Radical Uncertainty

7059 words
“…Certainty is this sort of thing - is arbitrary and tautological, it is like a programme or rule that we follow in order to give our lives structure and purpose. Once in place it is an absolute tyrant, yet, really, there is no ‘sense’ to it at all, it only makes sense if we don’t question it. But we want that surety; it is not the details that are the issue but the fact that it is possible to have those rock-solid details, whatever they are. …”

“… The habit of naming stuff and then thinking that you actually know what you are talking about tends to be a particularly pernicious one in the expert clinician. It is a real pitfall, and who can say that they have not ever fallen into it? The whole thrust of psychiatric medicine is to create a science of certainty, yet the domain of mental illness is far more opaque to reason than physical illness, in fact it is an awfully difficult thing to try to make a science of. Because we don’t understand consciousness (which is to say ourselves) in the least, we have even less idea of what is happening when the mind seems to ‘go wrong’. The whole idea is very threatening, perhaps even more threatening than physical illness, which wrong-foots us from the start. …”

The Consciousness-Only Model

5180 words
“…The property of being able to easily believe that such-and-such is true, or that some other thing is true, is a fundamental form of gullibility and in the absence of wisdom this gullibility is the main property of consciousness. The way this works is through the process of ‘irreversible information loss’: when I fall into the trap of believing that such-and-such a proposition is true, then what happens is that I immediately lose the possibility of seeing the world in any other way and so the ‘information content’ of my world collapses or crashes. …”

Dissolving False Certainty

4905 words
“Aside from the orthodoxy of ‘established wisdom’; there has always been an alternative way of thinking about things – a heretical current of thought going back over the centuries. This counter-current of thought has manifested itself most noticeably in the esoteric branches of philosophy and of religion, but it can also be seen beneath the surface in the theoretical leanings of some schools of psychology and psychotherapy. It may not necessarily be the case that there is a distinct tradition that is passed on from age to age, but what we can say is that there exists a recognizable flavour to all of these various schools, a sympathy of aims that runs through them. …”

The Double Bluff

1838 words
“…There is a gain here, curiously enough, and that ‘gain’ is actually a loss. What I lose by this unconscious manoeuvre is responsibility, or ‘freedom’, because no longer do I have to make genuine choices. I think that I am making choices, but really I am being unconsciously manipulated by the need that I have to carry on believing in whatever it is that I have ‘bluffed myself’ to believe in. This unacknowledged need calls the shots. It is a well known principle both in existential philosophy and humanistic psychology that the one ‘gift’ that we fear above all others is the gift of freedom. With absolute freedom comes a terrible responsibility and so our automatic response is always to run away from freedom, and let some external authority make the choices for us. …”

The Enemy Is...?

1217 words
When we are laid low with anxiety, depression or overwhelmingly painful feelings of any kind, we often tend to wonder where all this ‘apparently pointless’ suffering comes from. Although it is probably true that we only want to know where the bad feelings come from so that we can escape from them, it is still a very good question.
One way to approach this fundamental question is to say that suffering comes from having habits. This isn’t obvious at all because everyone has habits (i.e. predictable patterns of thinking and behaving) but not everyone is afflicted with anxiety, depression, and general feelings of alienation, isolation and desolation. The thing is however that habitual patterns of living do not cause this type of acute pain when we are able to carry them out as we have always done, but they do when for some reason we are no longer able to enact them as usual.

Enmeshment

1010 words
“…When I ‘fall in with the crowd’ I get caught up in the sort of socially prescribed life that other people (and myself) think I ought to have; I end up living the sort of life that society recognizes and validates; I end up following the path that has been laid out for me, rather than finding my own way. I end up enmeshing myself with the life that I have been given, a mass produced sort of a life, a life that could be anybody’s and yet which really belongs to no one, since it’s really only the mass-produced ‘shell’ of a theatrical life, a phoney life that is not really worth the paper it is printed on. …”

Freedom From Anxiety

3500 words
“The only genuine way to be free from anxiety is to cultivate an unprejudiced mind. If there is no prejudice, then there can be no anxiety – it is as simple as that.
By ‘prejudice’ we do not mean hating and despising a certain group of people (although this is certainly one example of prejudice). We are talking about prejudice in a more general and abstract sort of way; what we basically mean is attachment, i.e. ‘attraction versus aversion’, ‘like versus dislike’, or ‘greed versus fear’. …”

Games, Not Games and Consciousness

5093 words
“…What has happened now is that our understanding of what is implied by game and not-game has swollen to encompass all the possibilities that exist for describing anything at all. The domain of ‘game’ and ‘not-game’ has expanded from Berne’s programmed and unprogrammed social interactions to the Carse’s agenda-based and agenda-free activity to Leary et al’s adaptation of the universal Buddhist dichotomy of conditioned mind and unconditioned mind. The essence of each of these three models is the same, however: ‘game’ stands for the determinate mode of being or structure-based reality (= the particular or limited case) and not-game equals the indeterminate mode (the universal or unlimited case). …”

Integrating Depression: The Heroic Task

8768 words
“In our culture we do not value pain. Civilization consists not only of the management of our external world or environment, but also the management of our internal world of perceptions, feelings and thoughts. Management of ‘inner reality’ means that we don’t permit those elements which we don’t think are useful, i.e. those regions of inner experience that don’t have a place within our scheme of things. Our ideas about pain are a bit inconsistent: we see that physical pain has an important ‘warning’ function, but we don’t apply this idea so much to mental pain and distress. For example, if I pick up a hot poker the pain will make me drop it straight away - the pain is not nice, but it saves me from suffering any serious long-term damage to my hand. Pain stops us in our tracks before we can go too far. Pain lets me know that something is wrong. Why are we so sure that mental pain does not have a similar ‘helpful’ function? …”

How Can I Change?

466 words
“…When the ‘me’ sees with absolute clarity that it can never ever change, not if it tried for a billion billion years, then it stops hanging on to the tired old ghost that is itself. And the paradox is that this perception of the impossibility of change is itself the most profound of all changes. This is the real thing – this is radical change, which is what Krishnamurti calls ‘freedom from the known’.”

The Mind Maze

2804 words
“…Therefore, in anxiety, truth starts to reveal itself as an indefatigable force – a force that cannot be denied. The dawning of unfettered awareness means that I can’t help seeing that I can’t escape, and I also can’t help seeing that I can’t escape from seeing that I can’t escape – which is of course what I would prefer, since life in the mind maze is only tolerable if we resort to self-deception. I want to escape from seeing how futile everything is, I want to escape from seeing how lacking in freedom I am. …”

Not Contending

1154 words
“… This movement with reality (this dance) is a ‘thoughtless’ thing because as soon as I think ‘I am doing it!’ then it is no longer happening. The reason for this is of course because the thought in question is ‘an attempt to attain the superior position’, which is contending. Actually, when there is no thought that ‘I am doing it’ there is simply no ‘me’, and that is the secret. The ‘me’ is the contender and so when there is no contending, there is no ‘me’. When there is no ‘me’ there is only the fathomless harmony of the universe - perfect strength in perfect weakness, perfect balance without any trying.”

Psychotic Irony

916 words
“…Pleasure is the enjoyable feeling that I get as an actor or player in a game who does not know himself to be an actor or player in the game. If I were to have any sense of irony regarding my role in the proceedings then obviously I could obtain no euphoria as a result of gains made in that game, as a result of advantages attained in that game.
Depression or despair is the disagreeable feeling we obtain as a result of losses or disadvantages sustained in the game. Both pleasure and pain are literal, i.e. they only make the type of sense that they do make to us because we experience them in relation to a strictly literal (or non-ironic) understanding of who we are. …”

Radical Risk

2372 words
“…This ‘misplaced fear’ makes everything very deceptive because even if I do successfully solve the problem in one place, the anxiety is only going to pop up somewhere else. When I am anxious I get very short-sighted – all I want to do is to ‘fix’ the problem that is currently worrying me. All I am concerned with is how to eliminate the trivial risk (i.e. the risk that my trivially important goal might not be attained), and because I insist that each particular risk must be eliminated, I am setting myself up to go around and around in circles. I have set myself a ‘self-deceiving task’ - a task that can never be finished. The reason we say that the task is self-deceiving is simply because just as long as I am preoccupying by endlessly trying to solve surrogate problems (i.e. endlessly chasing red-herrings), I am more-or-less successfully distracting myself from what I am really afraid of. …”

Seperating Thinking and Feeling

3006 words
“…There is a reason why thinking and feeling are so intertwined and the reason is that our habitual patterns of thinking are in fact all about pain avoidance. The automatic thinking that sets in when we start to feel bad is our way of trying to escape the unwanted feelings. We are trying to 'wriggle out of it', to 'find a loophole', to 'side-step the issue'. The neurotic pattern of thinking is how we try to 'wangle it'. If this escape attempt actually worked then that would be okay but the thing is that not only does our attempt to escape pain by thinking in a particular way about it not work, it actually works against us. …”

Serious Escaping

4035 words
“The most basic way of explaining the difference between psychological work and what we usually call ‘work’ is to say that whilst normal everyday work is work that is done for a purpose, psychological work is work that is down for no purpose at all. Both can be hard enough, but there remains this key difference. This actually explains why we spend so little time engaging in psychological work - why on earth would we put ourselves out, and do something hard, if there is no logical rationale at all behind what we are doing? Why would we undergo serious difficulty if there is no defined goal, no defined ‘benefit’ to obtain as the result of this difficulty? …”

Stop!

2300 words
“Thought always rolls on and on and on, never getting anywhere but always justifying itself and promoting itself on the basis that ‘it is going somewhere’.
Actually thought rolls never-endingly onwards because that it the only thing it can do. It continues ceaselessly minute after minute, day after day, year after year because that is the only thing it knows how to do. It rolls ahead for the sake of rolling ahead; it carries on for the sake of carrying on. It is exactly like a person who talks non-stop about nothing in particular - a person who is ‘talking for the sake of talking’. They have nothing new to say, but saying something new is not the point. …”

The Art of Losing

4601 words
“…There is no way around this – if my new goal is to lose, and I then set out to achieve this goal, then my interest is purely on winning, just the same as it always is. Nothing has changed at all. The same is true for escaping: sometimes the pattern of my mind will create situations for me that are so hellish that I just want to escape, by drink or drugs or some other self-destructive addiction. I might want to end it all with the act of suicide. But the goal of ‘escape’ (in whatever form this might take) is a goal of the very same mind that I am trying to escape from. In other words, by trying to escape from the underlying pattern of cognition and behaviour I make that pattern stronger since trying to escape from the pattern is an essential part of the pattern. There is nothing that I can deliberately do, or try to do, that will not exacerbate the original problem, which is my complete inability to look for an answer outside of my narrow and limited way of understanding the world. …”

The False Self

706 words
“…The freedom that I have given up is the freedom of my spirit, the generosity and endless patience of my soul, which seeks nothing for itself, nor runs from anything. The spirit does not need to contend, for it is complete in itself. …”

Anxiety: The Philosophical Approach

1297 words
“Our usual way of dealing with anxiety is by trying to solve it within our established framework of thinking. In other words, we want the anxiety to be eliminated, but we want the thinking (which is our framework of understanding) to remain. We could also explain this ‘unacknowledged double-requirement’ by saying that we wish to interrogate the anxiety, to find out where it is going and where it is coming from, but we do most definitely do not wish to interrogate our established way of looking at the world. …”

The Search for Meaning

4507 words
“…Rather than endure the pain of not knowing – which would be the honest thing to do – I seize upon the conclusion that ‘there is nothing to know’, and derive whatever dry satisfaction I can from this. The former option involves committing myself to the belief that ‘such-and-such’ is the ultimate reason for us being here, and the second option involves me committing myself to the belief that ‘there is no ultimate reason’. Neither of these strategies leaves any room for questioning, for curiosity, because there is an actual investment that has taken place. It matters to me more than I am willing to admit that I should be right. If I close my mind, it is because I am afraid of taking the risk of leaving it open. I want to slam the book shut, and spend the rest of my days alternatively gloating and despairing over the meaning that I think I have captured. …”

The System of Belief

5221 words
“…the one hope that we never give up on is the hope that one day things will work out the way we want to. Of course, often enough we slide into despair – we despair that things will ever work out for us. But despair still contains as a key ingredient the stubborn belief that things ought to work out for us, that life ought to follow our plans for it. If this stubborn belief were to finally evaporate, then there would be no more despair because despair is all about ‘me’ and ‘my plans’. ‘Me’ and ‘my plans’ are the very same thing (as we have already said) and it is the stubborn yet futile obsession that creates so much trouble for us. …”

Transforming Pain

2137 words
“…At this point pain becomes interesting because it is relating me to life itself – from it I am learning about something real, something bigger than ‘me’. Because it has become interesting I do not have the automatic reaction of putting all my energy into trying to push it away, and when I am no longer try to fight it or push it away the pain no longer traps me in myself. The curious fact (that we never stop to discover) is that fighting pain creates a false self that cannot ever truly escape pain, and if there is no fighting, no attempt to stay in control, there is no self to be trapped in. …”

Lie #1

Longer Works by Nicholas Williams:

The Intentional Self

36,300 words

THE SELF AS AN ARBITRARILY CHOSEN ‘CENTRE’
THE COUNTERPRODUCTIVE EFFORTS OF THE BELEAGURED SELF…
IGNORING ARBITRARINESS
THE UNIVERSAL MEDIUM
THE ‘IMPOSSIBILITY CLAUSE’
THE DEFINED SELF AS A ‘VIBRATION BETWEEN TWO POLES’
THE ‘UNBRIDGEABLE GAP’ BETWEEN MEDIUM AND MESSAGE
A SHARED FRAMEWORK EQUALS ENTROPY.
GAMES EQUAL ENTROPY
THE GAME OF THE MECHANICAL SELF

“…It is being suggested here, then, that what we perceive through the senses as empty space is actually the plenum, which is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The things that appear to our senses are derivative forms and their true meaning can be seen only when we consider the plenum, in which they are generated and sustained, and into which they must ultimately vanish. …”

Introduction 21,516 words