptible to being exhaustively described in a short succinct manner. Being regular means that your boundaries are known, in other words, and this in turn means that your identity is walled off by a twelve-foot hight perimeter fence which is electrified and topped with razor wire. This perimeter fence equals impossibility: I am defined in terms of what it is impossible for me to do, and in terms of what it is impossible for me to be. My speech becomes full of negative absolutes: I am forever coming out with “can’t s” and “mustn’t s” and “shouldn’t s”; I am convinced that “it’ll never work...” What I actually can do is so vanishingly trivial, one wonders why I would bother with it at all - it is so petty in scope as to be practically meaningless! Despite this, and with commendable obstinacy, we become inordinately self-satisfied and self-important: “Why...” I say to myself, “this identity of mine is a terribly grand thing!” I become inflated with self-justifying pride; I share this pride with all those other people who have also invested in an ‘identity-prison’ built to the same specifications - this collective pride we know as ‘patriotism’ or ‘nationalism’.
All the same, for all of this imagined glory, the confined space of the prison pinches us from time to time, and it all gets a bit stale after a while, and so we don’t really enjoy ourselves as much as all that. But because we are invested in it, we bury our doubts - we lock them away away in a prison within a prison, so to speak. One time when our dissatisfaction truly comes out is when we see someone who doesn’t abide by the same restrictions that we do - this annoys us terribly and, if given a chance, we will deal with such a person harshly. All of the wars in mankind’s bloody history come down to this ‘displaced’ self-frustration. After all, if we were as happy as all that we could afford to be magnaminous; if we were as rich in spirit as we would like to think then we would be generous; and if the ‘Truth’ that we hold to be so ‘self-evident’ was as true as all that, then we would not need to defend it so anxiously, we would not need to fear the heretic. When we do peer out from within the bleak confines of our self-imposed prison, it tends to be with bitter resentment disguised as self-righteousness. The reason orthodoxy is cruel is because it is based on mean-spiritedness, and the reason it is mean-spirited is because it knows, deep down, that its prized possessions are all sham, just as its truths are all lies.
Adaptation always brings a let-down in the end, a sense of being betrayed. To start off with we are rewarded for our decision to ‘play the game’, we are rewarded by acceptance and success within the framework of the game which we are playing. At the end of it all, however, we find that these gains mean nothing to us, since the game itself, in the ultimate analysis, means nothing. Because we have invested our lives in illusion, the ultimate ‘pay-off’ is also illusion. The fact that we put everything we had into it makes the final fruit all the more bitter when we discover that life’s effort was all wasted, spent on nothing but dreams and fantasies. The product, when we finally obtain it, does not match the high hopes we had from watching all the ads. The contents are not what we were led to expect from the label.
‘FACING FACTS’ VERSUS ‘FACING UNCERTAINTY’
To be odd is to be alone, and it is a hard thing to be alone. Being odd means that you don’t have anyone to turn to, it means that you can’t ask for help from outside yourself. Basically, you can’t rely on any external authority! The funny thing is that it actually feels good to surrender our authority (or autonomy). It feels good, but it feels bad at the same time..... If you join the army, for example, there is a distinctly unpleasant aspect to the whole business of having your personal authority stripped away; similarly, if you get admitted into a psychiatric ward it doesn’t feel nice to have your decision-making power, your ‘responsibility,’ taken away from you. Yet at the same time it is a real weight off your shoulders - let someone else do the thinking! You can sink into a state of blind trust that ‘they’ know what they are doing, and that removal of uncertainty feels very good - particularly if you are a bit on the anxious or insecure side, as most of us are. And of course, if things do screw up, then its not your fault - you can blame the “experts”!
Autonomy can be related to this strange phenomenon called consciousness, and consciousness has got something to do with uncertainty. Uncertainty can bring anguish and pain, it can be excrutiatingly uncomfortable, but at least we are finally facing up to what is there; we are standing on our own two feet and we can grow as a direct result of this. The comfortableness of certainty equals unconsciousness, and anything that helps us slip into this state is welcomed by the weaker side of us. That is why alcohol, valium, heroin and TV are as popular as they are: they are potent inducers of cognitive equilibrium states, they are staunch and highly dependable allies in our number one pursuit, the task of ‘life-avoidance’! Life in an open universe is uncertain, we can make the equation life = uncertainty. If, on the other hand, we wish to live in a universe that is founded upon certainty, upon some basic ‘fact’ that one can know for sure and which exists independently from our viewpoint, then the situation is different. In a closed universe ‘consciousness’ has to be defined as the state of being in exact agreement with the given determinate reality. In this case adaptation is the highest good, it means ‘wising up’ to the ultimate nature of things, getting the picture of how things really are. This is what people mean when they talk about facing facts: this is understood as the right and responsible thing to do, it equals ‘getting real’ or ‘growing up’. What we are talking about here is the situation of ‘accepting an external authority’. The type of order involved is extrinsic: the concrete is subjugated by the abstract; the system of formal-world logic triumphs over the real-world; reality is made into a game. When someone says that they wish that you would face facts, what they really mean is that they wish you would subscribe to the same picture of reality that they do. So what people call consciousness, within the context of game-reality, is actually unconsciousness - it is defined backwards, everything is seen ‘up-side-down’.
Facing facts is totally different to facing uncertainty. Someone else can tell you what the facts are that you need to face, which means that the responsibility lies with an external structure, an external authority. All you have to do is place your faith in that reality - you just need to accept without questioning, that is all. Uncertainty is different: nobody can tell you what the uncertainty is that you have to face, and they can’t tell you how you might go about facing it. They cannot even tell you which direction to look in: its all up to you. The type of order here is intrinsic, it was in you the whole time, it arises spontaneously out of nowhere! One gets to intrinsic order by withdrawing belief in extrinsic order and so this path is known as the via negativa, the negative way. Another way to put it would be to say that we proceed by dissolving certainty.
THE EMPTY-HANDED WARRIOR
Facing up to uncertainty means that we have to scrap all of our comfortable opinions, habits and routines, our whole persona in fact. We can’t rely on anything we have thought before, and we can’t rely on anything that other people have told us. When something happens we have to deal with it without any help, we have to face reality directly without a tool-box of tried-and-trusted techniques, without the benefit of conventional wisdom, without the benefit of consulting our peers. Instead of going into situations prepared, already armed or ‘tooled-up,’ we go into them defenceless, mentally naked. Instead of being a professional highly trained commando with assault rifle and stun-grenades at the ready, with a game-plan that has been rehearsed and re-rehearsed down to the last detail, we are like David Carradine in the Kung Fu television series - unarmed, without a plan, and without expectations, patiently waiting. This is what is meant by being a warrior with empty hands: it is not just your hands that are empty but your mind, empty in the sense of ‘unoccupied’.
_ SPONTANEITY
The West (with the occaisonal exception here and there) has traditionally been preoccupied with finite games; in the East the emphasis tends to have been on the other side. Jung explains this difference by saying that we Westerners have developed the function of rationality and neglected the complementary intuitive function, whilst in the East they have it the other way around. This means, says Jung, that we have focussed on directed (or goal-driven) thinking, whereas in Eastern cultures it is spontaneous thinking that has been brought out more. Fritjof Capra has put forward a similar argument in his book The Turning Point. The basic thesis of the book is that there are two complementary types of activity: self-maintaining (i.e. equilibrium-seeking) activity, and self-transcending (i.e. ‘non-equilibrium’) activity. Using the Chinese yin/yang symbol to explain this complementarity, Capra (1982, p 20-22) links the rational faculty with the yang and the intuitive faculty with the yin:
In the Chinese view, then, there seems to be two kinds of activity - activity in harmony with nature and activity against the natural flow of things. The idea of passivity, the complete absence of any action, is not entertained. Therefore the frequent Western association of yin and yang with passive and active behaviour, respectively, does not seem to be consistent with Chinese thought. In the view of the original imagery associated with the two archetypal poles, it would seem that yin can be interpreted as corresponding to responsive, consolidating, cooperative activity; yang as referring to aggressive, expanding, competitive activity. Yin action is conscious of the environment, yang action is conscious of the self. In modern terminology one could call the former ‘eco-action’ and the latter ‘ego-action’.
These two kinds of activity are closely related to two kinds of knowledge, or two modes of consciousness, which have been recognized as as characteristic properties of the human mind throughout the ages. They are usually called the intuitive and the rational and have traditionally been associated with religion or mysticism and with science. Although the association of yin and yang with these two modes of consciousness is not part of the original Chinese terminology, it seems to be a natural extension of the ancient imagery and will be so regarded in our discussion.
The rational and the intuitive are complementary modes of functioning of the human mind. Rational thinking is linear, focused, and analytic. It belongs to the realm of the intellect, whose function is to discriminate, measure, and categorize. Thus rational knowledge tends to be fragmented. Intuitive knowledge, on the other hand, is based on a direct, non-intellectual experience of reality arising in an expanded state of awareness. It tends to be synthesizing, holistic, and non-linear. From this it is apparent that rational knowledge is likely to generate self-centered, or yang, activity, wheras intuitive wisdom is the basis of ecological, or yin, activity.
One could equally speak in terms of the complementarity of the two principles of purposefulness and spontaniety. Yet if this is so, then why is it so hard to find a philosophical system that treats them as equal in the sense of being equally fundamental? In the West we have tended to over-rate the former, but in Taoism and Buddhism purposeful behaviour seems, on the face of it, to be treated as totally inferior. Capra explains that in traditional Chinese philosophy one type of activity is said to be harmonious with nature whilst the other is against nature, which means that we have a split between nature and not-nature. One might as well say, then, that the complementarity that we are speaking of is the complementarity between wisdom and foolishness, or even, between ‘truth’ and ‘illusion,’ and this is hardly treating the pair as equally important. After all, a wise person does not become wise by valuing wisdom and ignorance the same; on the contrary, wisdom is the result of seeing illusion to be false and unworthy, and discarding the type of activity that is based upon illusory ideas.
In Buddhism, too, we tend to find the Void praised as the ultimate reality, and the realm of forms and appearances dismissed as a distraction. This is particularly clear in Zen where the student is encouraged to discard all reflective thought as unhelpful ‘artificiality’ which blocks his or her natural, spontaneous wisdom - although, as Watts (1957, p 162-3) points out, one reason for this is that Zen has traditionally served as a remedy or medicine to counteract the ‘mental paralysis and anxiety’ that results from rigid social conditioning such as was found in Confucian China, and later on in formal Japanese society. Thus, we see spontaneity (or openness) being praised over purposefulness in following quotation from Rinzai master Takuan (1573-1645), [taken from Theodore de Bary (1969, p 381)]:
Everything should be done spontaneously. It should not be done as a result of premeditation. What is premeditated in the mind does not correspond to reality. There is nothing to which emptiness cannot accomodate, be it long, short, square or round; only the mind, kept empty, can tackle anything that confronts it.
When the mind is preoccupied, one cannot judge matters objectively because the preoccupation blocks the mind. The mind that is occupied leaves no room to accept anything else. A guest room can be used to receive guests only when it is empty. If occupied, where is there room for guests? Everything which appeals to the mind is like the guests, and our mind is like the guest room. When the guest room is cleared, only then can the guests be received and entertained in a desired manner....... When the clouds do not appear, the sky is clear of objects and remains serene. The clouds come and float in the sky, but the space the clouds occupy was not prepared in advance. After the clouds move away, there remains no trace in the sky.......
The trouble would seem to be, as we said earlier, that we end up with no complementarity at all, and in fact one wonders just what the point is in phenomenal existence. This attitude itself becomes rather one-sided - if the world of appearance and conventional meaning exists only to be gotten rid of, then we find ourselves in the suspect position of wishing to uncategorically reject what is evidently a natural aspect of reality. The aspect that we are talking about is, as Heraclitus has said, the ‘playful’ aspect of Reality that conceals its own true nature by pretending to be what it us not. But, then again, Reality does not actually ever pretend to be ‘certain’ - it would be more accurate to say that it seems quite happy to go along with us if we jump to certain conclusions about it, but it is also happy to show its true face when we drop our assumptions. If we look at Reality in a hasty or short-sighted way it will humour us, but if we give it a chance it will unfailingly show its true colours. Life, as it says in the Black Uhuru song, is a test, and we will only fnd ourselves played for fools when we ourselves collude in the illusion-making process.
_ DIRECTIONS IN COMPLEXITY
Complexity theory is a helpful way to understand the complementarity between appearance and essence, between the visible and the invisible. If there is a movement in the direction of increasing complexity then, obviously enough, there also exists the possibility of movement in the complementary direction of decreasing complexity. The two directions are not mirror-images of each other because the direction of higher complexity contains all that is in the lower, but it also contains information that is not in it. It is not the same each way, in other words: high complexity can contain low complexity, but low complexity cannot contain high complexity; the open can contain closed, but the closed cannot contain the open. As we have already noted, Carse elucidates this same point, a finite game can be part of an infinite game, he says, but an infinite game can never be a ploy within a finite game. What this means is that I can do something which seems purposeful, but which is actually a playful move, i.e. I do it within the greater context of purposelessness; if, on the other hand, I do something apparently purposeless that is in actual fact done for a purpose, then it is not purposeless at all. If indeterminacy were to be part of a determinate scheme of things, then that indeterminacy would be determined. What we are looking at here is the ‘The One Way Street Principle’, known to chemists as irreversibility. Irreversibility is famously expressed in terms of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which says that the only way that the entropy of a closed system can change is by increasing.
For the purposes of our discussion, it is also helpful to talk in terms of relative versus absolute meaning, or in terms of provisional versus ultimate truth. The equilibrium world, as we have said, is chock-a-block full of ‘opaque’ objects that make an absolute claim upon our consciousness, objects which assert their reality in such a way as to leave us in no doubt whatsoever that they exist the way in which they appear to exist. This extremely persuasive property of ‘pseudo-solidity’ and ‘pseudo-reliability’ is, we have been arguing, actually pathological (or ‘self-defeating’) when we move too far in this direction, i.e. when we become too adapted. If there is no glimmer of novelty anywhere then the world of real objects becomes curiously flat and humourless, it becomes so ‘matter-of-fact’ that it actually becomes lifeless and uninhabitable. The equilibrium world is inimical to consciousness because there is no freedom there; there is no freedom of interpretation and therefore no freedom of action. One gets a good sense of this from the following reflections by Colin Wilson (1978, p 605):
.....As living creatures, we find ourselves confined in a world that appears to have four dimensions, three of space and one of time. Our science concerns itself with this world. But this ‘real world,’ as grasped by reason, leaves no room for life, let alone for freedom. We ought to be totally trapped in cause and effect. Yet I can reach up and scratch my nose or decide not to scratch it; I can decide whether to think about philosophy, sex or my dinner. There is no room for freedom in the real world, yet it exists. Stare at your face in the mirror until you have lost all sense of identity; suddenly, you are seized with horror at this strange face looking at you. You were living in your own inner world of being and freedom and, suddenly, you are stranded in a world of objects in which freedom is an impossibility.
Most of us, most of the time, have in our day-to-day lives a little glimmer of extra perspective that lends spaciousness and freshness to our lives, and it is only when we lose our ‘sense of humour’ that it vanishes. This happens when we get neurotic (when we think too much about life) or when we fall prey to negative emotions. It also happens when we are too much in love with a central theory, notion, or belief. The idea that we need a bit of extra perspective about things, as we go about our daily business, is exactly what Erich Jantsch meant when he said that in day-to-day life there exists a very real and necessary complementarity between novelty and confirmation, non-adaptedness and adaptedness. If we are not a at least a little bit out of balance, than we will end up in ‘dead-ending’ ourselves in the sterile cul-de-sac of our own minds. Sociologist Ivan Illich was saying the same thing when he defined the health of an individual in terms of the autonomy which he or she has from the social structure, the freedom to do things differently. If the system totally defines you, then there is no real you at all! You haven’t even been born yet.....
_ ONLY PRAGMATICALLY REAL
To say that we have to take both confirmation and novelty into account is not to say that we must believe in any fundamental directionality. This is the tricky point that we keep trying to get at: the whole idea of confirmation is dependent upon where you are in the first place, it is ‘position dependent,’ it is a relative measure. When I am stuck in a particular location, then that location seems real to me, it has been reified and therefore my assumptions appear to me as self-evident truths. Anything that agrees with these truths equals confirmation, whilst anything that exists independently of them equals novelty. The fact that I am experiencing myself as being located in an absolute framework is only because I am tuning in to information that confirms my position, and screening out information that doesn’t. Therefore, if we want to look at the framework which I am stuck in from the outside (so to speak) we automatically think in terms of having a better framework within which to include the old one. That, however, is no good at all since having a framework always equals confirmation. This would be getting us nowhere fast, since we are not wanting to escape a particular framework (trying to escape from a framework only reconfirms that framework, after all), we are wanting to move beyond all frameworks. So the direction we want to move in is the direction from <HAVING A FRAMEWORK> to <NOT HAVING A FRAMEWORK>. But this is precisely where the snag comes in - to have a direction at all presupposes a context, a ‘greater framework’ within which the direction <HAVING A FRAMEWORK> to <NOT HAVING A FRAMEWORK> actually makes sense. However, a ‘greater framework’ is still only a framework, and so we haven’t moved in the direction we wanted to after all. We want to move vertically up the W-axis on the Paradoxical Framework, but all we end up doing is moving horizontally, i.e. changing in such a way that the information content of our pattern of interaction with the universe stays exactly the same.
This is supremely frustrating, and yet it is perfectly straightforward at the same time. All that we are saying is that there may be a given direction at any one moment in time, but that directionality always arises out of pragmatic considerations, it is a function of what is going on at the time, i.e. it comes out of ‘relatedness’ not ‘absoluteness’. So it is perfectly possible to move out of informational equilibrium, into a state of disequilibrium with our previous assumptions, but it is not possible to conceptualize the movement that we are making. I can do it, but I can’t think about it, in other words. Movement up the W-axis is not purposeful since the point above cannot be conceptualized in the terms of the point below. There is a gap there that logic cannot ever cross.
Normally we use information in an absolute sense, we relate it to an unchanging framework which we have unconsciously created, and which we are unconsciously maintaining (unconsciousness, we may say, equals ‘having a fixed framework’). Because of this, the only type of information we know is confirmation. Confirmation allows me to ‘optimize’ my position with regard to a static set of criteria, whilst novelty doesn’t actually allow me to do anything within the terms of reference that I am used to. It is totally useless to us! Because we all agree on what the framework of meaning is, this means that the ‘information’ is the same regardless of who receives it, and regardless of who sends it. A word means what it means no matter who hears it. In contrast to this ‘absolute’ type of information, pragmatic information is effective (with regard to its potential to effect qualitative change in me) only in that unique, specific situation in which I presently find myself. Its meaning exists only for me, only for that moment, and therefore it cannot be generalized, or made into an inflexible ‘rule’. This makes it totally useless within a shared context of meaning, which means that I can’t transmit it by rote to anyone that comes along; the idea of pragmatic information is only meaningful for individual, unique interactions, not within the consensus realm of group interactions and mass media. James Carse has expressed this same idea, only instead of talking in terms of pragmatic information as Ernst and Christine von Weiszacker have done, he speaks of finite and infinite speech (1986, p108-110):
Infinite speech is that mode of discourse that consistently reminds us of the unspeakability of nature. It bears no claim to truth, originating from nothing but the genius of the speaker. Infinite speech is therefore not about anything; it is always to someone. It is not command, but address. It belongs entirely to the speakable.
That language is not about anything gives it its status as metaphor. Metaphor does not point at something there. Never shall we find the kingdom of daylight’s dauphin in one place or another. It is not the role of metaphor to draw our sight to what is there, but to draw our vision to what is not there and, indeed, cannot be anywhere. Metaphor is horizontal, reminding us that it is one’s vision that is limited, and not what one is viewing.
The meaning of a finite speaker’s discourse lies in what precedes it utterance, what is already the case whether or not it is spoken.
The meaning of an infinite speaker’s discourse lies in what comes of its utterance - that is, whatever is the case because it is spoken.
Finite language exists complete before it is spoken. There is first a language - then we learn to speak it. Infinite language exists only as it is spoken. There is first a language - when we learn to speak it. It is in this sense that infinite discourse always arises from a perfect silence.
Finite speakers come to speech with their voices already trained and rehearsed. They must know what they are doing with the language before they can speak it. Infinite speakers must wait to see what is done with their language by the listeners before they can know what they have said. Infinite speech does not expect the hearer to see what is already known to the speaker, but to share a vision the speaker could not have had without the response of the listener.
Speaker and listener understand each other not because they have the same knowledge about something, and not because they have established a likeness of mind, but because they know “how to go on” with each other (Wittgenstein).
TRUTH AS A PATHLESS LAND
If there is no standardized framework of meaning, then there is no standard way to escape difficulties, and there is likewise no standard way to find freedom. Krishnamurti expressed this by saying that truth is a pathless land. This is not to say that there is no such thing as truth, or that there is no way to find freedom, but that the way is fresh and new each time, and is not standardizable. The ‘way’ is not a procedure but ‘going beyond procedures’. It is not a ‘finite game’, but the ‘infinite game’. The Twelfth Tai Situpa (1996, p 161) makes this point by saying that the path is always relative to what we need:
The path is limitless. It manifests according to the kind of relative obscurations, shortcomings, habits, or defilements that each of us has. The path is a remedy, a way through which we can deal with ourselves and with other human beings. The path is defined according to what is really there to work out, so it is impossible to talk about the path as a whole. It is individual and complex. ........
Therefore, you cannot tell me where to find it, even if you have found it for yourself. We can look at this in terms of exclusivity and inclusivity. If I have an agenda to find ‘the way,’ then the way that I will find is conditioned by my preconceptions, and so it is not a ‘way’ at all. It is a ‘non-way’, a blockage. If I look out at the world with logic in my head, then I can only ever see stuff that agrees with my logic - my awareness will be restricted to the domain of ‘logically-linked’ elements. If, on the other hand, there is no ‘gate-keeper’ in my head, then I will see the Whole of everything, and it is through the seeing of the Whole that I realize that I am free. The Whole is not logical, it has nothing to do with logic (which is confirmation). The all-inclusive vision shows me an illogical diversity of things, and I become aware, therefore, of an unrestricted field of randomly related elements whose reality has no dependence upon my seeing of them. An unrestricted field of unconnected elements equals the Complex Whole! Alan Watts (1940, p 159-160) deals neatly with this idea in a discussion of the I Ching and synchronicity:
.... The I Ching and the system of divination based upon it has, I believe, puzzled so many Westerners because it presupposes a way of life and a way of reasoning which are quite foreign to us. This is what Jung terms the principle of synchronicity.
All our reasoning is based on the law of cause and effect operating in a sequence. Something is happening now, because something else happened then. But the Chinese do not reason so much along this horizontal line from past, through present to future; they reason perpendicularly from what is in one place now, to what is in another place now. In other words, they do not ask why, or from what past causes, a certain set of things is happening now; they ask, “What is the meaning of those things happening together at this moment?” The word Tao is the answer to this question. The present situation within and around oneself is Tao, for the present moment is life. Our memory of the past is contained in it as well as the potentiality of the future. In short, this way of looking at things is based on a great appreciation of the significance of the moment, and implies that all things happening now have a definite relation to one another just because they have occurred together in time, if for no other reason. This is another way of saying that there is a harmony called Tao which blends all events in the universe into a perfect chord. The whole situation in and around you is a harmony with which you have to find your own union if you are to be in accord with Tao. When you have discovered your own union with it, you will be in the state of Te, sometimes rendered as “virtue” or “grace” or “power,” but best understood as Tao realized in man. Of this Lao Tzu says in his laconic style, “High Te is not Te and thus has Te; low Te does not lose Te and thus is not Te,” which Ch’u Ta-Kao renders, “The supreme virtue is not conscious of itself as a virtue; therefore it has virtue. The inferior virtue never lets off virtue; therefore it has no virtue.”
Finding the Way (i.e. the Tao), therefore, comes down to not having a context within which to see that the Way is, indeed, the Way. We could also say that genuine movement out of the state of being in equilibrium with one’s own mind can only occur when we stop ‘checking up’ on ourselves to see if we are getting somewhere or not. To ask “How am I doing?” instantly returns one to the ‘groundedness’ of dependence upon absolute information, where the meaning ascribed to events and things never changes. This corresponds to John Bennett’s psychostatic versus the psychokinetic modes of mental life, which we will come to later on.
These two ideas that [1] Truth has a dynamic or unfixed nature, and [2] Truth is not perceived through sequence or ‘cause-and-effect’ are here combined by Herbert Guenther in a discussion of the significance of the mandala in Tantric Buddhism (in Guenther and Trungpa 1975, p 53-4):
The situation in which spiritual development takes place is represented visually in the Tantrayana as a mandala. A mandala is understood as a center which is beautiful because of its surroundings which are present with it. It represents a whole situation in graphic form. There is the center which stands for the teacher, or more esoterically, for the guru. The guru is never alone, but exists in relation to his surroundings. The surroundings are seen as the expression of a new orientation in relation to this centre. The mandala is set up in terms of the four cardinal points of the compass. These points symbolize an orientation in which all aspects (directions) of the situation are seen in relation to the guru and therefore have their message. The whole situation becomes, then, a communication on the the part of the guru or teacher. It depends on our level of spiritual growth whether we see the guru only concretely as a person or can also see him symbolically.
The mandala has a certain specific quality in that each situation is unique and cannot be repeated. Only similarities can obtain. The mandala also has its own time factor which cannot be equated with the passage of time as we ordinarily understand it. It has a quality of simultaneity of all aspects which goes beyond our ordinary understanding of sequence. If properly understood, the mandala leads us back to seeing what the spiritual path is, back to the possibility of becoming more related to our own being without identifying it with this or that. Even the understanding embodied in the mandala is traditionally surrendoured and offered up as a guard against reification.
_ THE INTERFACE
We have been discussing the notion that it is possible to look at information in two ways: [1] by saying that it literally describes an unchanging and already known reality; and [2] by saying that it is meaningful only in the sense that it tells us something about the ‘limitness’ of our way of looking, since what we are looking at can never be known. The first is absolute view of information, and it binds one to one’s assumptions, whilst the second is a pragmatic view, which gives us the possibility of questioning these assumptions. The first creates stasis, the second allows change. Having pragmatic knowedge of my situation means that I am aware of the essential relativity involved in that knowledge. This is very similar to the Buddhist idea of absolute verses relative truth: It is relatively true that I am wearing a pink tee-shirt, but it is not absolutely true. If I think that it is absolutely true, then I am badly stuck, but if I realize that all my descriptions of my situation are only ever relatively true, then I am free to move. I am free to evolve my understanding of the situation. The corrolary of seeing that all confirmation is relative, is seeing that novelty is absolute. Everything is novelty really, when you get right down to it; it is only our way of looking at the world that renders it familiar and normal and once we drop our habitual viewpoint everything straightaway goes back to ‘strange’. Weird is the default setting of the universe! This is not to say that I must deny the truth of the ‘non-strange’ reality that I see to be around me. If I do this, then I am falling into the trap of thinking that I can have absolute knowledge that such and such is definitely NOT TRUE. All I have done then is to turn around my naive literal acceptance of what I see, into a naive literal denial of what I see; there is no new information at all, merely a reversal of polarity - I say NO instead of YES. Both YES and NO mean that I implicitly believe in the absolute nature of the information which my senses are receiving. If, on the other hand, I was to be aware of the pragmatically true nature of the information I have to work with, then instead of YES or NO I would have a provisional [MAYBE]. This means that I don’t believe that I am wearing a pink tee-shirt, and I don’t disbelieve it. I am not in the believing game at all!
RESISTANCE
It is very easy to get confused at this point because the chances are that we will rely on our rationality to make sense of it, and this is the one thing that rationality is guaranteed never to understand. Rationality is another way of talking about purposefulness, and the [MAYBE] mode is not produced through purposefulness. To produce MAYBE purposefully we would have to make a goal of it, and to make a goal of it we would have to specify it, and yet the whole point about MAYBE is that it is undefined! When I first meet the idea that saying an absolute YES or an absolute NO to my pragmatic reality (accepting it or rejecting it) ensnares me in it, my immediate response is to think that I should be deliberately provisional about it, so as to say “Well, I will go along with this pragmatic reality of mine because I know that it is only a veil which hides a deeper and profounder and more interesting reality.” This approach is no good at all though because it involves the basic assumption that I know something.‘knowing’ is not MAYBE, knowing is a flat, unquestioned absolute. Actually, to approach my pragmatic reality this way is a sneaky sort of a trick, a low act. I am not being sincere at all in my attitude at all, I am like a person who makes friends with someone because he is hoping to borrow money off them at some point. In order to go beyond my evaluative mind what is needed is that I become a true friend of my pragmatic reality, and not just be hanging around because I am hoping to get something.
A good way to get this straight is to think in terms of resistance, which is a word that Krishnamurti uses. The reason I end up believing absolutely in my pragmatic reality is because I am caught up in acceptance/ rejection the whole time - I am caught up in reacting to my premature evaluation of my situation. As soon as I prematurely react, I get stuck in my assumptions, as soon as I say YES or NO I go into psychostatic mode. This is what Krishnamurti called resistance: if we like something, or find it attractive, we resist not having it, and if we dislike something, or fear it, we resist having it. According to Krishnamurti resisting is what we do all the time, which is why we are never in reality! This is a curious sort of idea - what it means is that I am stuck in my pragmatic reality because I am never actually in it. I am never actually in it because I am always stuck in my goal orientated mind, accepting and rejecting, hoping and fearing. The one thing I never do is to unconditionally acccept where I am. This doesn’t mean accepting for a reason, accepting with an agenda, it means being where I am because that is where I am. This equals ‘seeing the truth of my situation’. If I saw the the truth of my situation, then that truth would free me. If I was to be where I really am, even if where I am is ‘unreality’, then that would mean that I am back in reality after all. Another way to look at this is to say that if I reject my illusory pragmatic reality, then I reject the reality of the illusion, because the reality of the matter is that the illusion-world is where I am. This sounds rather odd since ‘illusion’ means ‘not true’, but the fact that I believe in stuff that is ‘not true’ is itself true. My pragmatic reality is where I really think I am.
BEING PATIENT WITH APPEARANCES
What we are saying is that it is no good me trying to reject boring old normality, because that simply perpetuates the normality, since it was my accepting and rejecting that created it. [Equally, it is no good me trying to accept strangeness, because that perpetuates normality too.] Instead of rejecting or accepting normality, I see it: seeing normality is synonymous with seeing how strange it is that stuff should seem familiar to me. Even confirmation is novelty when it comes right down to it. There is nothing that is not new, and even the old becomes new again when we see it as it really is. The key is, in a word, to be patient, and not to try to force things.
‘Resistance’ basically means being impatient, and it is this impatience that keeps me prisoner in my mind. If I could be patient with being where I am, with being who I am, then resistance would not arise, and so I wouldn’t be trapped. There are certain stimuli that render us very impatient indeed, which all come down to attraction and aversion, i.e. what we have earlier refered to as extrinsic motivation: If I see something that looks very attractive, then I am impatient to obtain it, and if I see something that looks very frightening or horrible, then I am impatient to get away from it. Fear, pain and sadness are potent triggers for resistance, and the irony is that it is the resistance that perpetuates the fear, pain and sadness. Once we react, then we automatically make whatever it is we are reacting to ‘known’, and so we don’t see it ‘as it is’ any more. Actually, fear, pain and sorrow are emissaries of the Great Mystery, they are pure sources of novelty, but as soon as we label them and start to run away from them we become lost indefinitely in illusion, lost in a pointless, thankless, and ultimately frustrating excursion into unreality. Because we always think that we will find salvation elsewhere, we never find it at all. Because we are always so keen to be somewhere else, we are actually never anywhere.
In conclusion then, we can say that it is at the interface between relative and absolute truth that we will find the possibility of movement out of the tedius stale-ness of our conceptual minds, and into the ever-fresh meaning of contextlessness.This is very handy, because that interface is exactly where we are anyway! No matter how stuck we seem, we are always on the edge of disequilibrium, conveniently positioned in the place where normality meets strangeness.
THE DOCTRINE OF THE PERFECTLY HARMONIOUS THREEFOLD TRUTH
Certain Buddhist schools have also taken the view that the ‘ultimate’ arises from the meeting (or relationship) between form and emptiness, rather than being found in either extreme. Here, Montgomery (1991, p 70-71) explains this particular development, which is known as the doctrine of the ‘Perfectly Harmonious Threefold Truth’:
.....Mystical philosophers, from Plato in the West to Shankara in the East, have tended to begin in dualism and end in monism. They begin by distinguishing between spirit and body, mind and matter, substance and accident, the One (principle) and the many (phenomena), good and evil, Nirvana and Samsara (the world of change), permanence (Law, Dharma) and change (facts, dharmas), God and the world. They usually end with mind-only (or its opposite, matter-only), spirit-only, substance-only, the One, Nirvana-only, or God becoming ‘all in all’. (Cor. 15:28).
The Buddha neither began with dualism nor ending in monism, but his followers were not always able to resist the temptation to speak in these categories. Constantly reiterated statements that ‘the world is neither real nor unreal, thus nor otherwise’ (Dharma Flower XVI) are difficult to grasp. Mahayana Wisdom teachings tried to oppose the tendency towards monism with the formula ‘Emptiness is form and Form is Emptiness’. The reader, however, is left bewildered (which is exactly what the author intended), his mind swinging between the two apparent opposites. Nagarjuna, Madhyamika philosophy, and Zen stop at this point, insisting that the reader go ahead and cut the knot by himself (Cheng, Empty Logic 55 ff). Chih-i goes right ahead and cuts it for us.
It was Chih-i who brought Buddhist thought to its ultimate exposition. Reality, he said, is not two-fold but three-fold. Phenomena (ke) are, indeed, constantly changing, precisely because they have no permanent substance. They are empty, void (ku), just as the sutras have said. Therefore, the ‘true-state’ (jisso) is both empty and transiently real. It is the Middle (chu).
For example, a cherry blossom is a temporary phenomenon; it blooms, filling the world with fragrance, and then is scattered by the winds of time. Nevertheless, by nature it is always a cherry blossom; it is not a horse. Oriental philosophers had been turning away from the cherry blossom, seeing it only as a temporary manifestation of an unchanging absolute. They had divided the world into two parts, one of which was visible but unreal (because it is constantly changing), and the other invisible but real (because it is the eternal principle). Others, reversing the two elements, claimed that only the visible was real; the invisible principle was a figment of human imagination.
Now the Heavenly Terrace thinkers pointed out that without void there could be no temporariness (everything would be permanent, which obviously it is not); and without temporariness, there would be no Principle. Change, itself, is principle. Each reveals the other in the third element: the middle.
WORKING IN THE HERE AND NOW
There is a healthy, pragmatic, ‘here and now’ quality which comes out of unconditionally accepting provisional realities - if one becomes concerned with some ideal or perfect state of being then this encourages a attitude of ‘other-worldliness’ in which one impatiently rejects mundane entanglements as being unworthy of one’s time. The commonplace is scorned, passed over. Yet, as the doctrine of the Perfectly Harmonious Threefold Truth asserts, these mundane details are pure expressions of the highest truth, and, as Montgomery says, ‘every blade of grass has cosmic significance’.....
The details, therefore, are not mere dross, they are the Answer which you misguidedly sought to find in high places. We could also say, as the alchemists did, that truth does not appear where we expect it - it is a slippery customery, and it cares not in the least for our preferences and our prejudices, being not at all snobbish or exclusive. Therefore, if you reject the mundane, you also reject the spiritual. If I deny my illusion, I am trapped by it all the more. Spontaneity does not come because there are special circumstances - it arises because it is equally free to arise or not arise, it arises because there is no one there who cares whether it arises or not, it arises because there is no one there with an axe to grind. In terms of complexity theory, we may say that rejecting any aspect of one’s experience equals decomplexification, just as ‘hanging on’ to one’s experience is decomplexification. We can also say that decomplexification means rejecting the reality of ‘here & now’, and that it is this ‘here & now’ (which sounds so familiar or known to us) which is actually the purest expression of novelty. It is ultimately unfamiliar because it is totally and utterly independent of our assumptions, of our way of looking at it. All purposefulness (i.e. rule-based interaction) is based on assumptions, which is why rule-based interaction prevents that ultimate stranger, the ‘here & now’, from ever showing its face.
WORLDS MADE BY EMOTION
Up to now we have looked at how purposefulness, thinking, goals and agendas actually create the world that we live in. In the next chapter we will consider the proposition that emotions also have agendas, and result in decomplexification in exactly the same way that rationality does. We will suggest that emotions create highly convincing ‘virtual reality’ worlds for us to us to live in, aided and abetted by thought.
All Material © Nicholas Williams |
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