Tag: Psychology

The Purely Conceptual World

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We have been given a ‘purely conceptual world’ to live in. Because it is a world that is ‘purely conceptual’ this means that there is nothing at all in it. A purely conceptual world is a world with absolutely nothing in it and yet that’s all we are being given. It’s not worth sitting around and waiting hopefully for ‘something else’ to come out of this world because nothing is going to come out of it no matter how long we might wait! It is absolutely the case that we have been given a purely conceptual world to live in and it is also absolutely the case that we are sitting around waiting for something good to come out of it even though nothing good ever can. This is exactly our situation. We go through life thinking that we’re up against this problem and that problem and that we have got this issue and that issue to contend with, and in a (subjective) way this may indeed be said to be true. The underlying problem however – the problem that we can’t ever see – is that we’re stuck in a purely conceptual reality.

 

To talk about ‘a conceptual reality’ is of course an oxymoron – it can be the one way or it can be the other but it can’t be both. We have reality or we have the concept of it but we can’t have both because the two things are as far apart as any two things ever can be. The conceptual reality is like the reality of a film set that, from a certain angle, looks like the real thing, but which can’t ever be investigated from any other angles without it being instantly revealed for what it is. The whole point is not to investigate it from other angles. ‘Life in the conceptual reality’ means making very sure indeed that we only ever do look at things from the proper prescribed angle therefore. If we look at it any other way then the illusion is abruptly shattered; the ‘magic’ that keeps the film real is lost and then we are confronted with the distinctly un-magical nature of the situation.

 

Our allegiance is always to the reality that is being created by the rational mind rather than anything else and we show our allegiance by feeling cheerful when our thoughts indicate that we should be cheerful and being downbeat and morose when they indicate that this is the appropriate reaction. If I think that I’m doing well then my mood improves, and if my thoughts tell me that my prospects are poor then my mood is correspondingly down in my boots. Such is our loyalty to thought that we were put ourselves through all this on a daily basis. We will suffer all sorts of indignities rather than doubt that what our thoughts are telling us about the world.

 

So if our loyalty to thought causes us to make fools of ourselves by becoming elated or depressed at the drop of a hat, bobbing up and down meaninglessly like corks floating in a choppy sea, then our loyalty to the conceptual mind causes us to devote our attention to a superficial pseudo-reality that has nothing interesting about it at all. So on the one hand we’re making a big song and dance about nothing at all the whole time, and allowing ourselves to be serially transfixed by banalities (when we could be paying attention to something that was genuinely interesting instead, i.e. the real world as opposed to the theatrical one) and on the other hand we are obliged to be very rigid and controlling with our perceptions in case we discover that the drama which is keeping us entertained (or ‘transfixed’) is nothing more than a hollow sham.

 

When we tease these two ingredients apart – the inherent dullness of the pseudo-world that we are compelled to believe in and the (usually) invisible anxiety that is attendant upon the maintenance of this fragile artificial world view – we can see something very significant, we can see two elements of depression and anxiety clearly revealed. What else is depression other than the discovery (the unwilling discovery) that the life which we have placed so much stock in (the life which we have been encouraged to place so much stock in) is utterly devoid of any worth or meaning, and that the ‘sense of self’ which has been constructed in relation to this artificial life is fake and lacking in any genuine sincerity or integrity? And what is anxiety apart from this invented – but all too believable – need to make something work that is never going to work?

 

Our encultured response to depression is to say that it is some kind of mechanical defect and that the life which we construct in relation to the ‘purely conceptual world’ which we have been provided with is authentic and meaningful and interesting and all the rest of it. That this is the case is not up for negotiation; that’s not on the table at all, and so any intimation – no matter how convincing it might be to the individual concerned – is inevitably going to be dismissed out of hand. The possibility of not dismissing it out of hand is something that never even crosses our threshold of consciousness. It never makes it that far, it’s shot down without any further ado, and so the message that the condition is screaming so loudly is roundly ignored by everyone concerned – everyone apart from the sufferer themselves, that is (who can’t really ignore it). This denial of the very obvious message behind depression suits the rest of us very well therefore but it doesn’t help the sufferer at all. Far from helping them, denying the reality of what they are feeling makes their suffering even worse – it is made worse because we – in our professional cleverness – have arrogantly denied the meaning of their most intimate personal experience. This experience – far from being pathological in nature – is actually profoundly healthy and this is the possibility we can never allow for.

 

In the case of anxiety our response is exactly the same. We are receiving a message against our will, we are receiving a message but we are fighting against it every step of the way – we are fighting against it for all we’re worth because it is so very inimitable to us. What the anxiety is telling us – in no uncertain terms – is that the endeavour which we are engaged in is untenable, that it is just not going to work out for us. It’s not going to work out for us because it is all taking place on a false basis; everything is always taking place on a false premise in the purely conceptual world because it is in the nature of concepts to be false. It’s a false basis because ‘the concept of me’ is trying to achieve ‘the concept of something else’; ‘the concept of who I am’ is trying (inevitably) to achieve some goal or other and goals are concepts just as anything else in the PCW is!

 

Anxiety is the same story as depression because the message is so strong, and because it hits us on such a deep level that we just can’t override it, or ‘conveniently reinterpret it’ as everyone else can. We feel it in our bones, so to speak. We feel it on a level that is deeper and more profound than the level of our thinking and so even though thought has been our master up to this point, it has finally being trumped stop trumped by reality (albeit a reality that we don’t like). It can’t stand up to our deeper intuition, even though it tries its hardest to do so. Thought isn’t really the master after all – it only pretends to be. Wisdom comes about as a result of suffering, Aeschylus says. Aeschylus also says that wisdom comes about ‘against our will’.

 

Naturally wisdom comes about against our will – what we are learning undermines everything we believe in, after all. It undermines everything we have invested ourselves in so deeply. If only we are able to understand what Aeschylus is talking about here deeply the process that we are undergoing would be so much less punishing for us. If we were able to have some insight into this timeless truth that would make such a profound difference to our experience, even though the process would continue just the same.

 

If we were supported in this crucial understanding (which could only happen if we as a culture were more psychologically aware, or even psychologically aware at all) we would have a far better chance of having this insight ourselves and then as a result of this insight we would still be mechanically struggling against the awareness that it brings us but we would be at peace with our own struggling. We would be ‘at peace with our own struggling’ (as strange as this might sound) because we would understand it but the problem is that the social milieu within which we are enfolded in is profoundly dismissive or denying of any such insight. We cannot after all – as we have already said – countenance for a second the suggestion that the PCW is devoid of any worth or meaning, or any actual reality. We couldn’t get our head around this suggestion even if we tried – that isn’t a thought that we are able to have.

 

Suppose that I do have the thought that ‘all my thoughts are devoid of substance’ – if I were to entertain this thought (the thought that ‘my thoughts are hollow’) then I would be ‘trusting my mental process in order to discount that very same mental process’ since ‘my thoughts are devoid of substance’ is itself a thought. The thinking mind never really sees through itself, even if it does play at it. When we talk about ‘the hollowness of the PCW’ we are of course talking about the hollowness of thought and so this ‘blankness’ or ‘emptiness’ is something that can never be known about on the basis of the PCW. We can talk about it, as we just have done, we can intellectually play about with the idea quite easily, but it’s a sham – not something that is actually helpful. It is very likely to be ‘helpful in reverse way’ because the more we intellectually play about the concept the more we become trapped in the intellect that is doing the ‘playing about’! We can as a culture field any number of intellectual heavyweights capable of discussing the hollowness of thought but that’s not going to help anyone, least of all them.

 

What does help is to focus solidly on two points: [1] that society provides us with a purely conceptual world to live in, a world that we are almost incapable of ever questioning, and [2] that the invisible hollowness that is inherent in the PCW ultimately manifests itself as neurotic suffering (which is displaced suffering, suffering which we cannot see for what it is, suffering the origin of which is entirely obscure to us. As a culture, we see ourselves as being very resourceful, very practical, and very capable; we also see ourselves as having an unprecedented amount of knowledge at our fingertips  – more knowledge than human beings have ever had available to them throughout the whole course of our history. That is unquestionably how we see ourselves. The thing about this however is that it is all a joke if we can’t see that being adapted to a purely conceptual world renders our lives completely sterile, completely meaningless, completely futile, and that this is the ‘Soul Sickness’ that Jung warned about over 80 years ago now:

Deviation from the truths of the blood begets neurotic restlessness, and we have had about enough of that these days. Restlessness begets meaninglessness, and the lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not as yet begun to comprehend.

As Jordan Peterson says in one of his lectures, psychologists these days are strongly discouraged from mentioning Jung’s name in academic circles; to do so would be the kiss of death because everyone would then realise that you are ‘soft in the head’, so to speak (which is to say, not appropriately rigorous and therefore scientific enough in your demeanour).  No one would ever take anything you say seriously again after this fatal faux pas. No one would ever heed your words ever again. This fact in itself tells us everything we need to know about contemporary psychology! By trying so hard to be ‘scientific’ (whatever we might imagine that to mean) we have departed from our subject. Modern psychology is – at best – a source of confusion. It is a source of confusion because it traps us even more in the purely conceptual world under the pretext of somehow ‘illuminating’ us! Rational ‘therapy’ does the very same thing – under the guise of ‘freeing’ us from our thought-created suffering it compounds that suffering further. All rational therapies do this – there is no way that they can’t, of course…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nondual Psychology

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People sometimes say something to the effect that whilst we can’t necessarily control what happens around us, we can control our reactions to what happens and herein lies our freedom. That’s what we have to work on, in other words – our ‘non-reacting’. This is a familiar enough meme to see doing the rounds on social media sites and – supposedly – it represents an empowering message for us, as is generally the way with such memes.

 

The only problem here is that it isn’t true. It isn’t at all true – we don’t have any control over our reactions and if we were to try to (which of course we very often do) then we would simply be ‘reacting to our own reactions’, which is hardly going to help matters! What makes us think that our reactions are any different to all the other events taking place in our life, after all? What makes them special? There is a rather big ‘unwarranted assumption’ going on here…

 

Our freedom doesn’t lie in attempting to control our reactions to events that are outside of our control. That’s just a straitjacket. All controlling of whatever kind takes away our freedom – controlling arises out of the need to control and ‘needs’ equal – obviously enough – the ‘absence of freedom’. The idea that by acting out of the absence of freedom we can somehow give rise to freedom is, needless to say, utterly absurd. Freedom cannot come out of the lack of freedom; unless there is freedom there right at the beginning then all we will ever do is perpetuate our state of inner slavery, whilst hoping all the while that something is somehow going to change for the better as a result of us ‘persisting in our folly’. This – in a nutshell – is the difference between ‘dual’ (i.e. conventional) and ‘nondual’ psychology – conventional psychology says (in a very serious way) that we can control ourselves whilst nondual psychology laughs and says that we can’t…

 

Odd though it may sound to say it, our reactions have as little to do with us as all the other events that are happening around us. They are also ‘events’ and they also can’t be controlled. All events are – ultimately – not subject to our controlling, not subject to our ‘say-so’. Sometimes we can of course be apparently effective in our controlling, but what we usually fail to see is that – generally speaking – the only reason we are controlling in the first place is because we are ‘not free not to control’. The only reason we are controlling is because we are being ‘controlled by the need to control’, in other words. So in this case even if we do ‘control successfully’ we are still only ‘being a slave’. Life when we are basing everything on control has only the two basic possibilities in it – [1] is where we are successful within the terms of the narrow game we are playing and get ‘a pat on the back’, and [2] is where we fail at the game we are playing and get punished instead. Needless to say, neither of these two possibilities have anything to do with freedom!

 

So when we think that everything is about controlling, and how effectively we are able to control, we have fallen into a trap. As a result of being in this trap we are going to be constantly upset when things don’t happen the way we want them to (or the way we think they ought to) and when we get upset in this way we sometimes try to placate ourselves by telling ourselves that whilst we can’t always control the things that happen in our life, we can control how we react to them. In this way we fall into ‘the trap of controlling’ (or ‘the trap of thinking we need to control’) all over again. We try to avoid one trap by falling into another one and we imagine that this (i.e. controlling ourselves rather than controlling the world) is somehow a more ‘spiritual’ approach to life.

 

The thing that we find so extraordinarily hard to understand – even though it is at the same time so very simple – is that we are ‘an event’ just as everything else in the world is ‘an event’. The universe itself is ‘an event’, and so is everything in it. We can’t (in any ultimate way) control the events on the outside of us and neither can we exert control over ‘the event that is us’! If we could see this then we might be able to accord ‘ourselves’ the basic respect that we (possibly) give to other events. We might accord ‘ourselves’ the respect we (possibly) accord the universe itself. The point is that we just can’t see this however; we can’t come anywhere close to seeing this – instead of seeing who I am as essentially ‘an event’ I see who I am as ‘myself’, and this is another type of thing entirely! We take a type of proprietorial attitude to ourselves (naturally enough) – we claim ownership of ourselves, in other words, which is rather an odd thing to do, when we reflect on it. There is a type of ‘taking things for granted’ type of attitude here that is very different to the respect we might accord some marvellous event that clearly has nothing to do with us. If we could only have this type of awareness about ‘ourselves’ then how very different things would be! It’s quite unimaginable (from our normal everyday perspective) how very different things would be then…

 

When we say – as we did just now – that events can’t really be controlled in any ultimate sense of the word then this of course isn’t going to make a hell of a lot of sense. What else do we doing life apart from control (or attempt to control) things anyway? We are stuck in ‘control-mode’ pretty much all of the time and that’s why we have this nasty habit, in our Western culture, of seeing people as either being ‘successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’, as being either ‘winners’ or ‘losers’. We absolutely don’t see any problem with the ‘paradigm of control’ at all, and yet there IS a problem. There’s a problem whether we see it or not – there’s a kind of gremlin at work behind the scenes that emerges at key moments. There’s a ‘killer glitch’, just waiting to unfold! The confusion that we suffer from arises because of the way control seems to work so well in such a simple, straightforward cases as ‘steering the car’ or ‘choosing what to wear when we go out for a night on the town’ or ‘deciding what we want to cook for dinner’.

 

In these cases we can control without any problem – if I want to cook curry and rice for my dinner then I can have curry and rice, and if I want to cook roast chicken and mashed potatoes then I can have roast chicken and mashed potatoes and there’s no problem here. I get what I want and that they are no repercussions, no nasty surprises to contend with. It’s when it comes to the bigger picture that control no longer works so straightforwardly however – it does work, after a fashion, but only at a price. I can choose to grow either cabbages or beetroot in my back garden and the choice is entirely mine, but when I try to ‘manage’ the whole ecosystem things quickly start to go very badly out of control! The same is true of the human body – when we try to manage the processes taking place in the body by placing more and more reliance on medication (to give another example) then unwanted side-effects quickly build up, that in turn need to be managed. As Ivan Illich points out in Medical Nemesis, when we try to manage (or ‘medicalize’) the whole of human life so as to achieve a desirable standard of health then what we achieve is not actually ‘health’ at all but its exact opposite.

 

Generally speaking, taking ‘society as a whole’ an example, we can say that when we collectively try to manage life and ‘standardise’ it in some way (which we need to do if we are to manage it) then the result is not life at all but some highly ‘unsatisfactory version or analogue’ of life that we then have to spend a lot of time validating and maintaining for ourselves. We will have to repeatedly reassure ourselves that we are ‘living life as it should be lived’ (or that we are ‘having a good time’) even though the truth is that we aren’t at all. We’re actually living a parody of life. By taking control of everything (or rather by trying to take control of everything) we inevitably spoil it, we inevitably ruin things for ourselves. Life itself, in its very nature, is a ‘letting go’, so how do we imagine that ‘trying to take control of it’ is ever going to work out well for us? Life itself is ‘a risk that we have to take‘ so where exactly do we imagine that we are going with our ‘wall-to-wall risk avoidance’ – the ‘wall-to-wall risk avoidance’ that is modern life?

 

The bottom line is that processes of life or of nature cannot be controlled in any ultimate sense and that they’re not meant to be. Freedom lies not in controlling what’s going on ‘successfully rather than unsuccessfully’ but in realising that – at the end of the day – we can’t control it. This insight is freedom! If something happens that I don’t want to happen (if some outcome that I’m negatively attached to comes to pass) then I am in all probability going to negatively react to this and if I have any degree of self-awareness then my negative reaction to the unwanted event is itself going to constitute ‘an unwanted event’ and this is going to tempt me either to attempt to exert control on them, or blame myself for not being able to control them (which is the flip-side of the coin of control). Both of these responses equal ‘resistance’ (or ‘aggression’) and as such they feed into (or aggravate) the underlying issue rather than curing it. And if I try to either ‘accept’ my involuntary reaction to control the situation (or accept my reaction of blaming myself for not being able to control it) then this too will constitute resistance/aggression and so this too will aggravate the underlying issue. I can’t get out of the mess this easily just by using ‘acceptance’ as a tactic!

 

What does help however is to see that both what happens ‘on the inside’ and ‘what happens on the outside’ are independent events and that ‘thinking that we ought to be able to control independent events’ is a suffering-producing delusion’! Thinking that we ought to be able to control life (or control ourselves) is a suffering-producing delusion and it very much helps to see this. We are looking at things in a completely deluded way when we think this and out of our deludedness no good can come. Out of delusion comes attachment and identification, which means that we are going to be ‘hooked on controlling‘, whilst out of awareness comes ‘freedom from the false need to control’ that comes out of identification. Realising that there never was any question of being able to ‘control our reactions’ (and thus supposedly gaining freedom from all the external factors that are controlling how we feel) doesn’t mean that our reactions are then going to continue unchecked (or that they become more exaggerated or violent in their intensity), which is what we always tend to think. Quite the reverse is true – when we realise that there isn’t some kind of supposed ‘external agent’ outside of the-event-which-is-who-we-are that needs to be controlling the event, then peacefulness comes back into the picture – peacefulness being (of course) the one thing that can never be arrived at by controlling!

 

 

 

 

 

The Negative Psychology Of Everyday Life

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When we lose ourselves, and don’t know that we have lost ourselves, what happens next? What’s the story then? How does this peculiar situation work itself out? The awareness isn’t there, so we can’t find out what happens through ‘direct appreciation’ of the fact, so to speak, and yet we will still find out one way or another, sooner or later.

 

How could we lose something as big as ‘who we are’ and not miss it? One point that comes up in relation to this question (the first point, perhaps) is that we don’t miss it at all and that this is something which is empirically verifiable with the greatest of ease. All we need to do is take a look around us, or think about all the people we know, and ask ourselves whether they seem to be aware of ‘missing something very important’. Quite the opposite is usually true of course – we go around thinking that ‘we’re all here’, we go around acting as if our assuming basis is ‘the only true and correct one’. We take this very for granted, and our unconsciousness with regard to this assumption is what gives us our (apparent) ‘confidence’ in everyday life!

 

We could say that this is a statement of the basic human predicament: there is something very peculiar going on, but we can’t for the life of us spot it! We are not here at all, and yet we are absolutely convinced that we are. Because there are so very many people all feeling that they are fully and properly themselves (rather than being merely ‘tokenistically themselves’) this creates a type of ‘illusion field’ that is very hard to break out of, or see out of. We can’t believe that there is something crucially important missing from our lives because everyone else is acting as if everything is perfectly OK and ‘as it should be’; we can’t believe that we are suffering from an absence of our genuine being (which is a kind of ‘negative elephant in the living room’) because no one ever talks about it.

 

This ‘illusion field’ makes it extremely unlikely that anyone is ever going to trust themselves if they do start to get the uncomfortable feeling that there is more to them, or more to life, than everyone says there is (or that ‘there is more to being a human being than society tells us that there is.’) This awareness – we might guess – probably happens to people often enough and there are two ways things can go when it does – either we will go around telling everyone about it (in which case we will quite possibly get diagnosed as being classically psychotic and delusional) or we will have the presence of mind not to inform the world and his uncle about what we have just discovered and ‘keep the news to ourselves.’ We will in this case be able to get on our lives without either being diagnosed as having a mental illness, or in any other way being judged as peculiar or abnormal. The biggest possibility of all however is that we will simply just go along with the very limited expectation of what it means to be a human being that we have been provided with. Any awareness that is contrary to this expectation will simply be disregarded as not making any sense, as not being commensurate with the all-important ‘consensus viewpoint’.

 

So – just to recapitulate – we lose ourselves completely and we have no way of recognising that there is anything missing. This is the basic statement of the human predicament. We have fallen into ‘a dark pool of forgetting’, and as far as we’re concerned there is nothing to have forgotten. There is nothing to have forgotten and so we get on with your business of doing whatever it is that we imagine we have to get on with. We get on with the type of life that we would be obliged to get on with if there were no more to us than just what the collective mind defines us as being, or what our own ‘operating system’ (i.e. the OS of the rational/conceptual mind) tells us we are. The awareness of ‘being present as we truly are’ (for want of any better way of putting it) is gone, and instead we have a sense of ourselves that – very oddly – comes from outside of ourselves via some kind of an ‘external all-determining authority’, whether that external authority be ‘the thinking mind’, or ‘the collective/generic mind which we are all a part of’.

 

We could call the ‘amnesiac’ version of ourselves (the version that’s forgotten who it really is) ‘the mundane self, ‘the everyday self’, and we could ask the question again: what ways does the everyday self have of practically encountering or coming across ‘the lack which is itself’? One (perhaps surprising) way to try to answer this question would be to say that the everyday self encounters the ‘limitation-of-being which it suffers from without knowing that it is suffering from anything’ when it experiences irritation, frustration or annoyance. There is a whole range of situations which routinely cause us to ‘lose our sense of humour’ in this banal and ridiculous way. We’re looking for things to be a certain way and things just aren’t that way, and – what’s more – we don’t have any tolerance for things being any other way than the way we want them to be. Who doesn’t know what this feels like? How many times a day does this happen?

 

What we’re talking about here may seem to be very commonplace and therefore not very illuminating for the purposes of furthering any argument that we might be making, but the ‘obviousness’ of the example that we are using blinds us to what its true significance. The point we’re making can be expressed very clearly and concisely – who we really are isn’t petty-minded, judgemental and intolerant like this! We’re operating ‘below ourselves’, in other words; who we really are isn’t in the least bit upset by things (or other people) ‘not being the way we absurdly think they should be’. This is like a litmus test therefore – if we find ourselves to be irritable, petty minded and judgemental about all sorts of nonsense then that shows us beyond any shadow of a doubt that we are ‘not ourselves’; it shows that we have mistakenly identified ourselves with some paltry illusion of ‘who we really are’.

 

P.D. Ouspensky says somewhere that the false self is an engine for producing negative emotions – it generates negativity of one sort or another on an ongoing basis, just as a badly tuned car engine produces black choking smoke. The reason for this (we might add) is that the ‘false self’ has absolutely no strength or flexibility to it. How can a false construct (or paltry semblance) of ourselves have any genuine strength or flexibility, after all? All it can do when it’s under pressure is to produce a terrible grating noise; all it can do when under stress is to emit toxic negativity, and thereby most regrettably pollute the environment around it. What’s more (needless to say!) the false self is almost always going to be under pressure of one sort or another, this being the nature of the world we live in. Things never work out as we would like them to. There will of course be times when everything is ‘going to plan’ and then the false self will be content, and not be bitching or complaining or sulking or creating bad feeling one way or another, but experience shows that these ‘periods of placidity’ are never going to last very long…

 

Carl Jung says something similar when he states that the big danger (or perhaps even the biggest danger) we face in life is when the mask (or persona) that we wear in order to fit the assumptions and expectations of society grows onto us and becomes part of us – a part that we can no longer remove. We no longer even want to remove the mask because we are falling under its hypnotic power and we think that it is who we are. We have become ‘possessed by the persona‘, and it lives our life for us; it lives life on our behalf, so to speak. Now it goes without saying that this mask, this persona, doesn’t have any genuine human qualities. It can mimic them, it can ‘ape’ then, but it can’t actually manifest them. The ‘mask-which-we-take-to-be-ourselves’ cannot be sincere about anything either – how can it ever be ‘sincere’ when it is not a real thing, when it’s not really us? A mask is by definition insincere. In addition to its lack of genuine human qualities’ (which we can hardly blame it for since these are not in its nature) the mask also has the propensity to generate what is generally referred to as ‘negative emotional states’, which all come down to the ‘passing on’ or ‘reallocation’ of mental pain. The mask has to pass on (or displace) mental pain since it has zero capacity within itself to bear that pain; it lacks this capacity because it isn’t a ‘real thing’, because it’s only a gimmick, a show that we putting on.

 

What we have here is therefore a very straightforward way of detecting the absence of our true, ‘uncontrived’ nature – when we react to difficult situations by ‘going into a sulk’ or ‘getting nasty’ or ‘cutting up rough’, etc, then we know that we aren’t living life ‘as we essentially are’ but rather we’re living life ‘as the persona’, ‘as the mask’, ‘as the artificial construct’. Furthermore, when we find ourselves acting violently or aggressively or in a controlling fashion, we can say the same thing – ‘something inside us’ is living a life for us, on our behalf. The mechanical/artificial version of us can only do two things after all – it can either control successfully and be euphoric, or it can be unsuccessful in its controlling and ‘cut up rough’ (i.e. ‘become dysphoric’). Ultimately, both euphoria and dysphoria are ‘toxic states’ since both derive from ‘the false version of ourselves’. Nothing good comes about as a result of putting the false self in charge of everything – everything is bound to go to wrack and ruin. If the false self is in a good mood this is not a good thing!

 

This is, then, the ‘litmus test’ any of us can apply to see whether we have ‘lost ourselves without knowing that we have’. When everything is going smoothly and ‘all is to our liking’ then we will be apparently sweet and good-natured, but when things are no longer going our way then we will immediately ‘show our true colours’, so to speak, and become sour instead of sweet, unpleasant instead of pleasant; we will start passing on pain to other people in order to make them feel bad instead of us, in other words. Either this, or we will ‘internally redirect’ the pain and blame/punish ourselves instead, which is the other ‘mechanical option’ that we have. Either way, we’re not ‘peacefully allowing to pain to be there’ but rather we’re recriminating about it – either we are targeting ourselves or others in a thoroughly non-compassionate (if not wilfully malicious) way.

 

This is of course the basic stuff of everyday life. It’s all part of the terrain, it’s all part and parcel of being a human being. Through being self-aware and taking ‘responsibility for ourselves’ (as we say) we journey in the direction of becoming more truly human, and ‘less of a machine in human guise’. If we don’t cultivate self-awareness, and we don’t take any responsibility for our ‘manifestations of toxicity’ then we journey in the opposite direction. This dual possibility’ is – we might say – what life is all about: either we become less mechanical, or more mechanical in our nature. It’s got to go either one way or the other! If we work consciously with our ‘toxic manifestations’ then they are of great help to us because they point to the absence of our true nature and if on the other hand we make excuses for them (or don’t pay any heed to them at all) then these manifestations send us down ‘the bad road’ – the road that ends up in a situation of very great suffering. Everything depends upon whether we ‘ignore the warning signs’, or ‘don’t ignore them’; the direction we are travelling depends on whether we live consciously or unconsciously, in other words.

 

What we have so far said represents a very straightforward approach to the psychology of everyday life therefore, the only thing being that it’s a negative approach rather than a positive one – it’s negative because rather than attempting to describe or say something about who we are (our ‘true nature’) it’s a description of all the things that come to pass when we are not who we are (or when we forget who we are). Instead of proceeding naïvely, as we do in ‘positive psychology’, and attempting to say something meaningful about our true nature (which we absolutely have no clue about anyway) negative psychology operates purely by looking at what we might call the symptoms of our absence, or the symptoms of our self-forgetting, (which is of course the usual situation). More than ‘the usual situation’, it’s the only situation we know about. We don’t live in a world populated by conscious human beings, after all!

 

Positive psychology is bound to be dismally unfruitful given that it’s based on the description of an idea of our self which has nothing to do with our true nature, but which is merely the mechanical construct that we have mistakenly identified with. It is accurate in one sense however; it’s accurate because the false mechanical semblance of ourselves is the basis upon which we actually operate. It is ‘useless knowledge’ all the same because no matter how well we describe ‘the false mechanical self’ it’s not really going do us any good. It’s a tremendously ‘arid’ knowledge for one thing, and for another thing the better we get at optimising ‘the performance of the false self’ the worst were actually making our situation! Without wishing to put too fine a point on it, we are bound to say that investing all our efforts in furthering positive psychology is something of a grotesque mistake therefore. All we really need to know about the mask is that it is a mask – we’re never going to make it into anything else, no matter how assiduously we work at it…