ESCAPE

Thought beyond description

Isn’t it suffocating?

We live in the words we read; your vocabulary is a windowless room. How do you perceive the world beyond it?

Writing divorces thought from mind: externalised upon the page, the separation creates a mirage of timeless conceptualisation, a Platonic realm, experienced through reading, where concepts exist beyond us, above us, and yet also within us; we come to believe they are real, and confine our selves within their categorical paradigm.

Can you describe yourself without language? What terms do you put yourself in?

We have declared our freedom; but we escaped from the sensory-situational matrix of orality only to plug into a literate-situational virtual replacement.

Can I show you a place you’ve never been?

Can I take you on a journey beyond description?

Representation is friction; just as the force of gravity is only experienced when resisted by matter, - astronauts in orbit, curving around the Earth at 8 kilometres per second, afloat, in contrast to us, Earthbound, pressed to the ground until the surrender of death - we experience violence, division - vivisection into a collectively decided cosmos of representation (like Marduk dicing up Tiamat) only when that representation is present.

‘You’re a difficult woman.’

‘What kind of a man are you?’

Representation is a rock in the flow of the river of consciousness. The laminar motion of mind, timelike and impermanent, crashes into uncompromising timeless definition in a violent spray. To label yourself is to create or accept an expectation of yourself - an idea that by definition of its representational nature you will always consider separate from yourself - you are Tantalus in the underworld, always chasing your desire, never reaching it.

What if you could conceive yourself without language?

There is a space between what isn’t and what is.

Think of binary code - the numbers 1 and 0, standing for “True/Something/Yes” and “False/Nothing/No” respectively. When I tell you, ‘I believe in nothing’, you reach for 0/Nothing/Isn’t/False; but that is not the nothing I mean. To assert ‘nothing’ is only partial negation, as ‘nothing’ remains a representation, a map creating reality; instead, between 1 and 0, there is blank space - not a nothing, but an absence.

What’s the difference?

If the Emperor has no clothes, does he cease to be?

Say you are multilingual. You know five ways to express what you mean; yet to have ways to express something implies that there must be a ‘something’ separate from the means of its expression.

Can you describe it? Can you define it? No - you can only force it into representation.

But you can imagine it regardless.

‘It’ is a twin of the quantum wavefunction; where infinite possibilities are collapsed into certainty by the act of measurement; infinite representations reduced to one upon exposure to the Other. Our minds think in terms indescribable with the language of the physical - Red, Love, Justice, Prayer - and yet, our bodies are inseparable from it; the only conclusion remaining being that the Universe, on some unimaginable level, must contain the property of consciousness, with our bodies momentary eddies in its neverending current. Perhaps it should not be surprising our communication is subject to the same kind of violence - the two biopsies of measurement are one and the same.

Just the same, our mental world arises in the same process; dissipative structures flaring into life, vortices, cyclones in the physical are intertwined through the political/economic with our dissipative structures of desire (For justice, for dignity, for Money, for Power) - entropy allied, joined at the hip with the fires of Capitalism in an incomprehensibly advanced wildfire transfiguring the world into an optimised hellscape - but also, small words, sentences, every attempt to ‘Change our world’ or ‘Understand our world’, every Theory, every Label, every Representation: wherein the potential lies for a revolution beyond description.

We forget that we have power over reality in this way. We surrender, by assumption, the realisation that we make the words, WE make the structures; they arise from US. There is not some Ur-Democracy or Ur-Fascism that we approach, asymptotically, from a flawed material world - the idea of the ‘System’ itself is not there.

And when I say this, I do not mean ‘Not There’ as in ‘Therefore, there should be/is no system’. There is also not ‘No System.’ The concept of a system itself is an illusion; it is not present, it is absent, it is an insubstantial phantom, a hallucinatory imaginary friend we play-act with as if it were real, forgetting that it is a product of our imagination. To define ourselves in terms of it is to surrender the horse to be led by the cart.

What if we did not believe that transcendent structures such as systems were real? How would we do society? Politics? How would we relate to each other?

Democracy is a partial negation; we change the people within the structure. To go beyond categorical realism is to live in a population capable of recognising that the ‘structure’ itself can also be peacefully rearranged.

The future is coming at us fast; we are failing to adapt. The formal machinery of literacy and literate culture is being evaded - its clunky attempts at timeless definition to ensure accountability are easily evaded - like a mutating virus dodges a vaccine - by the amorphous cancers of informality and anecdote. To face it, we must think in time: we must accept the impermanence of things, whilst also remaining structured; we must create a network of people unbound by pursuit of anything other than living for its own sake, together; and we must use that network to infiltrate the structures of literate society and informal society.

You see, the self is just as irreal as the system; it is to us, personally, what a system is to our collective consciousness. When it is shorn of us, we remain - naked emperors - purely ourselves, without pressure to fit - spinning fragments of a universe witnessing itself, alive and undefinable. If I were to sit here and tell you all, ‘Go, do [This One Specific Thing] it would be comical hypocrisy: no, the paradigm-shift here is to build a structure without and beyond that.

If we can conceive of our selves being mutable, we can conceive of the world the same; if we can conceive of our selves independent of language or social constraints, we can enter those pre-existing structures of power, working together with others who see the same way to create a new neural-network of thought within the body of the Old World; an informal-formal network, embedded in formal structures yet aware of how they can be changed - without motive, other than to share the experience of being human. Action without action, like travelling down a river by floating along it.

I am not proposing a utopia - I am not proposing anything specific at all. I am simply proposing that we try to think differently - to jailbreak our thinking from the terms we have internalised in this era, and therefore, to escape its challenges.

There will be further challenges. There will always be challenges. But with a capacity to adapt definition - rather than deny or enforce it - we will be better placed to face them.

This blog is a mission statement - more details will follow.