Life In The Consensus Reality [Part 1]

The consensus reality works by not letting anyone see beyond it. This is such an obvious statement that we hardly need make it – if anyone were to see beyond the consensus reality then it would of course stop being ‘a consensus’ and when the consensus reality stops being a consensus it can no longer be a ‘reality’ either! It will in this case be nothing more than ‘something we agree to believe in’, which is all that it was all along of course. In order for the consensus reality to work as a reality it is strictly necessary that we never see beyond it, or think beyond it. That’s the one condition we have to adhere to – we can do whatever we like, just as long as we adhere to this. What’s more – and this goes without saying really – we have to make sure that we never go beyond whatever the consensus view is whilst at the same time never seeing that this is what we are doing. It is an absolutely necessary requirement that we be restricted without knowing that we are, ignorant without ever guessing that we are. Just as long as this is the case, we can do absolutely anything we want. This is the dubious freedom granted us by the consensus reality!


The CR (to the extent that we are aware of it at all) probably seems like a fairly harmless sort of thing – irritatingly petty at times perhaps, but basically harmless. It isn’t harmless, however! The CR is far from harmless – it’s a spider’s web from which we can’t escape. We can agree that it is ‘functionally useful’ but this doesn’t mean that it is in any way harmless. Because all meanings are fixed in the CR (because we can never go beyond the meanings that have been set by the system) we are able to use words and know that everyone will understand them as we meant them and in no other way; this is useful in a practical way but it is also a trap. It’s a trap because the fixed meanings that our words have control us, have power over us, have a ‘determining influence’ over us. It might seem odd to say that fixed meanings ‘control us’ but a moment’s reflection is all that is needed to show that this must indeed be the case – as soon as we take a fixed (or literal) meaning for granted and start operating on that basis we create a world that reflects those meanings back at us wherever we go. We create a closed world, in other words. This is the same as saying that when we use rules without acknowledging that we are then these rules will constitute an absolute limit to our existence, a limit that we cannot ever question. The only questions we can ask are those that are predicated upon the rules which we are taking for granted, and so our ‘mode of questioning’ is itself a manifestation of our unexamined rules.


We could make a list of all the things that we human beings have invented over the course of the years, including such things as the printing press, the sewing machine, dynamite, the steam engine, the aeroplane, the computer, the television set and so on. The thing that never gets put on this list however is the consensus reality and this really is a pretty big invention! Not only that, but it’s the type of invention that subsumes all other inventions, the type of invention that subsumes our entire lives in fact, so this surely makes it worthy of mention. The CR is reality for us so that must put it on top of any list we might like to draw up with regard to all the clever things we have invented. Tools and instruments and machines are one sort of thing but manufacturing our own reality is quite another kettle of fish. How the hell do we even do that? How is it possible to ‘create a reality’?


The problem here of course is that we don’t recognise the CR as being an actual thing and so we never do ponder the question of how we managed to pull off the stunt of ‘creating our own reality’. We have in other words invented the consensus reality without knowing that we have invented anything. This being the case, we get ‘subsumed by the system’ without being any the wiser with regard to the fact that something extraordinarily significant has actually happened here. The simulation isn’t content just to be a simulation; it actually replaces what it has simulated so that there is no further need for the original, as Jean Baudrillard says. The hyperreal is a fundamentally aggressive type of phenomenon – it can’t rest until it has converted everything it comes across to its own ilk, to its own formula. Everything is converted to Disneyland. Then – and only then – can it ‘rule supreme’. Who’s to say what is really ‘real’ when reality itself has become something we are no longer capable of registering, something that we’re not even able to miss? Anything can be real, in this case; anything can be real because there is nothing to show up illusion for being illusion. There is no one left to challenge the Great Liar which is the system.


The consensus reality is created via our agreements, as we started off by saying. We make an agreement with regard to what is true or what is important and then we get trapped in this agreement. It might be wondered why this should happen – an ‘agreement’ sounds like a positive sort of thing, after all. Surely – we might argue – it’s good to agree on stuff because then we can get on with each other on the basis of the agreement that we have made. That’s how civilisations come into being, after all. All great civilisations are founded upon a tacit agreement as to what is important in life, as to what our values are, and so on. The fact that agreement forms the basis upon which our collective endeavours can take place is one side of the coin (and this certainly does seem to be a positive thing) but what we are not so quick to see is that an agreement of this sort – by its very nature – is something that can’t be altered once we have made it. Our agreed-upon foundation wouldn’t work as a foundation if we could go back any time we wanted to and change the details of our agreement. We aren’t free to ‘disagree with our original agreement’, in other words, because if we did then there would be no more basis, no more foundation. This is the whole thing about ‘making rules’ to govern society – once we’ve made the rules we have to abide by them! Rules are rules, after all…


Civilisations and cultures are created on the basis of the agreements we have made it is true, but the other way of putting this is to say that civilisations or cultures work by repressing the questioning of our original agreements, our original assumptions. The CR works as a world, as a reality, only because it has surreptitiously taken away our ability to ask original questions, or see the world in an original way. We don’t know that it has done this, but it has all the same. Perhaps this is the price we have to pay for any sort of culture, for any sort of ‘group’ that we can have the convenience and comfort of being part of, we might wonder. Perhaps that’s just the way things are… If so however (and it is inarguable that it is) then this is surely a price that is too prohibitively high to be worth paying! To lose the capacity to see the world (or ourselves) in an original way is to lose rather a lot, after all. We are losing more than we realise here because ‘our ability to see the world in an original way’ is actually our individuality and our individuality is who we actually are!  Aside from this, we are nothing; aside from this, we don’t even exist – not really.


One’s individuality is not a small thing, even though it’s easily overlooked; if we were to lose our individuality, who would we be, in this case? We could actually be anybody because all of us are perfectly interchangeable when this element called ‘individuality’ is taken out of the picture. We actually are ‘anybody’, even though we don’t know it. We are Jung’s ‘Everyman’. We are (in this case) no more than perfectly disposable representatives of ‘the Borg’. There is a concept in sociology known as ‘false spontaneity’ and false spontaneity is where we come out with conditioned views and opinions in such a way that we really do think that we are the original author of the view or opinion in question. It absolutely does feel as if we are and yet at the same time these views are mere ‘prejudices’ that we have picked up along the way without realising it. It’s our ‘programming’ in other words. We feel that these are our genuine views just as we feel ourselves to be ‘genuine individuals’ when this is not at all the case. It can’t be the case just as long as everything about us is supplied by society; it can’t be the case when we are in a state of ‘automatic agreement’ with the consensus reality and are therefore in the position of being completely defined by it. We can’t be defined by the CR and yet at the same time be ‘the true individuals that we are’, obviously enough! We can’t have it both ways. The individual has to be sacrificed for the sake of the state, as Okakuru Kakuzo says in The Book Of Tea

Definition is always limitation – the “fixed” and the “changeless’ are but terms expressive of a stoppage of growth. Said Katsugen, “The sages move the world.” Our standards of morality are begotten of the past needs of society, but is society to remain always the same? The observance of communal traditions involves a constant sacrifice of the individual to the state. Education, in order to keep up the mighty delusion, encourages a species of ignorance. People are not taught to be really virtuous, to behave properly. We are wicked because we are frightfully self-conscious. We never forgive others because we know that we ourselves are in the wrong. We nurse a conscience because we are afraid to tell the truth to others; we take refuge in pride because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves. How can one be serious with the world when the word itself is so ridiculous!


The ‘price we are paying’ is the loss of who we are therefore, and the fact that we do not perceive this loss – since we have been automatically provided with a false sense of individuality  – does not in any way make it less significant as a loss. We will continue to believe that everything is fine, that everything is OK (for the most part, anyway) but underlying this conditioned perception that ‘everything is OK’ there is a howling void. This isn’t the ‘fruitful void’ spoken of in Buddhism but a sterile void, a blank void – it is ‘the voidness or absence of our actual true nature’, which is not a convenient societal construct. Much has been made in recent times of our growing lack of ‘resilience’ with regard to the difficulties and challenges that come our way in life. Possibly – it is said – this is a trend that is occurring at the present moment – the eroding or undermining of our natural ‘resilience’. We don’t know the half of it, though! We’re missing the point in a big way. Current thinking on the subject is that there can be such a thing as a ‘course’ or a ‘therapy programme’ to build up our resilience and teach us skills and strategies that we can use in difficult situations in order to ‘cope’ better (‘coping’ and ‘managing’ are two of our favourite words in therapy, it seems). We imagine that with the correct ‘coping strategies’ we ought to be able to weather the storms that life throws at us. Rules are a substitute for consciousness however, as Jung says – and they are not a very good substitute either! Our tacit assumption is that the central deficiency that we are suffering from (the ‘invisible elephant in the room’, so to speak) is the ‘lack of who we truly are’ and we are supposed to get around this deficiency by learning skills and coping strategies. How do we think this is ever going to work? Resilience isn’t an ‘add-on’ or an ‘extra’, it is not something we learn, it isn’t something that is ‘separate from us’; what we call ‘resilience’ is actually who we are!








The Challenge of ‘Becoming Real’ (Part 1)

The whole area of psychological therapy itself starts to look rather suspect at this point, not just this modern thing called ‘resilience training’. If our core problem is that we are ‘unreal people living in an unreal world’ (and if this is what lies behind our neurotic symptomology) then no amount of two-dimensional ‘fixing-type’ therapies are going to help us! Band-aids aren’t really going to be the answer here, no matter how hopeful we might be. When we are unreal people living in an unreal world then no type of ‘trivial, rule-based procedure’ that we might enact us is going to cut it when things really start getting rough. Rules can’t help us in the task of becoming independent from rules, after all!

 

What’s more, we don’t have to be a stereotypical selfie-snapping narcissist in order to qualify as being ‘unreal’; this is a general condition rather than being some type of exotic psychopathology. We’re all ‘unreal’ in this particular ‘psychological’ way when it comes down to it. We can pick the most normal-looking, well-adjusted, competent person we know and the chances are very much that they will qualify as being ‘unreal’ in the sense that we are talking about. The whole point that we are making here is that it is possible to be superbly adjusted to this consensus world of ours and yet at the same time be unreal. We are unreal precisely because we are so superbly adapted to the consensus reality – we are taking the illusion much too seriously, in other words. We are taking something seriously that we oughtn’t to be taking seriously and that is the whole root of the problem right there. We are taking our games, our conventions, our arbitrary preoccupations, more seriously than we are taking reality itself, and there is simply no way anyone can say that this very peculiar orientation of ours isn’t going to have major ramifications in the field of mental health!

 

When we are adapted to the socially-constructed world we immediately feel confident in ourselves and this is the confidence of a game player who is good at playing their game. Within the context of this game, this confidence is entirely justified; outside of the game however it’s not, and this is where the big problem lies. The ‘big problem’ comes about because we don’t understand the game to be a game; we don’t think that there is anything outside of the game in other words, but there is – outside of the game there is this little thing called ‘reality’!

 

When we see people who are confident, self-assured, socially integrated, well-adjusted, and all the rest of it this doesn’t mean that we are in a state of good mental health. The inference is unwarranted. In societal terms, we are mentally healthy’ (or saying’, or whatever term you might like to use) (or well-adjusted’), but these are – as we have just been saying – very narrow terms stop test’ – as always – is when things get difficult. When things get difficult do we ‘rise to the occasion’ or do you ‘lose it’? Do we ‘keep our heads’ (as in Rudyard Kipling’s poem) or do we freak out and become utterly useless to everyone concerned, including ourselves? But it isn’t so much about some difficult external situation that comes along unexpectedly to challenge us, that’s only a rough and ready indication, albeit a rather good one. Our mental health isn’t just a measure of our ‘degree of equanimity with regard to difficult external situations’, it also has to do with our ability to be non-reactive and non-judgement in relation to our own state of mind when that state of mind becomes painful or difficult for us in any way.

 

This is a more intimate gauge of our mental health (or ‘resilience’), we might say – how well are we able to stay present with our own difficult mental states?’ It ought to be noted at this point that our ability to stay present with ourselves ‘through thick and thin’, or ‘for better or for worse’ doesn’t mean ‘coping’ with our difficult mind states. This is one of the great absurdities of Western culture – the idea that we have that mental health consist of to a large extent of something as frighteningly superficial as ‘coping strategies’! We are told to be strategic with difficult states of mind; we are taught appropriate ways of ‘managing’ them. Good mental health thus becomes a matter of being a good manager of our emotions, or a skilful manager of our anger, stress or anxiety. The current fashion – and fashion is what it is – is to learn off a whole bunch of coping strategies that are seen as being ‘healthy’ or ‘adaptive’ rather than relying on mechanisms that have been shown to be ‘unhealthy’, ‘non-adaptive’ or ‘dysfunctional’. To say that this is ‘trivializing’ mental health is a tremendous understatement, but it is very hard to find anyone in the mental health services that we even come close to acknowledging this. No one wants to ‘buck the trend’, after all…

 

This approach sounds so eminently reasonable that we never think to question it. We can plainly see that our ‘normal’ response to recurring mental pain is to react in ways that make matters worse rather than better, so it makes sense that the answer must be to do helpful things instead. The only problem with this commonsensical way of looking at things is that nothing we DO in order to help us deal with difficult mental states is going to be genuinely helpful – nothing we do in order to be able to ‘cope’ is going to be healthy or helpful because all we are doing – no matter what strategy in question is – is avoiding pain. So what’s wrong with avoiding pain, we might ask, if we can get away with it? What’s wrong with this plan is of course precisely that we can’t get away with it; we can’t legitimately ‘escape’ or ‘fix’ our own mental pain – all we can do is find ‘new and improved’ ways of ignoring the pain, postponing the pain and generally ‘dissociating’ ourselves from it. All we can do is disconnect ourselves from what’s going on with us, in other words.

 

This is ridiculously easy to see once we actually look into the matter – if something is happening to make me feel that I need to use some kind of coping strategy then this straightaway tells me that there is something there that I need to look at rather than ‘cope with’. If I find a strategy that allows me to use over than the one thing that we can be sure of is that we are not we won’t look at it! After all not taking a closer look at our mental pain (whatever that pain might be) is the one thing that we don’t want to do! Jung makes the point (speaking from the undoubted authority of over half a century of clinical practice) no one ever changes unless their back is well and truly against the wall. If we have the option of not changing (which is to say, if we have the option of utilising some convenient coping strategy) then we are most definitely not going to change. We’ll make the situation more manageable instead.

 

We utilise coping strategies as an alternative to changing, as an alternative to developing resilience. The popular idea that accumulating a whole load of coping strategies (so as to be able to avoid being in that zone where we are ‘no longer in control’) is what being mentally healthy is all about is an extraordinarily obtuse misrepresentation of what being a genuine human being actually is. To be ‘in control the whole time’ – which we think is a good way to be – actually means to be hiding from life; if it were possible to have strategies to cope with every difficult situation that comes along so that they never becomes too difficult (and ultimately it isn’t possible) then we would as a result be permanently removed from life. We would then be leading a life that is ‘safe but sterile’ and that would to be no fun at all. More than simply ‘no fun’, this type of ‘safe’ or ‘managed’ life actually turns out to be a living death – it turns out to be ghastly parody of what life is meant to be.

 

We don’t see things like this because we imagine that it ought to be possible to avoid the more challenging moments in life by using clever strategies and yet at the same time not be insulated from the rest of life (which is to say, the part of life that we would like to engage in / not be disconnected from). We want to ‘cherry pick’ in other words – we want the sweet without the sour, the good without the bad. We want to be reliant on gimmicks and strategies some of the time (the knife is getting tough) but independent from them for the rest of the time, and whilst this idea might seem reasonable enough when we don’t focus on it too much, if we actually were to give it any real attention at all then we would immediately see it to be the purest hogwash! We’re trying to have our cake and eat it.

 

What we are asking for here – without admitting the fact – is the convenient situation in which we can insulate (or remove) ourselves from life with our thinking when it gets too difficult for us and yet not insulate or remove ourselves with our thoughts the rest of the time. Unfortunately for us it just doesn’t work like this – what actually happens is that we get insulated (or removed) all of the time. To be directly in touch with what is happening to us (i.e. not in touch ‘via the agency of the thinking mind’) requires a type of muscle – it requires the development of a type of strength. This strength or muscle grows through ‘weight-bearing’, and the weight in question is simply the inherent ‘difficulty’ of life. Life makes us strong when we don’t avoid it in other words, and to say this is hardly to say anything very new or revolutionary! There are – in life – two roads that we can go down – the road of getting better and better at avoiding difficulty, or the road of getting better and better at not avoiding difficulty! The first road involves control, and the second road doesn’t. The key thing to note here is that we have to put our money on one horse or the other – we can’t ‘hedge our bets’, we can’t ‘chop and change’ to suits ourselves. This is a bit like saying that we either have to decide on lying or telling the truth in order to get by in life. Or to put this another way, we have to decide between ‘finding the easy way round all of our problems’, or ‘doing the required work, whatever that work might be and however much we don’t want to do it’. This doesn’t mean that if we opt for the ‘honest approach’ we won’t ever cheat or tell lies, it just means that we don’t believe that cheating or lungs can really get us anywhere worthwhile, and so because of this insight we won’t invest in the total way that we would have done before.

 

The ‘default setting’ is for us to absolutely wholeheartedly believe whatever it is that the thinking mind tells us, so that when the TM tells us that we are ‘onto a winner’ we get foolishly excited, and when it tells us that we have ‘screwed it all up’ we become equally foolishly despairing. We are ‘one hundred percent gullible with respect to what the TM tells us’ in other words, and this is what lends that particular and peculiar ‘mechanical’ quality to our responses. We don’t have to be 100% gullible though (that’s only our ‘default’, as we have said) – we can learn to doubt the thinking mind and become perhaps only 98% gullible instead! We will still ‘react’ even when we have – to some limited extent – started to see through the thinking mind; we will still react because our ‘perceived well-being’ is still linked or coupled to what our thoughts tell us about ourselves and the world, but there is now a part of us that is not buying into it as much as we used to. The ‘buy in’ is not total anymore, and this changes everything – something else has entered the picture apart from ‘mechanical reacting’. Consciousness has come into play…

 

The point that comes out of this therefore is that it actually suits us to buy into what the TM tells us because if we don’t then we can’t use the thinking process to insulate ourselves from the difficult times in life. This is the argument that we are making here – that if we want to use ‘strategies’ to help us when things get rough then we have to ‘believe our thoughts to be real’, but once we take the step of ‘believing our thoughts to be real’ then we can’t simply go back to not believing in the reality of our thoughts once the need for a coping strategy is past! If we invest in games and game-playing to make ourselves feel more secure in life then we can’t just ‘exit’ our games a bit later on. This is the point that we keep on making – that what we are looking at here is strictly a ‘one-way street’, which is to say, the process in question is ‘irreversible’. Once we ‘start playing the game’ then we can’t just ‘stop playing it’; we can’t just ‘stop playing it’ because we have now lost the capacity to know that the game is a game!

 

 

 

 

Art: wallpaperhi.com

 

 

 

 

 

Throwing Out The Baby

The trouble with generic therapy is that it is all about copying. We can hardly deny this – we have after all made a virtue of copying, just as we have made a sin of deviance. To copy to be trustworthy and reliable, to deviate on the other hand is to be a loose cannon, an untrustworthy individualist. The idea is that when we all sing from the same hymn sheet then the effectiveness of the therapy will not be compromised. Moreover – and perhaps even more importantly – the organisation that you are working for can ‘stand over’ what you doing because it is guaranteed ‘best practice’. Best practice is what we are always hearing about. This then is what we are calling ‘generic therapy’ – it is a therapy that is fundamentally based on approved protocols and procedures.

 

This tends to sounds good to us – it certainly sounds good to organisations and to healthcare providers, but it isn’t by any means as good as it might sound. There is a very serious problem with it and that problem has to do with the way in which we are always ‘copying from a template’, which are of course what protocols and procedures are. Protocols and procedures are templates. If we base what we’re doing on a ‘model’ then this too, needless to say, is ‘copying from a template’. This again may not sound like a problem – templates are after all to a large extent essential in modern life (they are essential in all manufacturing and industrial processes, for example) but one place where templates for understanding and behaving are not useful is in the realm of mental health! Templates are not just ‘not useful’ here, they are a positive liability…

 

Templates are a liability when it comes to mental health because they represent the antithetical principle to consciousness. We may not consider that consciousness does have ‘an antithetical principle’ but it does and that antithetical principle is routine, or habit, or ‘acting on precedents’. Routine is something that we don’t think about but which we just ‘do’, just as a template is something that we don’t look at afresh each time, but which we just take guidance or direction from. A template is there to direct us, not to be questioned, not to be examined. What we are actually talking about here are rules therefore and rules are the quintessential antithetical principle to consciousness. Rules are the antithesis of consciousness because consciousness comes down to ‘freedom of attention’ whilst rules are – of course – the very absence of freedom.

 

When we follow a routine or act on the basis of a template then we are not looking at what we are doing and when we’re not looking at what we doing then we’re unconscious – our attention is following the channels that have been cut for it and this means that we are basically ‘seeing what we have been told to see’ (or ‘seeing what we have been influenced to see’) and seeing what we have been told to see (or seeing what we have been programmed to see)  is not seeing! We could therefore talk in terms of ‘operating on the basis of the templates that we have been given’, or we could talk in terms of ‘copying’ – ‘copying’ clearly indicates that the authority is outside of us, it clearly indicates that the authority is not us. We could also express this idea by simply saying that we are ‘obeying rules’, and this brings us back to the point that we have just made about ‘rules being the antithesis of consciousness’. If it is consciousness that are studying therefore (or trying to ‘work with’ if we are counsellors or therapists) then using models and protocols and procedures and strategies is ‘using unconsciousness to work with consciousness’. We are required to be unconscious (i.e. operate merely as an unreflective tool of ‘the system of thought’) in order to work helpfully as a therapist!

 

When we follow rules (i.e. when we operate on the basis of models, theories, protocols and procedures) then everything is coming from outside of us and nothing is coming from the inside. Everything is come from the logical system/framework that we are working within. This of course is the modern way! What is essentially happening here is that ‘the inside’ is not being trusted, either by the system or organisation that we are working for, or by ourselves. We need our officially approved maps to follow, we need our state-sanctioned rules to obey. This actually annihilates the individual of course and so we are again confronted with the same self-contradiction that we have just highlighted. The self-contradiction that we’re talking about is nothing if not clear – mental health is where we are operating in the world on the basis of our own true individuality, and ‘compromised mental health’ – we might say – is where there are factors that are denying our true individuality and therefore causing us to be what we aren’t. Our true nature has been distorted, in other words. Somehow, therefore, we are expected to work effectively as therapists by abdicating our true individuality, by repressing it, by submerging it under a suffocating blanket of ‘generic responses’.

 

Another way of looking at this in terms of wisdom. Wisdom is a traditional term and as such it doesn’t really have very much currency in the modern world. It has become a rather ‘quaint’ or old-fashioned term – it’s almost as if the word only belongs within the context of fairy tales, legends and myths. Carl Jung might have talked about ‘the archetype of the wise old man’ but what has that archetype to do with this modern ‘scientific’ world of ours? We have put ‘experts’ on a pedestal it is true, but experts are a very different thing to wise men and wise women; experts are a different kettle of fish entirely! Experts work on the basis of ‘evidence’ and evidence always comes from the outside.  We could say that ours is an ‘expert culture’ and although in common speech we will from time to time acknowledge a person we know or have heard of as ‘being wise’, this designation has no credibility within society itself. Wisdom is not something that is every officially recognised. There are no certificates for wisdom, after all; there is no professional body to regulate the ‘holders of wisdom’ and say whether they have a right to this title or not.

 

A huge (but nevertheless invisible) distortion has crept into our present-day culture therefore – a distortion that is particularly ironic in the field of mental health, as we have been saying. In one way of course it makes good sense to regulate the field of mental health and whatever therapies or approaches or professions there might be that claim to have relevance here – illness of any kind, when it’s chronic and not easily dealt with, has always drawn quacks and charlatans in their droves, a lot of them even managing convince themselves that they know what they are doing! When we take this too far however – as we have done – then it is undoubtedly a case of ‘throwing out the baby with the bathwater’. When there is no possibility of truly independent thought (or truly independent perception, which is to say, perception that is not guided by models and templates) then to use the word ‘therapy’ is both misleading and irresponsible. Whatever else is going on here, it isn’t therapy! In the absence of unfettered (or unconditioned) consciousness, there is nothing one human being can genuinely do for another, as far as mental health goes, at least. The blind cannot lead the blind – or if they do, then it is only in the direction of the nearest cliff-edge!

 

The world of therapy is just one example of what we have been talking about here however, albeit a rather pertinent one. In contemporary society everything ‘comes from the outside’ – our ways of looking at the world, our ways of understanding ourselves, our very way of ‘being in the world’ – all of these come from the outside, all of these are supplied by ‘the omnipresent external authority’. This is convenient in one way of cause but it is deadly in another – it is deadly as far as our actual individuality is concerned and our ‘actual individuality’ is who we are! When everything comes from the outside there is no wisdom. Rules are a substitute for consciousness, as Jung says. Instead of wisdom we rely on skills and strategies, tricks and manoeuvres, protocols and procedures, that we take out of our famous ‘toolbox’ as and when needed. This – we hope – will get us through life. Most of the time it does indeed seem that our ‘bag of tricks’ (our ‘collection of coping strategies’) will get us through life safely – it seems as if it will until one day something happens that isn’t just some ‘minor upset along the way’. That’s when things start (very quickly) to fall apart.

 

When something of a more major or long-lasting nature happens we discover (even though we might not know at the time that we are discovering it) that the answer doesn’t come ‘from the outside’. The responsibility is ours and it always was. We might go looking for experts or trained professionals to help us when this happens but – unfortunately – it is almost always the case that our experts are just as empty of individuality and wisdom as we are! That’s the way our society is set up. That’s the predicament we’re in – although none of our experts or trained professionals will ever admit it…

 

 

Art: Thomas Chamberlain, on goodfon.com