The Humpty Dumpty Show

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What we don’t realise about this whole business of so-called ‘mental health’, which we mistakenly (and ridiculously) imagine ourselves to know all about, is that Humpty Dumpty has to go. He has to lose his balance – he has to be toppled from his vantage point and whether this happens by accident or design doesn’t matter. We absolutely don’t see that Humpty Dumpty has to fall, that is his job to fall, that this is how the process has to start (the only way in which it can start) – via a disturbance to the equilibrium state that can’t be rectified or damped down after the event. There has to be a ‘runaway fluctuation’ before anything meaningful can happen, before any actual ‘mental healthiness’ can come about. In short, Chaos – which we don’t at all like – is a necessary ingredient for growth (and without growth there is clearly going to be no mental health).

Instead of seeing this, we get it all backwards and solemnly say that Humpty Dumpty has to be saved, no matter what the cost. Saving Humpty Dumpy is what it’s all about. We do our best to make sure he never does have that fall, and if (or when) he does, then we go all out and trying to put him back together again. Mental health – for us – is all about preserving Humpty Dumpty and ensuring that he never does take a tumble from his comfortable niche on the wall. We want to avoid all risks, we want to make him as comfortable as possible. We manage the situation, in other words, and ‘managing the situation’ means sticking like glue to the equilibrium values, no matter what. Mixing our metaphors here, it means trying to make sure that nothing rocks the boat or – if it does – it means that we can get the situation under control again as quickly as possible. The Humpty Dumpty show mustn’t be interrupted, not under any circumstances…

What’s going on here of course is that we’re seeing Humpty Dumpty as being a final state, an optimal position, a ‘terminal destination’, which is like saying that a tadpole or caterpillar doesn’t need to change any further, that they represent an organism at the end stage in development. It is like ‘sticking’ with the hand of cards the hand in a game of pontoon because we’re gambling that it’s the winning hand. We are sticking with what we have been given rather than taking a risk on it, rather than saying ‘twist’ to the dealer; we’re all about conservation, we’re all about ‘holding onto whatever it is that we’ve got’ (rather than throwing it back into the pot and taking a chance with what comes next, if indeed anything ever does). As E.F. Schumacher says in his book A Guide to the Perplexed, we’re convinced that our ‘greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter acorns’. It’s Acorn City all the way – we neither know nor care anything about oak trees. We scoff and sneer and say that ‘oak trees’ are a myth, a fairy story. We arrest people who talk about such things…

The principle that we’re talking about here goes back a long way of course – it’s hardly what we might call a ‘modern’ or ‘new-fangled’ idea! In John 12:24 we read,

Verily, verily I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth match fruit.

In medieval alchemy we come across the famous motto solve et coagula, which indicates that whatever has been achieved in the work must then be thrown back into the acid bath and returned to its constituent elements before the next step in the Alchemical Opus can be taken. This constitutes a radical break with what we might call ‘the law of accumulation’, which is the default law, which is the only law most of us know. If we don’t risk it then we lose it anyway, in other words. If we don’t give it away voluntarily then it will be taken off us against our will, to our very great discomfiture, later on in the proceedings. Logically – of course – it makes no sense whatsoever to ‘let go of what we have gained’, to risk the certain in favour of the completely uncertain. We’d be seen as mad to do this. When we are operating in Mechanical Mode – which is to say, when everything we do is purposeful and rational, when everything we do is done for a reason – then we will always stick with what we’ve got, we will always shun the risk and play it safe in this case. We will always have the wrong idea about mental health; we will always view it in a closed way as ‘optimization with regard to a specific environment’ rather than seeing it in an open way as ‘a journey towards Wholeness’ (which – unlike optimization – is not a journey towards a specific goal).

The Mechanical Mind cannot – by virtue of its nature – ever understand what ‘genuine mental health’ might look like and that’s our problem. Our problem is that we have never being able to get past the deliberations of this rule-based mind; that’s the limit beyond which we cannot go, and because of this shortsightedness our interpretation of mental health, our ‘reckoning’ with regard to what this means, is always going to be centred upon either saving Humpty Dumpty (so he never has a fall) or doing our level best to fix him up as good as new after he does. Our endeavours in this respect are always going to be in conservative mode, in ‘backwards-looking mode’ – our ingenuity and technological resources are going to be dedicated to the task of either ‘preventing what can’t be prevented’, or ‘fixing what can’t be fixed’. Whatever temporary (or limited) success we might have in this unrealistic endeavour is always going to be to our ultimate detriment therefore – there’s no way that it can’t be.

We could argue – if we wanted to – that mental health is we define it as being and that if we wish to adapt ourselves to an artificial or contrived environment then we can and so for us MH will be the measure of how effectively we are able to do this. ‘Mental wellness’ and ‘adaptation to the system’ are conflated, in other words. In this case, our interest is always going to be in optimizing adaptation within a Finite World that has been designed specifically to support acorns, to protect them from risk, to promote their interests, and so on and so forth, and no one is going to find fault with this scheme of things, no one is going to see the utterdisaster that this short-sighted approach will turn into. Only a small minority of us are going to remain unconvinced by this argument, which means that we can of course very easily dismiss them as being eccentrics or cranks or mentally ill people (or whatever else). This is therefore the Model of the Mental Health that we have settled for – what we have done is to ‘optimise the Designed Environment for the life of the acorn’, which means that we are using that Designed Environment as a measuring stick to assess how mentally healthy we are or are not. If we adapt well to our situation, and appear to function well within it, then we are regarded as being mentally healthy, and if we don’t – if we fail to thrive – then we are understood to be suffering from some kind of problem (mental health wise) which in turn means that we require some sort of ‘social adjustment therapy’, as Alan Watts calls it. We need to be fixed – linear interventionism is required so that we can ‘get back on track’.

This is all a ridiculous joke, however; we’ve created a kind of Humpty Dumpty Disneyland – a kind of sanitised, risk-free, highly regulated habitat for the artificial pseudo-entity (the pseudo-entity we are symbolically referring to in this discussion as ‘Humpty Dumpty’), an artificial habitat which is optimised for our hero never have to have any unfortunate accidents like falling off a log wall perhaps. Our measure of what constitutes ‘health’ or ‘well-being’ makes perfect sense to us therefore from the acorn’s perspective, but this is only because we’ve got caught up in a loop of logic; that is only because everything has been provided for us by the very system that we are supposedly assessing. The system is evaluating itself; the system is investigating itself and then – on the strength of this investigation – giving itself a clean bill of health. We’ve got no perspective on the matter, in other words; if we did have a bit of perspective than what seems perfectly logical and sensible (which is to say, defining mental wellness in terms of how well we are thriving within an artificial system) would be revealed as being the most frightful mistake ever. It’s ‘the most frightful mistake ever’ because it neatly sets us up to be bullied and exploited by an abusive regime that we mistakenly see as being our friend…

There isno mental health, no integrity in a ‘loop of logic’ (which is to say, ‘in a view of the world which holds together via the tactic of constantly reaffirming its own arbitrary assumptions’. No sort of mental health can be found here, only self-deception, only the systemized avoidance of truth. The Designed World may contain the illusion of health and well-being, the illusion of growth, the illusion of happiness and fulfilment, etc., but existing in the heteronomous (or ‘passively-identified’) state of mind in which we are constantly falling for the manufactured illusion that we are happy and that our lives are meaningful, that we’re absolutely on the right track as regards this business of ‘life and how to live it’ just because we’re copying the given template, and so on, is of course a profound malaise in the first place. Believing what is not true to be wholesome and valuable and worth protecting is the worst malaise or affliction there is. To be separated from the truth and being proud of this separation, being cocky or arrogant about it, being downright smug about it, is the most unwholesome mind state that is possible to be in. This is toxic ignorance, this is avidya – the root of all our ills which we can’t be persuaded to relinquish.

There isn’t any type of mental health (or ‘integrity’) in the generic, ten-a-penny idea that we have of ourselves – which is the ‘pseudo-entity’ Humpty Dumpty that we’ve been speaking of. We place a lot of hope in him, we place all the hope we’ve got in him but that hope, that fanatical belief (and all the investment that goes with it) is never going to come good for us. Instead of saying that there is ‘no mental health in the pseudo-entity known as Humpty Dumpty’ , we could say that there is no Wholeness – there’s no Wholeness in a vacuous, self-negating loop of logic, there is no Wholeness in the Linearity, and so no matter what sophisticated medical interventions we might make (on behalf of Mr H. Dumpty) we are never going to be able to change this basic fact. The only thing that’s ever going to bring about Wholeness is the thing that we don’t want to happen – which is the accident (the ‘Fall’) to which the well-known nursery rhyme refers. The only chance we have for growth and change is if our hero is allowed to fall from the wall where he was sitting and meet his end on the unforgiving grounds below. The key thing here is Wei-Wu (or not doing) – the key element here (in the Negative Path) is not trying to ‘put Humpty Dumpty back together again’, and that just happens to be the hardest thing there is. We’re great for the positive doing (which comes down to unconscious reflex-type behaviour) but absolutely no good at all for negative doing (which is to say, ‘consciously not going along with the pattern of thinking and behaving that is being imposed on us’).

Life isn’t about consolidating our position – that’s not life, that’s the avoidance of life. Reaffirming our current position as being ‘the one and only right one’ (and not being interested in ‘what happens next’) is how we put off the moment when we actually have to start living (rather than just thinking about it or talking about it). ‘Life avoidance’ means being orientated to keeping things the same (no matter what price we will have to pay for this); it means that we are constantly trying to return to the state of blissful ignorance which is the ‘prior situation’. The prior situation (i.e., the situation that prevails before Humpty jumps or is pushed) corresponds to the ‘world egg’ that Herman Hess is talking about here in this quote from his novel Damien –

The bird fights his way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who must be born who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is abraxas.

‘Destroying the world’ doesn’t sound particularly great to us – it doesn’t sound good at all. We’re very much attached to the world. Rather than fighting our way out of the egg, we put all our energy into fighting to get back into it – we put all our resources into figuring out ingenious ways by which we might return to the comfort of the ‘preborn state’. We’re driven by ‘nostalgia for an illusion’, or ‘nostalgia for an ideal state that never existed’, rather than being orientated towards the world as it is, the world that exists outside of the egg, outside of the artificial situation. We are essentially ‘equilibrium seekers’ (or equilibrium dwellers) and we are frightened of anything that might come along to disturb our sleep. We’re holding on to what we know, even though ‘what we know’ is only a fantasy. When we talk about ‘mental health’ therefore we’re really talking about that sterile state of existence in which nothing does disturb or disrupt us, that state of being which is really nothing more than an idea or notion that we have – an idea or nothing which is as compulsively attractive to us as it is because it represents a successful escape from any sort of ontological challenge, anything that might lead to us having to let go of our ‘deeply-familiar-but-totally-deluded’ way of seeing the world. We’re yearning for an escape from the challenge that life makes on us (which is something that just isn’t possible, no matter how much we may want it) and we frame this avoidant (or ‘reality-denying’) mentality as being ‘mentally healthy’, as being ‘the way we should all be’…







Image credit – blogs.loc.gov/folklife/

Trying To ‘Please The System’

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What other people think of us doesn’t matter. It’s without meaning. What other people think of you doesn’t matter because what they think isn’t just ‘their own business’ – what they think is them. They’re not meeting us, they’re meeting their own distorted idea of who we are, and we – for our part – are playing along with this. We’re playing along with this as best we can because that’s how the social game works. Compliance is rewarded, deviation punished.

What people think of us has nothing to do with us, therefore – we each live in the world of our own projections (we each live in a world that is made up entirely of ourselves, in other words). We’re living with what William Gibson calls ‘a Seamless Universe of Self’; we are in other words surrounded on all sides by our absurd ideas about the world, by our unexamined expectations of it, by the half-baked assumptions we have unconsciously made about it. In this (seamlessly closed) world nothing figures but ourselves – nothing else is allowed. The world is thus a reflection of our own unrecognised face, just as Carl Jung says.

The undeniable fact that we very much do care what others think of us is telling us something, therefore. It’s telling us something very important – it’s telling us that we are trying to live our lives in terms of how someone else is seeing it.  As soon as we notice this peculiar fact – which is admittedly a very rare thing to notice – we see we can’t help seeing that there’s something completely absurd about it. It is – not to beat about the bush too much – an utterly insane situation. It’s an utterly insane situation but it’s also the only situation we know…

The situation where we all live ‘inside each other’s heads’ (or ‘living solely on society’s terms’) instead of simply ‘living’ is absurd to a truly surreal extent and yet we treat it with the utmost seriousness. We couldn’t be more serious about this business of ‘how our peers see us’ – appearing to be a bad or stupid person to others (which is to say, ‘being socially disgraced’) is – as it has been said – a fate worse than death. We’d rather anything than this. we’d rather be swallowed up by a hole in the ground, never to be seen again. That would by far be ‘the preferable fate’.

If ‘how I am perceived by others’ is the overriding factor, the overriding motivation, then what this means is of course that we’re living inside the other person’s head, inside their own peculiar biassed version of reality which simply isn’t real. The question is, therefore – just why the hell would we want to do this? Firstly, we let some other person (some agency, or some group of people) ‘decide what reality is’ – in accordance with their own unaccountable prejudices (which they themselves have had pushed onto them by some external authority) and then secondly, we try to make sure that they like us, that they accept us, that they approve of us, within the terms of this their distorted (and ridiculously inauthentic) version of reality! How crazy is this?

What we’re talking about here is pure insanity, no doubt about it, and yet notwithstanding this fact it’s what we all do. We don’t know any other way of functioning, any other way of being. When we ‘adapt to society’ then what this means is that we are adapting to ‘an arbitrary biassed version of life’, a parody of life, a fake copy of life, and we do this purely on the basis that everyone else is doing it too. Everyone else is doing it so we better jump on board as well, so that we don’t get left behind, so that we don’t let ourselves in to be ridiculed or sneered at by every Joe Soap that comes along, so that we won’t be persecuted and attacked by all of our brainwashed peers…

This is the Social Game (only we’re not allowed to call it a game). Instead, we are obliged to take it with the utmost seriousness, as we have just said. Not only are we obliged to adapt to the Super narrow, super slanted, cock- eyed version of how things are – we are also compelled to compete within it for various illusory prizes. We are compelled to strive to be better at playing the game than everyone else, which meansenacting the biases, which means continually affirming and reaffirming the biases, no matter how patently ludicrous they might be. To compete successfully we are obliged to double down on our support for the unpleasantly prejudiced viewpoint, we are obliged to propagate its ‘truths’ with fanatical fervour. We’re obliged in other words to be better at believing and propagating the lie than anyone else is, and it is this meaningless mechanical ‘pressure to conform’ that we are constantly having to take seriously, that we are constantly getting stressed out about.

We are all super-busy trying to ‘please the system’, so to speak, and our belief (which we do our very best to hang onto) is that this will pay off for us later on. Our belief is that the reward is ‘just around the corner’, as Alan Watts says in one of his lectures. Trying to please the system (at the expense of our actual autonomy) is never going to work, however – the system is geared towards benefitting itself not us, and at the end of the day this is what exactly it is always going to do. When we opt to exist within the common ground that is the ‘agreed-upon’ reality, the ‘consensus’ reality, then what’s happening here is that we are ‘trading authenticity for convenience’. What we ‘accept as being true’ doesn’t have to be actually true, it just needs to be ‘true in relation to what everyone else thinks’. It’s ‘relative truth’ we are concerned with, not anything else. As Kurt Vonnegut says, we agree with people not because we are convinced of the truth of their assertions, but because we want to ‘make friends’.

This is the ‘pragmatic approach’ and it generally pays off on the short term. If we don’t take the pragmatic approach then this ‘unfriendliness’ on our part costs us – life very quickly becomes a hell of a lot more difficult for us and – into the bargain – we are privileged to see a side of the human race that only deviants and non-conformists get to see – we are privileged to see a side to human beings that no one ever admits to. We get to see their ‘shadow side’, we might say – we get to encounter a darkness that society as a whole absolutely refuses to acknowledge. Society’s shadow (which gets darker all the time in accordance with our unconsciousness) is projected on us (because of our non-conformity to the game rules that we don’t admit to being there) and we are treated accordingly…

All of this is inherent in the verynature of social collusion, the very nature of collective enterprise. Collective enterprise means that we all get together on the same page as regards how we are to see things, as to how we are to go about doing things, (or ‘organising things’). Standardisation is needed, in other words. Standards must be set and then adhered to scrupulously – these are the basic mechanics that have to be in place before we can get started on the collective endeavour, before we can all get together on the same page. Rules must be formulated and then established in practice. On one level this makes perfect sense and is a good solution to the problem – if for example each one of us were to speak our own idiosyncratic language there would be no language, we wouldn’t be able to understand each other, and there could be no collective. This is – as anyone who has ever attended Sunday school knows – is the Babel Effect…. If every household appliance ran on a different voltage, then the results would be sheer chaos, and so on and so forth. What we don’t see however is that we can’t apply this same logic to ‘organising the truth’, to applying a standardised formula as regards ‘how we are to see and relate to reality’.

Without recognising the enormity of our presumption, we go straight ahead and take it that this pragmatic principle works ‘across the board’ and that’s what is true for having the same voltage on all household appliances (or having the same size port on all makes of laptops) must also be true, must also be eminently sensible and practicable when it comes to the way that we have of perceiving and describing reality. We charge full steam ahead and standardise this too, without realising what we’ve done here – what we’ve done here is that we have created Samsara, what we’ve done here (by ‘standardizing everything’) is that we have generated our very own Communal Hyperreality Bubble. Reality cannot be standardised – thereIS no authorised viewpoint from which it can be surveyed and mapped out, there is no ‘bird’s eye view’ to paraphrase Ilya Prigogine. ‘Standardised reality’ is an illusion – we can come up with such a thing (even though it’s not real) and then we can substitute it for ‘unstandardized’ (or non-homogenized’) reality if we want to, but when we do this therefore what we’re doing is that we’re replacing the real with the unreal, the actual with the imaginary, just for the sake of ‘pragmatic convenience’. What does ‘convenience’ mean when we’ve lost all touch with the real world, however, and what price do we have to pay for it?

The price we pay for over-simplifying (or simulating) reality in this way can be seen in terms of ‘psychological abuse’, as odd as this might initially sound. When we make adaptation to a defined or standardized version of reality into the rule, into something we all have to do, then a peculiar phenomenon comes into play – a phenomenon whereby we get fleeced, a phenomenon whereby we get taken for a ride without us knowing anything about it. The basic principle behind the oversimplified (or simulated) world – we might say – is of course the Principle of Deception (since nothing about it is true); the basic message of the Simulation – we might then continue to say – is that if we play the game successfully then we will win the supremely important prize. What else are games ever about, after all? When we adapt successfully then there will be a big ‘pay-off’ coming our way as a reward…

We have to pass through a very narrow gate in order to qualify as being worthy of this prize, however – we have to get it exactly right, we have to hit the bullseye dead on. If we think of in terms of ‘gaining acceptance or approval from the social system’ (if we think of this as being ‘the prize’), then we first have to define ourselves narrowly on the system’s terms. That is what is required of us. We gain this validation, this acceptance, by stepping through this exceedingly narrow gate, but in this we are being tricked, we are being spoofed – we’re being tricked because we’ve put ourselves on the ‘same level as the system’ and the system is an empty projection. We’ve been tricked because we’re we’ve handed over everything we’ve got and gain nothing in return. We’ve ‘sold our soul for a mess of pottage’.

This is the problem with trying to ‘please the system’, therefore; this is always the problem – when we try to please the system (no matter how hard we try to conform to the rules, no matter how hard we try to fit in) we get ‘refused entry’. ‘Approval’ is withheld. When we get to the point of sacrificing everything – which we do by defining ourselves entirely within the terms of the system – then we get nothing in return. There is no ‘prize’, we find out that we have been burned…





Image credit – mutualart.com


Making A Wish…

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When we’re patient then (in time!) everything will be revealed to us but when we’re impatient then nothing is revealed to us – not ever. The thing about this is that patience is strictly ‘an old-fashioned virtue’ and it’s not considered to be ‘a thing’ anymore; instead, we believe in instant gratification (as is often pointed out). In one way we believe in instant gratification because it’s in our nature to do so; it’s also true to say – however – that we believe in it because we have been sold the idea by our culture, because we have been educated to be that way. Acting on our impulses is highly beneficial for the economy whilst the ability to not act would spell financial ruin. ‘Greed is good’, as the line in the film goes.

Alan Watts observes that everything about our technologically orientated culture has to do with ‘shortening the gap between where we are and where we’d like to be’. Transport is a literal example of this sort of thing – in order to get from one town to another we once had to either walk, or travel by horse and cart, which was of course a very slow business. Now, we can travel by high-speed train. Within a decade or so (if we continue uninterrupted on our present course) then hypersonic stratospheric shuttles will be the thing. The development of information technology is probably the most dramatic example of this tendency to keep on shortening the gap (the gap in question being the one between ‘asking the question’ and ‘getting the answer’). We used to do computations in our fingers, then we moved onto the abacus, and now we have vast arrays of computer cores and the so-called ‘evolution’ of artificial intelligence. Our number-crunching ability is increasing logarithmically, and the reason this is so important to us is because it helps us to get what we want more quickly and more effectively, and that is where all the money is.  Giving people what they want faster than anyone else can is an unfailing recipe for success.

This isn’t to say that technology is either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, that it is either beneficial to us or detrimental, simply that it can be used to facilitate the demand that we have within us to make things happen quicker. It’s not so much that we value technology because it can improve the quality of our lives therefore but because it enables us to dramatically shorten the interval between ‘the wish’ and ‘the fulfilment of this wish’. It seems quite reasonable to imagine that – as some point in the future – the ‘uncomfortable interval’ (during which we have to wait and drum our fingers on the table) will be eliminated altogether and that our wishes will be instantaneously fulfilled…

We might (naively) think that this would constitute a tremendous achievement for humankind and that a world where our desires are instantly manifested for us via super-advanced technology would be as close to utopia as we would ever want to get. It’s not as quite as simple as this, of course – all we need to do is think of all those fairy stories where somebody is granted three wishes by a powerful genie or spirit to realise that this can also easily turn into a recipe for hell on earth rather than being a recipe for utopia (or we could think of the classic science fiction film Forbidden Planet). It’s only when we’re young and foolish that we think this sort of thing would be the answer to everything; as we get older and wiser (if we do get older and wiser, that is, because there is of course no guarantee of that) we realise that ‘getting what we want’ could actually be the worst possible thing that could ever happen to us…

Psychologically speaking, getting our wishes manifested for us straightaway is hazardous in the extreme and one way in which we can understand why this should be so is to look at it in terms of ‘learning’ versus ‘non-learning’. All the emphasis in this technologically orientated world of ours is on ‘the efficacious obtaining of our goals’ and it is no exaggeration to say that our self-esteem (along with the esteem of others, which is of course a closely related commodity) depends upon how effective we are at realising our goals. If we are demonstrably effective in this we get to be called ‘a winner’, we get to be called ‘a success’. We don’t tend to express this quite so bluntly (because it sounds crude and unsophisticated) but this is nevertheless what it comes down to – we obtain our self-esteem (our so-called ‘confidence’) by being very good at controlling. Our confidence is entirely dependent upon our ability to control, in other words, so this is ‘confidence’ which can very easily turn into pure anxiety. ‘Conditional confidence’ and ‘anxiety’ are the same thing.

The need to control, and the wherewithal to do this, is not what we might call ‘a psychological strength’; on the contrary, when control is what we’re mostly concerned with then this points to an underlying weakness, not a strength. It points to a deficiency within us. Why is the ability to control so very important to us, after all? What’s the big fuss about? If we were truly ‘confident in ourselves’ (as in, ‘at peace with ourselves’) then we wouldn’t care so much about controlling, we would be more laid back than this, we would be more exploratory and playful in ourselves. We would have more of a sense of humour, more of a sense of irony about things. We wouldn’t be so concrete in our outlook – we would be open to the world, rather than being closed and controlling.

If we are successful in our controlling then what happens as a result is that we are able to stay closed, without any interruption to our comfortable closed way of life, and from our regular point of view this is exactly what we want. This is our goal. We can relate this to what James Carse calls finite game playing, the point of which is to ‘successfully resist change’. Just because resisting change seems like the best and most advantageous thing to do when we’re a finite game player that doesn’t mean that it is, however. The reason ‘successfully staying the same’ isn’t good for us isn’t too hard to see – when we resist change then what we’re actually resisting is ‘growth’ and when we resist growth (when we refuse to grow) then we are incurring suffering. We are incurring suffering because we’re going against our own essential nature.

The link between ‘valuing the ability to control’ above everything else and our ‘not growing as a person’ isn’t one that we tend to make! Conveniently enough, we don’t make this connection. To be excellent at attaining our goals sounds like a very dynamic thing to us; a society or culture that is highly advanced technologically also sounds wonderfully dynamic to us. We perceive ourselves as being ‘on a journey to somewhere great’, and we can’t wait to get there. What we don’t see is that realising our goals won’t allow us to move beyond ourselves and ‘moving beyond ourselves’ is what growth is all about. Growth means changing our viewpoint on things, not reinforcing it. Or as we could also say, growth means that we change (in a radical not a superficial way) so that what once seemed to be ‘an all-important goal’ no longer seems so important after all. Growth means outgrowing our ideas, not repeating them forever!

As Israel Regardie says somewhere, ‘The magician who sets off on the journey is not the one who attains to the summit’. Contrariwise – therefore – we can say that ‘the finite game player who sets off on the journey to the goal is exactly the same person as the one who arrives at the specified destination’. This is the whole point of finite play, after all. Between ‘the setting of the goal’ and ‘the obtaining of it’ there is no learning, no growth, no shift in perspective. If anything like that did happen (if there was to be some change happening between ‘conceiving the idea’ and ‘realising it’) then the game would be busted  – immersion in the dream would have been lost, the hypnotic power of the goal would have been broken and when the hypnotic power of the goal (which we ourselves are projecting) is broken then that’s the end of it. That’s ‘game failure’ right there. From the inverted viewpoint of the finite game player this is the ultimate disaster and so we will do everything we can to make sure that this eventuality never happens.

Our impatience is ‘our unseemly haste to realise the goal’. We’re ‘holding our breath’, we ‘can’t wait’ to get there (even though waiting is exactly what we’re going to have to do). Our impatience is what lies behind our controlling, behind our ‘heroic striving towards the goal’; we are – when we’re operating in this this modality – fixated upon ‘what’s happening on the outside’ and our belief (or assumption) is that when the correct type of change takes place ‘on the outside’ then this will transform (or fix) stuff ‘on the inside’. We wouldn’t put it like this of course because that would sound too foolish, but that’s what it comes down to all the same. This is ‘displacement-type activity’, it’s an example of ‘pseudo-solution’, and the whole point of displacement-type activity (or pseudo-solution) is that we must not see it for what it is – if we did see it then (clearly) then there would be no more ‘displacement of attention’ occurring! We’d be ‘seeing through to the heart of the matter’ and so there would be no more need for ‘the theatre of purposeful activity’! As long as we can keep on assuming (without knowing that we are) that the answer to everything lies in our goals, then we keep on doing this forever. Just as long as we remain fixated upon ‘change on the outside’ then we can avoid ‘change on the inside’, which is what we are referring to as growth. In one way, therefore, we can say that being in Goal-Orientated Mode is effective – it’s effective as a tactic by which we can indefinitely postpone actual psychological growth.

‘Patience’ means dropping our fixation on the outside. This isn’t to say that we don’t carry on doing whatever we’re doing (if that happens to be a helpful thing to do) but we’re doing it in a different way. We’re more conscious in what we’re doing – we can see that we are engaged in the ‘perennial game of displacement-type activity’ and as soon as we see this that takes the blind fanaticism out of what we’re doing. It takes the bleak humourlessness out of what we’re doing, it takes the brute aggression out of it. We can clearly see that obtaining some arbitrary goal not going to solve anything (in any magical, ‘wish fulfullment-type’ way) and so we stop putting all our money on it. We become graceful and sensitive rather than strained and utterly insensitive; we become peaceful rather than violent. It is of course true that learning patience is harder than anything else we might have to do in life but the biggest difficulty here is that we don’t want to learn it. We don’t want to learn it because we know on some level that this means ‘letting go of who we thought we were’. When we learn patience then everything is revealed to us, but the crucial point here is that we don’t actually want  for it to be revealed…







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Simulated Mental Health

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Would living in a simulation be a safe or an unsafe thing? Could it be bad for our mental health, for example? Are there any hidden glitches that we ought to know about? One way to reply to questions like this is to say that life in the simulation of life is the reverse of mental health – we could say that this state of being (the simulated state of being) is the perfect antithesis of mental health. It’s a great disaster, it’s the way not to do things…

Why this should be the case (why living a second-hand version life isn’t a healthy thing to be doing) might be considered too obvious to need pointing out, but we will make the argument all the same (if only for the sake of the exercise). The only reason we would want to live in a simulation of reality would be if we imagined – for some reason – that there was some kind of advantage to it, clearly, and so we can start by asking what exactly that advantage could be. Why would we imagine that ‘living a simulated life’ could be an improvement on the real thing?

One reason could be if the simulation were to contain more possibilities (or perhaps more interesting possibilities) than what is being simulated; it might – in other words – represent an upgrade. Maybe we could even be immortal and live as gods! Maybe we could cheat death… If we are prone to optimistic, utopian-type thinking then we might well have ideas like this in our heads. Instead of being used to somehow liberate humankind from the sorrows and limitations of our present existence the technology of simulation could of course be turned to the opposite purpose and used to oppress humanity even more than it is being oppressed already. There is an undeniable tendency for new technology to be used for malign rather than benign purposes, as has often been pointed out, and so this is definitely a possibility worth considering. If we’re not careful then we could end up in a ‘Matrix-style scenario’ where reality is being controlled in order to control us; this is after all exactly what’s happening now, even with the relatively low level of technology that we currently possess.

The higher the technology the greater the potential it has for abuse; when the technology to create super-realistic simulations comes on stream, then what exotic possibilities for abuse will this engender, we might ask? And as we were suggesting earlier, we don’t actually have to wait around too long to get an answer to this question – even in the absence of any super-advanced technology the potential for simulations of the world to be ‘used for ill’ has come into play. This kind of thing has been around for a long, long time – it’s been around for many centuries before the advent of the first printed circuit board. What we’re talking about here is better known as ideology (or belief) – the ideology or belief we adhere to defines the world for us just as effectively as any coding would. Ideology is coding – it is a comprehensive set of instructions telling us how to see the world (and which we then internalise and experience intense irrational loyalty towards).

Our beliefs condition our perceptions – we see what we’re supposed to see and we’re blind to anything else. We only see what our beliefs allow us to see and so then this proves to us that our belief system – whatever that might be – must be ‘the right one’. Beliefs tautologically prove themselves – any viewpoint that we adopt will tautologically ‘prove itself to be true’. Ideologies are simulations, therefore; belief structures are simulations and so if we want to look at the question as to whether simulations are harmful to our mental health or not then all we have to do is consider how we have got on with our beliefs, our ‘compulsory social conditioning’ over the centuries. All we need to do is consider therefore is whether this ongoing business of ‘having beliefs’ has been good for our mental health or whether it has been to our detriment.

This is not a question we ever stop to ask ourselves however – we most emphatically do believe that the blinkered way of looking at things that we have adopted is good for us. We most emphatically believe that the worldview to which we are adhering to is the right one, which automatically implies that it must be beneficial to us. In the case of a fundamentalist type of religion, our understanding is invariably that we will obtain our reward for choosing the right path in heaven whilst all those people who have not made the right choice (for whatever reason) will suffer eternal damnation as a consequence of their disbelief. This is – needless to say – very from being what we might call ‘an objective viewpoint’ – it’s actually the most biassed viewpoint we could ever have possibly have! It’s ridiculously biased… The fact that we have been inducted into whatever belief system it is that now has the claim on our loyalty means that we’re obliged to take the position that ‘our belief is the correct one’ – anything we might have to say on this subject automatically becomes quite meaningless therefore. All we are – in this case – is ‘a mouthpiece for a bias’, ‘a spokesperson for a prejudice’.

When we are inducted into the particular ‘simulation of reality’ that is created by our system of belief then we lose any chance of having an autonomous viewpoint – a viewpoint that is actually ours. Instead of autonomy we now have heteronomy (which is where everyone adheres to the very same way of looking at things). On the one hand, therefore, this shows how ideologies can be used (by those who are in a position to take advantage of such an opportunity) to control or exploit people, whilst on the other hand, the mechanism by which autonomy is replaced by the situation where masses of people are utterly dependent upon an unquestionable external authority can clearly be seen as a crisis in the mental health of everyone concerned. There is no greater crisis in mental health than the situation in which personal autonomy is subsumed within collectivism – this is ‘the loss of who we really are’, which is no small thing! It is treated as a small thing, to be sure, but that is of course no more than ‘societal whitewashing’. As Kierkegaard writes in The Sickness unto Death,

A self is the last thing the world cares about and the most dangerous thing of all for a person to show signs of having. The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.


This consideration – the consideration of ‘losing who we are without realising it’ – brings us to the very crux of the matter. The detrimental thing about living in a simulation is simply that there is no freedom whatsoever in it. As drawbacks go, this isn’t just punitive, it is total, it is ‘all-encompassing’ and as a result we’re cut off from everything that really matters. We’re alienated both from ourselves and the natural world. This is the ‘sickness’ that Kierkegaard is referring to, the sickness that befalls us when we live only ‘on the outside’, only in the ‘consensus reality’.  

Most men live without ever becoming conscious of being destined as spirit… There is so much talk about wasting a life, that only that person’s life was wasted who went on living so deceived by life’s joys or in sorrows that he never became decisively and eternally conscious as spirit, as self.

Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death


By ‘self’ Kierkegaard doesn’t mean the ‘socially constructed ego’ (or ‘identity’) therefore, but rather ‘the essence of who we are’, which is something entirely independent of any artificial societal context (which is what Kierkegaard calls ‘spirit’ in the quote given above). A simulation isn’t (needless to say) ‘an independently existing reality’ – there is of course nothing in it apart from what the designer, the artificer, has put into it. It can be regarded as being nothing more than an extension of the designer’s agenda or will. Although we tend to be favourably inclined towards the idea of ‘simulating our own reality’ and are intellectually excited by the notion (even to the point of seeing it as a way in which humankind can escape the eventual heat death of the universe, or ‘escape from the limitations of our physical mortality’, which is another well-known trope in modern science fiction) this is only because we don’t really get what simulations are. We don’t get it at all! Psychologically speaking, we might say, a simulation is an act of pure aggression. ‘Aggression’ – in this sense of the word – means that we are wholly subject to some extrinsic will, some extrinsic source of order. To control another person is an act of aggression, to tell someone else ‘who they are’ or (‘what the world is’) is aggression. All judgement is aggression (because we’re imposing our thoughts on someone else).

When we live in a simulation then everything about us is determined by that simulation. Our core understanding of what is real has been supplied to us by another, by an external source of authority – we’re ‘taking it all on trust’, in other words, and this core understanding what is real (which we have taken on trust, as we’ve just said) lies behind everything we think, everything we do, everything we hope for or fear. The totality of our existence is determined by this borrowed / unexamined way of understanding things. This picture of reality determines everything about us and yet it is an artificial imposition that has nothing to do with us (and which is – into the bargain – completely untrue, completely fictitious). There is no ‘true picture’ (or ‘true model’) of reality, only thought’s simulations, and thought’s simulations are – when it comes down to it – only ‘thought in disguise’. As the great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna says,

All philosophies are mental fabrications. There’s never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things.



In order for there to be freedom in a simulation there would have to be truth, and – by definition – there isn’t any! In order for there to be freedom there would have to be ‘something there that is independent of the simulation’ but there isn’t. There isn’t anything ‘independent’ in a simulation. That’s the whole point of the exercise, after all; anything independent of the system straightaway gets labelled as error (and is promptly gotten rid of on this account). If I have designed a simulation and I find something in it that I haven’t specifically put there, then – by definition – whatever it is that I’ve come across has got to be error. It absolutely has to be a ‘meaningless random fluctuation’ – there’s nothing else it can be! My ‘getting rid of anything that doesn’t fit my plan’ (anything that doesn’t ‘accord with my agenda’) is the quintessential example of what we are referring to as ‘aggression’. Aggression is where I take away ‘the freedom things have to be different to the narrow way that I have defined them as being’. If a simulation isn’t aggressive then there’s simply no way it can get to exist…

When we indoctrinate someone (so that our view of the world becomes their view) then this is an act of pure violence, this is an act of outright aggression. What they might happen to think doesn’t count for anything, whilst what we think is ‘all-important’. We don’t – as a rule – see this as violence; we don’t see it as violence because we know we’re right! It doesn’t really matter what we believe, therefore – it doesn’t matter what we believe because we’re always going to be right. We’re going to be right no matter what. We’re always right and this is the benefit that we are given; this is the ‘incentive’, so to speak, that prompts us to buy into the belief system in the first place – we are provided with this immense sense of validation, this immense feeling of certainty, the iron-clad certainty that ‘we are right and everyone else is wrong’. This is the ‘benefit’, but we pay for it and the price we pay is also immense – we have had to give away all of our freedom. We aren’t even allowed to keep a crumb of it – we have had to give away the freedom that we had to be ‘who we really are’ so that now we are compelled to be ‘something else’ (something else that we’re not, and never could be). We are compelled to be the puppet of some mechanical external authority which – at the same time as compelling us in everything we do and everything we think – is also compelling us to believe that we are free when we absolutely aren’t.

Were we to come back to the question we started off with, then we would have to conclude that ‘living within a simulation’ (as opposed to ‘living freely’, as opposed to ‘living in an unsimulated way’) is most emphatically not beneficial for us, mental-health wise. If we were to define mental health as being ‘a function of our essential independence from thought’ (i.e., independence from our ‘ideas about things’) then since being subsumed within the conditioned or mechanical realm of everyday life means that we have zero independence from thought (means that we are thought!) this shows that we simply don’t have any mental health. Our mental health is completely missing, it’s completely missing since our ‘mental well-being’ and ‘intrinsic freedom’ are two ways of talking about the same thing. Instead of mental health, what we have is abject slavery. Instead of mental health, what we have is what Jung calls ‘Soul Sickness’, we have what Kierkegaard refers to as ‘The Sickness unto Death’. In the absence of the real thing, the very best we can hope for is ‘the two-dimensional appearance of mental well-being’.





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Society is a Zero-Sum Game

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We measure (and therefore value) ourselves on the basis of how other people see us and this – although we can’t see it – involves us in a vicious circle, a ‘runaway tautology’. Society is all about ‘measuring ourselves in terms of how others see us’ (whether we want to admit this or not) and that means that the social world – which is the only world we know – is a vicious circle, a self-devouring loop of logic that is constantly going around and around without the possibility of ever getting anywhere. The very ground we stand on (or think we stand on) is nothing more than a cheap hoax, in other words.


We stand to gain in the world that has been created by us comparing ourselves to everyone else – we stand to gain because there’s always a chance of us coming out on top, because there’s always the possibility of us ‘being admired rather than despised’ (to put it crudely). We stand to lose – therefore – for the very same reason. If we wanted to be more exact about it, we could say that, on balance, we stand to gain to the very same extent that we stand to lose.


Everyone playing the game knows this, of course (on some level, at least) but it doesn’t put us off because we’re willing to bet that we’re going to find ourselves amongst the winners rather than the losers. It seems perfectly reasonable to take this gamble, after all. We’re just as likely to come out as winners as we are to end up as losers and so this seems like acceptable odds as far as we’re concerned. ‘Seize the day’, we say. ‘Be positive and give it a go’. God loves a trier, after all, and ‘if you’re not in then you can’t win…’


From a purely personal point of view this logic would appear to make sense. This is the way games are played, of course – all games come with an equal risk of losing and winning and this is the challenge, this is the risk. Accepting the challenge posed by the game is widely held to be ‘the healthy thing to do’. This is pretty much our whole ethos right there – we have the greatest possible admiration for someone who boldly accepts the risk and then comes out on top. This is the glory we all aspire to – the glory of the winner.


Curiously however, we do not show much (if anything) in the way of sympathy for those of us for whom the venture turns out badly, which seems bizarrely arbitrary of us. They too have accepted the challenge of the game, after all; they too have taken the chance that they might not come out on top, just as we have. Why then do we look down on them as if there was something inherently unworthy or inferior about them? This hardly seems fair. It doesn’t seem very logical either – it isn’t actually logical at all. Why – we might ask – is there such a thing as ‘the indelible stigma of failure’ when it’s all just ‘the luck of the draw’.


There is a type of logic to this however, albeit it a very narrow and shortsighted type. There’s a brand of logic here, but it turns out to be not a very pleasant one. It’s certainly not a way of thinking that we’re in a hurry to admit to! The point (which we are so reluctant to dwell on) is that if I see I have come out on top purely by chance, purely because ‘someone had to’, then I don’t get to experience the glory that comes with winning. I could equally well not have won, so how can I possibly feel good about myself on this basis? The fact that I have done well in the game has nothing to do with any personal virtue of mine, after all. Being a winner doesn’t really say anything about me in this case. It’s true of course that I might have done better than my fellows because I’m smarter, or stronger, or better looking (all of these factors can confer advantage, of course) but the same point applies – I was born with those advantages, it wasn’t something special that I did and can take credit for…


We don’t just want to win, therefore – we want to win and feel worthy of it. We want the personal validation; we want to experience the glory that comes with being a winner! That’s what we wanted all along, not simply the bald fact that we have ‘come out on top’ in the system of ranking that makes up this inherently competitive society of ours. We’re ‘glory hounds’, we’re perennially hungry for the sweet taste of success. Basically, we want to feel that we’ve got to ‘where we are today’ by our own steam. As we’ve already said, it can’t just be that we were born into a better situation, or that we are gifted with more intelligence or cunning than our fellows, it has to be some sort of genuine honest-to-goodness personal virtue that we ourselves are responsible for.


The euphoric ‘hit’ of success is founded purely upon this belief – the belief that the fact I have excelled in the struggle demonstrates the existence of some special quality in myself that I myself am responsible. This is what the ego covets above all else – the feeling that we are ‘special’ (in a good rather than a bad way). This feeling – entirely illusory as it may be – is what all finite game-players are playing for. There is therefore a deliberate (if unconscious) dishonesty in this, and because of this dishonesty (which underpins everything we do in social life) we are obliged to live our lives in an entirely superficial or shallow way. We have no choice in this – as soon as we start playing the game we’re ‘locked into it’; that’s what the game is all about – we can’t go deeply into anything because that would blow the whole thing. Not being superficial would be a disaster because it necessarily invalidates the foundation upon which we are playing.


The flip side of this is that we automatically believe that if someone doesn’t make it in society or doesn’t do particularly well then that must be because of some personal flaw or weakness in their character. They deserve what they get (just as we deserve what we have got) and so we can rest content that ‘all is well in the world’. Without this ‘excuse’ for our shocking lack of compassion, our ruthlessly competitive way of life simply wouldn’t be able to continue, and we don’t want that. The game must go on, no matter what the cost. And if our circumstances change for the worse, we will judge ourselves just the same because that’s the way it works – ‘What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’, after all.


Seen from the broader perspective it is abundantly clear that there’s no overall advantage to playing this game; this whole business of ‘basing our view of ourselves on what everyone else thinks of us’ is – if only we could see it – the worst idea going! Overall, it always comes down to ‘investing in a zero-sum game’. [‘Player one’s gain is equivalent to player two’s loss, with the result that the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero’. Wikipedia] Playing the game necessarily makes us selfish – ‘playing the game’ is a selfish (if not flat-out narcissistic) thing to do and this means that we don’t ever take the wider view of what’s going on. As long as we have our fun then that’s all that matters. The logic of the game means ‘not caring that society is a zero- sum game’ – that’s how the whole thing works. That’s what we’re buying into.


Even if we look at it in a totally one-sided way (the ‘I’m alright Jack’ kind of a way that the system encourages us to) it still doesn’t work out for us. There’s no satisfaction to be had in ‘getting caught up in a vicious circle’, only the tantalising (and ultimately frustrating) promise of it. Our stark absence of compassion towards others rebounds on us as ‘the inability to be compassionate to ourselves’ and so – even if, by some freak chance, we were able to dodge the principle of ‘what goes up must come down’ – we’ve still ‘done the dirty on ourselves’. We’ve still done the dirty on ourselves since (as we’ve said) to enjoy ‘being a winner’ we are obliged to live life in a crassly superficial way. That’s the trap we’re caught in. Ultimately – no matter how skillfully we play the game, no matter how much pain we deflect onto our less fortunate fellow human beings – there’s no escaping the truth that ‘winning only exists in relation to losing’ and that – therefore – it’s only a hollow illusion.








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The Heteronomous Mode

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We could very easily spend decades (or even centuries) discussing what is right with society and what is wrong and still not get anywhere. This is a ‘hoary old chestnut’ – we each have our own opinions on the subject of ‘what’s wrong with the world’ and we are generally more than happy to talk about it pretty much ad infinitum. All of the ways that we commonly have of looking at this question miss out on something fundamental, however; we almost always fail to take into account what might be called the ‘psychological factor’ (which is to say, the question as to whether the social system we’re in favour of will help us to fulfil our true potential or whether it won’t). This – needless to say – turns out to be THE crucially important question to ask; the only thing here however being that we never do ask it. For the most part, we don’t even think of asking it.

We don’t know enough to ask the question because we don’t know anything about our ‘true potential’ (as is generally the way with potential); what’s more, we are being constantly fed all sorts of societal propaganda about what life is supposed to be, and what we’re supposed to be, which (inevitably) has absolutely nothing to do with our actual nature. This is what present day civilization excels at – persuading us that ‘we are what we aren’t’, persuading us to adapt ourselves in ways that will bring us nothing but misery. It’s ‘good to excel’, we might say – our culture adores excelling in whatever form it may take (since this is how we ‘distinguish ourselves from the masses’) – but excelling at whatever society tells us we should be excelling at is simply a sneaky way of controlling us, a sneaky way of enforcing social adaptation.

This line of reasoning brings us closer to an understanding of what we mean by the ‘psychological factor’ – the all-important psychological factor that we don’t ever (in our headlong stampede in the direction of progress) stop to consider, which has to do with the ‘wholesomeness’ (or lack of it) of the way of life that we are so busy creating for ourselves. We are led by ideas or trends that – for whatever reason – get amplified by society and which, as a result, go to form the basis of our way of understanding things. This is a classic positive feedback mechanism and we can explain what this means by looking at the phenomenon of celebrity. What positive feedback means in relation to celebrity may be expressed by saying that ‘the more famous you get, the more famous you get’. Whatever random fluctuation it was that started the ball rolling doesn’t really matter here since the phenomenon of fame doesn’t necessarily depend on anything outside of itself (which is to say, it’s perfectly possible to ‘become famous for being famous’, in which case, if I do become mega-famous, then this doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with any virtue on my part.

Another good example of this sort of thing would be fashion – things become fashionable (we might say) simply because they’re fashionable. If – for whatever reason – enough people take an interest in some nascent trend then, purely because of this interest, lots more people are going to become interested as well and so in no time at all the whole thing (whatever it is) is going to ‘take off’, is going to ‘skyrocket’. Again – as in all such positive feedback phenomena – there doesn’t have to be any good reason for what’s going on; the phenomenon feeds on itself (as we see illustrated in the ancient symbol of the self-eating serpent, the Uroboros). From the standpoint of sociology (or social psychology) we can say that this is a fundamental principle, i.e., we can say that, in a group (where everyone is necessarily ‘externally directed’), positive feedback loops are how things get to happen.

We might imagine that this process can be controlled (or ‘directed from behind the scenes’) but the whole point of positive feedback processes is that they aren’t controllable; they are – on the contrary – out of control. Control is on the contrary always a negative feedback mechanism; positive feedback – in contrast to this – is ‘the system running away with itself’. If it were the case that positive feedback loops could be deliberately engineered, then we would be doing that already. Anyone finding a way to get some sort of promotional material to ‘go viral’ would be able to sell this trick for billions – this is advertising’s ‘holy grail’ and no one has as yet found it. There is no such thing as ‘a formula to predict whether a meme is going to go viral or not’. What we’re saying here therefore is that there’s simply no such thing as progress in the way that we tend to think there is; what we call ‘progress’ is merely movement in the direction of ‘optimizing whatever it is that happens to be trending at the moment’, and when we say this then it does not of course sound quite so inspirational. It’s ‘utter garbage’ (albeit garbage that we are all pretty much obsessed with).

All of this is inherent in the nature of social groups – when we are members of a group then, as we have been saying, we are necessarily ‘externally directed’, we are necessarily in ‘Heteronomous Mode’. We are – in other words – orientated towards the ‘outside of us’ rather than ‘the inside’. We take our cue from the ideas that are circulating in the social matrix, not from our own insight, not from our own unique perspective on things. If ideas arise within us that aren’t congruent with the ideas that are circulating on the outside, that do not make sense in relation to the official viewpoint then we will disregard them, we will repress them, in fear of being embarrassed, in fear of making fools of ourselves. In order to be valid, an idea must be agreed upon by the collective; in order for society to hold together, we have to suppress our own creativity. To quote James Carse –

It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces… Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished.

Just as we become culturally impoverished as a result of ‘following the script’, so too do we become personally impoverished as a result of being ‘heteronomous rather than autonomous. When we are always deferring to ‘what’s on the outside’ then this means that we are ‘neglecting what’s on the inside’, and that means that our ‘inner life’ becomes impoverished. It doesn’t just become impoverished, it becomes non-existent; it gets so we don’t even know what ‘an inner life’ is.  We now have the outer (or generic) life in place of the inner one but the thing about this is that the generic life isn’t actually life at all – it’s merely a mechanical formula, a meaningless script to be endlessly repeated. We can come back to the idea of potential here – merely living the generic (or socially prescribed) life then we are of course merely what we have been defined as being and this means – quite simply – that we don’t have any potential. The game we’re playing denies our potential – it automatically denies our potential since because the game (or the script) doesn’t recognise anything but itself and ‘itself’ doesn’t have any potential. It is only what it is defined as being; ‘what you see is what you get’, so to speak – there is no more.

Instead of potential (which is the same thing as depth) the prescribed life has ideals which we are continuously being pressurised to accord with. The better we are at reflecting society’s ideals (which on the level of the individual are quite meaningless) the more we are rewarded; far from realising our potential therefore we are ‘mimicking some sort of external standard’, some sort of ‘artificial template’ that has nothing to do with us. The more effort and time we put into actualising the societal template the further away we move from realising our potential; these two things – ‘optimising our game’ – and ‘personal growth’ are absolutely incompatible. One does not grow as a person by striving mightily to ‘be what society wants us to be’, in other words (which, when we put it like this, would seem to be pretty much undeniable). The social world – despite all its protestations to the contrary – doesn’t care one jot about our personal growth or well-being; on the contrary, its continued integrity depends upon us not growing, us not realising our potential. Its continued existence depends on our obedience, not our growth! The social system can hardly be blamed for this either, since it is functionally incapable of being otherwise; The responsibility lies squarely with us, not the collective which we hand over all responsibility to.

Our mental health can’t be ‘handed over for the collective to take care of’; Other things can be – the transport system, the water or electricity supply, the distribution and storage of foodstuffs, the treatment of sewage, and so on – but this thing that we call ‘mental health’ absolutely can’t be – mental health has nothing to do with arbitrary standards (or parameters) that have been set by a collective! Mental health has nothing to do with ‘conforming to an ideal’ – when we conform to an ideal this benefits the system that we are conforming to but it sure as hell doesn’t benefit us! We’re the ones who suffer here, not the system. We can’t expect a system that is made up of fixed rules or regulations to help us grow as the individuals we (potentially) are; we can’t expect this any more than we can expect it to somehow ‘cure’ us of the malaise that itself has brought about in us. And yet we do expect it to – it simply never occurs to us that there might be something deeply wrong with this bland assumption of ours…







Image credit – The New European

The Question You Mustn’t Ever Ask

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Reflect Mode is where we take a break from what we’re doing and ask ourselves what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. It’s not that we have to literally ask ourselves the question – that would be too formulaic, too mechanical to do us any good. That’s not being reflective, that’s just ‘ticking the boxes’, that’s just ‘going through the motions’. Reflecting isn’t a mechanical process…

Reflect Mode isn’t something that we do, it’s ‘not doing’, it’s leaving a gap or a space and then seeing what comes to us (if anything). The value of RM is that we aren’t doing it ourselves (i.e., we’re not in control), which means that it’s not just ‘more of the same’; Reflect Mode is like being in conversation with someone and pausing so as to see what they have to say on this subject. Reflect Mode involves what we might call ‘the other’, therefore. It takes a degree of awareness (or detachment) to step out of the frame in this way; in the absence of awareness (or in the absence of detachment) we will stay in Doing Mode, when there isn’t any detachment then what we get is guaranteed to be ‘the same old ding-dong’, is guaranteed to be just ‘the same old story, on endless replay’…

Our culture doesn’t support Reflect Mode – it claims to do so (since ‘never stopping to question what we’re doing’ is clearly pathological) but it absolutely doesn’t. We are – as small children – allowed to go around asking annoying questions all day long but we’re supposed to have got that out of our systems by the time we hit double digits, age-wise (or if we haven’t got it out of our system, then it is expected that we will at least have learned to suppress our irritating pointless question-asking and ‘get on board with the programme’. As adults, we learn that asking too many questions is an unprofitable thing to do (and that it is quite possibly even dangerous into the bargain). ‘Adaptation to a system’ and ‘wondering if we actually need that system’ don’t go together!  

What human institution ever welcomed too many questions? If one is a member of a gang, a group, a religion, a particular political affiliation (or whatever else) then the key thing is that we don’t going around asking questions all the time. To question the rules that lie behind a group is to challenge that group’s existence; no group is going to tolerate this in its members. The only way a group gets to be a group in the first place is for everyone to tacitly agree not to question the core tenets by which it all hangs together. ‘Having an agreement not to question stuff’ is how groups are created, whilst persistently asking awkward questions is how we bring them to the end. No agreement ever made will stand too much scrutiny since all agreements are compromises.

When an institution (or organisation) claims to support reflection on our part this is very ironic, therefore. It’s a transparent pretence, and yet we’re loathe to admit this, even in the privacy of our own thoughts. It would be too uncomfortable for us to allow ourselves to realise just how much we have had to compromise ourselves in order to be accepted into whatever group it is that we have joined and ‘compromising ourselves’ is what being a member of a group always comes down to. As Philip K Dick says in Do Androids Dream…’ –

You will be required to do wrong the matter where you go. It is a basic the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life.


To exist within the artificial (or man-made) world is always to do wrong, therefore; we won’t get anywhere in society (or in the organisation in which we work) unless we first bite the bullet and agree to ‘sell out’; we all know this on some level or other even if we don’t like to dwell on it too much! When the artificial world to which we have become adapted claims that it wishes to encourage or facilitate a ‘reflective state of mind’ in its members then this is just a trick – it’s a trick because this is the way the organisation gets to prove that it’s ‘not at fault’, that – far from exploiting us – it is giving us all the opportunities; it does this so it can argue that if there is a problem then it must be our fault for not bothering to make use of the help that it has given us (which would have prevented the problem). This is how this system washes its hands of any culpability, therefore – the system takes care of itself by pretending to take care of us. It doesn’t really need to do help us – it just needs to put on a superficial show of doing so.

It might sound unreasonably cynical for us to say something like this but it isn’t cynicism, it’s realism. We just don’t like to hear it. From the POV of the system, the POV of the organisation or institution, it is providing us with what we need, it is ‘ticking all the relevant boxes’. The POV of the system is always skewed however – there’s no way that it can’t be skewed (which means that ‘being biased’ isn’t something we can blame it for). We can’t blame it for being what it is. An organisation such as a hospital or a factory might for example introduce weekly mindfulness sessions for its staff as a means of supporting them, as a means of reducing the stress that they’re experiencing. No one can reasonably argue that this isn’t the beneficial and helpful thing to do. What we can’t see however is that this is inevitably done for the sake of the institution, for the sake of the organisation. There’s no way that this can’t be the case; the system can’t ever do anything that isn’t ultimately for its own benefit. This isn’t cynicism, it’s straightforward mechanics – that’s how machines work.

If a giant supermarket chain does its bit for the community when it builds a new outlet by building playgrounds for the local children, or by making regular donations to various worthy charities, then whilst this might superficially look like altruistic behaviour (i.e., behaviour that is driven by something else other than self-interest) but of course it isn’t. The entity behind this apparently altruistic action is simply ‘improving its profile’, which is for its own good, not anyone else’s. This may sound like splitting hairs, but it isn’t – a system (or collective) can never see things the way an individual can. Even with the best will in the world they couldn’t do that (and they don’t have the best will in the world, they only have self-interest). The reason a system or a collective can’t see things the way an individual can is because whilst an individual can let go of its agenda, a system or group can’t. It’s not mechanically possible for a system to ‘let go of its agenda’ because it is its own agenda, and its agenda won’t let it let go of itself. A machine is driven by rules and there’s no such thing as ‘a rule that says there should be no rules’ – that’s like ‘having the firm intention that there should be no more intentions’.

Suppose – just to give an example – I am working in an organisation and I’m availing of all the mindfulness sessions that are being offered. The organisation I work for necessarily sees mindfulness in a distorted way – the act of ‘dropping all rules and seeing what happens’ isn’t something that it is capable of comprehending. The idea is of course that by practising mindfulness I can significantly reduce my stress-levels, which will make me both happier and more productive. The system however is only interested in my happiness or well-being to the extent that this will allow me to work better; happy workers who aren’t totally burnt out are always going to be more productive. This is the system’s ‘blind spot’, therefore – it can’t help seeing everything in its terms. If I drop my agenda (which is to say, if I take an unprogrammed break from my non-stop mechanical doing) then I might realise that I don’t want to carry on working there. It might come to me that I just don’t want to work in that organisation anymore (since – as we have said – ‘adapting to the machine’ always involves compromising ourselves). In this case – therefore – mindfulness helps me by allowing me to see that the job is no good for me; this is ‘stress reduction’ for sure, only not quite in the way that the organization in question understands it…

The organisation absolutely can’t understand this – it can’t appreciate how it could be the problem! It can’t see how it could be the problem any more than the everyday ego can see that it is not ‘the centre of the universe’. This illusion of centrality is its blind spot and this means that Reflect Mode isn’t a possibility – no organisation (and no ego) ever reflected honestly upon itself and then voluntarily dissolved itself. That would be like a government voluntarily stepping down from office when they don’t need to, when they aren’t forced to, or even more to the point – like an infectious virus deciding one day to stop infecting people. A genuine individual – on the other hand – can let go of themselves – the possibility is there. This is the great benefit of Reflect Mode, after all the benefit is precisely that we can reflect on what we’re doing in the world and then – potentially, if we see that what we’re doing is nonsensical, harmful, or absurd (or all three) – drop it. A machine can’t do this however – a machine can’t ‘drop itself’. A machine – which is to say, a system or organisation – is permanently ‘stuck in Doing Mode’. A machine is always going to be ‘locked into DM’ because it is its own doing. If a machine were to stop ‘enacting its agenda’ (which it can’t do voluntarily) then it would render itself irrelevant – it wouldn’t be anything then. It would have written itself out of the story.

When we talk about our mode of societal organisation as being machine-like hi has been rigid, based on rules then it’s relatively easy to spot it for what it is; it’s not easy as in ‘falling off a log easy’ but it’s easier than spotting the machine on the inside (which is the Thinking Mind, which is who we take ourselves to be). The TM isn’t who we are, the TM is simply who we think we are. ‘Who we think we are’ is of course just another thought, and most of our lives are spent firmly believing that we are this idea, this thought, and acting accordingly (which is to say, acting in a purely ‘machine-like’ fashion). To quote Gurdjieff –

Man is a machine, but a very peculiar machine. He is a machine which, in the right circumstances, and with the right treatment, can know that he is a machine, and, having fully realised this, he may find the ways to cease being a machine.


We have the potential to reflect upon ourselves and see that we are functioning as machines, see that we are repeating futile / dysfunctional behaviour patterns over and over again for no good reason and to see this is to let go of it. The ‘letting go’ is in the seeing. There is no intention to drop the Machine Self (or to let go of the state of identification), no pressure / coercion / control is used to ‘make it happen’ – all that is needed is to see it and the rest happens by itself. The thing is that a machine can’t see that it is a machine so if I can clearly see this then I can’t be! We are convinced in the West that therapy should be a matter of purposeful doing – clinical psychology at this point in time appears to be obsessed with doing (which includes thinking) to the exclusion of everything. We might argue that therapy is a mixture of Doing Mode and Reflecting Mode – which is to say, first we get the insight and then we act on it (or first we obtain the insight and then we think about it and come to some conclusion about it) – but that’s not how it works. Doing isn’t the thing – there are no conclusions to be drawn and anything we come up with in this line is never going to be any more than a convenient lie. It’s ‘convenient’ because we don’t want to look any further and then have to deal with whatever it is we might learn. We might learn that we aren’t machines but that we act as if we are, and what an upset to the all-important status quo that insight would be! As far as the ‘status quo’ is concerned, that would be an utter disaster (no matter how marvelously beneficial being freed from the Machine Mind might otherwise be)….







Image credit – pxhere.com




No Pain, No Wisdom

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There is no wisdom without pain, no growth of the individual without pain, no ‘freedom from the pattern of habits that we’re caught up’ in without pain. This is something that the ancients knew but which we do not! We’re entirely clueless in this regard…

In our age no value is seen in pain – the meaning that it might have had for us in the past (the meaning it has to ‘traditional’ cultures) has been debunked as a bunch of irrational hocus-pocus. For us, if we find ourselves in pain that we cannot do anything about, then this is wholly negative – this is a disaster, this is shameful, this is something to feel bad about. This attitude – whether we want to admit to it or not – is inherent in our culture – to be suffering from pain that we can’t do anything about is to be a loser. We won’t necessarily go around saying this, but it’s what we think nonetheless.

In our paradigm / worldview the only value is ‘doing well’ or ‘succeeding’ – we only value what seems pleasant and progressive to us. We don’t want anything difficult, anything that can’t be understood as ‘a positive’. We understand it to be the case that to be not ‘living your best life’ (i.e., to be falling short in some way) is to be failing, is to be unworthy – we are not deserving of any respect from anyone, least of all ourselves. We haven’t been able to ‘make the grade’ and that’s de-validating for us. We consider this to be a healthy attitude, a robust attitude that will – we feel – weed out weakness and result in a better (more fruitful) future for the human race (or some sort of vague nonsense like that).

In whatever way it has come about, this deeply pathological attitude somehow makes sense to us (and it certainly doesn’t bear much in the way of serious scrutiny), it has become the template for the way in which we are supposed to be looking at life. This template (or paradigm) doesn’t work out for us in the way that we think it should however – instead of making us stronger it makes an awful lot weaker. It makes us infinitely weaker – it is the ruination of us. Our determinedly positive philosophy backfires on us in a big way because by doing our very best to avoid the unattractive side of life (where everything isn’t just ‘plain sailing’) we have denied ourselves any opportunity to actually grow. We have completely overlooked that side of things, which isn’t very smart of us.

As a result of this superficial attitude we have ended up with the phenomenon of what Ivan Illich calls the anaesthetic society, which is a society where pain is seen as a type of ‘error’ that needs to be eliminated. ‘Eliminating the pain’ is the ideal, it’s the way things should be, and our medical / pharmaceutical technology is directed exclusively towards this end. If we’re left in pain (for whatever reason) and our medical ‘know how’ can’t fix that for us, then we’re an embarrassment. No one wants to know in this case – suffering from chronic pain isn’t very ‘positive’, after all! It’s not something anyone wants to be focusing on.  If we don’t respond to the pain management techniques that we have been given (which is often the case, since such techniques never work as well as we’d like to believe they do) then this is something that no one wants to deal with. If we can’t fix it, then we don’t want to know – we’re going to ‘turn our backs’ on anyone who happens to be in this situation. The problem – as Illich says – is that we are ‘adopting a purely technical approach to pain’ and this has proved to be a terrible mistake –

Traditional cultures confront pain, impairment, and death by interpreting them as challenges soliciting a response from the individual under stress; medical civilization turns them into demands made by individuals on the economy, into problems that can be managed or produced out of existence. Cultures are systems of meanings, cosmopolitan civilization a system of techniques.



If there is no meaning in pain then the suffering of this pain is going to be a meaningless thing too, and so the fact that we are there in this position of ‘suffering unnecessary pain’ – as we see it – is profoundly undermining for us, which is what Ivan Illich is saying. We have therefore shot ourselves in the foot.  This is the hideous spectre of ‘meaningless pain’ which we have made a reality for us; by turning our backs on pain in the way that we have done then – far from empowering ourselves – we have become ‘the helpless and deluded victims of our own avoidant attitude’, which will eventually bring us into a very dark place. This is something we just can’t see, however. We just don’t get it (and we don’t want to get it either) …

On the one hand therefore our ‘anaesthetic-seeking sensibilities’ mean that we will suffer far more than we would do if we weren’t embracing this half-baked self-punishing philosophy, and on the other hand we have deprived ourselves of the conditions that allow growth – the conditions that allow us to develop in a healthy way, to mature, to find genuine meaning in our lives, and so on. Instead, we end up in a helpless dependent state which is no good for us at all (although – all the same – we have to note that it is wonderfully convenient for the spurious authorities that wish to control us). There is a very great fear in us – namely, ‘the fear of growing up’, ‘the fear of taking responsibility’, the fear of leaving the playpen’, and the system is exploiting this fear of ours to the maximum.

We are only too happy to hand over all responsibility to the experts, to the rulers, to the officials, and it is always going to be the case that if we are in the grip of this fear (whilst of course not admitting this fact to ourselves) then forces are going to arise in our environment that will take full advantage of this unacknowledged weakness of ours. It is the lack of acknowledgment regarding this fear that puts us at the mercy of society’s mechanisms of control – if we don’t want to take responsibility then we’re putting an open invitation out there for anyone who wants to take our freedom away! What we’re looking at here is a kind of a natural ‘law’ or ‘principle’ – if it secretly suits us to be exploited then we are – when it comes down to it – conjuring up the mechanisms by which we will be exploited, by which we will be controlled, by which we will be hoodwinked. We always get the type of society we deserve, in other words…

Our attitude – as has often been pointed out – is that we want one aspect of life (the ‘feel-good’ aspect, the ‘euphoric’ aspect) whilst at the same time not wanting the difficult part. We want the rose petals but not the thorns. To this end we have come up with a philosophy of life that validates this, a way of life that ensures that ‘keeping it superficial’ is the road we go down. We’re not given the freedom to behave otherwise, we’re not permitted the freedom to see things from any other angles – our way of interpreting pain and responding to it is codified in the very structure of society. Society becomes the means by which we are facilitated in turning our backs on our own pain, facilitated in our denial of there being any sort of problem. What we call ‘mental health care’ isn’t about supporting us in witnessing our suffering (i.e., ‘bringing it to light’), it’s about managing the symptoms of our neurotic avoidance so that it becomes possible to carry on with it. Our idea of mental health is that it is ‘successful avoidance’, in other words, even though successful avoidance doesn’t really work. Our approach is a purely technical one – it’s about finding techniques for managing pain, not mounting a philosophical inquiry, not going deeper into life…

This is a classic vicious circle – we need to be wise in order to spot our own fear of maturity (and so not fall victim to the hidden need to avoid this fear) but without wisdom we will always put our money on the facile philosophy of life that tells us we don’t need to experience pain or difficulty and this ‘philosophy’ will to do nothing but engender ream upon ream of misery for us. We seek comfort and ease in all things and this idealisation of comfort (this idealization of happy / positive / cool stuff) means that we have put ourselves in a position where we aren’t going to become wise. We’re going to stay dumb! We’ve cut ourselves off from the core of life – which is its difficulty, which is the suffering and turmoil that comes with it – and as a result we’re just going to become more and more helpless, more and more deluded, more and more dependent and the forces that we have made ourselves dependent on don’t have our own best interests at heart, no matter what we might like to think…





Image credit – xxicollective.com



The Negative Approach

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The negative approach doesn’t reveal to us what is true or right, it doesn’t give us a path to follow, or ‘list the steps we need to take’. It gives us no map of the terrain, no metaphysics, no overview of what’s going on, or ‘what it’s all about’. It doesn’t do any of these things and that’s the whole point of it – the whole point of the via negativa is that it takes away whatever it is we think we know and gives us nothing in return.

The via negativa has never had very much in the way of mass appeal, therefore. It has never figured in any list of ‘what’s trending right now’! For most of us (for almost all of us) what we’re looking for is the exact opposite of this – we want to be given a path to follow, we want to be told what the steps are that we should take, we want an explanation of what’s going on and instructions as to what exactly we should be doing. We want it spelled out for us in nice black and white terms so that everyone can clearly see what’s true and what isn’t true, what’s right and what is wrong. We want all of that to be taken care of for us so that all we have to do is conform to whatever system it is that has been laid down for us.

In one way this seems reasonable enough, the desire to be guided in this way seems eminently prudent – think about all the mistakes we could make otherwise! Surely – we say to ourselves – there are wise people (or experts!) out there who can do this for us. It doesn’t (or at least it shouldn’t) take too long however for us to work out that there is a very big problem with this implicit demand of ours however, the implicit demand to be ‘guided’ or ‘shown the way’! It shouldn’t take us too long to spot the big problem with this because this is what has been going on for the whole of human history and it hasn’t ever done us the slightest bit of good. The desire to be guided by someone else translates – when it comes down to it – to the unhealthy willingness to hand over responsibility to someone (or something) else. We want someone else to ‘tell us what our lives should be about’, and that’s asking for trouble!

If we were to look at human history in psychological terms (rather than focusing on tedious accounts of the reign of Kings and Queens, or the dates pertaining to this battle or that battle) we would see that is only ever been one thing happening (albeit in many different guises) and that ‘one thing’ is the ongoing struggle to convert everyone else to seeing the world in the same way that the group we belong to does. This has absolutely nothing to do with any concern that we might have with that inconsequential little thing called ‘the truth’, and it has everything to do with the pursuit of power. Being the one ‘who gets to say what reality is’ is the ultimate expression of power, it’s the ultimate expression of power because it’s the ultimate form of control. If I get to be the one who defines how you perceive (or understand) the question of ‘What is reality?’ then I control you absolutely. Control doesn’t get any more ‘total’ than this…

Friedrich Nietzsche makes the comment:

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

When we have the power to determine which ‘interpretation’ is the official one (the only one that people ever get to hear about, the one we all have to go by) then we have complete control and – from a psychological perspective – this is what we all want. Control – we might say – is the ultimate commodity from the POV of the idea that we have about ourselves (i.e., the ego) because it is only because by being in control of how things are seen that this idea appears to be actually real. This makes ‘control’ not just important, but essential. If I have control (with regard to how things are to be seen) then I can use this to give myself high status, and anyone who is against me low status – within my own subjective sphere I can always make myself out to be ‘the good guy’ (or ‘the one who is in the right’) and this self-serving distortion of the truth is of course the classic hallmark of the everyday ubiquitous ego! We see it going on all the time…

On the personal level therefore, we have the power to tell ourselves whatever lies we want to and ‘get away with it’, and so this is what we – generally – do. We would like to extend this sphere of power if we could however and be able to control other peoples’ subjective reality too (if we could) and this is what lies behind the drive to wield power. This is why we (as egos) are forever playing nefarious ‘power games’ with those around us – it’s the natural progression of what we are already doing. Not everyone can succeed at this however and so we get this situation where we band together in groups, which vastly amplifies our ‘ability to distort reality and get away with it’. The bigger the group the greater the ‘power’ the group has and so our motivation – as ‘group members’ – is always to convert everyone else to see things the way we do, in ways that can be either subtle, or extremely crude. History bears witness to our ongoing attempts to control how reality is seen, therefore.

There are two complementary things going on here, we might say – there is the drive to be the one who defines ‘what is real’, and there is also the drive to conform to a convenient group identity so as to have our lives defined for us. In a crude way, we could say that there are ‘those who want to have reality defined for them’ and ‘there are those who want to do the defining’ (and enshrine their elite status within the set up that they themselves have thereby created). There’s not as much difference here as we might think, however – it turns out that it’s ‘all the one game’ (which is ‘the game of thought’, ‘the game of defining and being defined’). If I get to make up the rules of the game myself, which will of course be to my own advantage (as we all understand); if I define reality then you can be sure that I will do this in order to suit myself.

We might for example think of the Christian Church over the last thousand years or so – what better position could the Church put itself in than the position of being able to authoritatively say what life and death is all about, and cast themselves (conveniently enough) as ‘the exclusive mediator between God and Man’? It’s no surprise that the Church held on to this position for one thousand years or so or so – they were ‘the definers of reality’ and this brings serious perks. The Church Fathers thus demonstrated themselves to be consummate masters of the power game, and all in the name of saving souls!

The advantage gained here is entirely illusory, however. The one who wields power is just as hopelessly trapped as those who have been ‘disempowered’; the use of power is an evil to everyone concerned and there is no good outcome in it for anyone, despite what we all think. We think that this is the key to everything but it isn’t – the winner of the game is every bit as much a victim of the game being played as the loser is. That’s because the winner is – of course – just as much ‘defined by the game’ as the as the losers are; everyone playing the game imagines that playing successfully will allow them to ‘escape the game’ but it doesn’t. There is no ‘liberation’ to be had as a result of game-playing, no matter how well we play!

Power means that we get to take away the freedom of those less powerful than we are, the ones who are not as clever as us (or as lucky as us, perhaps) – they have to dance to our tune then. We’re in the coveted position of ‘being in control’; but the benefit here is an illusion, as we have just said – it’s an illusion because we’re tied into the arrangement just as much as everyone else is. We are being controlled by our own ‘need to be in control’, and so we have (paradoxically) given away our own freedom in the act of taking it away from others. The idea that there is this ‘supreme benefit’ in being a winner is ludicrous – the benefit in question is only nominal (which is to say, it only exists within the terms of the game). There is no freedom in a game, not for the winner or the losers! The only thing that benefits us – the only thing that’s worth anything – is freedom and no one ever became free as a result of exercising power!

The mediaeval Church got to say what reality is for everyone else, and it made sure to take up a privileged position in the hierarchy that it was responsible for creating, but when we look at it we can see that the members of the religious elite closed down reality for themselves just as much as they did for the population as a whole (who were given no autonomy, no voice, no influence, no ‘say so’). In recent times the game is changed of course – superficially, at least. Now, those with power have defined what life is all about in a different way – it’s not about God and the devil (or Heaven and Hell) anymore (and doing everything according to ‘religious rules’) but rather it’s about ‘buying and selling’, it’s about consumerism, it’s about ‘the law of the marketplace’. [The basic idea here being that happiness (or ‘well-being’) is a product to be bought and if we want to be able to afford it then we have to engage with the social game, and – essentially – sign our lives over to it.]

This is therefore another way of oppressing people therefore, and a very clever one at that. This is another way of having our freedom taken away from us without us realizing it. The ‘freedom’ we’re talking about here isn’t some vague wishy-washy metaphysical notion but something very concrete, something very down-to-earth, something very real. The freedom that has been taken away from us by having reality defined for us is quite simply the freedom to be something other than what we have been defined as being.

The freedom that has been taken away from us (via the masterful exercise of power) is the freedom to be anything other than what we have been defined by our society as being. But the rub here is that what we’ve been defined by society as being isn’t a real thing at all – it’s just a fiction that we have been persuaded to believe in. We might therefore think of various shortcomings or problems in society and tried to come up with ways to fix these problems, but this is beside the point entirely, once we see what ‘the collusion which is society’ is really all about. Society exists to prevent us from having any awareness of who we really are, any connection with who we really are. It just wouldn’t work otherwise – we wouldn’t have any interest in this artificial system of relations if it hadn’t sneakily substituted itself for real life (which is not and never could be defined or regulated). As Alan Watts says, “To define means to fix, and, when you get down to it, real life isn’t fixed.” The Defined World – and who we supposed are in that Defined World – is made up purely of ideas. It is purely and simply a manifestation of hyperreality and hyperreality operates by eliminating (or ‘denying’) the genuine article.

Any positive approach – without exception – does this; by their very nature, positive approaches always function by taking away our freedom. That’s why they are called ‘positive’ – that’s what ‘positive’ means, philosophically speaking. That’s how hyperreality functions – hyperreality functions by taking away our freedom and then telling us that it has given us something great. Positive reality – therefore – gest to exist by providing us with the illusion of freedom in place of the real thing. It gets to exist by ‘substituting itself for the real thing’ (which is to say, by substituting itself for ‘the negative or unstated reality’), by – in other words – ‘controlling us without us realising that we’re being controlled’.

Positive approaches are all about dislocating us from reality. To be guided or defined by any authority is to be hoodwinked, is (without exception) to be sold a fake reality. To be defined is to be the victim of aggression; it is to be exploited down to the nth degree. This business of ‘seeking to be told what life is all about’ (or ‘wanting to be the one who tells others what life is all about’, which is the same thing backwards) has been going on for as long as human beings have existed, and no one has ever benefited in the least bit from this. As we said at the beginning of this discussion, allowing ourselves to be hoodwinked by ten-a-penny ‘positive worldviews’ is what we absolutely ALWAYS do. It’s the only play in our playbook. The negative approach however is very different – the negative approach doesn’t take our freedom away, it returns it to us. The via negativa doesn’t compel us to identify with the social fiction – on the contrary, it shows up that cheap and unpleasant fiction for what it really is…




Living The Stereotype

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We live our lives in a world that is made up of other people’s thoughts, other people’s thinking. This is an idea which we can all relate to on a more-or-less superficial level, but which actually goes far deeper than we might imagine. We generally believe that thought ‘sheds light on the world’ and that each idea (once it has been scientifically approved of and added to our store of knowledge) takes us a little bit further in the direction of the truth, but that just isn’t how thinking works! We don’t – as a culture – validate thoughts or ideas for ourselves because they are true, but because they fit what we want to hear, because they provide us with ontological security. Each additional thoughts or idea about reality takes us further and further away from the truth, not closer to it. We claim – both individually and personally – to be interested in knowing the truth, but this doesn’t actually turn out to be the truth! We lie when we say we’re interested in the truth…

Living in a world that is constructed out of other people’s thoughts (which is what Robert Anton Wilson refers to as ‘our consensus reality tunnel’) turns out to be a total disaster because it takes something very important (or rather something essential) away from us and that is the chance that we have to live our lives ourselves, ‘first hand’, as it were. When this possibility is taken away from us this leaves us nothing with nothing at all – just a faded copy of life, just a poor shadow of the real thing. We are left in the position of having been cheated out of life itself and yet – despite this – we never protest. We don’t take to the streets in outrage – we don’t even see anything wrong with this way of doing things. As G.I. Gurdjieff says,

This strange trait of their general psyche, namely, of being satisfied with just what Smith or Brown says, without trying to know more, became rooted in them already long ago, and now they no longer strive at all to know anything cognizable by their own active deliberations alone.

Not only do we see nothing wrong with this setup, we see it as an opportunity for us to advance ourselves, an opportunity for us to do well in life and prove our worth. What we don’t stop to consider in our mad rush to make something of ourselves (and to avail ourselves of whatever is out there to to be availed of) is that there is something essential which we’ve quite forgotten about. We’ve forgotten to ‘check things out for ourselves’ rather than taking everything on trust and this means that we are in great danger of proceeding on a totally false (if not to say totally ludicrous) basis. And if our starting-off point is wrong then it doesn’t matter how much effort we put into what we’re doing, it’s all going to be ‘precious drinking water poured into the parched desert sands’ -we’ll never get it back and it won’t do the slightest bit of good to anybody. This is what J.G. Bennett refers to as the principle of Waste.

It’s as if we’re handed a parcel upon entering this world, and we’re told that it contains something very valuable in it (namely life) which we must be sure not to waste or throw away, but then we never bother to take a look at so as to see what it really is. Other people have told us what’s in it, what it entails, and how should go about living it, etc., and so we never bother to find out for ourselves. We take what we have been told on trust, just as those who are telling us took it on trust, and as a result of this misplaced trust we enter into the Circle of Confusion which is what ensues when ‘everyone copies everyone else’. We are provided – in effect – with The Book of Rules and all the emphasis is on correctly following these rules. No emphasis at all is placed upon investigating the rules and checking out their provenance. Quite the contrary is true – we are actively discouraged from doing so. We will be punished most severely for questioning them, for daring to think that we know better…

There are rewards for believing in the Presented Reality (in the same way that Jung says that there are rewards for pretending to be identical with our societal roles or masks) and this is what causes us to adapt to the template that is being offered to us. We’re getting on board with the story that’s being told us (because that story seems to be ‘where it’s at’, ‘where it’s all happening’) but it turns out that this is a path that takes us nowhere at all since it’s not actually our life we’re living but someone else’s second-hand idea about what that life should be. ‘Agreeing with the idea’ brings approval and acceptance and all that sort of stuff, but because the idea we’re agreeing with is what we might call ‘a hollow cliché’ or ‘blank stereotype’ this act of reckless identification it’s hardly going to pay out any dividends for us further down the line, which we’ve been told we can expect. We’ve been told that if we follow the rules then we’ll go to heaven but that just isn’t true – it’s just a device to sucker us, it’s just a trick to get us to play ball…

It’s not that anyone is deliberately deceiving us (although this can happen too, of course) there’s nothing deliberat a about what we’re describing here since everyone else is in exactly the same boat as us. Everyone else is doing exactly what we’re doing, which is ‘trusting the story of things that is being put about’. We might feel that we’re different and individual and not like every other random person on the street but inasmuch as we are buying into the same story of things that everyone else is buying into we are just another version of them. We’re another version of them because ‘the story of things’ we buy into defines us (rather than vice versa) – it tells us who we are and we can’t help believing it. ‘Heedless social adaptation’ is a mistake that we’ve been making for as long as human beings have existed; it’s a mistake that everyone makes, a hole that we all fall down, and – what’s more – it’s a mistake we don’t ever seem to learn from, a hole that we never climb out of. We just keep on repeating the same old mistake over and over again.

We’re drowning in a sea of ontological insecurity but instead of helping each other we’re pulling each other down (in our panic) into the mire of false identification; it isn’t the ‘sea of ontological insecurity’ that’s the mire but rather our attempted solution to it. Just as a drowning man might drown someone who comes to try to save him (unless they are cautious) so too we make matters worse for ourselves by trying to hold onto (and thereby ‘make real’) stuff that isn’t real. The only thing that can save us from our fate – the fate of ‘unquestioningly holding on to the official-but-untrue narrative of things’ – is the courage to go it alone, the courage not to grasp on to the framework of ideas that everyone else has grasped onto in the attempt to save themselves. Trying to save ourselves doesn’t work – trying to save ourselves is how we sink ourselves! The only thing that does work is for us not to attempt to save ourselves (which means ‘not compulsively buying into some convenient narrative’). When we try to save ourselves we enmesh ourselves in thought all the more and thought – like a heavy iron chain – unfailingly sinks us. Thought is ‘our attempt to hold on’ and the problem with this – as we’ve just said – is that there’s nothing there to hold onto. This means that it is our ‘attempted holding on’ that is the problem, and not the lack of anything to hold onto.

There is – we might say- a ‘psychological principle’ here that we can’t afford to ignore, a principle which states that a generic, virally-propagated idea of ‘what our life should be’ isn’t a legitimate substitute for us discovering, first hand (in a totally unique fashion) the truth for ourselves. Ignoring this principle means that we will pay a very high price in the form of suffering and while it’s easy enough to say the word ‘suffering’ and talk about it as if we actually know what we’re on about, when the thing itself comes along it’s a different story. The mistake we make is to ‘go along with a cheap copy for the sake of not having to make too much effort’ which – as everyone knows – is always a false saving. If I were to have an operation to replace a valve in my heart with a prosthetic unit then you can be sure that I won’t go for a ‘knock-off copy of a reputable brand’ just for the sake of saving a bit of money, and yet – when it comes to life itself – it seems that we couldn’t care less! It looks very much as if – for us – ‘saving money’ is the only consideration that matters…