Outsideness vs The Pyramid

Outsideness is a meditation, a koan. What is it to be outside? Not physically, like outside my house. But mentally. Mental outsideness. Outside the pyramid of normal ways of thinking.

Imagine a sphere. Maybe it’s like an apple.

Now imagine taking a knife and cutting a square shape somewhere on the surface of the sphere. Then, with your knife, you dig in from each of those four lines to the centre. You could pull that chunk out if you wanted to. You have created a pyramid.

So this is the model.

We are brought up to spend all our mental life inside the pyramid. Even though it’s only a tiny fraction of the size of the sphere from which it originates. The pyramid is attractive to all humans, because we’re primates. And primate psychology is finally all about status.

Living inside a sphere is not exciting for primates. How are you going to get status living in a sphere? How are you going to create a hierarchy and be able to move up?

So it is not hard to convince us primates to stay in our pyramid. There’s a sense of hierarchy, we could move up a level, if we work hard or create stuff that people further up the pyramid approve of.

The sides of the pyramid maybe look something like this - Academia, Science, Media, Psychology. In any of these fields, we can create status for ourselves if we work hard and play by the rules of the game, maintained in place by those higher up.

We might get pissed off with the pyramid, decide to fight it. Oppose its dominance. Choose not to play by its rules.

Trouble is, that just helps the pyramid maintain itself. By making the pyramid our opponent, we create an alternative pyramid. We might be able to fill it with people who also want to oppose the original, finally grab some status for ourselves. But our pyramid is now beholden to the original. It needs the original in order to give it meaning. We are literally feeding the original with our libidinal energy.

So, if you don’t want the pyramid, you have to choose outsideness. But you can’t do it in opposition to the pyramid.

Outsideness is a mediatation, a koan.

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