Drilling through the illusion of the Hyper-real (Explanation)

Reference is made to Alexandre's AMA thread.In it, Alexandre asked me to explain "Drilling through the illusion of the Hyper-real". To do this, We'll need to explore Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation", Martin Buber's "I and Thou" , Mercea Eliade's "Sacred and Profane", Alan "Watts' "The Book of the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are" and probably some of Joseph Campbell.

I'm going to go ahead and lock this thread because I have a plan. I'm more than happy to start a discussion thread on this topic

Firstly, let me be clear in saying that this something that I am still exploring. We are, therefore, going to be exploring together this idea of the hyper-real.
The notion of the hyper-real comes from Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation”. It's a philosophical treatise written in French and translated into English, because phenomenology and meaning making are not difficult concepts to grasp; we need more of a challenge /sarcasm.
Now, the treatise begins with a fable. It tells of a group of cartographers who create a map so detailed and true to scale that it ends up covering the entire empire. When the empire collapses, the map ages and disintegrates so that only bits of it are visible here and there, mostly where there isn't much foot traffic. Deserts and such.
Baudrillard flips the script when he applies it to us and our world, suggesting that what is actually disintegrating is not the map but the real itself.Actually, he suggests that the fable doesn’t really work except where it concerns the imperialism of present day simulators who endeavour to make all the real coincide with their simulations. Whenever we attempt to make reality match our simulations we are imperialists, In case you are wondering.
In doing this, Baudrillard says, “Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other (map and territory), that constituted the charm of abstraction. Because it is difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real” (pg3).
It took a considerable time for me to think about what he may be getting at here. The key words sovereignty, poetry, and charm evoke something spiritual, but not necessarily religious. To fully appreciate a poem, isn’t it best to step out of the profane? Isn’t charm a word we use to describe a certain something we can't otherwise articulate? Doesn’t sovereign connote something bigger than ourselves?
Instead, Baudrillard says our real is made up of “miniaturized matrices, memory banks models of control”. But if we can build the world,reality, as we go isn't a bit like using your imagination to create a masterpiece out of legos? Unfortunately not in this case. Particular attention here to the phrase “models of control”. By attempting to control our “reality” we have taken out all the mystery of it.We’d like to think we are like those cartographers and that we hnave gone over the breadth and depth of our reality, our empire, but we haven’t. The world is easier, reality is easier, when you know what to expect. Hence models of control.
Alan Watts says, in his lecture on the Nature of Consciousness that we feel we must “impose our will upon this world as if we were something completely alien to it from outside”. In fact, considering his ideas about models of control, which he calls “two great myths” may actually help to understand what Baudrillard is getting at a bit better. I want to explore that in the next post.

Alan Watts delivered a lecture on the nature of consciousness in which he discusses two images of the world which are influencing us more than we realize. One is the ceramic model of the universe and the other is a fully automatic image of the universe. He breaks each of these images down to discuss the ways in which they are still influencing us and the way that we interact with the world. In the ceramic model of the universe common the world is an artifact. It is made, and people and things become “stuff” which is shaped and molded and informed by a master Carpenter.
Eventually, the idea that the master Carpenter was watching everything that we do got a little embarrassing. So we got rid of the lawmaker and kept the law. Having gotten rid of the lawmaker we also got rid of our “purpose”. An unforeseen consequence of this was that we determined that we were flukes of nature. And being flukes created in us a lot of fear. We were imposing our will on nature as creatures created in the image of a master Carpenter. But we began to do so motivated by fear that we may turned back into whatever, our waves might dissappear when we began to adopt the automatic model.
When we talk about desperation as Alex does in his ask me anything, we can see it pretty clearly as we look at the two images of the world. In my first post I talk about The Borges fable wherein they create a map. A myth is a map. Any myth is a map because it gives us hints about how to navigate the world.
If your life is going well, you have no reason to discard or even question your map. Because your map is lining up with your reality. But it's when you get lost which can be caused by circumstances or dissonance, or existential crisis that you wonder whether you're map is really helpful.
The truth is you haven't passed this way before. You're map may not account for this, but it's comfortable. And you have to be willing to give up that comfort in order to truly explore and engage with a real as you are experiencing it. And the gap between the known and the unknown is frightening, and challenging, and frustrating, and dare I say, not comfortable.
Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, and Jiddu Krishnamurti all say in some way or another that if your life is going fine you don't need this. And I'll just go ahead and say after six years of study, that if your life is going fine you won't “get” this, because it's more than an academic or surface pursuit. People who approach it as such generally don't get as much out of this. It's easy to give up when it's just something you “try”, because you can just “not try” it. But you have to get tired of trying and do. And that means do in spite of challenges, in spite of comfort, in spite of fear, and in spite frustration. And there's no one who can make you “do” like that. That's intrinsic and it's motivated by desperation and requires the work of digging.