One definition of mental health could be to say that it is when there is a movement away from the self, away from who we think we are. This of course is counterintuitive in a big way; we would tend to see mental health as being a measure of the robustness of the self, the robustness of who we think we are. There’s an unspoken or taken for granted literal description of reality that we all buy into and ‘who we are’ or ‘what it means to be a person’ is an important part of this official description. This is the ‘equilibrium view’ of how things are and the equilibrium view is kept in place by everyone who subscribes to it. It is therefore inevitable that any or agreed-upon definition of mental health (whether implicit or explicit) will be normative with respect to the equilibrium value. In current times – when criteria for gauging what is mentally healthy and what is not mentally healthy is collectively decided upon by groups of ‘like-minded’ experts who can essentially be seen as an elite club who are even more homogenous in their thinking than the wider social collective – we are moving very strongly in the ‘equilibrium direction’. The question is therefore, how can we allow a tightly knit group of specialists to be in charge of how we understand mental health when the process by which we come to agree with each other in a group is determined by what amounts to peer pressure rather than by each individual concerned thinking for themselves, which is of course the ‘mentally healthy’ thing to do? In this way we have actually institutionalized psychology, which is a terrible thing to do!
Any independent viewpoint on the matter is always going to take issue with the how ‘the club’ agrees to see things. A club is made up, after all, of people who have tacitly agreed to put their individuality to one side in favour of how everyone else sees things. Group thinking is always an act of cowardice, therefore. The greatest danger facing humankind is without any doubt the danger of ‘mass-mindedness’; as Jung says, mass-mindedness is the breeding ground for psychic illnesses and the contagions, and as a breeding ground for psychic illnesses and contagions mass-mindedness can hardly be expected to come up with a helpful or enlightened way of looking at mental health! The Non-E way of talking about mental health, as we have said, is to say that the movement away from who we think we are, which is also the movement away from who the consensus mind says we are, and since the consensus or group mind is incapable of appreciating or valuing anything other than itself, and since the process of individuation is the process which leads away from everything that the consensus viewpoint holds dear, it is very easy to see why this process of becoming who we truly are isn’t exactly going to be encouraged by the people and institutions around us. For an equilibrium system, any deviation from normative values equals ‘error’ and nothing more, and errors – as we know – only exist to be corrected. Social groups – by their very nature- don’t like deviance, and this is putting it mildly.
All of us have two distinct tendencies to work at work within them – one (we might say) is the conservative tendency and the other is the explorative one. In the first case the values of the past are what matters and anything that leads away from these values is a threat; in the second case the old is seen as a trap precisely because of our attachment to it and what is of interest to us seeing what lies beyond what everyone else takes for granted. Or as we could also put it, the Conservative Mode is where we value security above all else whilst the Exploratory Mode is where we value the truth more than security. ‘Truth’ and ‘security’ are always opposed for the simple reason that in truth, there is no such thing as ‘security’! Or to put it the other way round, we can say that the only way that we can find this supposed thing that we call ‘security’ is by firmly turning our backs on what is actually true. It’s either the one way or the other way – either we are interested in the truth or we are interested in our games, which are our way of avoiding the truth.
We can reformulate our definition of mental health at this point simply by saying that what is beneficial – health-wise – for us is to move in the direction of becoming more conscious. From the conventional point of view this statement doesn’t make any sense because we are all convinced that we are perfectly conscious already; we’re not however – that’s just an idea that we have, the idea that we are actually aware when we are not. When we are in Conservative Mode then the whole point is not to be aware! When we are in CM then we have thoughts about the world rather than being aware of it; we judge the world and have beliefs about it rather than taking an actual interest in it. It is often said that thinking is how we ‘make sense of the world’, but it could equally well be said that thinking is how we ‘protect ourselves from the onslaught of reality’. But why should reality be ‘an onslaught’, we might ask? This tends to imply that reality is somehow hostile to us, against us in some way, and how could that be the case? To think that reality is hostile is to suffer from a paranoid delusion, after all. The point is of course not that reality (as it is in itself, before we get around to thinking about it) is against us but rather that reality (as it is in itself) does not tolerate any insincerity from us. We can’t get away with any games in other words, and the reason for this is simply that reality is itself not a game. This is – needless to say – a fairly obvious statement: things just are what they are (or they aren’t what they aren’t) and that’s all there is to it. A game – on the other hand – is precisely where we pretend that things are what they’re not. Reality – by its very nature – falsifies our games (if we let it) and this is exactly the same as saying that truth has the ‘property’ of falsifying our lies. Of course it does – it could hardly be ‘the truth’ otherwise!
This has nothing to do with morality however, which is something that we ourselves invent in order to coerce ourselves to do whatever it is we think we should be doing, or not do whatever it is we think we shouldn’t be doing. What we’re talking about isn’t morality (i.e. rules) but simply ‘the natural way of things’. The natural way of things is that truth naturally shows up lies to be lies (this being implicit in the nature of the truth), or that reality shows up games for being games, since this is indeed what they are. No violence is being done here – the game is being shown up for being what it is, and the only problem here is from the point of view of the game, since we can only play a game when we don’t know it to be one. So it is the way of things for reality to falsify our games, just as it is also ‘the way of things’ for us to play our games, and to try to hang on to them for as long as possible. It’s all ‘the way of things’, it’s all the Tao, and so there is absolutely no need whatsoever for any ridiculous artificial morality.
The point we’re making here therefore is that it is natural for us to try as hard as we can to defend ourselves from ‘raw undiluted reality’ (which doesn’t give us any leeway to play our games) and that the way we do this is by thinking about the world so as to create a model of it, which we can then relate to exclusively as if the model were the real thing. This is the manoeuvre by which we dodge the essential complexity of the universe, complexity that would otherwise inundate us and overwhelm our made-up boundaries and – as a result – unfailingly falsify our pet models and theories which are always absurdly oversimplified. We avoid the challenge of a multivalent reality by describing it to ourselves in a literal way in other words, and this ‘literal description’ becomes the rule that we have to obey without knowing that we are obeying it, without knowing that there is any obeying going on. This puts us in the situation of ‘being slaves whilst thinking we are free’. First we create an oversimplified world with our thoughts and then we get trapped in this oversimplified or unreal world and this is how we keep a distance between ourselves and the actual truth of our situation!
When we all get together and make a big official ‘literal description of life’ (or literal description of reality) then this collectively agreed-upon description is called society. Part of that description – the most important part – is the description of who we are and this is why we can say that mental health is ‘the movement away from the self’ (or ‘who we think we are’), as well as being ‘the movement away from society’ (or ‘who society says we are’). Mental health is the movement away from our own defences, the defence is that we don’t know about, the defences that we falsely imagine to be some sort of ‘sacred reality’ that we must never offend against.
Societies isn’t just ‘society’ – as we usually understand the term – it is ‘a total package’, it’s a closed way of looking at things that we aren’t allowed to question. Society is the ‘generic mind’, we could say – it is the mind that doesn’t belong to any of us but which – all the same – controls all of us! Living out the course of our lives in the crudely limited version of reality (which is all that society permits us) is actually a travesty, even though no one will ever come out and say this. It’s a travesty that none of us (or few enough of us) will come out and say to be a travesty, for a very simple and straightforward reason that we owe our livelihoods (along with whatever status that we might have in society) to this same travesty.
