Tag: Rational therapy

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 Error Of Technical Therapies

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We start off on the wrong footing, and then put all our efforts into trying to make things better on this basis. This is our situation in a nutshell! All of the benefits, advantages and comforts that society provides us with are for the sake of assuaging the pain caused by us starting off on this ‘wrong footing’ and this – of course – means that we are quite uninterested in what would constitute our genuine well-being. The more work we put into compensating for the original mistake (so to speak) the less likely we are to ever become aware of it! We’ve headed off in the wrong direction entirely…

This is most poignantly the case when it comes to psychological therapy – our efforts in developing psychological therapies are all in the direction of ameliorating – as best we can – the suffering that comes about as a result of our ‘mistakenly assumed basis’. It is always possible that these therapies may be partially ‘successful’ within the terms that they themselves set out (i.e. the reduction of pain) but were this to be the case, this very success would be acting against us. When we are facilitated in starting off on the wrong basis and then in continuing on this basis without being able to experience the suffering and alienation that is the inevitable consequence of us taking the wrong starting-off point as ‘a legitimate basis’ then this is the exact opposite of helpful. We think we’re doing good work but we’re not; our misery is made more tolerable to us and – because of this – we are able to continue indefinitely with it. This corresponds to Gurdjieff’s ‘evil inner god of self-calming‘.



‘Making mistakes’ is perfectly OK, we might say, that’s how we learn, that’s the process of life: we go astray, and then the pain of finding that we have ‘gone astray’ brings us back again with renewed appreciation for what we have gone astray from! This is of course the message of the parable of the prodigal son – the other sons in the parable – the ones who haven’t gone off the rails – are understandably annoyed, to say the least, by the joy which their father expresses at the return of the erring son. They didn’t stray after all, and yet no feast is thrown for them! The other sons undoubtedly feel that they should get the larger share of the credit therefore, seeing that they were good and dutiful sons who didn’t go off the rails. There is a subtle aspect to this story however, just as there is in all good stories. The point is that we can only know what we have when we lose it. This idea is illustrated very well by the story ‘Fetching water for Vishnu’, as told here by Devdutt Pattanaik. When we restrain ourselves from breaking the rules because we are afraid of what might happen if we do break them (or because we want to earn brownie points) then this is no good at all! We don’t become good merely by ‘refraining from sinning’, no matter what we might have been told in Sunday school – obediently following the rules just makes us sanctimonious and judgmental, which doesn’t do anyone any good.

According to William Blake, ‘the fool who persists in his folly shall become wise’ and we are all fools when it comes down to it. The way forward for us is to persist with our folly therefore and learn from what happens! If however we persist in our folly whilst at the same time insulating ourselves from the painful consequences of that folly then this is another matter entirely… What is happening here is that our folly is being enabled; our foolishness is being validated and so we can all go around being ridiculously proud of being the fools that we are. Instead of genuine well-being we have artificial well-being, the type of well-being that comes about as a result of the validation of the false idea of ourselves, which is what our culture is all about. There is zero support for the process of ‘going beyond the comfort zone of who we think we are’ in the world that we have created for ourselves, but there is plenty of validation for who we are brought up to believe we are, who we are told we are. Folly has thus become ‘the way to go’ and we are effectively prevented from questioning it. Questioning the socially-sanctioned form of folly is regarded as deviance and reprehensible wrong-headedness and is treated accordingly.

The ‘wrong footing’ that we are talking about here is the idea that we have about ourselves, therefore. What we are talking about is ‘the easy answer’ as regards the all-important question “Who are you?” – it’s the ‘easy answer’ because it takes no effort at all to come up with it! We will investigate other things in the world that we’re interested in perhaps, but whoever investigates their own assumed identity? We run with this without ever giving it a second glance and this is of course a very peculiar thing. Why we would we be so blasé and incurious about the perplexing question as to ‘who we are’ when this would seem to be the central mystery of our existence? What could possibly explain this? What could explain our lack of interest in the central mystery of our lives and our preoccupation with other, less profound matters, our undying obsession with superficiality and trivia? Although this in itself might sound like something of a mystery it turns out that it isn’t – ‘lack of interest’ is the very antithesis of consciousness, and the only reason we would go down the road of ‘embracing the antithesis of consciousness’ (rather than having anything to do with the real thing which has infinitely more possibilities in it, needless to say) is because we’re in the grip of fear. When we are in the grip of fear we fly from awareness, we don’t embrace it! When we are in the grip of fear then we’re not at all curious about the world around us; we don’t want to ‘find out about anything’, naturally enough. We don’t want to find out what’s going on; on the country, we want to not find out, we want to stay as dumb as possible. This behaviour is what Chogyam Trungpa calls intelligent stupidity.

Obviously, we all know that fear – if it is great enough, if it really has us in its grip – produces as a result a state of profound incuriousness, a state of concreteness that is characterised by us putting zero inquiry into our descriptions or ideas or theories about the world (which is to say, literal-mindedness); the problem isn’t knowing this, or being able to understand this, the problem is applying it to ourselves! That can’t be us, we say, we’re not like that, we’re not literal-minded and incurious about the world around us, or uninterested in going beyond/seeing beyond our drab and formulaic descriptions of reality. We are a scientific, progressive and above all dynamic culture so that can’t be us at all! But if this accusation of literal-mindedness isn’t true then why are we – as a culture – so single-mindedly invested in control and technology, and so ridiculously weak and feeble when it comes to investigating ‘who we are’ or what it means to be ‘conscious beings’? Why are we so extraordinarily unphilosophical in our outlook, after all the good work that has been done in this field by earlier, more philosophical eras? We’ve let the ball drop big time!

There are (we might say) two distinct possible modalities of existence that we can orientate ourselves from, one being the mode that is preoccupied by the ‘HOW’, and the other being the one which we consider the ‘WHY’ to be of supreme importance. In the first case we invest everything in technical knowledge (and the means of control based on this technical knowledge) and in the second case – whilst we will not be averse to technical knowledge – we are much more interested in the process of investigating and examining phenomena ‘for its own sake’, not because we want to exploit or utilise the insights that we might uncover along the way. There are no surprises for guessing which modality contemporary Western culture exemplifies. This isn’t exactly the hardest question in the world to answer – we are the ultimate masters of the ‘HOW’, we are the ‘Great Exploiters’.

So what happens when a HOW-type culture does psychology? What happens when a ‘technical/controlling-type’ civilization tries its hand at psychotherapy? We have already looked at this question of course; this is what we started off talking about at the beginning of our discussion – what this comes down to is the unfortunate business of starting-off on the wrong footing and then putting a whole load of effort and ingenuity into what is essentially ‘a lost cause’. What has happened to us is that in our haste to improve our situation (so to speak) we have completely failed to our examine our formulaic description of who we are, and as a result all of our efforts have gone into fixing – or at the very least ameliorating – the problems that beset this unexamined idea of who we are, of which there are plenty!

It just so happens that this is never going to work out for us since the mental construct we’re trying to fix is inherently jinxed  – it can be said to be jinxed on the one hand because all logical-constructs contain an inherent if invisible self-contradiction that can’t ever be ironed out (which comes down to ‘the paradox of self-reference’), and it is jinxed on the other hand because the self-concept has nothing to do with our true nature anyway, which means that we are ‘tilting at windmills’! Technical therapies can NEVER work therefore – at the best they can perhaps succeed at making life a little bit more comfortable for us, a little bit more tolerable for us, but this – as we said at the start of this discussion – is very far from being ‘a good thing’!







The Imaginary ‘Mental Health’ of The I-Concept

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Almost all of our mental activity, all of the stuff that goes on in our heads, is happening as a result of our identification with what Wei Wu Wei calls the ‘I- concept’. All of this constant agitation, this constant busyness, this constant yearning and striving, is happening in relation to the concept that we have of ourselves, and the crucial point here is that this concept doesn’t actually refer to anything existing in reality.

 

The undeniable fact that we are always being unsettled, agitated or disturbed by this ‘background mental activity’, the fact that we are forever being pulled ‘this way and that’ shows that we don’t realise that the I-concept has no correspondence with actual reality. We don’t see that at all and this is why we never have any peace of mind. If we ever do have peace of mind (which can still happen every now and again, but not because we have done anything to bring it about) then that would mean that we are no longer acting in relation to (or on behest of) the concept that we have of ourselves and what a blessed relief this is! That’s why it is a relief – because the self-concept isn’t there with all its demands, all its hopes and fears, all its constant unremitting agitation. When we talk about ‘peace’ or ‘tranquillity’ this is what we actually mean – we mean peace from the I-concept (not peace for that I-concept).

 

We don’t see it like this of course – we see ‘peace’ as being something to be gained by the I-concept and then enjoyed by it. We see peace as being some sort of ‘prize’ to be won, in other words – maybe we can go somewhere to find it, or meet someone who will help us discover it, maybe we can learn some sort of discipline to help us gain it. Maybe relaxation techniques or practising regular mindfulness will work. We’ve actually got a backwards way of looking at things therefore and the chances are that we will never realise this. It’s not part of our culture to have this particular realisation, after all! Our culture assumes (just as we individually assume) that the I-concept is rightfully supposed to be at this very centre of things, that everything should happen for the I-concept’s benefit. Modern ‘consumerist’ culture works by encouraging the tendency which we already have to believe that we are the I-concept, and – as a result – put all of our eggs into this particular basket.

 

There are problems associated with living life on the basis of the celebrated and highly-esteemed I-concept, however, and these are problems that can’t ever be solved! They can’t ever be solved because the root problem is ‘us thinking that we are the idea that we have of ourselves’ and we aren’t about to address this core problem any time soon. We spend our whole lives trying to sort out this problem and that problem but the root problem we never go anywhere near. The root problem we never even want to talk about. This makes our collective endeavour in the area of mental health rather ridiculous – if we spend all of our time searching for answers to the secondary problems that have been caused by the invisible ‘root problem’ and yet never come close to addressing the original problem itself, what does this say about us? What exactly is going on here?

 

What we are actually trying to do in the field of mental health is ‘avoid the main issue by chasing red herrings’ and we all take this business of chasing red herrings very seriously (as we’re supposed to). We have a high opinion of ourselves and our endeavours and what we have so far (supposedly) learned in our endeavours. We talk endlessly about ‘research’ in psychology as if this research has ever actually informed us of anything useful, which it absolutely hasn’t. Since when has research in psychology revealed anything interesting, let alone genuinely helpful? All the research in the world is useless if it is based on a confused (or back-to-front) way of seeing things. If this is the case it doesn’t matter how impressively rigorous we are. The scientific spirit – we might say –has to do with the commitment to uncover the truth regardless of how that truth may conflict with our precious beliefs and opinions and this is what sets science apart from most other human endeavours (which – for the most part – come down to the attempt to validate our pre-existing beliefs and opinions). This is not at all what is happening in psychology however because everything we do in this field is done on the basis of the core assumption that ‘we are the I-concept’.

 

This necessarily means that our understanding of what mental health entails or consists of is going to be totally skewed – when we talk about ‘mental health’ – as we do very freely – what we mean is ‘mental health for the idea that we have ourselves’. This is inevitably going to be the case when we are investigating matters from an exclusively rational point of view; when we are looking at things in an exclusively rational way we are only ever going to be dealing with our own ideas – rationality doesn’t believe in anything else but its own ideas, its own theories. The thinking mind won’t have any truck with anything that doesn’t dovetail neatly with its own pre-existent assumptions about the world and what this means (when it comes down to it) is that it won’t have any truck with anything other than its own ideas. Thought is a closed system, in other words, just as David Bohm says. The result of this rational approach advises that we cause ourselves to become flatly incapable of seeing the absurdity of imagining that they could ever be any such thing as ‘the mental health of the I-concept’.

 

The idea that we have of ourselves can’t have any sort of mental health for the simple reason that it is only an idea. The I-concept can never be ‘mentally healthy’ because it is only a concept (i.e. it isn’t real). We can relate this back to what we were talking about a short while ago about ‘peace’ coming about as result of the absence of the I-concept – all of the mental agitation which we notice going on in our minds on a full-time basis is due (we were saying) to the belief that we have that we ‘are’ this concept. This identification is what drives almost all of our thinking; almost everything that happens in our heads comes about as a consequence of us being totally convinced that we are the idea of ourselves and so to try to figure out how the I-concept can enjoy peace or tranquillity is absurd because this construct is itself the cause of our agitation, the true origin of our ‘lack of peace’. The self-construct – being a construct – requires constant maintenance, constant defending and constant promoting, and so there is no peace ever to be had here! No matter what else a life of the ‘self-construct’ might entail, it will certainly never entail peace.

 

Another way of putting this is to say that the type of life that we lead when we are living in the ‘conditioned realm’ is a life of perpetual struggle, a life of constant striving, a life in which we are continually (and unsuccessfully) trying to control both ourselves and the world around us. The concrete sense of self is a striver and it can never not strive – it might drive itself mad with its own unremitting striving (or controlling) but it can never figure out a way of ‘not striving’ or ‘not controlling’, however much it may want to. Our collective endeavour in the field of mental health, for the most part, comes down to the efforts of this very same I-concept to find ‘a remedy for itself’, we might therefore say. The more purely rational the approach, the more true this is, and in the case of modern psychology – which is overwhelmingly rational – this is very starkly the case. We are being super-clever in order to cure ourselves from the curse of our own cleverness (although we won’t of course ever see things like this).

 

One problem that arises for us when we live life (or attempt to live life) on the basis of the I-concept is that we are forever striving, forever struggling, forever analysing and calculating, forever plotting and manipulating, and this is all very wearisome for us. We try to improve our situation by investing in control (or more effective control) but this is a slippery slope because the more we control the more we have to control. ‘Once you pop you can’t stop’, as the Pringles ad says. The more we get drawn into controlling the further we move away from who we really are; the more we invest in cleverness, the more alienated we become from our true nature and from the world around us. Our neurotic mental suffering quintessentially comes down to this ‘alienation’ – what could be worse than living in a state of alienation from our own true nature, or from the world into which we were so innocently born? We start off innocent, but we all-too-quickly become corrupted by ‘the ways of the world’. This is – moreover – an alienation (or corruption) that we do not understand or in any way acknowledge. We’re alienated but we don’t know that we are alienated and the reason we don’t know this is because we are so well-adapted to the artificial world that we have created for ourselves – we’re too well adjusted to the ‘Designed World‘ that we have so industriously constructed all around us.

 

The Designed World is the world that perfectly fits the needs and desires of the I-concept and were the case that this limited identity really is ‘who we actually are’ then all would be well – there will be no major problems involved. But there are problems involved, irreducible problems, problems that can never be fixed, and these problems come about – as we have said – as a result of our hapless identification with the I-concept. Being identified with the self-construct doesn’t mean that we are the self-construct however – it just means that we are confused! Or as we could also say – it just means that we now live in a very narrow, artificial way that can only exist or seem to be meaningful to us because all traces of ‘who we truly are’ have been denied. We have been ‘subsumed within the game’, in other words, and the game is a heartless kind of a thing. There’s nothing in the game other than struggling and we don’t even know what it is that we are struggling for. There is nothing in the game but suffering when it comes down to it but we deny the suffering, or minimise it and ascribe it to all sorts of false causes, ‘causes’ that we can imagine we can solve by the judicious application of even more ‘cleverness’, even more control’…

 

The cure for the pain that is engendered by the game (or rather engendered by the fact that we are playing the game without knowing it) isn’t to learn to ‘play the game better’ (i.e. ‘optimization’) but to abandon it altogether, which is the ‘radical solution’ that no one wants. Instead of taking the mind-created sense of self so very seriously, and doing our level best to ‘fix’ it and return it to its state of imaginary mental health – which is the phantom which keeps on eluding us – what’s genuinely would help us would simply be not to take this mind-created sense of self so very seriously, and there are no fancy ‘scientific’ ways of doing this! There are no methods for not taking ourselves so seriously (any more than they could be such a thing as ‘a method for understanding jokes’) – techniques for this do not (and cannot) exist. No ‘tricks’ exist by which we can pull this off and this is what has us so baffled, since all we know or believe in are our tricks…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Working Via Pressure

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Our default operational mode is to work via pressure. Not to work under pressure that is, but by means of pressure. Pressure means that the reason we are doing this or doing that lies outside of ourselves — we are trying to obtain what has been defined by thought as a ‘desirable outcome’ or we are trying to avoid an ‘undesirable outcome’. We are always either seeking advantage or sidestepping disadvantage but either way the reason for our activities lies ‘outside of ourselves’. We’re fixated upon a world that is external to us.

We can’t really see this properly because it’s so very normal for us. We don’t understand what’s being said here because ‘the outside’ is all we know. The point is however that the motivational force acting on us isn’t really ‘an expression of who we really are’ — is not intrinsic, it’s extrinsic. Something else — our thinking, our ideas about ourselves and the world — is telling us that such and such an outcome is good, or that such and such an outcome is bad. What extrinsic motivation means (when it comes down to it) is that we are compelled to act based on what our thinking tells us and our thinking isn’t us. Thought is always ‘an external mechanical authority’: we are compelled to act this way or that based upon what we see as necessity; we are under pressure to act and — more than this — we’re under pressure to succeed within the terms that have been given to us.

The difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation couldn’t be greater therefore — how could there be a bigger difference than that between a force that is acting on us from the outside (which has nothing to do with our true nature) and the free expression of who we actually are? What we are actually asking here is of course ‘What could be a bigger difference than the difference between slavery and freedom?’ We can hardly hope to smudge the distinction between these two things! And yet despite the complete lack of similarity between these two forms of motivation we very rarely make any distinction — the gulf between freedom and slavery is glossed over as if it doesn’t exist. In short, we don’t see the difference between being acted upon by forces that come from outside of ourselves and acting in accordance with our intrinsic nature (without there being any ‘compulsion’ involved whatsoever).

The reason we can’t ‘see the difference’ is of course because we have internalised these external forces — we have been doing this since an early age. This is what happens when we are brought up in environment that is based on controlling, as is almost always the case. Most families are controlling, and our ‘collective’ families — which is society — is always controlling. Society functions on the basis of conditioning — not on the basis of freedom, not on the basis of encouraging everyone to think for themselves and be whatever it is in their nature to be. Another way of putting this is to say that we are ruled by belief, and our beliefs are forced upon us from the outside. Beliefs are always denying of individuality/autonomy and yet we persist in thinking that belief — the enforcement of ideas upon people from the outside — is a good thing.

We think that ‘passing on belief’ is a good thing because we feel that what we are believing in is actually true, but the thing here is of course that we only think that our beliefs are true because we ourselves have been have already been conditioned by them! We are being ‘obedient to the belief’ in thinking that ‘the belief is true’ — all beliefs require us to accept them as being actually ‘true’. No matter how palpably foolish or preposterous a belief might be it will always require us to accept it as being absolutely true. So because we live in, and have been brought up in, a ‘coercive environment’ which doesn’t allow us to think for ourselves (or be ourselves) we can’t tell the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, despite the immense gulf between the two. We have no ‘inner life’ of our own, only the beliefs and opinions and viewpoints that have been put into us. We dream what we have been told to dream, and that’s what makes the (consumerist) world go round. We all have to value and desire the same stupid things; we all have to be walking down the same well-worn path.

Having no genuine life of our own means that we have to ‘run on pressure’ — that’s all that’s left to us in the absence of ‘interiority’. Not knowing who we really are, all we can do is rely on various types of pressure — pressure to do this, pressure to do that, pressure to do the other. This very easily gets to be all too much for us and so then we become candidates for stress-management, candidates for anxiety-management (or perhaps anger-management). This is a very great irony, if only we could see it. All over the world stress-management programs are being taken seriously and staff are being sent to them by companies, hospitals, organisations of all sorts, all of which institutions operate in the first place only by ‘putting pressure on their workers’. When the pressure gets too much we are told to go on a stress-management course, which involves us ‘putting pressure on ourselves not to be so pressurised’. Anything that is based on a generic way of doing things, a ‘one size fits all’ method, is pressure. We learn ‘skills’ it is true, but skills are rules: ‘skills’ equals ‘rules’ and ‘rules’ equal ‘pressure’. Rules are of course the very quintessence of pressure.

We are a certain way (stressed out, anxious, or angry) and so then we put ourselves under pressure (however subtle) to be a different way. Whichever way you look at it is still pressure — the only thing that wouldn’t be pressure would be where we are able to give heartfelt permission for that pressure (stress or anxiety) to be there, but in order to do that we would have to have a sense of genuine interiority, we would have to have an ‘inner life’. Or to put this another way, we would have to have ‘inner freedom’ (which means ‘freedom from rules’). We would have to have inner freedom since without it we cannot give permission for anything — without inner freedom we can only ever ‘control or be controlled’.

The same is true for CBT and all cognitive therapies — my thoughts are putting pressure on me one way or another (they are putting the ‘big squeeze’ on me, so to speak) and so I use the techniques of CBT to prevent these thoughts from controlling me in the way that they are. I am using the ‘pressure’ of the techniques in order to counteract the pressure that the negative thinking is putting on me, and so I’m ‘using pressure to counteract pressure’. This may offer temporary relief (and then again, it may not) but the end result is not going to be good for me either way, since I have merely been drawn in deeper to the web of control and counter-control. There is no freedom here, for sure! What would help me is (again) for me to find it within myself to unconditionally allow these painful or worrying thoughts to be there; then — with no more resistance to feed on — the thoughts would lose their power over me. Without inner freedom (or inner peace) I cannot do this however, and the one thing CBT can never teach me is how to find inner peacefulness.

Anything we do in the name of therapy — if it does not result in the development of a sense of our own interiority, or connection with our own ‘inner life’, is a farce. If I’m troubled in my mind then teaching me strategies to ‘manage’ these troubles just adds to my burden — that just adds to my bondage, my slavery to thought — and it is this slavery that lies at the root of all my problems. We don’t even know the true meaning of the word ‘freedom’ however — all we know methods of control, and control — no matter how successful it might be it seem to be at first — always leads to more dependency upon control (which is a loss of freedom). The greater our initial ‘success’ therefore the more dependent (or ‘enslaved’) we are going to become later on. The root of all our psychological problems lies in the fact that we are running entirely on pressure (entirely on extrinsic motivation) and that — as a consequence — we know nothing else. We don’t have any concept of what intrinsic motivation is; for us to know that we would first have to have some sort of genuine ‘inner life’, a life which is by its very nature ‘independent of what happens on the outside’, and which does not — on this account — need to protect itself by investing more and more in control…

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…