Tag: Wholeness

‘Therapy’ Happens Despite Our Interference, Not Because Of It…

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We can’t force ourselves to be interested in the truth! This is the most impossible thing in the world. To say that we can’t force ourselves to be interested in the truth (which is equivalent to saying that we can’t force ourselves to be interested in our own true nature) is a statement that has huge consequences for therapy, very obviously, and yet at the same time it’s not something that we have a tendency give much if any thought to.

 

If we force ourselves to see the truth (or try to force ourselves, rather) then what this means is that we don’t want to see (or establish a relationship) with our actual situation, which is revolves around the fact that we aren’t really interested in the truth. Not being interested in the truth is the default situation for all of us, strange as this may seem to the psychologically naive. If we were interested in seeing the truth then we wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of trying to compel ourselves to be interested, obviously. The issue of ‘forcing ourselves’ would never arise – nothing that happens naturally needs to be forced!

 

How on earth could we ever force ourselves to be interested in anything? If the interest isn’t there then it isn’t there. If the interest isn’t there then we won’t be interested in the fact that there is no interest there! If the interest isn’t there then whatever we do to try to remedy this situation will only be an act, a façade, a hollow pretence; as soon as we stop putting the effort in then the so-called ‘interest’ is going to stop dead. It’s not a real thing, after all.

 

Coming back to the question of therapy – allowing that they might even be said to be such a thing – it’s clear that the matter – essentially – ‘out of our hands’. We can’t instigate it, we can’t orchestrate it. We can’t ‘manage’ it, much as we’d love to, much as we always talk about doing so… After all – as we have just said – there’s absolutely no way that genuine therapy can ever take place unless we are genuinely interested in the truth of our situation, and – equally – there’s absolutely no way that we can actually cause ourselves to be interested in the truth of our situation if we aren’t to start off with. So where does this leave us?

 

What brings about change is ‘one thing and one thing only’ – what brings about change is our relationship with the truth. If there is no relationship with the truth then there is no possibility of change, obviously enough. Change can never come about in any other way – it certainly can’t come about the sake of convenience’. As a rule, change is never what we might call convenient’! Also as a rule therefore, genuine change comes about despite us, not because of us…

 

So here we have a situation where the only thing that can ever bring about change is a relationship with the truth and – furthermore – as we have just said, this relationship is in no way subject to our will, in no way subject to what we want or don’t want. This is always our situation – there’s no other situation that we could be in, there’s no situation in which we can bring about a relationship with the truth because that happens to be ‘what we want’.

 

As we keep on saying therefore, this has major implications for therapy – all types of formalised therapy involve two things – they involve a blueprint for whatever it is that’s ‘supposed to happen’, followed by an official protocol of ‘how to make that process happen’. This is ‘rational therapy’ in a nutshell – you could walk into just about any psychiatric hospital, any mental health setting in the world, and see this sort of thing happening. This is how healthcare services think change should happen. We think that this is how to ‘do therapy’; we think that therapy should be done ‘on purpose’, in accordance with a formal set of ideas about what is supposed to happen, and why.

 

This isn’t therapy though, it’s just us imposing (or rather trying to impose) our ideas upon ourselves and other people, which is what we always do. That’s what ‘unconscious living’ is all about. We pretty much don’t know what else to do in life – we have the idea (or rather absorb it from someone else) and then we try to impose it, if at all possible, on the world around us. We call this ‘purposeful or goal-orientated behaviour’! Anything else is too ‘passive’ for us; anything else just feels like sitting on the sidelines twiddling our thumbs and watching as life passes us by. This isn’t to say that rational therapies ‘can’t produce any results’, only that the results in question will always be achieved at a price which makes them – in the end – not worth achieving. After all isn’t this always the way when it comes to forcing ourselves (or other human beings) to be the way that we think we/they ought to be? Alan Watts says (somewhere) something to the effect that society works by compelling us to do what we would naturally do anyway, and that – by doing this – it effectively alienates us from our own life. Society plays what is essentially a ‘self-contradictory game’, says Alan Watts.

 

To act rationally is to act with a purpose – this is inevitably the case. We can’t act in any other way when we are acting from the basis of rational thought. This being so, when we try to act so as to establish some sort of relationship with the truth of our situation, then we always have to have some kind of ulterior motive for what it is we are doing (or trying to do). We always have this ‘reason’ or ‘purpose’ that was there before we started trying to reach the position of ‘having established a relationship with the truth’, and so what does this tell us?  It tells us a hell of a lot – it tells us everything we need to know, really. Any reason or purpose or goal that we might have prior to us ‘establishing a relationship to the truth’ is necessarily going to be irrelevant to the truth, irrelevant to the actual reality of our situation…

 

There is (and can be) no reason for us wanting to establish a relationship with the truth, with reality, and this is something that the rational mind can never understand. There can be no logical reason for wanting to do this. It’s only through dropping all reasons, dropping all purposes (i.e. dropping all our theories and beliefs) that we can come face-to-face with the truth of our situation, and we can’t do this on purpose. There are no ‘reasons’ for letting go – letting go isn’t something that can be orchestrated by the thinking mind for its own convenience. If we do have a ‘reason’ for wanting to let go then we are ‘holding on’ to this reason, and this is a contradiction that we are never going to get beyond.

 

We can only establish a relationship with the truth of our situation we give up all hope of being able to orchestrate things for our own convenience. Another way of putting all of the above would be to say what actually helps is to work with the process that is already going on (which is not a process that has been created by the busy-body rational mind) rather than trying to instigate and manage the type of change that we want to see happening. Working with the process or processes that are already going on in the psyche is another way of talking about the natural, spontaneous process of healing, or ‘becoming whole’. This type of approach sounds hopelessly wishy-washy to anyone coming from a rational-intellectual platform but – when it comes right down to it – working with impulses that are genuinely our own, impulses that are spontaneous rather than directed is the only real thing that we can do.  Anything else is fantasy, anything else is make-believe, and what’s so ‘hard-headed’ or ‘pragmatic’ about that?

 

Ultimately, what we’re afraid of is ‘relinquishing control’ and it just so happens that mental health (or Wholeness) can never be attained via some sort of dextrous and resourceful controlling, despite what we might like to think! Not only that, but attempting in any way to control the process that is going on not only fails to have any helpful effect, it is actually the very opposite of helpful. Spontaneous processes are thoroughly jinxed when we try to ‘help them along’. Mental health can’t be a goal. I can’t make myself forgive you if I am holding something against you, and if I try to ‘make this happen’ then I’m actually putting the process into reverse; all that’s going to happen is that – deep down – I’m going to resent you all the more! The same is of course true for patience – if I try to force patience then all that happens is that I start to get impatient with my own lack of patience, so I am actually  – though my efforts – becoming less patient than ever! If I persist long enough with this nonsense I will eventually become extremely frustrated and angry….

 

We can work with what’s there, but we can’t work with what’s not there. We can’t impose our ideas of ‘how things should be’ on the situation, in order words, and if we try to then we’ll just make things worse for ourselves. We’ll dig ourselves into a deeper hole. What this comes down to is simply ‘working with the truth of our situation’, and no matter what our situation might be, there’s always truth to it, and this means that there’s always somewhere that we can start working. Our actual situation is that we are – in all probability – interfering with the natural process of becoming whole again, so rather than trying to fight against it we ourselves to relate to the truth of what’s going on here, and this is a far more genuine type of work than the so-called ‘work’ of trying to fix ourselves…

 

 

 

 

 

Making Thought Our Master

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When we fall into the Realm of Form (or ‘the Realm of Definite Things’) we fall into a world of neurotic suffering – we fall into a world of neurotic suffering because everything becomes about maintaining and preserving boundaries, and yet the boundaries we feel we have to maintain and preserve aren’t actually real. They’re just a projection of the thinking mind – that’s what the TM does, it projects boundaries! To be completely preoccupied with the need to protect boundaries that aren’t real is the very essence of neurosis.

 

This combination of the two things – [1] the experienced need to maintain certain boundaries no matter what and [2] their actual nonexistence – is what produces neurotic suffering, and this suffering can never cease until we see through the illusionary boundaries that we are so very concerned with, and no longer experience the absolute need to hang onto them at whatever cost.

 

Boundaries are produced by the thinking mind, as we have just said, and the thinking mind acts as our ‘infallible guide all things’. It’s ‘infallible’ because we cannot doubt it. The thinking mind is infallible within its own remit, within the terms of the game it is playing, but outside of this remit, outside of this game, it has nothing to say. The problem is that the thinking mind has no way of knowing that there is any world outside of ‘the world of boundaries’ that it itself has made, and because we are dependent upon it as we are, the ‘ignorance’ of the thinking mind is also our ignorance.

 

Our ‘problem,’ therefore, is that we can’t see beyond the everyday thinking mind; we can’t see beyond the thinking mind because the thinking mind is functionally incapable of knowing about any other sort of reality other than the one it itself assumes, and we don’t know anything about reality other than the one that the thinking mind tells us about it. To say therefore that it is important to understand this point, to have this awareness about the limitation of thought and how thought works, is putting it mildly! Everything hangs on this. There are two sorts of life we could lead, depending upon whether we see that ‘we don’t know anything other than what thought shows us’, or whether we don’t see it. We can consider both of these possibilities in turn.

 

The second possibility is the easiest to describe – when we don’t have this awareness that ‘we don’t know any world other than the world that thought shows us’ then we will of course live entirely within the world that thought makes. That’s the only place we can live, obviously! This world corresponds to ‘the Realm of Form’ (or ‘the Realm of Definite Things’) that we started off talking about’; it is as we have said a world that is made up entirely of boundaries. Our total preoccupation is with what lies within the mind-created boundaries (i.e. with what thought says is real); as far as anything else goes, we couldn’t care less – we ‘don’t care and we don’t care that we don’t care’. We’re ‘not interested and we’re not interested in the fact that we’re not interested’. Another way of talking about this is to say that the world thought creates for us is always a concrete (or ‘literal’) one.

 

It’s rare to experience the world in a completely literal way – our awareness is never (or almost never) contained wholly within the thinking mind’s compartments; there’s always a bit of’ undefined (or ‘unformatted’) consciousness leftover to ‘humanise’ us. This unformatted consciousness allows us to live in a somewhat ‘softened’ world, a world with a bit of actual depth to it. It is this ‘depth’ or ‘non-literality’ that makes the world liveable – otherwise it’s very hard, very unforgiving, and that makes us hard and unforgiving too. We reflect the environment that we perceive, and this environment reflects our way of seeing it. The world is seen to be made up of ‘definite things’ and thus we are a ‘definite thing’ too, just like everything else. We’re a ‘thing in a world of things’, as Colin Wilson puts it…

 

How concrete or defined the world we relate to is varies according to our emotional state, or – as we could also say – it varies according to how dominated we are by the greed or fear. When we free from the ‘decomplexifying emotions,’ free (to some extent) from attachment of one form or another then we soften, we naturally become marvellously conscious, rather than appallingly ‘thing-like’ or ‘machine-like’. There is no need to speculate or argue about which of these two options feels better or ‘more wholesome’! Is it better to feel like a human being, or some kind of highly strung, utterly humourless ‘reaction machine’, careering blindly from one collision to another? This is clearly one of those questions that answers itself!

 

Thinking about things in this way allows us to get a better feel for what it would be like to live in ‘the literal–concrete world’. A completely concrete world is a world without any space in it – ‘reactions’ happen in it (like billiard balls colliding on a billiard table) but there no possibility of actually being there is present in any genuine way. ‘Automatically reacting’ is not the same as ‘being present’! The thing about’ literal signifiers’ (which is what the concrete world is made up of) is that every signifier we come across is like an arrow that points somewhere else – ‘the buck doesn’t actually stop anywhere’, in other words. The reason for this is what we might call the inherent poverty of all literal meanings – once we ‘get’ the literal meaning in question then we have to move on to something else. We have to move onto something else because there is nothing else there to get. The whole point of literal meaning is that there is ‘nothing else there to get’!

 

The real world isn’t like this however – the real world isn’t like this because it isn’t made up of literal meanings! The real world has got actual ‘content’ to it (which is why we call it ‘real world’). Content is never concrete – ‘concrete’ means that everything we come across comes neatly wrapped up in regular size parcels; reality itself doesn’t actually come in parcels however. There is no one there in the sorting office, wrapping stuff up, allotting meanings ‘according to the book’. There’s no bureaucracy in reality, no ‘organiser’. A good way to explain this is in terms of the ‘holographic principle’, which Anaxagoras talked about over 2500 years ago when he said that ‘there is a little bit of everything in everything’. There isn’t ‘a little bit of everything in everything’ when everything has been all neatly packaged up by the thinking mind – there’s no ‘holographic principle’ at work in the sterile categories of the thinking mind – that would totally defeat the entire object of the exercise, after all.

 

When we ‘organise things’ then the whole point is that there isn’t ‘a little bit of everything and everything – we are of course moving in exactly the opposite direction from this. But at the same time the fact that there isn’t any HP at work also means that there is no reality in our mental categories either – that’s how reality gets to be reality after all, by the holographic principle. Reality (we could say) gets to be reality by being ‘undivided’, by ‘not excluding’ anything, by not ‘following rules’. As soon as we start dividing things up, excluding things, following rules, then we depart from reality. We depart from reality and become impoverished, even though we won’t know it because we will be far too bamboozled by all the literal meanings flying around. We will be far too busy bouncing off the walls of our concrete world, in other words…

 

The inherent poverty of content of the rational-conceptual mind means that we can never actually be present – we can never actually be present because there’s nothing there to be present with! Things are different in the real (i.e. ‘non-abstract’) world; things are different because there is content. Content means that things aren’t ‘what they appear to be’ (which is one of Heraclitus’s principles.) Things don’t just stay as ‘what they appear to be’ (or ‘what they are nominally defined as being’) – there just isn’t that type of ‘static organisation’ to the real world. There isn’t any rational mind behind it all; there is no ‘overarching bureaucracy’! The lack of bureaucracy means ‘no impoverishment’, it means that we’re not forever living in a film set made up entirely of glossy façades; as we have said, there is actual real honest-to-goodness substance to the world.

 

We can be present in the real world because there is something to be present with, therefore. But it’s not just that we can be present in the real world (because there is actual content in it), there’s also actual content in us! We’re real too. It’s not just the case that the world around us isn’t made up of mere two-dimensional ‘conceptual furniture’, neither are we. There is a possibility being present ‘as we really are’, rather than being present in a purely abstract or nominal sense, rather than being present as mere ‘things’ in the thing-like universe. When we are mere ‘things in the thing-like universe’ then we are (as we have said) forever bouncing from one literal meaning to another. It’s rather like being a ball in an old-fashioned pinball machine being batted crazily from one place to another, with our eye always on the big jackpot, only the thing about the concrete world (unlike the real pinball game) is that they never actually is going to be a jackpot. How could there be a jackpot when literal meanings are by their very nature inherently impoverished? What exactly do we expect that the literal realm is going to provide us with, other than yet more empty promises and threats?

 

This is the key thing to understand about the literal world – when you’re in it there’s nowhere to go, and yet at the same time everything in this world is about going there! We have to do it, and yet we CAN’T do it! This is simply ‘pointless pressure’ therefore, and this gives us another way of looking at ‘life in the literal world’ – we can say that life in the literal world always involves being under the pressure to do something that just can’t be done. It’s a ‘double-bind’ in other words. A good way to explain what this ‘impossible thing’ is that we’re trying to do is to say that ‘we’re trying to find reality in a place where there isn’t any’. Reality can’t be found in the non-holographic universe – we are under the illusion (and it’s an extremely compelling illusion) that by breaking everything up into categories (or compartments) we can eventually find the ultimate prize, which is ‘reality’. It will be lurking there one of our compartments, so to speak! This is of course just another way of saying that we believe that the ‘infallible guide’ which is the thinking mind will one day ‘bring us to the Promised Land’. We are working away, working away, working away, with feverish industry and fanatical determination, towards this end.

 

Reductive analysis won’t bring us to reality however, only synthesis can do this and synthesis isn’t under the remit of the rational intellect! The thinking mind can take things apart, but it can’t put them back together again. Reality is of course already there; it was already there before we start trying to find it, before we started trying to ‘isolate’ it. Reality is in the Undivided world, the Uncategorised world, and that’s the world that is around us all the time, before we start trying to exploit it, or ‘mine it for goodies’. As Gottfried Leibniz (1670) says –

Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.

In this, the ‘non-conceptual world’, everything already contains everything else, just as Anaxagoras says. Everything – and everyone – reveals itself or themselves to be ‘the Whole’, when we pay enough attention. Why then would we have to go devoting our lives looking for ‘the special thing’, and walking all over everyone else as we do so? Why the rabid competitiveness? Why then are we so keen to hand over responsibility for our lives to the machine which is the ‘thinking mind’, and make it our master in all things?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ‘Assumed Sense of Self’

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Our collective viewpoint on what so-called ‘mental illness’ is and how it comes about is, I would say, remarkably obtuse! It’s as if we have a lorry-load of logs stuck in our collective eye. It’s not an accident that we’re so obtuse either – it’s just that this is where our personal and collective ‘blind-spot’ happens to reside and this blind-spot (as all blind-spots do) takes precedence over good sense. It takes precedence over everything. The blind-spot which we are talking about here has to do with the assumptions that we make about ourselves, and (unwisely) use as a spring-board to enthusiastically propel ourselves forward in life…

 

Collectively speaking, all we can ever do is ‘charge blindly ahead on the basis of our unexamined assumptions’. This is because a group of people (rather than ‘a random collection of people’), by its very nature, can only exist on the basis of conventions that are tacitly agreed upon but never actually acknowledged. The group would never hang together otherwise; society itself would never hang together and this is of course why oddballs, misfits and eccentrics are always treated so badly. Anyone in the group, or anyone in society, who does start questioning these ‘unacknowledged conventions’ is there never going to get anywhere; this is ‘a given’ – they’re never going to be listened to, their voice is never going to be allowed on the platform. Only ‘non-questioners’ are going to be allowed this privilege. And yet it is only by questioning the group’s hidden assumptions (or society’s invisible conventions) that wisdom is ever going to arise – in this case, wisdom with regard to these chronic patterns of unhappiness that we call ‘mental health conditions’. Our refusal to look outside of the box means therefore that wisdom is something we are going to have to do without! Wisdom isn’t ‘evidence-based’, after all!

 

The Big Question we never want to go near is the question of ‘who we truly are’ – this is the question we have all tacitly agreed never to look at, and yet this is also the door to wisdom, which is actually something that our particular expert-based form of knowledge doesn’t even acknowledge as ‘a real or significant thing’. When we assume ourselves to be something that we’re not, then this becomes a source of existential problems later on. How can it not? We can go further than this and say that when we go forward (or rather what we think is ‘forward’) on the basis of ‘who we think we are but aren’t’ then we’re never really going to get anywhere. We can’t get anywhere because we’re proceeding on the assumed basis of us being who we aren’t! We might, at times, imagine that we’re ‘getting somewhere’ and this will feel good to us, but the problem or snag here is that sooner or later we’re going to find that ‘the territory we thought we’d gained we haven’t’.  sooner or later we’re going to find out that we’ve been conned, we going to find out that we’ve paid good money for ‘real estate that only existed on paper but not in reality’…

 

This straightaway gives us a model that we can work with: when we have the perception that we’re getting somewhere when we’re not (because the ‘sense of self’ we’re identified with isn’t us) then this gives us the ‘positive feeling in life’ that we’re all trying to get. This particular mind-created illusion generates a type of good feeling that we might call euphoria – euphoria being (we might say) the feeling that attends the apparent well-being of the false sense of self. When on the other hand we experience ourselves (or rather the FSOS) as losing ground rather than gaining it then this produces a type of bad feeling that we can refer to as dysphoria. Everyday life is thus the constant play of euphoria and dysphoria –we are forever going ‘up’ and ‘down’ in our emotions depending on whether we feel that we’re getting somewhere or not getting somewhere on the basis of the FSOS. It follows that just so long as we are convinced that we are this FSOS then all we will ever experience is euphoria and dysphoria. Going up and going is all we ever know – the banal terrain of advantage or disadvantage will constitute the whole of life for us, therefore.

 

So far we have said nothing that relates directly to what is called ‘mental illness’. We have just described the arena of everyday life in its ‘unproblematic’ or ‘unglitched’ aspect – this is the game when it’s not manifesting any systematic faults, faults that cannot be ironed out or ignored. Two major glitches present themselves immediately however, when we start looking into it. One is where we get disillusioned with what we are calling ‘the game’ (i.e. ‘the game of pretending that the assumed sense of self is really who we are’) on some deep level such a way that we can no longer believe in the possibility of ‘gaining ground’. We have this deep-down feeling that we won’t be able to get anywhere (on the basis of us being who we mistakenly think we are) and even though we will try our hardest to fight against this feeling it keeps coming up time and time again. When the process progresses far enough it ends up paralyzing us; we can’t move forward (in the sense of acting purposefully or obtaining goals) because we have no more confidence in our ability to do so. What we’re talking about here is of course anxiety.

 

The other possibility is where we somehow become disillusioned, in a deep-down way, with ‘the game’ (i.e. with the assumption that we are the FSOS and that genuine honest-to-goodness possibilities await us on this basis) in such a way that nothing that we have achieved or gained seems to be actually worth anything. Equally, we are no longer motivated to try to achieve anything, not because we suspect that we can’t (as is the case in anxiety) but because we can’t help feeling that nothing we could achieve would be worth anything. Our so-called ‘achievements’ mock us with their fraudulency and we have been brought to a standstill because we can’t help knowing that nothing we could do would make any difference to this.  We ourselves – in our very core – feel hollow and worthless and – more to the point – we feel as if we’re pretending to be someone rather than being someone. This is of course utterly incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been disillusioned with the game and – more than incomprehensible – it is perceived as being a deeply sinister development…

 

From the conventional point of view (which is everyone’s point of view) this is a development that is both inexplicable and utterly malign – it is an evil to be resisted with every means at our disposal. We are – when this happens – pronounced by those who have the official authorization to make this sort of pronouncement to be suffering from ‘clinical depression’, which is said to be an illness like diphtheria or smallpox. From the point of view of the model that we are looking at here however neither anxiety or depression is  ‘sinister’ or ‘wholly negative’ sort of a thing, and certainly neither can be equated to a physical illness which is caused by some sort of pathological agent such as a virus or a bacterium. On the contrary, it is through the pain of seeing – in whatever indirect or occluded way – that we aren’t at all who we take ourselves to be (and that this was an utterly mistaken view) that we come closer to remembering who we really are.  Seeing through the false is the prerequisite of seeing the truth, no matter how painful that might be, and the pain we endure is certainly no reason to avoid seeing the truth – the truth is after all not a ‘bad’ thing, it’s just something we could never have imagined…

 

If everyone we came across were disposed towards supporting us in remembering ‘who we really are’ then this would make all the difference in the world but this is not the way it works – that’s not the way it works at all. To experience profound and painful disillusionment with the game (that no one recognizes as a game) is a tremendous opportunity, more tremendous than we could ever imagine, but neither anxiety nor depression (nor any other crippling disturbances to the life of the FSOS) is seen as any sort of an opportunity at all – all the talk is of ‘recovery’ or ‘being cured’, which is code for ‘returning to a wholehearted belief in the game that no one sees as a game’. If things were left to the proper authorities the opportunity would be crushed unceremoniously and we would be led to understand that there is something wrong with us – we would be led to understand that everyone else is well (in the way that they see the world and themselves) but that we are unwell. This has of course always been the way things are when the consensus reality has been called into question.

 

It isn’t the onset of anxiety or depression that is unaccountable but rather why some of us get disillusioned with the game (against our own wishes) whilst others don’t. If someone doesn’t develop a crippling neurotic condition this doesn’t mean that they’re not living life on the basis of a false sense of self – we’re all in the same boat there – it just means that they’re still sleeping soundly! So the question becomes, why do most of us sleep on soundly, obliviously, whilst others – apparently against their wishes – are called upon to painfully wake up to the true nature of their situation? This is the real mystery…

 

We now come to what is called ‘psychosis’ and how this relates to the model we are exploring here, but before we do that we could say a few more words about this question of ‘who we really are’ as opposed to ‘who we assume we are within the context of the game we are playing without admitting that we are playing it’. The assumed ‘sense of self’ that we’re all so familiar with (or most of us anyway) is such an extraordinarily limited sort of a thing – it’s fantastically limited, but we just can’t see that. The assumed SOS is made up of limitations (i.e. statements about what we’re not) rather than actual context, even though saying this does not make any sense at all to the rational viewpoint, which is the only viewpoint society cares about. We are constructed out of restrictions, out of denials, out of prohibitions, even though we don’t (and can’t) see it like this. When I say “I am this” (which sounds positive to us) I am at the same time saying that I am not everything else, whatever that ‘everything else’ may be (and I don’t actually know that). I have therefore reduced the ‘range of possibilities’ to virtually zero; I don’t see what I have just excluded in order to arrive at this positive statement – I don’t see what I have had to ‘throw away’ and – what’s more – I don’t care either because all my attention is on the ‘defined world’, which is an abstraction created by the thinking mind.

 

By making something ‘definite’ (i.e. by making it ‘this-but-not-that’)we exclude Wholeness, in other words, and by doing this we imagine that we have obtained something real, something that is tangibly true and ‘objective’. But when Wholeness is excluded – as it must be in order to define anything – we obtain nothing. Or rather, we obtain a skinny mind-created abstraction which now looks like a real thing to us (because we have excluded Wholeness from our awareness) whilst what is truly real has been placed ‘out of bounds’ for us. We can no longer relate to or have any connection to reality itself, and instead can only believe in the images that the thinking mind produces for us, which includes ‘the image of myself’, which is the assumed ‘sense of self’ that we keep talking about. I now have no way of relating to or connecting with reality as it is in itself and if by accident I did ‘run into reality’ then it would show up the basis of my experience of ‘being here in the world’ (which is the assumed SOS) as being a mere abstraction, something that is not there at all but only seems to be there when we look at the world in the peculiar narrow way that the thinking mind makes us do. Both the cut-and-dried world we believe so unreflectively and the black-and-white idea of myself that I place so much reliance in are shockingly  revealed as being insubstantial mind-produced phantoms – the ground is ‘cut away from under my feet’, in other words.

 

This brings us to the nature of psychosis. Using Stan Groff’s terminology, we can say that al psychotic experiences, without exception, are due to ‘holotropic intrusions’. The Whole manifests within the realm of the fraction that had up that point arrogantly considered itself to be the Whole, when it was no such thing. What happens when Indivisible Wholeness starts to show itself in the fractional world of the assumed sense of self? How are we going to relate to this occurrence? It is Everything and our entire world (never mind us) is nothing more than a mind-created abstraction, something like a cartoon or an ad on a subway wall. As far as we were concerned the Whole of Everything doesn’t even exist – the thinking mind has made it unreal, even though it is the only reality. We didn’t really think that the Whole of Everything ‘didn’t exist’ of course (as we have already said) because we have our ‘substitute’ for it, which is the image that we have in our minds of reality and our place in it. So when the substitute gets shown up as ‘only a substitute’ and the real thing sudden enters our little world, what are we going think then? This is like the Buddhist story of the frog in the well who doesn’t believe that the ocean could be bigger than his well until he goes to see the ocean one day and his head explodes…

 

To say that this eventuality comes as a tremendous earth-shattering shock is far too mild and feeble a way of putting it – it is Indivisible Wholeness itself we are talking about here, and what are we to compare this with? What happens to us when we try to cling to our mind-created world in the face of Indivisible Wholeness? And yet our trained experts in the field of mental health will tell us that what is going on is merely due to ‘chemicals misbehaving in our brain’ (or some such story), and that our extraordinary perceptions when we’re suffering from ‘psychosis’ don’t really mean anything at all really…