A Human Strategy #541: The reification of the mind through the unexpected
541
It is not true that the ideal cannot translate into the real. It is not a contradiction to fail expectation; failure is rather the reification of the mind through the unexpected. A flimsy signpost that points upwards no longer contradicts gravity when it collapses, but confirms it. It was in fact the stretching of the misunderstanding that enabled both the collapse of the presumption and the traction between the real and its functional counterpart, the conceptual. An ideal was indeed translated into the real. It is just that we call our certainty here our bad luck.
Reality is in the end mapped out by what checks our presumptions. This puts the ego under the constant threat of recognizing the truth. We want the contours of our certainties but without the impossibilities that trace them. And that is why we have so few certainties. But there is more certainty in a signpost’s failure to be that which it designates than in the myriad possibilities we successfully dream up to believe designating and designated “the same thing.” Thus, if one’s aim were to incorporate a concept of happiness which would also be that happiness, one would fail with certainty.
We often throw impossibilities forward into the future to convert them into perceived uncertainties. There is a sensation of hope which is altogether different from a later, realized state, which being an experience is therefore certain, and so not at all like the former sensation of hope. Our escape depends upon maintaining this gap between the mind and its pre-condition, as if the consequence could maintain a distance from its own cause. Any insight into our true nature would shift the conceptual view from side-by-side logic to that of a causal sequence, closing the gap. That is why we have so many discarded impossibilities.
Under such stress, we keep our reality below consciousness by valuing the slightest possibility of escape from our condition over the probability of our being its outcome. And with possibilities, our confusion comes again. We prefer misunderstanding ourselves to ridding ourselves of the hope that required it. Had we the discipline to align thought to that which constitutes its reality... that is, had we aimed for the truth, then what we presently think a failure of the ideal would be a success in the real, and what we presently think the misery of hopelessness, would be the realization of our hopes. We often act as though we had never read a story all the way to the end and propose that hope go on forever, instead of seeing that nothing is truly happy that does not end the condition that required hope.