In answer we would say that none of the above scenarios qualify as instances of radical uncertainty. The latter examples might be pretty damn unlikely but we are still talking trivial not radical uncertainty. So just how unpredictable does an eventuality have to get before we call it ‘radical’? Does Mandy need to spontaneously mutate into an ocean liner full of bilingual, break-dancing, Eurovision-song-contest-winning penguins before we concede radicality? Even this feat won’t do it, however, its still banal. To understand what is needed to be truly radical we have to start outlining a few definitions. To start of with, we could say that trivial uncertainty is where we still have a category to cover it. So X, Y, or Z happens and we search our ‘inventory of possibilities’ and we find that there is indeed a corresponding conceptual category to slot in the occurrence. It is trivial. Another way to define trivial uncertainty is to say that it is the type of uncertainty that is found within a game. You are playing chess and you don’t know whether your opponent will take your castle with his bishop, or put you in check with his knight. You really have no way of knowing which he will do, but you do know all the various alternatives that are open to him. Krishnamurti, who was a kind of ‘spiritual rebel,’ a man who didn’t go along with any orthodox view, spent a lot of time trying to get the point across that movement from one known to another is not movement at all. Ilya Prigogine, who, as a Nobel prize-winning chemist has what most of us would consider impeccable credentials, recently came out with the same idea when he said that change is of two varieties:

[1] Change that obeys fixed rules (= ‘variations on a theme’ or optimization / adjustment)

[2] Change where the underlying rules-of-change are themselves fluid (= radical or spontaneous change).

In a similar vein, then, we can say that ‘uncertainty where all the possibilities are known’ is not uncertainty at all, it is really just certainty in disguise. Trivial uncertainty can be very sophisticated, but this just means that we are saying something unremarkable in a highly convoluted manner.

This brings us to ‘the psychology bit’. Generally, we lay people tend to think that psychology is a deep business. We can’t help feeling some kind of respect - after all, these guys have plumbed the mysteries of the mind, they know what makes us tick better then we do ourselves. Psychologists are our rationalist/materialist equivalent of a shaman or soul-doctor. Yet this in itself is a bit of a joke because there is absolutely nothing deep about the science of psychology, there is nothing profound about it at all, it all fits into the realm of trivial uncertainty. All that happens here is that there is a tedious hopping from one concept to another, a futile journey from one category of thought to another. The whole domain of modern, mainstream psychology represents nothing more than the rational mind endlessly reshuffling its limited alternatives. No matter what comes out at the end it is guaranteed to be the same thing; its truths are dressed-up banalities, apparent novelty in the service of certainty. The sophistry of contemporary psychology (the psychology that is fashionable at the beginning of the twenty-first century) is to find a million ways of saying that who (or what) we are is the result of conditioning, either conditioning due to genetic endowment or conditioning due to learning.

We have made ‘certainty’ sound like a bit of a dirty word, we have spoken of it as if it is were altogether a seedy and rather unworthy business. If you had been incautious enough to allow yourself to be taken in by this, don’t worry - you will soon snap out of it as you realize the preposterousness of it all. “What is this crap?” you will splutter, “just what the hell else are we supposed to be looking for if it isn’t certainty? What does this jerk think that science is all about, anyway?” This book is an attempt to convince the reader of the inherent self-contradictoriness of such assumptions, our aim will be to demonstrate that it is consciousness not certainty that we need, and that the two are actually complete opposites. If you are conscious you don’t know anything for sure, and if you know something for sure you are not conscious - the former state is when you are in touch with the unmodified reality, the latter means simply that you are trapped in a game, a conditioned state of being which you take as ultimate real, but which is actually no more than a faithful reflection of your limiting assumptions. It is of course true that our collective aim is to increase certainty - this is synonymous with maximising control, and this is what lies at the heart of our civilization. We want to know ourselves, we want to know our universe; we want to control ourselves, we want to control our environment. The general idea is that this is our route to happiness and self-fulfilment. We intend to ‘control ourselves to happiness’, we reckon that we are going to optimise our health and well-being through clever manipulation of the variables. Such are the noble intentions of the dominant culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The only problem is that it is all complete nonsense, it is all a colossal mistake! Anybody could see that flaw in this piece of reasoning if they sat down and thought about it for a while, but somehow we are not encouraged to. The realization that we can’t control our way to happiness is not beyond anyone; it is, however, utterly beyond the ‘collective of us’ - there is no way our civilization can come up with such healthy self-doubt, it has no capacity of self-questioning, anymore than a multi-national corporation, as an entity, has the capacity to question the wisdom of making more and more money. As an individual you might conceivably realize that there is absolutely no point in making money just for the sake of making money. Every now and again someone does, they simply see how stupid it is and they go off and do something else! After all, one needs real meaning in life, not just the circular, tautological meaning of a game. An organization, however, can never do this. They simply can’t, any more than Dawkin’s selfish genes can stop being selfish. Organizations, like genes, are pure selfishness - that is their essence. They exist to perpetuate their own rules, to consolidate their own identity; the programme is written in stone so that all one can do is repeat it over and over again. Certainty is this sort of thing - is arbitrary and tautological, it is like a programme or rule that we follow in order to give our lives structure and purpose. Once in place it is an absolute tyrant, yet, really, there is no ‘sense’ to it at all, it only makes sense if we don’t question it. But we want that surety, it is not the details that are the issue but the fact that it is possible to have those rock-solid details, whatever they are.

So, we want certainty. We aim for it, we value it, and we constantly attempt to maximize it. The only uncertainty in our lives is of the trivial or managed variety, the non-threatening variety, which means that it is not uncertainty at all. Yet the certainty we have is spurious, make-believe, which means that in reality we have nothing at all. Nowhere is this more obvious than in psychiatry, which is where notions about what is ‘normal’ and ‘correct’ come sneakily into play, and are remorselessly brought to bear on a very mixed bag of individuals, all coming into the blanket category of ‘the mentally ill.’ Some of these individuals want and possibly need more certainty, whilst other amongst their number suffer from an excess of it. The users of mental health services might be said to come in two distinct varieties, those who have ended up in this positions because their perceptions of reality are so fluid, unstable and many-layered that they can’t cope; and those whose dealings with themselves and their world are so routinized, rigid, and down-right automated that life has become an unbearable problem for them. Probably it is true that the majority of people from the first category would benefit from being more grounded in a solid structural reality. Even so, mental health practitioners ought to realize that they are dealing with people who are engaged in a brave (if involuntary) experiment to push forward the frontiers of human experiences and be prepared to learn from this experiment; instead the professionals that they tend to meet are out and out ‘certainty-addicts,’ psychiatric ayatollahs who see their task as reinstating ‘official reality’ whatever the cost. They don’t question stuff and neither should you... Some really radical people come into psychiatric hospitals, people who would benefit immensely from encountering open-minded mental health care workers, yet the odds are overwhelming that they will be brought face to face with the exact opposite, convinced social game-players who have zero interest in extracurricular realities.

For the second category of people, those suffering from over-rigid reality-interpretation, a re-enforced, new, improved dose of certainty is exactly what they do not need. When one finds oneself hopelessly constrained by the limitations of one’s beliefs the only thing that can really help is determined and fearless questioning of core assumptions. After all, it is these unexamined assumptions that have got you into the situation in the first place. Cognitive behavioural therapy looks as if it might fit the bill for a ‘questioning’ or ‘challenging’ therapy, but when one looks into CBT more closely one tend to find that there is the subtle suggestion that once one sees through the old, dysfunctional, unrealistic or ‘distorted’ assumptions, one can replace them with thinking that is functional, realistic, and ‘correct’. The assumption here is that there is a positive underlying reality, that there is a correct way to see the world, which makes CBT (as it is commonly used) a certainty therapy. Most therapies are based on an underlying absolute descriptions; if a theory is taken seriously then one is committed to the perspective which it embodies and as a result one has lost sight of the essential relativity of it all. One has become a humourless game-player, reacting and interacting by design; one has become a ‘rational calculator’ rather than a real human being. How many psychotherapists, when they go to college, learn properly the lesson that all models, all theories, are ultimately false? How many psychologists realize that all frameworks for rational understanding are provisional, mere conventions of thought? How many psychoanalysts come to the point where they are able to see that all interpretations of psychological material are sneaky evasions of ‘what is’?

The habit of naming stuff and then thinking that you actually know what you are talking about tends to be a particularly pernicious one in the expert clinician. It is a real pitfall, and who can say that they have not ever fallen into it? The whole thrust of psychiatric medicine is to create a science of certainty, yet the domain of mental illness is far more opaque to reason than physical illness, in fact it is an awfully difficult thing to try to make a science of. Because we don’t understand consciousness (which is to say ourselves) in the least, we have even less idea of what is happening when the mind seems to ‘go wrong’. The whole idea is very threatening, perhaps even more threatening than physical illness, which wrong-foots us from the start. Medical science, contrary to popular opinion, is not a science at all, it is applied science, a technology. It is very much concerned with obtaining data, constructing systems of classification, and the development of techniques of manipulation; these are associated with what we call science but a key ingredient is missing. We don’t even have a halfway plausible model for the common mental illnesses; we just can’t see what is going on like we can when we say that someone has a pulmonary embolism, or a compound fracture of the tibia, and because of this we don’t really know what to do to ‘fix’ it.

Now, there are any number of psychological theories of course, but none of them seem to shed much light on the matter. In physics we have an understanding of the equivalence of energy and mass, we have discovered universal constants like the speed of light and Planck’s constant, we can see how phenomena appear to be particles when viewed one way and waves when viewed another way; we can predict that particles and antiparticles will erupt out of hard vacuum and then mutually annihilate a fraction of a second later - and then we can actually go away and see it happening in a cloud chamber. It has been said that the psychologists at the beginning of the twentieth century suffered from ‘physics envy’ and tried to tackle their subject in the same way. Similar success was not to come their way however, and one cannot help wondering if the approach is appropriate. In regard to this point, we can say the following. In a way, up to a point, it is ‘correct’ to treat the universe as a positive object (i.e. an object that has an intrinsic or independent character of its own). By ‘correct’ we mean that it is helpful to see things in this way, there is some sort of practical pay-off that comes from it. TVS, computers and washing machines are all examples of this pay-off. By way of contrast, it is not so helpful at all to look at our ‘self’ as a positive object. There is a tiny, superficial sort of a pay-off for utilizing this perspective on psychology, but it is hardly worth speaking about really. It is very easy to see that the useful knowledge it gives us is entirely within the realm of the superficial - after all, the best objective psychologist in the world is not really likely to be any more happy (or ‘psychologically successful’) than the rest of us. He or she might have a bit more insight than one of their neurotic patients, but if things go seriously wrong in their life they are just as liable to crack up as anyone else. This is not an unfair point because we will be putting forward the argument that there are some people who do a hell of a lot better under extreme stress, and these are NOT those people who rely upon sophisticated psychological theories to sort themselves out. Rather, we will suggest, these are the people who have no model of themselves at all, and who therefore ‘lean on nothing’.

The point is not that our framework is wrong, and thus we need a better one, but rather that we need to dispense with theoretical prejudice altogether. The question that we need to ask is “Can I treat myself as an object, without losing what it is that makes subjectivity so vital?” ‘Object,’ we may note, equals certainty, i.e. one level of description, closure in understanding, whilst ‘subject’ equals uncertainty, i.e. infinite relativity. Our ‘self’ (that is, consciousness) is, we will assert, a relativistic phenomenon, just as the universe itself is. Basically, then, by trying to be objective we miss the point, big time! It has been observed by the Taoists that “The more you look for it, the more it runs away...” This observation refers to the essential ‘trickiness’ or ‘duplicity’ that bedevils all those who search for self-knowledge; if you are ham-fisted and literal minded your search will never yield fruit - consciousness cannot seize itself any more than a tooth (as Alan Watts says) can bite itself. The ‘Hermetic Scientists’ of old understood this principle perfectly well, they knew from practical experience that the thing which they sought was ‘elusive,’ ‘fugitive’ and ‘mercurial’ (indeed, the patron of alchemy was none other than Hermes/Mercury himself, the very embodiment of slipperiness and trickiness). Our cumbersome and literal-minded modern day ‘scientists of the mind,’ as inept in the psychological arts as the alchemists were adept, continue to dream that they can capture Mercurius. This belief is deeply rooted in the more general contemporary twenty-first century culture: we dream that we can obtain happiness and meaning in life purely through scheming or calculation. We assume that we will find existential fulfilment through some sophisticated ‘technique of living,’ through the application of conceptual knowledge, i.e. through ‘life management’.

What we are saying is that one cannot obtain psychological insight into oneself through theories. Instead, one needs direct, non-conceptually mediated experience, i.e. subjectivity, uncertainty. Who, however, is brave enough to take up the challenge to do this, and venture off alone down this unsubstantiated and, for us, totally discredited, avenue of knowledge? If you go to university people will recognize your learning, you will be given the right to practice psychiatry / clinical psychology / psychotherapy, the only problem is - you won’t have learned anything! You will have learned to name stuff, you will have learned to think in a certain way, you will have learned to distrust the non-rational faculties of consciousness (actually, you won’t just have learned to distrust them, you probably will have learned not to believe in their existence at all). The best irony of all is that the higher faculties, manifestations of consciousness such as telepathy and ‘astral vision,’ will become - to you - Grade A symptoms of psychotic illness, i.e. a break-down of ‘objective’ reality. You might have to, as part of your job, professionally invalidate (rubbish) the experience of beings far more aware than yourself: the full weight of a rationalist/materialist culture, which is dedicated to an ultimately unreal objective view of the world and human beings and fervently opposed to less tangible realities, reaches out through you and uncomprehendingly tries to wipe out any trace of mystery. You are, after all, a willing (if not eager) partner in the planet-wide collusion that is going on. The deal is “If you help us clamp down on uncertainty, we (‘society’) will acknowledge you, reward you; we will make you our culture-hero....”.

This is Uncertainty Denial, and it is big business. This, in one form or another, is the unconscious driving force behind all purposeful activity. We busy ourselves with the illusion of materiality in order to hide from the terror of the unknown - the vastness which we arose out of and are destined to return. The thought of withdrawing from the samsara-creating activity with which we fill our days scares the life out of us, just try to sit down doing nothing for ten minutes and see how it makes you feel. One feels uncomfortable, foolish, lazy, bored - it actually seems down-right weird to take a break from the normal day-to-day routine and do nothing at all, without turning on the TV, without listening to a radio DJ filling your head with crap, without reaching for the paper, without lighting up a cigarette, without nattering to a friend. It is hard to take your regular ‘game-playing self’ seriously without the props - the distractions - of game reality, you might even feel as your persona is going to evaporate. All the stuff that you have been avoiding starts to creep up on you, little thoughts that you have turned your back on, feelings that you have ignored, intimations of ‘wrong’ in your life. What do you do - sit there and face it, or get up and re-engage in your games again? Well, it will come as no surprise to learn that the odds are overwhelming that we will do the latter, we will opt for certainty, we will choose to immerse themselves in comfortable unconsciousness. It is as if we find ourselves, from time to time, in a multivalent reality which is actually not a fixed reality at all. This is an uncanny sort of a place (or ‘unplace’), it is like CS Lewis’s ‘world between the worlds’ in The Magician’s Nephew, that quiet in between place where all the wells are that lead to the other worlds.

Instead of an uncanny ‘interworld’ and lots of wells we could speak in terms of the desktop screen on a PC: the wells are the various icons, the gateways are the applications, programs or games. In a sense, the desktop is no use to us, apart from the fact that it provides us with an over-view over everything that lies within it, thereby giving us the means to hop from one program to another, one game to another. This ‘realm of maximized perspective’ is only something to rush quickly through however - we don’t want to stay there. When we find ourselves, by default, in this uncommitted realm, we automatically reach out for the mouse and click an icon, and re-enter a nice, familiar game. What is more, we don’t admit to ourselves that we were ever there, back in the desktop world where the games are only games and therefore not real at all. “It didn’t happen!” we say, and we all agree to agree that it didn’t happen. We also agree that those strange people who say it did happen should be ignored, or treated scornfully, or even oppressed with psychiatric drugs. In days gone by such people would simply have been tortured and burned (witness the Cathars), now mental compliance (belief in The Game) is enforced in an altogether more high-tech fashion. We have come a long way in the fight against uncertainty!

This is not to say that people coming into psychiatric hospitals don’t need help, that they are fine. If I end up seeing a psychiatrist the chances are that I really do need help, that everything is not fine. But the point is that the ‘help’ I receive may not be very helpful. I need open, unprejudiced and unbiased understanding, but I am very likely to encounter the opposite - most professionals have acquired, through their training and subsequent clinical experience, an ‘agenda’ to understand mental illness in a particular way. But what is so wrong with that? Most people would see such a statement as being a perversely distorted way of looking at the matter, our mental health experts may have an agenda but it is an agenda based on scientific knowledge, it is a ‘correct’ agenda, surely? How can I or anyone else know that the current paradigm is faulty? The answer to this is simply that any agenda you can pick is absolutely guaranteed to be the wrong one - this is the meaning of uncertainty, and uncertainty (subjectivity) is the name of the game where consciousness is concerned. Our culture, based as it is on the cult of rationalistic materialism, the paradigm of certainty, has a problem with this, yet the matter is plain: Where objects are concerned one can be certain, but where subjects are concerned one can never be certain, for ‘I’ am always the subject, never the object. Consciousness is not a thing, rather it is the realm of the ‘I’, there is nothing else there but ‘I’...

Our response to ‘problems of the mind’ is to muster up a spurious but highly impressive psychology of certainty, a whole industry based on ignoring or denying the unknown and elevating our provisional models to the level of some sacred truth, a touchstone which can be used to explain all things, and therefore control them. This is a technology of manipulation, an industry of denial, based not ‘truth as it is’ but ‘truth as we would like it to be’. We have got confused and we have muddled two very different impulses - the noble impulse to uncover the truth, which is what science really is, and which proceeds by successively discarding paradigms and models as they prove no longer appropriate; and the shoddy impulse to press into service one particular paradigm, as if it is the One True Faith, in order to fulfil our need to feel that we are in control. We want to stand on a bedrock of solid conceptual ground and, when it comes down to it, we don’t actually care too much if we have to lie to ourselves to obtain that stability. Current psychology is a hopelessly biased attempt to prove to ourselves that we were correct to apply an objectivist, reductionist framework to consciousness and the mind; if you start off from a different viewpoint you will be laughed out of town! We are looking for the pound coin we lost by the street lamp, even though we dropped it on the other side of the road, because the light of rationality is the only light we know. Our psychological models are examples of a psychology for a self that does not actually exist, they are reviews of a book that has never been written, an entity that never could be any more than a rational projection, an abstraction of the mind. This self, the empirical, game-playing self, the ‘known self’, is a fabrication - the theories about it might seem neat and logical, but what use is this if the ‘object’ in question is a fiction?

If you walk, as a patient, into the sleek and efficient machine that is a modern psychiatric hospital, what you will meet with is a predominately a series of ‘rule-based’ interactions. You will be processed, in other words. When you are examined by a doctor they will evaluate you in accordance with a well established set of criteria. What he or she subsequently says and does will naturally be guided by these diagnostic criteria. This is the paradigm of certainty. There is another way however, and that is the way which is not based on rules but openness, or spontaneity. When I find myself in a psychiatric ward I don’t want to meet a machine, but real, whole people! In a manner of speaking, therefore, what we need is not a psychology of certainty, but a psychology of uncertainty, we need to attend to ‘the stranger within’. It is, of course, not just in psychology that we have things the wrong way around, according to Gurdjieff we have everything back-to-front. Everything we do, says Gurdjieff, fails, none of our endeavours stand a chance of yielding the fruit of happiness because we are coming at it from completely the wrong angle; we seek what is good and wholesome and unfailingly reap sorrow and misfortune, we are a curse unto ourselves. We obtain calamities through the application of our erroneous assumptions, and our misguided attempts to rectify matters only embroil us further in confusion. As modern day Ch’an master Wei Wu Wei (1963) says:

Why are you unhappy?

Because 99.9 per cent

Of everything you think,

And of everything you do,

Is for yourself -

And there isn’t one.

Certainty, i.e. thinking that you know what the problem is, and what the solution ought to be, does not help us in the long run. Certainty was only ever a denial of the existential abyss of conceptual voidness, it was never actually a real proposition in the first place and so it is not much of a basis to work from. Our rational, conceptual minds are, as Carlos Castaneda says, no more than inventories, which is to say they consist of no more than a list of ‘possibilities of interpretation’ [A, B, C, D...]; this equals trivial uncertainty, the yes/no dichotomy of Aristotelian Logic; the only escape route back into reality is through the bottomless [?] of radical uncertainty. Thinking doesn’t do it, because we can only think what we know.

Einstein said, “You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created that problem.” The father of relativity theory did not quite hit the nail on the head here. In fact, if you wanted to be spot on, you would have to say that you can’t solve problems full stop, for the simple reason that, when you get down to it, there are actually no such things as problems! All definite goal states, both negative and positive, desired and abhorred, are illusions - artefacts created by the perspective we use to see the [?] which is the unconditioned, unmodified, unprogrammed reality. This is the true meaning of uncertainty: infinite relativity, infinite conceptual instability, the total irrelevance of all possible models. It is not, therefore, particularly surprising that we find this such a hard pill to swallow - we stand to lose everything we hold dear. But then again, we never had what we thought we had in the first place: all we ever possessed were fantasies, illusions, shadows... It is only through painfully relinquishing our ‘dream possessions’ that we realize we had the real thing all along - as Kevin Ayers says: “What you’ve lost you’ve found’.

To get back to our psychiatric dilemma about helping people, it has to be said that we cannot rationalize spontaneity, which would naturally leave one wondering how one could write a book about it. We cannot rationalize spontaneity, we cannot make a method of it, but we can approach it, we can get the gist of it in a fleeting sort of a way, we can get a tantalizing feel for it - in passing, as it were. This is possible by bringing into play the mind-bending parameter (or anti-parameter) of complexity. So in this book we are going to delve into the subject of psychological complexity, or ‘multi-facetedness’. The basic principle we are going to need is the principle that says there is more than one truth. This is paradoxical from the start, since truth is something that we usually understand as having exclusivity. Truth is the Big Boss, the King, the Great Tyrant, it does not allow other ‘truths’, there is only ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and if you’re not right you must be wrong. Exclusive Truth is static, dumb and dead. On the other hand, the kind of Truth we are going to try to get to grips with is All-Inclusive Truth, Anarchistic Truth, Slippery Truth, Elusive Truth, Shape-Shifting Truth, Mercurial Truth, Truth-in-Motion, Trickster Truth, Non-Falsifiable Truth, the Glorious and Awesome Truth that lies beyond the limitations of our puny little minds, the Living Truth of Uncertainty.

Slippery truth isn’t just part of the arcane lore of the alchemists, it is a thoroughly modern conception too - it is called complexity. It is worth making a comment or two on what is meant by this term. The usual way in which we use the word indicates ‘complicatedness’ - it makes one think of tangles and messes, of knots and convolutions. Thus, there is a distinct tendency to use complexity in a negative or perjorative sense, as if it is an unfortunate obstacle to our understanding; one feels there is something out there which we are prevented from knowing about by a fuzziness or blurriness. A baffling mass of variables renders cloudy the object we wish to see clearly. This notion is often applied to the human mind - it is all perfectly logical really, the argument goes, the only problem is that the system is too complicated to model with our present level of knowledge. Complexity is envisaged here as obscuring factor; a nuisance, almost. This is not what complexity means however, complexity does not necessarily have anything to do with an overly intricate pattern of details, it refers to the number of dimensions around which details can be arranged. If one constructs a model which is capable of being described by ten brief terms, each belonging to a different dimension of organization, then this is a complex model. It is not, however, complicated. To say that a reality is complex is not an admission of our failure to understand it, quite the opposite is true - we have shown that we understand it very well. Only, it has to be said that we are starting to mean something else by ‘understanding’ - in the normal sense of the word understanding stands for organizational closure, we will define this term later but in essence what it means is that we understand everything about the object in question, we have it all wrapped up. In the new, open sense of the word ‘understanding’ what we actually know is how many different ways there are to know something, we have appreciation of the relativity of our knowledge.

In the first case, then, we know by not knowing, as it were, because we deliberately don’t take into account the ways in which our mode of knowing is inapplicable, or ‘non-valid’. It is a sort of unconscious knowing, therefore. In the second case we know by knowing that we don’t know, so to speak. We know consciously, we know that all our knowing is only ever relatively true, it is only true in relation to how we chose to look at it. Complexity allows us to relativize our descriptions of ourself and the universe, it allows us to start bringing in all the new, ‘competing viewpoints that are out there. Basically, it allows us to increase the information content of the experienced (or pragmatic) system of [self + universe].

To realize that reality is complex is to realize something highly significant - a very deep principle is revealed. It is not so amazing to obtain a literal knowledge of all the features of an object being investigated, it would be far more important to have a knowledge of how much we would stand to lose if we loaded all the available information onto one single axis, one single level of description. To see an object as being complex is to appreciate its multidimensional reality. This has great relevance to the study of consciousness and the mind - if we take complexity theory on board we might start losing faith in the causal, classical/mechanical paradigm of discrete objects engaging in linear interactions within the remit of three-dimensional space. Our present approach is purely quantitative, i.e. it is based exclusively on counting and measuring. It has just about been forgotten that we have another, more intimate (qualitative) way of relating to ourselves. We can ‘relate’ to ourself by being ourself rather than by investigating our unknown ‘true’ self from the standpoint of a ‘false’ or artificial self. The true self is the whole or rounded situation, i.e. maximum complexity, whereas the false self is the one-sided or simplex situation that is generated by taking one perspective and abstracting it from the whole. This simplex situation corresponds to trying to get ‘outside your self’. Simplex, most succinctly, equals ‘objectivity’ - which is to say believing that the object exists independently from the observer, and has a inherent reality in itself; whilst ‘complex’ equals what Wu Wei Wu calls ‘non dual subjectivity’ - the unprocessed reality, the default situation that was not produced by the manipulating mind. This is Subjective with a capital ‘S’. Subjectivity in the usual sense of the word means that the experienced reality is ‘arbitrarily constructed’ according to individual bias. NDS, on the other hand, is unconstructed: the biasing factor is gone altogether...

We run into a bit of a problem by saying that objective equals simplex, i.e. that objectivity is a misleading view of reality. One would naturally tend to think that if everything is subjective, then ‘anything goes’ - there is no right and wrong. So why is the objective view not allowed as well, how can we say that it is wrong? If it is wrong, then we must be using some sort of objective criteria to evaluate it as such, which would mean that there is some sort of true or objective reality after all.... The problem arises out of a basic confusion between two rather different ideas of what is meant by ‘right’ or correct’: on the one hand there is provable ‘right,’ which is where one assesses with criteria (i.e. with a pre-set model of reality), and there is what we might ‘Right’ with a capital R, which is where there is a deep down feeling of something being real or true - we feel happy with something and the need to question or assess never arises. This sounds ridiculously airy-fairy, but it isn’t. What we actually are saying is this: there IS a real or true universe, but there IS NOT a right or correct way to see it! This mightn’t make much sense at first glance because we automatically assume that assertion 2 logically follows from assertion 1 - if something exists there must be a correct description of that existence, there must be a set of parameters that apply. The one does indeed follow logically from the other, but here is the fault - the universe contains logic but it is not itself an expression of logic, and for that reason one can make no logical inferences from it. Descriptions are logic, and so we cannot meaningfully describe the universe.

Perhaps this argument does not make the point simply enough. Just because the ‘whole’ exists, and it makes sense to speak of the ‘whole,’ that does not mean that one can say anything sensible about it. Wholes cannot actually be described without recourse to some reality that exists outside them, and the type of whole we are concerned with here is ‘the Whole of Absolutely Everything’ - there is no handy external reality from which to sneak a look at it. The universe, in this Holistic sense of the word, exists. When we are in our right minds we don’t feel the need to question this improvable fact, we are happy just to be a part of it. To want to prove stuff is a actually particularly insidious form of insanity since it is asking the impossible; one ends up losing our initial sense of ‘Rightness’ in the hunt for a non-existent objective validation. We may make a rule about this: In experiential terms, if something is true, then it doesn’t need to be proved. If it needs to be proved, then that is because it is not true... This ‘rule’ looks silly because we are conditioned to believe in the notion that truths can be meaningfully proved, in an absolute or ‘objective’ manner. We are totally sold on the idea of having stuff validating for us so we can then have the relevant credentials to stuff in our pockets and walk about with, secure in the knowledge that we really have something solid there. But what kind of dupe am I when it gets to the stage when I need experts to validate my own subjective experience of being ‘me’? Who needs instruction on how to ‘be themselves’? Who needs to buy a guidebook to their own soul? There is no substitute for the rounded, complex or Subjective truth of existence, which we know to be true precisely because it is beyond our one-sided models of it. It is real because it is ‘other’ - it isn’t manufactured by our minds. Robert Anton Wilson (1990) has commented that ‘the only thing equal to the universe is the universe’; equally, then, the only way for me to know myself is to be myself, since no map can do justice to the reality. This is at the same time perfectly straightforward and easy, like falling of a log, and mind-boggling difficult, like climbing Mount Everest with a grand piano tied to each ankle. It is easy because I am myself already, and it is difficult because I am so attached to (and anaesthetized by) the certainty of my own ideas about myself. It is the psychology of certainty which stands in our way, like the proverbial brick wall, and it is the psychology of uncertainty that will help us walk through that wall.