We live in a world that takes a ‘mechanical’ view of mental health more and more for granted. Everything is about technical manipulation: just as I would take a car that isn’t performing properly into a garage to be fixed, when my head is not running right I take it into a psychiatric service shop staffed by trained technical experts. It is the job of these experts to run a few diagnostic tests on me, and then sort me out as well as they can, so that I can return to where I had been in my life before the episode of mental ill health had so rudely interrupted me. Professor of nursing Margaret Newman calls this linear interventionism: everyone knows what being mentally normal is, and so all we have to do is fix the error, and thereby bring the unfortunate person back safely to within normal operating parameters. There is no room here for questioning these ‘normal parameters’; that is not what the mental health industries are about at all – after all, the whole point, as we have said, is to ‘normalize’ these individuals. Linear intervention is by definition all about keeping everything the same, which is appropriate if we are talking about blood pressure or body temperature or insulin levels, but not always appropriate if we are talking about psychological rather than physiological ‘operating parameters’. A basic psychological operating parameter – if we can be forgiven for using such cumbersome terminology – is ‘the way that we see the world’, which spills over into ‘the way we think about the world’, and ‘the way we interact with the world’. If we are trying to deal with mental illness using the linear or ‘fixing’ approach, this automatically assumes that there is a right way to see the world, a right way of describing the world to ourselves. Rational therapies (i.e. therapies which are based on the use of didactic logic rather than spontaneous insight) proceed along the lines of “How is my thinking wrong and what is the correct way for it to be?” Basically, I want a set of rules to follow which can put me right again, or perhaps a ‘commonsense’ sort of a framework to guide me (which comes to the same thing). “So what is the right way to think about all this?” I ask myself solemnly, not seeing the patent absurdity of all such questions.

When I ask what the ‘right way’ is, what I am actually doing is handing over responsibility for how to think about things. A crude example of this sort of thing is where I adopt some sort of belief or theory that will tell me how each situation is to be interpreted, and what my response should be. I hand over responsibility to some conveniently unquestionable external source of authority. This is like joining a fundamentalist religion where everything is spelled out for us in no uncertain terms. But what we are talking about is rather more subtle, and can perhaps be better explained in terms of ‘handing over authority to a particular logical perspective’ (which can be related to what Professor of physics David Bohm calls the system of thought). The way this works is simple: when I tune into any particular viewpoint the resulting loss of perspective means that I quickly lose the ability to see that there are in fact many other equally valid viewpoints that I might have taken on the matter, and the result of this is that I am no longer able to question the validity of the viewpoint which I have started off with. This viewpoint therefore assumes a pragmatically ‘absolute’ validity (or authority) that is actually quite spurious. Because I can no longer question the validity of the way in which I am looking at things this means that I am relieved of any responsibility - I am relieved of the responsibility of choosing that viewpoint over all other viewpoints. As a result, my situation becomes nicely unambiguous, and all I have to do is to follow the logic of the particular viewpoint that I am adapted to. Everything is ‘obvious’ and as a result I am genuinely amazed (or genuinely irritated) if no one else can see things the way I do. This is just like a following a path in the woods that is clearly marked out and sign-posted at all times.

This is a trick that we all know how to do, and psychologically speaking, we have to say that it represents a devious way of avoiding the challenge that is implicit in the irreducible complexity of all ‘real-world’ situations. Anger is a perfect example of this – when faced with a complex and demanding situation I might be tempted to drastically over-simplify the picture by identifying whole-heartedly with the particular narrow viewpoint that is afforded me by the angry state of mind. This makes me feel good because all the issues become nicely black and white, and it is very easy for me to shift all the blame onto some convenient scapegoat. Psychologically speaking, this is a ‘dodge’ because I am handing over responsibility for how to construct the situation to a specific (and entirely arbitrary) point of view, a point of view which has now become conveniently but spuriously validated for me. What could be handier?

Handing over responsibility to a particular logical viewpoint is the same sort of thing as ‘handing over to the viewpoint-of-anger’; anger is just cruder, which means that it is easier to see the dodge. But every time we think about the world in a rational or analytical sort of a way, we are oversimplifying the picture, and because we are oversimplifying the picture, we are gaining in terms of ‘psychological security’. Psychological security is basically an index of how easy we find it not to question our assumptions, which is to say, it is a measure of how easy we find it to believe in our own descriptions of ‘what is happening’. If I have a high degree of psychological security this means that I am automatically convinced of the ‘rightness’ of my way of looking at the world. This index is linked with my unreflectiveness, with the concreteness of my thinking (my ‘literal-mindedness’) and it is inversely proportional to my sense of irony. When my index of psychological security is at zero, then what this means is that I am acutely aware of the relativity of my beliefs (or knowledge), which is to say, I am aware of the participatory role of my thinking in creating whatever positive reality it is that I am relating to at the time. Conversely, when this index is at a maximum, then I am utterly unaware that my knowledge about the world is my own construct, and I take it to be an independently existent fact. Jung explains this by saying that the products of our rational activity (our thoughts) surreptitiously substitute themselves for the reality that they are modelling. Berger and Luckman, coming at it from a sociological angle, stated that this process of ‘reification’ (i.e. ‘concretisation’) occurs when we sneakily take the opus proprium to be an opus alienum. It is not my work but someone else’s. The state of ignorance synonymous with the state of maximized psychological security is indeed ‘blissful’ because I have successfully handed over all responsibility – I didn’t choose for the world to be like this, that’s just the way it is…

There are no two ways about it, as soon as I think, “How do I do this…?” then I switch from a direct mode of relationship with reality (which I am in by default just as long as I am not thinking about it) into the fractured ‘analytic’ or ‘rational’ modality. I have plugged into David Bohms’ ‘system of thought’, which is a specific, logically coherent way of looking at the world. A useful way to visualize the system of thought is to see it as a series of parallel mental grooves (or tracks). The pertinent thing about these parallel tracks is that when we are running along any one of them, then all the others automatically become invisible (or inaccessible) to us. The system of thought isn’t any particular logical groove, but rather it is the state of zero perspective which comes about every time we slip into a particular viewpoint. This state of zero perspective creates a positive reality that we can then relate to as if it were objectively true, rather than a mere subjective projection of our rational minds.

Going back to the example of a person who has handed over responsibility to a theory or belief, it is obvious that by doing this I am ignoring the most basic requirement of being an autonomous individual, which is to think for myself. It is also true however that when I hand over responsibility to the system of thought I am running away from my responsibility to relate to the universe in a direct (and therefore honest) way. This happens the instant I ask myself “How do I..?” because it is at this point that I turn my back on a direct (or intuitive) perception of my situation. “How do I?” separates me from myself, it creates the hopelessly abstracted (or ‘distracted’) state of ignorance that Buddhists call duality. I am not being myself, which would be direct or unitive, but rather I am thinking about myself – which is to say, I am running a simulation or model of what I think my situation is using the ‘system of thought’ as my workhorse for this task. In actual fact the answer is already there before I ask it (before I define the way I wish to hear it with my question), but as soon as I think about it then I become many miles wide of the mark. As both the Zen Buddhists and the Taoists insist: if you have to think about it, then you have missed the point!

It is true that the rational therapies make us feel as if we are working out things for ourselves because we have to try to analyse what our thinking errors are, what type of distortions we are afflicted with, and then come up with a more realistic or objective way of construing things. But all I am really doing is mucking about with the fine details, while leaving the over-all framework completely unexamined. There is a fundamental principle at work here and the way that this principle works can be explained as follows:

The more I strive for logical consistency within the system of thinking that I am taking for granted, the more impossible it becomes for me to question that system.

This is the point that quantum physicist turned psychologist David Bohm makes in his book The System of Thought: linear interventionism puts all the emphasis on making the non-systematic errors visible, but the price of making these errors visible is that the systematic errors (the errors that are implicit in the system itself) become profoundly invisible. This principle is of course open to exploitation, and then the principle can be formulated in this way:

The hidden psychological motive in problem-solving is to validate the framework of thinking within which the problem (and the solution) make sense in the first place.

This is not to say that I can never use my rational faculty for fixing problems without doing this for the underhand purpose of validating my own particular viewpoint – there are very many instances of problem solving are quite legitimate, whether it be the problem of how to fix my car when it is broken or the problem of what to cook for dinner. This type of problem comes firmly under the category of ‘non-systematic errors’, and it is only right and proper that I should use logic to deal with them. But we are talking specifically about neurotic problems, which is to say I am asking myself, “How can I correct my distorted thinking?” It is easy to see that here we are looking straight into the jaws of a systematic error because when I ask this question I am handing over responsibility to the system of thought to solve a problem that lies in that same system of thought. To put it another way, I want to correct my defective thinking with that same defective thinking, which delivers me straight into a paradox. The paradox in question is of course the well-known liar paradox which goes as follows: ‘everything I say is a lie’…

Now the paradox as formulated in the terms of CBT may be stated slightly differently, i.e. ‘my thinking is subject to a hidden thinking error’. But if that is so, then this very statement is itself suspect because we thought it, and we are thereby denied a valid starting off point. I have no platform, no objective basis from which to evaluate my thinking distortions, far less fix them. For this reason the half-assed notion of ‘using my thinking to fix my thinking’ simply has to be scrapped. And it is no good trying to cheat by calling in some clinical expert to act as an independent measure of what is and what is not ‘an error’ because, as Bohm says, it is all the one system of thought. We are all operating within the same framework of thinking; we are all plugged into the same self-consistent logical system and there simply isn’t any bit of that system that we can ‘stand on’ to look at some other, defective bit. The system of thought can focus perfectly on non-systematic errors but it cannot see itself for love nor money. Regarding itself (and the arbitrary assumptions upon which it rests) it has no perspective at all. As a matter of fact, the positively defined world that we collectively inhabit only appears ‘real’ because of this lack of perspective – if I suddenly obtained perspective (for example by standing out under the stars at night for an hour or two) then I would find my habitual concerns, which seemed so pressing a while ago, to be ridiculously unimportant – if not completely meaningless.

If we stopped to consider the matter for a moment then the impossibility of sorting out my neurotic concerns without somehow gaining perspective on the matter would be obvious enough. If thinking could cure thinking then we would be able to iron out our neurotic tangles without any great difficult and the plain fact of the matter is that we can’t. How often have we tried? This is what neurosis is after all – the self-defeating attempt of logic to jump over its own shadow, as Alan Watts has brilliantly argued. Of course we can’t fix our neuroses by thinking logically about them – it is our narrow logic that creates them in the first place. We ought to know this by now, enough people have tried to explain it to us: pure or ‘unmitigated’ rationality is toxic, it is (as Gregory Bateson says) pathological, it is ‘destructive towards the whole’. The way rationality works is to concentrate on the relationships between a narrow set of logically related elements as if this set of elements were the whole of everything. Anything that does not relate to this narrow picture gets totally and utterly ignored; by focussing on the part we lose track of the whole, in other words.

Now it goes without saying that there is absolutely no way on earth than we can connect to the whole by getting very rational about it. This is a contradiction in terms – the ‘whole’ is not a ratio of anything and it cannot be understood in terms of anything. This is like when one guy says, “life’s a funny old thing…” and someone else quips “Funny in relation to what exactly?” The way rationality works is by understanding what it doesn’t know in terms of what it does know, and it only knows what it knows in the first place by ignoring the fact that it doesn’t really know anything. To paraphrase Stuart Kauffman, ‘knowing depends on ignorance’ because we can only know stuff by ignoring the ways in which our model is incongruent with what it is supposed to be modelling. Basically, our model is only ‘true’ because we have chosen for it to be true, and the corollary of this is that all the goals that motivate us in our busy lives are only meaningful because we have chosen for them to be meaningful (without ever admitting that we have done so). This is the dangerous ‘comfort zone’ that rationality provides us with.

The result of ‘not questioning our goals’ is spurious certainty, which inevitably hides a profound sense of ennui, which in turns causes us to become even more attached to our goals in order that we might escape the spectre of meaninglessness. When rationality is in command everything becomes like a kind of stereotypical Marxist-Leninist state where there is constant purposeful activity but nothing actually makes the slightest bit of sense. It is a trade-off: clearly defined and unquestionable goals are obtained at the price of petty-mindedness and secret despair. On the face of it everything is splendidly meaningful but when we find the courage to scratch beneath this garish surface what we see is the exact opposite – unmitigated sterility, a wasteland of the spirit. If we want to reconnect to life as it really is, rather than the bloodless substitute that is offered by rational thought, then self-analysis and the rules of logic are no good at all. Something else is needed, something so obvious and so ‘under our own noses’ that we can’t see it. In essence, we need to learn an art that very few people practice – the art of not deceiving ourselves, which naturally starts with the art of ‘not deceiving ourselves about the fact that we are deceiving ourselves’.

Before we go on it is necessary to make an important distinction. What we call ‘mental illness’ comes in two basic varieties, the neurotic and the psychotic. Jung has differentiated between the two by saying that a neurosis produces no new psychic material, whilst psychosis is often characterised by a veritable outpouring of the most bizarrely and startlingly unfamiliar ideas. To put it crudely, we could say that when I am caught up in a neurosis I am starved of newness and change, and when I am afflicted by psychosis I am inundated by torrents of novelty – I am threatened with visions of a world in which nothing is fixed or certain, a world where (as Heraclitus famously said), ‘everything is change’. Abraham Maslow noted that the root of neurosis lies in the fear of novelty, which is the same thing as ‘fear of change’. I want to hold onto what I have already got, I want to consolidate my position, I want to avoid risks and threatening new ideas. I know what the ‘right way’ is and I do not want to know about anything else. My basic motivation is to feel safe and secure, which necessarily means repeating the basic pattern of thinking and behaving that I have learned, over and over again. Stifling predictability is the hallmark of neurosis.

Neurosis, as psychotherapists such as Scott-Peck tell us, is also about refusing pain and ‘difficulty’. This way of looking at neurosis goes hand in hand with our previous definition, because ‘sticking to the known’ is easy (i.e. unchallenging) and so when the unknown forces itself upon us, as it always does, then this is perceived in terms of fear. In addition, the necessity to ‘play it safe’ means that we sell ourselves short, we deny our own psychological growth, and this denial inevitably causes us pain, pain which our neurotic attitude causes us to reject. When we are talking about neurosis, therefore, it is plain that a normative approach (which is to say, an approach which seeks to return us to ‘normality’) is the very last thing we need.

The situation is less clear-cut in the case of psychotic mental distress. As we have said, in psychosis the world becomes too unpredictable rather than too predictable – I have too many competing (i.e. non-agreeing) ways of describing reality to myself, rather than too few. We could say therefore that normalization is in some ways a legitimate way to proceed since the fact of the matter is that I just can’t cope with this much ‘mental freedom’, this much novelty. It is as if my own creativity has become a virulent growth that proliferates at my expense - Johannes Fabricius speaks of schizophrenia as a ‘malign individuation process’. Of course, this doesn’t mean that just because I am experiencing some kind of psychotic episode I don’t need to change, to grow as a person and go beyond my own boundaries – the point is however that I need to have boundaries before I can go beyond them.

People suffering from psychosis tend to have the same desire for psychological security (i.e. a reliable external source of authority) as people suffering from neurosis; as Dr Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass) says, the actual source of distress in the case of schizophrenia is the desperate need to grab hold of one way of constructing reality and say, “This is what is happening”. The only thing is, the theories and interpretations that I am going to adhere to are bound to be very far-fetched and ‘socially incongruent’ and this in itself is going to cause me problems. What I really need to learn is ‘non-attachment’, which is to say, freedom from the need to identify things as being definitely true or definitely untrue. This type of freedom, however, is not technologically obtainable - it only comes as the result of long and hard work, work that none of us have the patience (or stomach) for. What is more, this is a subtle type of psychological work that our society does not even recognize in the first place, so what chance do I stand? What we are saying here is that in a more fundamental sense neurosis and psychosis are not so very different after all, since the pain and fear that I experience in ‘neurotic’ suffering are due at root to my unacknowledged attachments, just like the pain and fear I experience when I am subject to mental distress that is ‘psychotic’.

If mental pain (which includes fear) is due to unacknowledged attachment, then what this means is that the pain is actually healthy because it unfailingly draws our attention to that attachment. The situation is that I want things to be a certain way, but they are not that way. What has to change, the ‘way things are’, or my stubborn insistence on things being ‘the way I want them to be’? As Margaret Newman has noted, we suffer because our pattern of interacting with the universe is too narrow and too limiting, and we are too insensitive to see this. Quite possibly my pattern was ‘right’ for me at one time in my life, but I have grown attached to it and cling to it past the time when it was useful. The pain is how I get to see this fact, and if I am deliberately insensitive then clearly the pain is going to increase until the time comes when I am ready to take it on board, and not thoughtlessly label it as ‘a mental illness’. Unfortunately, society is only too keen to help us in this sort of thoughtless dismissal of our own pain, and the very fact that we speak in terms of a mechanical defect shows where we stand on this. We cannot see illness as a sign of health, as Margaret Newman does; instead we see it as a totally unwelcome interloper – an ‘error’ pure and simple. We automatically look at things in a ‘back-to-front’ way: instead of me seeing that I have to radically change the pattern of my interaction with the world, I stubbornly believe that everything else has to be cajoled or manipulated into place. My attitude is “Its not me that’s wrong, it’s everything else”. I blame the suffering that I am enduring; I say, “This pain shouldn’t be happening to me, this pain is wrong”.

This belief is particularly hard to challenge. Pain is wrong. Of course pain is wrong – how can you look at someone who is wracked by great distress and say that their suffering is not wrong? What kind of heartless wretch would I have to be in order to say otherwise? Despite being hard to challenge, though, this way of looking at things is completely back-to-front and we can show that it is easily enough by thinking about what happens when I put it into practice. If I believe that your pain is ‘wrong’ then it follows that I must do everything I can in order to eradicate it, and in a high-tech society we have a fair bit of leeway here. But what this means is that I am actually creating some sort of artificial ‘consequence-free’ environment in which you can ‘be’ anyway you like without ever having to learn that you have strayed from your true, innate nature. You are being supplied with a weird sort of freedom which is ‘the freedom to be stilted without knowing that you are stilted’. Another way to put it is simply to say that without legitimate pain we can never learn, and so we can never properly grow (in the psychological sense of the word). We are a bit like seedlings in a pot that are denied sunlight, only our situation is worse – seedlings kept in the dark have no sun, but we (in our false freedom) have a false sun; and so instead of orientating ourselves to the true ‘honest to goodness’ sun, we orientate ourselves around our own (or society’s) illusions and become deformed as a result.

Mental pain can be equated to ‘honest feedback’ – if I say something cruel then to you I will feel terrible a bit later on; if I act like a jerk then I will naturally feel bad as a result of this. But if I am able to anaesthetize my conscience, so to speak, then I am suddenly free to develop into the most unpleasant person imaginable - a psychopath perhaps, to use the popular term – and never receive the vital feedback that shows me just how much I have cut myself off from my humanity. We can also talk in terms of ‘humouring’: if you humour me and say that everything I do is marvellous, no matter what it is that I do, then the chances are very much that I am going to grow into some kind of travesty of a human being, a freak or monster. So by never telling me the painful truth about myself, you have colluded with me in a thoroughly pathological process.

Now we are not saying that neurotic conditions are due to me acting like a jerk and being allowed to get away with it – that was just an over-simplified example that we were using to get a point across. Neither are we saying that all pain is beneficial and must never be ameliorated under any circumstances. If that were the case I would be doing you a favour if I kidnapped you and tortured you mercilessly for many months, and instead of being sent to top-security prison for eighteen years I ought actually to be given a public commendation, or a Nobel Prize for compassionate works. There would obviously be something highly suspect about this. But psychotherapists sometimes use the term legitimate suffering, meaning that if I incur a painful consequence then there is no ‘legitimate’ way in which I can avoid facing it. A crude example would be drinking fifteen pints of lager, and believing that I can escape any trace of a hangover the next day - that pain is legitimately mine, and so the healthy thing is just to deal with it. Another example would be if I allow myself to become addicted to a drug such as heroin or nicotine, and then imagine that there must be some easy way of reversing the addiction. Despite what the makers of nicotine patches may tell us, there isn’t – there are no short cuts out of addiction.

But the pain doesn’t have to be the result of something that I did – if my brother dies in a tragic car accident then that suffering is also legitimately mine. That doesn’t mean that I ‘deserve’ the pain like a naughty child ‘deserves’ a punishment, it just means that there is no honest way to avoid the pain. It isn’t fair, but it happened, and so I must one day come to terms with it. I can of course try to avoid the pain by going into denial, or by getting very angry with the world, but all these strategies are psychologically unhealthy inasmuch as they are attempts to deflect the painful truth of what actually happened. When it comes right down to it I am trying to hide from reality, and reality being what it is, this effort can do nothing but bring me even greater misery in the long term. It is ‘doomed endeavour’, right from the start.

It is a basic principle that evading legitimate mental pain is a disaster from the point of psychological growth because the moment I stop being honest with myself is the moment I stop growing as a person. Whatever I do from this point on is not real life at all but a masquerade, a charade. What is more, I will only ever make things worse for myself in the long-term because avoidance makes me progressively less inclined to be courageous, it makes the issue ever more painful, and it makes the inevitable final reckoning all the more terrible. As if it wasn’t bad enough already! This principle regarding the ‘foolishness of postponing inevitable pain’ is not news, it is something we all know only too well - it is just that we usually choose to forget it.

Neurosis – according to the definitions that we have been looking at - is the result of refusing legitimate pain. This means that the experience of being anxious or depressed can actually be very valuable to us in terms of helping us find a new and healthier way of interacting with the world. But the fact of the matter is that neither I, nor society, actually want to find ‘a new way’. We want to stick to the known, to the ‘old way’; we want the pain to go away to be sure, but we certainty don’t want to let go of our basic attachments. As ‘individuals’ (in inverted commas) we are usually very conservative, very mistrustful of change, and when you get a huge collective mass of people this resistance to change becomes a massive collusion - a conspiracy in fact. It is a conspiracy because we are all in it together, whilst denying both to ourselves and everyone else that we are up to anything. But what we are ‘up to’ is maintaining the status quo at all costs, whilst pretending to embrace what we call progress.

Our fear of change means that even when neurosis puts the big squeeze on us and puts us through hell we still don’t want to drop our old way of thinking about life. What people in this situation tend to say is that they most definitely are not looking for a new mode of functioning in the world, they just want to get back to the old mode – no matter how much they might have complained about it at the time. When jolted out of the comfort-zone which is our routine, everyday existence we get nostalgic, we get homesick for ‘how things used to be’, and we forget just how unsatisfactory that actually was. I will pay lip-service to the need to change, but if I were to be truthful about it the only reason I want to change is because I want to feel better, and so my motivation is entirely skin-deep. It is a knee-jerk reaction, the reflex movement of an automaton.

This sort of ‘automatic’ motivation (motivation that is based on avoiding pain or obtaining pleasure) gives rise to what we might call ‘technical cleverness’ – it prompts us to come up with efficient strategies and techniques for obtaining the goal that is so important to us (either the goal of avoiding discomfort or the goal of obtaining satisfaction). All technical manipulation falls in this category because the point of manipulation is always to avoid a loss. We believe that there is something absolutely important that we stand to lose if we are not careful, and so we react on the basis of this flatly non-negotiable need. The point about this is that my actions are heavy and serious rather than light and playful since there is something at stake that I simply cannot consider loosing. There is no chance of me questioning my own thinking, no chance of humour, and not the remotest sign of genuine curiosity. In short, this reflex-type motivation is the motivation that comes out of attachment; it is action that comes out of grim necessity rather than free will.

If we look at neurosis in terms of attachment, and the motivation that stems from attachment (which is exactly the same thing as attachment), then this makes the trap-like nature of neurosis very clear. Attachment shows itself in two complementary ways, greed and fear, and the greater the provocation of either the greater is our tendency to react, and the more ‘serious’ (i.e. non-exploring or non-playful) is the behaviour that we manifest. We are only interested in stuff that we like or dislike, stuff that matches our pre-existent ‘categories of thinking’ and anything ‘outside’ of this simply has no meaning to us. We can therefore say that the motivation that comes from attachment is ‘closed’ – it is utterly disinterested in anything that has no relevance to its goals. An exaggerated form of mental closure is manifested in all possible varieties of neurotic disturbance and this closed-mindedness is really the ‘defining feature’ of such states of mind. In neurosis it can easily be seen that it is our unequivocally goal-orientated behaviour that causes all our problems; it is my insistence on either obtaining something that is not legitimately possible for me to obtain, or avoiding something which is not legitimately possible for me to avoid, that causes me pain. Rather than drop the whole thing, I make do with an illegitimate solution, a solution that is no solution at all really in the long-run, and it is this pathological (or self-punishing) short-sightedness that is responsible for my on-going torment.

This so-called ‘pathological short-sightedness’ may be put down to the fact that when I feel bad (or when I am craving to feel good, which comes down to the same thing) I become to ‘flat’ in my thinking, I lose sight of the whole or ‘rounded’ picture and focus intensely on the details. For this reason when I am caught up in a neurotically closed state of mind this actually makes me ‘more logical’ rather than ‘less logical’. My behaviour doesn’t show ‘how stupid or illogical I am’, but rather it elegantly demonstrates the limitations and self-contradictions of logic itself, it renders visible paradoxes that normally we would never muster enough insight to notice. If only I could pay enough attention, I would actually be better off than my fellows who still manage to maintain a state of blissful ignorance with regard to the inherent paradoxicality of rationality.

It is important to stress the point that we are making here:

The essential counterproductive nature of neurotic thinking is not so much due to the sloppiness with which the laws of logic are applied, but rather to the trap-like nature of logic itself.

Logic, when pushed to the extreme, causes us to become disconnected from the global reality of our situation; put simply, we lose perspective as a result of using logic and so our actions (which are an expression of the logic we are embracing) have unwanted and unforeseen consequences. Our narrowly logical activity breeds problems and when we tackle these problems with that same logic, we create the classic ‘glitched situation’ that is neurosis. I unknowingly create pain for myself, and my reaction to this pain makes it worse.

We can explain this point in terms of attachment: because neurotic behaviour and neurotic thinking causes me a particularly vexatious type of pain, this itself acts as a powerful trigger for aversive motivation. It is my attachment that caused me the pain in the first place, and so when the pain comes it is only to be expected that I shall demonstrate powerful negative attachment towards this pain, and thus the vicious circle of neurosis is set up. It is my tendency to react automatically (or unfreely) that is at the root of my problems, but the more problems I have the more I react automatically to them, and the more I react automatically the more I strengthen the tendency to so react. Once the ball starts rolling it looks as if it can never stop because the only way it can stop is if I experience a dose of vexation (or pain) without trying to run away from it, or displace it in some way. This is about as likely as Ian Paisley going to Mass.

We said that the motivation of attraction/aversion (which we shall call extrinsic motivation for the sake of brevity) gives rise to behaviour that is goal-orientated, calculating, and ‘serious’. Essentially, this is what we call ‘rational’ or ‘logical’ behaviour, and whilst rational behaviour is generally seen in a positive light because it is so understandable and predictable, it can also be seen in an unfavourable light for exactly the same reasons - because it is boring or banal. In extreme cases rational behaviour can even seem downright inhuman because of its cold, ‘remote’ nature, but all the same our rational-materialist culture places great faith in it. We believe, quite explicitly, that it can solve all our problems. And yet we have been talking here about one crucially important area in which extrinsic motivation is no help to us at all – neurotic entanglements. Extrinsic motivation (the motivation behind rational behaviour) is as we have said, implacably dedicated to changing things to be the way that we want them to be; presented with a situation that is not amenable to manipulation, it has no other recourse other than to go into ‘neurotic conflict’ mode. This is true on the level of the bedevilled neurotic individual, desperately thrashing around in a futile attempt to put a stop to his or her torment and - which is more surprising for us - it is also true on the level of the cool and clinical thinking of the mental health specialist, running an anxiety management group. It does not matter how I use the tool of logic; whether I am careful or crazed in my manner of wielding makes not the slightest bit of difference in the end because logic is the root of the problem that I am trying to fix. It is the problem itself; the logic is the illness, not the cure of the illness.

It is a curious thing to consider, but rational therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy, with its implicit or explicit claim to hold the secret to the ‘correct way to think about things’ is based just as much on extrinsic motivation as is the most obviously dysfunctional neurotic coping strategy. Both arise out of our belief in the power of ‘technical manipulation’; both are attempts to fix the problem through calculation and control. Admittedly, the theoretical underpinnings of CBT are better thought out and far more coherent than the world-view of someone suffering with severe obsessive compulsive disorder; we have no problem in accepting the fact that in CBT-approved thinking all ‘logical errors’ have been scrupulously ironed out of the system, and yet the basic motivation behind both the OCD-type method and the CBT-type method is the same. Either way I have a model of reality, which I rely on to guide my behaviour. In both cases I trust that there is a relationship between my theory of what is going on, and the actual reality itself, so that my actions may yield fruit and release me from my problems. “If I do X, Y and Z”, I say, “then everything will work out okay”. This is the superstition that I am relying on – that if only I can find the right method, then I will be able to escape my problems.

Psychiatrists sometimes speak of a curious thing that is called ‘magical thinking’ – an example of this would be where I count out exactly twelve rings on the phone before I pick it up, in order to avert the possibility of receiving bad news. Everyone knows that there is no logical mechanism by which this could work, but this does not stop me believing in it. Even though I myself might know well enough that it is ‘irrational’, I still can’t help believing it. It is not hard to see in such cases what the benefit is – in reality I have no means at all of warding off bad news, but because I am so averse to that possibility, I am forced to resort to self-deception as a way out. Because I have such strong negative attachment to the thought of getting bad news, and because I have no real way of exerting any control over that possibility, the only thing left for me is to come up with an illegitimate solution. We might call this ‘theatrical control’ since it is all about the effect that is produced when we refuse to question the actual validity of the procedures involved.

In neurosis our technological culture has met a problem that is not amenable to control. Control stems out of attachment, which – it will be remembered – means non-negotiable need. Now the only way to become free from the neurotic trap is the see the legitimate pain that we have been avoiding, and ‘seeing the pain’ has nothing to do with control at all. control means that want something in particular to happen, there is always a defined goal that I am striving for, but when it comes to acknowledging (or witnessing) the pain that is legitimately mine goals have absolutely no part to play. ‘Goals’ equal thinking and thinking about the pain is just another way of avoiding it. Intending to accept the pain is also avoidance, it is just prevarication. The fact of the matter is that my preferred modality of control is all about changing things to suit me, to suit the controller, and that motivation perverts the whole business of unconditional pain acceptance right from the start. Acknowledging my own legitimate pain is not about changing stuff, but letting it be what it already is, which is a totally different kettle of fish. It cannot ever be a ‘goal’ because a goal is always different to what ‘is’; the only way for me to establish a genuine or direct relationship with my pain is for me to drop my goals, which is to say, when I drop all my attempts to change the situation.

The trouble is that when our control-orientated culture comes across its nemesis – a painful problem that is actually due to our reliance on control – then it has no choice other than to pass over imperceptibly into the realm of ‘theatrical control’, which is to say, self-deception. For anything else to be the case we would have to be unattached, and that would mean admitting that the game is up, admitting to ourselves that we can’t control our way out of every mess that we find ourselves in. Collectively speaking, this is the one thing we do not want to hear and it is for this reason that we have, in our medical approach to mental illness, resorted to a pseudo-scientific form of ‘magical thinking’.

What this means is that it has become more important for us to believe in the myth of the near omniscient medical expert who we can put our trust in than it is for us to actually possess some kind of genuine wisdom as regards the question of what ‘mental illness’ is and what we should do (or not do) about it. We want to be able to sleep peacefully in our beds at night, and in order that we may be able to do this it suits us very well to believe in the unimpeachable authority of the medical establishment and the supreme efficacy of the various medications that they hand out. This is our ‘comfort bubble’ and we are certainly not at all keen for someone to come along and burst it. Psychiatrists therefore have two implicitly understood social functions, one being (as Szasz says) to deal with the difficult problem of ‘mad’ people and take them off our hands, and the other being to provide us with the comforting illusion that it is ‘all under control’. We want the experts to be there so that we can hand over responsibility to them, and this is the unspoken contract that exists between us. To publicly question whether our experts actually have any clue at all about what they are doing breaks the rules of this little game, and so it is only to be expected that no one will take this radical type of criticism seriously.

The myth behind the calm and cool clinician is that he or she is not driven by the same desperate sort of need that lies behind the actions of a person in great personal distress. There is a sense of objectivity, of the authority that comes from the untainted and scientifically trained intellect that immediately puts us at ease. But what we have been trying to put across is the idea that rationality, in all its forms, is a manifestation of ‘attachment’. The relationship here can be expressed in the form of a simple equation:

Rational understanding (which is to say, understanding that is based on a definite model or theory of reality), and the action that follows from it, equals attachment.

Basically, we are attached to our goals and so – on a deeper level - we are attached to the framework of thinking within which these goals make sense. This sort of argument is hard to see because of the inevitable prejudice that we have towards assuming that there has to be a ‘right’ model, a ‘right’ theory (or the ‘right’ framework), which would of course mean there is no attachment involved. If it is true, then I am not ‘attached’ to seeing that it is true; if it is true, then I cannot be accused of being prejudiced towards it. I’m not biased if what we are talking about is really the way things are. But the point is that, in the non-logical universe in which we live, there is no model (no intellectually derived picture) that can we can use to safely substitute for reality itself. This is a great error, it is a snide and sneaky cop out - reality is reality and there are no substitutes that can take its place. When I think that I know what ‘it’ is all about, then I orientate myself about my thinking (my unconscious assumptions, to be more precise). The unquestionable validity of my viewpoint comes first, and reality has to be squeezed and cajoled into compliance. This means that I am never looking out at the universe with (as Krishnamurti says) ‘new eyes’, but only with the ‘old eyes’ of my thinking, which is never radically questioned. My thinking rules the roost, and it reaches out and bends everything else to fit it. This is the ‘logic of control’. But true perception (which is essential before we can in any way be said to be mentally healthy), is exactly the other way around – the universe reaches in and influences me, not vice versa. I don’t call the shots: reality is ‘the master’ not me. This is healthy because it is essentially unattached: I am not attached to my thinking; I am not attached to my theory being relevant to the way the universe actually is and so I can actually learn and change in accordance with some principle that is outside of (and therefore independent of) my limited rational understanding. Basically, I am not investing in any arbitrary position.

But although rationality is always prejudiced, always attached, it allows itself the conceit that it is disinterested, impartial, and coolly objective. The mask of cool detachment is of course merely ‘attachment in disguise’ because we are attached to the idea that we are not attached; we are attached to the idea that our bias is actually the truth. The fact is that our academic professors of psychology are just as attached to the idea that their thinking is in some crucial way ‘relevant to reality’ as the OCD sufferer is attached to the idea that allowing the phone to ring twelve times will avert bad news. They are (like us all) rationality-junkies; inasmuch as we are operating from the basis of our rational minds we are all hooked on the assumption that our models can take precedence over the universe that is actually being modelled. This is the essential conceit of rationality.

What we are saying here is that the reason our clinical experts in mental health look cool and ‘professionally detached’ is because it matters very much to us that they should look so. But actually clinical aloofness is absurdly and bizarrely inappropriate in the field of mental health – if you as a surgeon are performing some tricky medical procedure on me, then a detached intellectual approach is called for. Certainly, an emotional response on your part is not going to help very much. But if I am consulting you because I am in a state of profound distress, then for you to deal with me on what is primarily a ‘coldly rational’ basis then this is ridiculous. What you are really doing is distancing yourself from me, and this distancing is for your benefit not mine. I might be impressed by your expert demeanour, but in real terms you are no use to me at all - you might as well be on Mars for all the good you are doing me. Rationality is the wrong man for the job because rationality is about control, it is about being attached to the idea that we can change things to suit ourselves, and this means that when we are faced with a predicament that we cannot change all we can do is retreat into theatrical control.

If the detached and analytical approach is the wrong man for the job, then what is the right one? According to doctor of psychology and psychotherapy turned spiritual teacher Ram Dass, the only thing that really helps is ‘non-attachment’. Non-attachment doesn’t mean that you don’t care, it doesn’t mean that my suffering somehow doesn’t matter to you; what it means is that you are not a slave to any non-negotiable needs. So if I am in a state of great distress, you are not driven by an absolute need to make me feel better. That would only be a ‘reflex motivation’ based on your aversion to feeling bad yourself. Instead of being driven by the need to change my situation, you share the situation that I am actually in, and because you are able to unconditionally accept the way that I am, this strange fact penetrates my awareness and creates a new way of looking at things for me. If you can unconditionally accept my pain, then perhaps it is okay for me to accept it as well? This is of course the most helpful thing possible because it is my previous inability to accept my situation that has created my neurotic predicament. If I can find the courage to see the truth about myself then I am no longer held captive by neurosis, and so my experience of pain or sorrow becomes liberating, rather than entrapping. There was no attempt to change anything, and as a result of this fundamentally sincere attitude, everything has changed. No cleverness is needed, no specialized ability to manipulate, only the willingness to unreservedly witness the actual truth of the other person’s situation.

We have said that when we are in neurotic distress (or indeed any other kind of mental pain) this acts as a trigger for ‘over-rational’ or ‘overly-controlling’ activity. Of course, this is not to say that even when I do seem to be functioning okay I can - if I want to be pro-active in my search for mental health - avail of all sorts of mechanical (i.e. rule-based or ‘normalizing’) techniques and procedures designed to maximize my success in living a happy and meaningful life. ‘Success’ is the key word here; everyone wants to live successfully which means that the emphasis is on ironing out self-doubt, stress and negative thinking, building healthy self-esteem, and acquiring all the skills that will allow me to win out over the negative stuff. What is wrong with this? It certainly sounds reasonable. The only problem is that, no matter how reasonable the ‘technical manipulation’ approach to mental health might sound, it just doesn’t work. There is a fundamental impossibility here – we simply cannot control our way to mental health, we cannot ‘be happy in purpose’. One argument that we gave was to say that if neurosis is the result of my refusal to accept pain that is legitimately mine, then my attempt to find happiness must itself be an integral part of my neurosis since the attempt to obtain happiness has the same underlying motivation as the attempt to avoid unhappiness. This type of ‘reflex’ motivation is not an expression of my true self, but rather it is a mere automatic response and the more I indulge it the more habit-ridden and unconscious I become as a person.

A more refined version of this same argument is to say that control (i.e. purposeful or goal-orientated activity) cannot result in the state of mental health because being mentally healthy means being mentally free – it means that we aren’t the unconscious slaves of our attachments in other words. Control is ‘attachment in action’ and so obviously this is jinxed from the start since there is no way that I can reach the state of non-attachment through attachment. I cannot compel myself to be free; the attempt to do so delivers me straight into the paradox of ‘wanting not to want’, or ‘trying not to try’.

Another way of getting at this crucial impossibility (the impossibility of being happy on purpose) is to say that the state of being mentally healthy cannot be made into a goal because it cannot normatively defined in the same way that that state of physical health can be. In fact we can go so far as to say that if my mental functioning (which has to do with the way I perceive, think about, and therefore interact with the world) can be normatively defined, then this is profoundly unhealthy. Having a pre-programmed way of conceptualising the world is the opposite of being autonomous – it is what the radical social scientist Ivan Illich called ‘heteronomous’, which basically means ‘being wholly dependent on an external authority to do your thinking for you’, or ‘take care of life’s difficulties for you’. Of course, the condition of heteronomy might be, as Illich observes, a deeply unhealthy way to be, but all the same it is pretty much a universal condition – we all take it for granted that there is a ‘right’ way to see the world and a ‘right’ way to be in that world, and as a result there is an immense conservatism to this unhealthy mental condition.

Biochemist and esoteric psychologist Robert S. de Ropp goes even further than this to say that our normal state of consciousness is actually defective in nature - it is defective because it is a form of self-deception. According to esoteric psychology we engross ourselves in the world of the superficial and the trivial in order to distract ourselves from anything else, and this self-deluded state is in fact our normal mode of being. This idea of ‘defectiveness’ can be related quite easily to Illich’s ‘state of heteronomy’ because handing over responsibility to an external authority is of course an exercise in self-deception. What we are basically talking about is good old-fashioned ‘psychological unconsciousness’ and this ubiquitous mental modality is guaranteed to be detrimental to us because is it essentially a denial of anything that we don’t already know. As a result of this closed-mindedness I end up dwelling in the paltry world of my own pre-packaged pre-conceptions, I end up eking out my days in a safe and sanitized ‘rational simulation’ of life, which is a thin and highly unsatisfying diet. And if this ‘thinness’ were not in itself bad enough, the wholly rational life that I have settled for (all for the sake of avoiding legitimate pain) dishes up other torments for me further down the line. Denial, as everyone knows, spells nothing but trouble, which is why the great psychologist Carl Jung spoke of unconsciousness as being ‘original sin’. Exiled from a wholeness that we can never experience through the rational mind, we wander blindly in the thinly disguised vale of tears that is our lot as purely rational beings.

A more succinct way to put this is to say that we have made a deal, the terms of which we have failed to acquaint ourselves. We buy the psychological security that comes when we live wholly within the realm of rationality (which is a neat and tidy world where there is nothing that is radically uncertain or radically unknown) and the price we pay is the particular type of mental torment that we call neurosis. Gurdjieff calls this ‘unconscious suffering’ – because we have disowned our pain it comes back to us in another, more sinister fashion. Unconscious suffering, we could say, is when we tell ourselves that everything is okay, when deep down we suspect that it isn’t. When in this situation it is inevitable that everything we do becomes co-opted in the on-going attempt to cover up this knowledge from ourselves. In the first case the pain is ‘clean’ – it is out in the open, so to speak, and in the second case, the pain is hidden and denied and so the quality of the suffering that we have let ourselves in for is all the worse since it is actually the unacknowledged basis of everything we do. When our lives are based on denial, this engenders the all-pervasive if more-or-less repressed conviction that ‘something very serious is wrong’. It is this terrible subconscious awareness, which we do not dare admit to ourselves, that constitutes ‘unconscious suffering’, and we need hardly labour the point that this ‘underground’ manifestation of pain is a far darker and more destructive thing than pain that is out in the open.

Actually, if the truth were known, pain that is consciously experienced is not destructive at all, even though we are very indisposed to seeing this. Our pain is actually the truth of our situation, trying to get through to us, and if we allow ourselves to take on board the message of the pain (which is that the life we are leading is in some way false) then the outcome of this is bound to be that we stop living life in that way. When we live life in a purely rational way, we are caught up in a mode of being that is essentially ‘abstract’ and therefore disconnected from the wholeness that lies beyond the remit of our logical minds. To be living ‘under ourselves’ in this way causes us pain and this pain comes back to us in the form of neurosis and so (as Jung says) it is the unsuspected function of our neuroses to lead us back to psychic wholeness, which is what we are really talking about when we use the term mental health. This is why we can say that the neurosis that plagues me and refuses to let me return to my blissfully uncomplicated rational existence is actually a manifestation of health rather than illness. My unconscious suffering needs to be made conscious, so that it can help me.

Once we see things like this it is apparent that that ‘linear interventionism’ represents nothing other than the attempt to return people to a defective or sleeping state of consciousness, even though it is this unconscious state, rather than a chemical imbalance in our brains, that is the true author of our misery. We do not want to becomes mentally healthy (or ‘whole’), what we actually want is to be able to carry on living the way we were before without ever getting any annoying reminders of the fact that what we are doing is, in a fundamental way, against ourselves. This is the Great Goal that we strive blindly towards, little realizing how dreadful is the type of freedom that we seek for ourselves – the freedom to always get our own way, the freedom to never have to see the truth. Radical Jungian Malcolm Timbers hits the nail exactly on the head when he writes:

What Timbers is talking about here is the rational mind’s dream of freedom from the unconscious, where its own brand of logic can reign supreme, unhindered by any jinx that might be put on it from the deeper realms of the mind. This of course ties in very well indeed with the ultimate fantasy of the ego - which is that it might be allowed to do whatever it wants to do, without any nasty consequences. This is what the ego wants most of all, the freedom to have its own way in everything, the freedom to ‘create its own universe’, in other words. There is more to it than just this however because the ego also demands the right to be externally validated in everything that it does; its wishes are actually what Timbers calls ‘infantile’, being motivated by nothing deeper than a craving for ‘power for power’s sake’. “I want…” is the beginning and the end as far as the ego is concerned, but rather than see its own infantilism laid bare it wants to possess the illusion there is something more to it than this. The ego wishes to be dignified with the trappings of integrity, even thought it is absolutely lacking in this department and recognizes no greater principle than the ‘principle’ which enshrines its own right to have ultimate satisfaction in all matters. It goes without saying that the ego serves no master other than its own fickle self – this is its essential nature which nothing can ever change.

What we have here therefore is the situation where modern technology is hijacked into serving the needs of this ‘infantile’ attitude, the sort of attitude which says that nothing else matters other than our own wilful demands. As far as our consumer-based materialist society goes, this attitude couldn’t be better because it primes us to focus more or less entirely on our ‘wants’. Basically, we are encouraged to worship these wants, to worship our own wilfulness whilst we carry out the masquerade that we are a mature and sophisticated culture. Timbers sees this stunted and ignoble level of existence as being something that is actively promoted by the forces that govern our society, since when we are like this we are very easily manipulated, and too concerned with our own comfort to ever make much of an effort to break free.

Instead of talking about an unconscious, which tends to act in an indirect way on the individual to ‘correct’ the pretensions of rationality, we are going to use a different approach. Instead of the ‘unconscious’ we will talk about the state of maximum perspective. This can be easily defined as the situation where we have access to all possible viewpoints on the matter all at the same time. This means that we are able to define whatever object it is that we are looking at in terms of a ‘non-bounded’ (i.e. endless) series of descriptions. This might seem pretty stupid since this completely open approach to defining things obviously results in no definition at all. But far from being a ‘defect’, this capacity not to totally define an object is actually nothing other than consciousness itself, since when we have totally defined an object of our experience there is nothing ‘new’ left, nothing that is outside of our mental categories, and this means that we are unconscious rather than conscious. Consciousness, on the other hand, essentially involves the capacity to let new information into the picture.

It can be seen that we are in danger of getting confused at this point if we still hang onto the Jungian orientation that we were discussing just a minute ago because in that system the unconscious is the source of all ‘newness’ or novelty, whilst the rational consciousness of our everyday experience comes down to little more than the condition of living in thrall to one’s own mental projections (i.e. ideas), which are by definition old. This is, however, merely a matter of convention and we are going to adopt the convention that is taken by the esoteric schools of psychology, which generally claim that our everyday mode of mental existence is the unconscious one. Putting it this way around is helpful later on in our argument because we are not going to hang the property of consciousness onto a so-called self (or ego), which is what psychology usually (with a few exceptions) usually seeks to do. Instead, we are going to take the position that the ego is always unconscious, and that in fact it actually is only able to persist in believing in its own objective or independent reality because it is unconscious, i.e. because it is in the state where it believes in its own mental projections. In a curious way, the ego is both the beneficiary and the victim of its own self-deception.

When we define an object of our experience there is always an aspect of what we are describing that has escaped us, and that remains ‘uncertain’ (or ‘invisible’) with regard to our mental categories. The more we are aware of this inescapable deficit or limitation in terms of our ability to ‘know’ the world, the more perspective we might be said to have. This quality of perspective is exactly the same thing as the scientific parameter of complexity, which may be roughly explained by saying that it is a measure of the number of different descriptive terms that are required to define an object. When our perspective is at a minimum we possess the illusion that we have a literal knowledge of the world, and when our perspective at a maximum we realize that all our ideas about what the world is are in fact no more than metaphors. When we study some object of our experience with the advantage of perspective, we realize that the ‘object-hood’ of what we are studying actually depends on our willingness to look at it in a closed or limited way, without acknowledging that we are looking at it in a closed or limited way. Therefore, it can be said that all reified objects only get to exist in this ‘reified’ way when we play a sort of trick on ourselves.

Every rational perspective that we might take equals a state of minimized perspective that represents itself as being ‘all the perspective that there is’. This is a re-formulation of David Bohm’s concept of the ‘system of thought’. Implicit in both formulations is the idea that there is an unacknowledged distortion taking place, a ‘hidden bias’ which goes on to produce the illusion of an independently existing positive reality (i.e. a reality that exists independently from our thinking). This unacknowledged distortion may be said to produce two results:

[1] It produces the impression of a positive reality

[2] It produces the state of compulsion, which is where we are subject to a sense of ‘absolute necessity’.

It can be seen that [2] follows from [1] since if there is some feature or object that exists as an absolute fact, then we are bound to take this fact seriously, which basically comes down to a ‘compulsion’. A subtler argument would be to say that if there is an unquestionably real object, then by implication there must an unquestionably valid way of looking at the world, which is to say, the perspective within which that object is constructed. If we accept this then we accept that there is a ‘right’ way to look at the world and a ‘wrong’ way, which is another way of saying we accept that there is a fixed or absolute rule. Rules and compulsions are intimately related and so we can again see that statement [2] follows [1].

What this argument allows us to see is that the system of thought is essentially an arbitrary rule that declares itself to be an absolute rule. Once again we come across Berger and Luckman’s principle of ‘reification’, where the opus proprium is declared to be an opus alienum. What we are looking at here therefore is the source of ‘external authority’ that we are all so glad to be able to hand responsibility over to. When we have handed over responsibility to the system of thought we are in what esoteric psychology calls the state of passive identification, which we have spoken of as the state of psychological unconsciousness.

Although it is easy enough to come up with such statements, the mere articulation of the ideas is a far cry from a direct understanding of the principle involved. A good way to get at a more direct appreciation is to imagine a very simple scenario where you are sitting down in your armchair thinking about your situation. Suppose that there are no distractions, and that your head is clear. It is perfectly possible that at this point there might be a metaphorical ‘click’ in your head as everything falls into place. “Now I get it!” you think as you leap out of the armchair, ready to interact purposefully with the universe on the basis of your new understanding. Now the point that we are trying to make is that any possible rational understanding that you might gain as a result of your state of contemplation, however perfect it may be in its own terms, is guaranteed to be utterly and completely wrong!

If there is any sort of ‘click’ at all, then the only thing that you really know for sure is that you have gone wrong because that click is the sound of your conceptual categories snapping shut like a rattrap catching a rat. An extreme example of ‘perfect rational understanding’ is provided by paranoia, which is where we suddenly see that there is some kind of sinister design to the world around us. The ‘click’ in this case is very palpable indeed and once it has taken place we are very effectively trapped in the terrifying rational vision that our paranoid state of mind has provided for us. Less dramatic instances of this same process occur every time we judge somebody as being a particular type of person, or whenever we ‘make up our minds’ about something or other. The flash of ‘rightness’ or ‘validation’ that I experience at this moment is a trick, it is what happens when I hand over responsibility to the system of thought, to my narrow rational understanding. I have become disconnected from everything outside my own private mental bubble, and from this point on I have ‘closed my accounts with reality’. I am in the system of thought and all lines of communication with the outside world have been surgically severed.

At first, this is a euphoric ‘hit’; it is like living in an absolutely neat and tidy world, a sort of clockwork world where everything makes sense. There is a scheme of logic in place within which everything has a place, and as a result of this all-embracing conceptual neatness we feel pleased – I have done the accounts and they all come out exactly right, even down to the last cent, and so there is a great satisfaction to be had from this finality. This is ‘rationalist paradise’ or ‘dogmatic heaven’ because we can walk around explaining everything we see to our hearts content and what is more we will be unassailably right. We overlook the fact that our rightness has been bought at the price of irredeemable small-mindedness and for a while it looks as if we really can get away with it.

A perfectly self-consistent rational world like this (a simplex world where there are no contradictions of logic) is essentially a ‘lie’ or ‘conceit’ however and the fall-out from this conceit is that we contradict ourselves without seeing that we are contradicting ourselves. Carse explains this by saying that ‘all finite games are self-contradictory’. So, in other words, we only get to live in a non-complex, non-paradoxical reality by making ourselves blind to the inherent self-cancelling nature of all positive logical statements. I am suffering from ‘opposite blindness’; as Bennett says, I can only see one half of a plus-minus dyad at any one particular time. In practical terms what this means is that my activity is self-frustrating because although I do not know that I am contradicting myself, I am all the same and there is no way in which I can avoid the consequences of this self-contradiction (or self-negation). I can fail to see the significance of what happens to me, I can focus on how I seem to be doing well and edit out the knowledge of how I am not doing well, but I cannot escape the reversal that is invisibly contained within every ‘perfect’ rational world.

Malcolm Timbers talks in terms of a ‘trickster’, a psychic figure which he refers to as ‘the Sphinx’ who originates in the shadowy realms of the unconscious and whose errand is to sabotage all our rational schemes:

It is definitely the case that if we were to focus clearly on our troubles we would see that there is some tricky or ‘disruptive’ influence at work that seems to have no other interest apart from irritating and frustrating us. At times this irritating bug becomes more up-close and personal and we start to complain that it is for all the world as if someone, somewhere, ‘has it in for us’. Nothing ever works out for me! This defect shows itself in the most obvious way when we are suffering in the throes of some neurotic mental disorder. In such cases an imp of contrariness plagues me without mercy, and everything happens the opposite way around from the way I want it to.

Rather than using a mythical language to talk about the indignities attendant upon the life of the purely rational being, and the tricks that are played upon him or her, we can use a more ‘mechanical’ metaphor and speak in terms of a bug or glitch in the programme that is governing our supposedly perfect world. The bug ensures in an utterly infallible manner that our insatiable desire for rational fulfilment (which means not just that we should be able to obtain our goals, but also that our goals should be finally and ultimately meaningful) is going to be eternally frustrated. The bug makes a mockery of my best-laid plans, and it heaps a veritable mountain of indignities upon each and every one of my rational pretensions.

A good way to look at how this glitch works is to consider that ‘achieving perfection according to my particular viewpoint’ comes as the outcome of a successful act of control; it comes as the result of an act of violence, in other words. Control always occurs within a dualistic framework – there is an automatic assumption that there are two totally different and unconnected things – the controller and the controlled, the subject and the object. If I get my way over you then I am the winner, and if you get your way over me, then I am the loser. This makes sense within a very narrow framework of thinking, but if we take a broader view of the matter a problem starts to show itself. The problem is that the division between subject and object is not absolutely valid, it is only valid with respect to the narrow viewpoint that I am taking. This puts a very different perspective on things because without the duality of winner versus loser all my efforts are obviously absurd: basically, if I gain the advantage then I am gaining this advantage at my own expense and so this means that I am incurring a disadvantage. What we are actually looking at is the ‘cybernetic paradox’ (which we have already met in the form of the liar paradox). This paradox can be stated very simply as follows: WINNING MEANS LOSING. Another, even more basic formulation of the paradox would be YES EQUALS NO, which doesn’t make any sense at all from a narrowly logical point of view, but which makes perfectly good sense if we step back a bit and take a broader look at what we are saying.

This intuitive understanding has been known for a very long time and has been articulated particularly clearly within the ancient Chinese discipline of Taoism, where it is said that ‘night begins at midday’. When we fail to appreciate the inseparability of the opposites, the ‘positive result’ of triumph gives way to the ‘negative result’ of defeat just as surely as a point located on the circumference of a spinning disc gives way in time to the corresponding point on the opposite side of the disc. By acting as if the dualistic way of looking at the world is actually true, we set in motion a revolving wheel which although it always seems to be progressing, actually never gets anywhere at all. In Buddhism this is known as the ‘wheel of samsara’, and in the Mahayana sutras we hear mention of the ‘cyclical mind’, which is the mind that allows itself to be totally controlled by its own attachments (or desires).

In the Western rationalist paradigm we believe that we can learn about reality by using theories and models. We take it for granted that the more powerful our model is, the closer to the mark we will come in our search for the truth. But in the intuitive Eastern paradigm, all theories and models (and indeed all ideas whatsoever) are seen as being impediments on the path to understanding reality, and the more ‘powerful’ the model is, the more in danger we are of becoming attached to the particular illusory view of things that it shows us. A very convincing logical theory is therefore a tremendous obstacle to overcome, and tremendous obstacles being what they are, most of us never stand much of a chance of getting beyond it.

This obstacle is particularly pernicious in the field of psychology, where we attempt to make progress by refining our ideas, which is to say, by operating more efficiently within the remit of the rational mind. The rational mind is a part of the total psyche, as Jung says, but we use its products (i.e. our thoughts and ideas) to tell us about the whole picture, which they obviously cannot do. In fact (as we have already argued) rationality cannot even see itself accurately because seeing itself means seeing itself in its proper context, which means getting outside of itself, and this is the one thing that the system of thought cannot do. This is the ‘classic impossibility’ associated with the system of thought. When it does try to go beyond itself, all that happens is that it involves itself in an infinite regression: I try to imagine what it must be like to be standing outside of my own conceptual horizons, but really the picture I get is just another conception, which means that I am still within ‘the system of thought’. If it dawns on me that this is what I am doing, then I might try to imagine what it is like to ‘jump beyond’ my attempts at jumping beyond my own thinking, not realizing that this attempt too is doomed from the start. No matter how far I take it, I can never get beyond the invisible barrier of my own assumptions.

Another form of this same infinite regress is the regression of ‘intending not to intend’ – clearly if I fall into the trap of thinking that I can stop intending by first intending ‘not to intend’, then first I have to intend to ‘intend not to intend’, and so on and so forth. This is obviously an endless task because no matter where I am in the chain of intending, I will always have to go back one step to try to stop it. Once I get locked into the struggle it becomes apparent that this is a truly terrible nightmare – it is the classic nightmare of the rational mind trying to escape itself. I am refusing to accept that I can never ever escape from my thinking, no matter how much I think about it. An infinite regression is just like a paradox because it is a manifestation of impossibility – when we fail to hear the message (when we fail to see the impossibility) then we enact the impossibility without seeing what it is that we are enacting. When we don’t see the cybernetic paradox (the ‘control paradox’) then we go tumbling around in circles forever – YES means NO means YES means NO means YES etc. When we don’t see the infinite regression then we just go on regressing forever – fondly presuming that we are walking whilst actually never leaving the same old spot. Clearly, not seeing the glitch in rationality is a lot easier than seeing it, and so this is what we generally opt for. We opt to live in a nice and simple world, a world without any (visible) paradoxes in it.

It follows that if we have settled for the non-paradoxical view of the world, then we also settle for a non-paradoxical view of the ‘self’, and our attempts to understand this self constitute what we have referred to earlier in our discussion as rational psychology. As a rational psychologist, I stand on a reliably objective mental platform and survey the terrain from this standpoint. I investigate the subject in hand with the greatest possible intellectual rigour, and because of this rigour I know that the conclusions I come to as a result have a validity that is free from the taints of my own subjectivity. Whilst the intellectual rigour is admirable, the problem doesn’t lie here but in the illusion of an independent (i.e. ‘absolutely valid’) framework of reference from which it is possible to launch an investigation. If there was such a ‘supremely justified’ viewpoint, then I would be able to feel safe in assuming that I am looking at things in the right way, but this basic assumption that there is an absolute frame of reference for us to orientate ourselves around is itself completely unjustified. Frameworks of reference that are independent of the observer are an outmoded fantasy left over from the golden era of unbridled rationalism.

If we were to accept the unrestricted relativism implicit in the statement we have just made, then we would have to abandon the simplex approach to obtaining psychological knowledge, and try out the complex approach. ‘Complex’ means that we accept that there are an unknown number of possible ‘levels of description’ (i.e. perspectives) that might be brought to bear on the object under investigation, and we accept that there is no reason whatsoever to think that any one of these levels of description should be any more fundamental than any of others. If we see this, then this also implies that we have learned about the sneaky ‘trick’ inherent in each level of description, which is that when we focus on the world from any particular logical viewpoint, then this viewpoint is automatically validated for us. Another way of putting this is to say that when we ‘drop into the groove’ by looking at things in a specific way, reality is represented to us by our cognitive processes in a certain (i.e. unambiguous) way. This is a ‘trick’ because the sense of cognitive closure we obtain as a result of using fixed (i.e. absolutely valid) evaluative criteria is gained only because of our ability to ignore all information that does not make sense with regard to the evaluative criteria that we have enshrined somewhere in the back of our heads. Because my mind is closed, everything is ‘black and white’, everything is ‘simple’.

We can also talk about the division between the simplex and complex approach to psychology by saying that when we want to obtain information about the world we have a choice between the rational and intuitive paradigms of knowledge. In the rational paradigm, we assume that we start off without the knowledge, we naturally means that we have to head out into the wild blue yonder and search for it. Knowledge is ‘won’ as a direct consequence of the efficiency and effectiveness of our purposeful searching behaviour – the better we are at manipulating the world so that it gives us the right answers, the more knowledge we get as a result. Obviously, what we are talking about here is ‘knowledge as a pay-off for successful control’. In the rationalist paradigm, knowledge is a way (indeed it is the ultimate way) of being one-up on the universe. ‘Knowing’ equals ‘winning’, in other words.

In the intuitive paradigm there is no question of us wresting nature’s secrets from her by sheer force of arms. Cleverness at formulating theories and skill at asking questions does not bear any fruit here. In the rational paradigm knowledge is a goal, which is profoundly paradoxical because if knowledge is a goal, this implies that we already know something about it – we already know the framework within which it is to be apprehended. What this means is fairly shocking by anyone’s standards – it means that rational knowledge is obtained by ‘ignoring paradoxicality’, which in turn means that the advantage we obtain is ‘glitched’ (or ‘bugged’). As intuitive psychologists we see knowledge not as a goal to be attained, but an already-achieved state of affairs that merely has to be realized. If I strain to understand myself (or somebody else) then straightaway I am assuming that the ‘knowledge’ is somewhere else and I have to go off somewhere to get it. But if the ‘knowledge’ was where I was already, then by heading off to search for it I have actually turned my back on it. In practical terms, what this means is that if I ask myself “What is the right way to think about this?” then I have already alienated myself from something that I already knew, but didn’t know that I knew, so to speak.

Intuitive understanding is not something that I work for, it is not something that I win as a result of performing the correct type of goal-orientated behaviour, but it is ‘information that is already there’. If we say that rational understanding is obtained as a result of doing, then intuitive understanding happens when I am not doing, when I am practicing non-doing, in other words. If we say that the process of rational (i.e. abstracted) thinking is our way of distracting ourselves from what we already know, then clearly all I have to do is to refrain from distracting myself in this way, and the information that I was avoiding will be instantly accessible to me. A common instance of this sort of thing is when I search vainly for the answer to a problem that is bugging me: an intuitive answer to the problem occurs only when I give up the struggle, and at this point it may (or may not, as the case may be) come popping into my head all by itself. This is the whole point about intuitive understanding – it comes by itself, when (and if) it is ready and there is nothing at all that we can do to encourage the process. When the answer does come (if it comes) then we are invariably surprised by it, and we can see straightaway that we had been barking up the wrong tree the whole time that we had been busily ‘fighting for the answer’. The problem with this sort of a process, so it seems to us, is its very unreliability. We are not in control, and so there is simply no security for us in the intuitive mode. “How do I know it will work, when I need it to?” I ask. “How do I know it won’t let me down?” Another (generally unvoiced) objection is “Suppose my intuition shows me something that I really don’t want to know?” It is because of our rejection of the insecurity (or risk) inherent in the intuitive mode that we collectively opt for the rational mode, which despite having its proper place in the over-all economy of the psyche, is very much open to abuse.

As we have said, there are two radically different views of ‘the self’ that we might entertain. If we are operating from within the dualistic rational mode, then we relate to a picture of the self that is essentially ‘fragmented’ or ‘split’. In this case the self is a fragment (or fraction) of the whole which automatically promotes itself as being complete – it is a part that represents itself as being ‘the whole story’. As we have said, this is the way rationality has to work and there is simply no question of it ever working in any other way. The inevitable consequence of this subterfuge is that all the rational self’s activities become tainted with the unacknowledged need to maintain the integrity of this fiction. The perfect rational world that this split self inhabits is the outcome of a purposeful intervention on its part, it is the result of ‘successful control’ and so there can never be any question of it ‘just letting things ride’. The disinterested approach is not on the cards. Furthermore, the integrity of the rational (or split) self is dependent upon it not seeing its own role in maintaining the integrity of its story of itself, and so we can see that this self is ‘split’, first and foremost, against itself.

No matter what I do, as a split self I am always ruled by an unacknowledged motivation which is the motivation to constantly validate my own viewpoint. Because this operation essentially comes down to validating myself, we can say that the bottom line for the rational self is always selfishness. Even when it does stuff that appears to be unselfish, it only does what it does to further itself, to promote itself, and defend itself. This subtle sort of ‘selfishness’ underlies everything we do as rational beings.

Rational psychology inevitably bases its investigations and deliberations on the self-deceiving self (that is, the abstracted fragment of the self that misrepresents itself as the whole (or ‘true’) self) and as a consequence any rationale-for-therapy that it derives has the aim of re-establishing and revitalizing this false sense of self; lying behind the therapy is the unacknowledged goal of ‘validating the false self’s spurious claims of supremacy. This is the whole point of linear interventionism after all – to help those individuals who are no longer ‘one-up’ on the universe, get back to their position of ‘successful controlling’. When I find myself in the grip of neurosis it is natural that I will want to be one-up on my troubles, it is natural that I will want to ‘fix the problem’ and what our rational therapies do is simply to aid me in his shortsighted quest. I am unsuccessfully ‘playing to win’, and so along comes the high-powered technology of modern psychology to ‘up the ante’ with the most sophisticated and effective means at its disposal. My stubborn and ill-advised attitude (my ‘refusal to lose’) is backed up and reinforced by the unquestionable authority of the healthcare system.

Of course, even if we did succeed in this aim (which we cannot anyway, since winning is contradicted by losing) we would still not be any better off because the self that would have won is not who we really are, it is only an ‘infantile’ attitude that we have unfortunately identified with. It goes without saying that we do not discover ourselves through successful controlling because successful controlling means ‘successfully defending an entrenched position’ and so clearly there is no chance of psychological growth taking place here. For me to grow as a person I need to find the courage to go beyond my boundaries – I certainly do not need to increase the strength and vigour of my denial-type behaviour. Erecting eighteen-foot high fences topped with razor wire and ‘GO AWAY’ signs is not going to help me.

Intuitive psychology has nothing to do with strengthening our ego-boundaries, or our sense of being ‘such-and-such a person’. It is not about fixing my problems, or ‘getting back to where I was before’. Instead of all that desperately humourless purposefulness, all that is needed is for me to see things from a broader perspective. Once I give up my futile evaluation of my situation, and my futile resistance against it, then I am struck by the actual reality of where I am, and this is an actual direct perception rather than an idea obtained as a result of intellectual analysis. My problem is not that the false or mind-created self cannot win out over reality, my problem is that I am identifying myself with this false sense of self in the first place! The cure for this predicament is therefore not some sort of heroic struggle (which I only engage in for the sake of distracting myself anyway), but insight for its own sake. Insight shows me that I am working to defend a self that doesn’t actually exist, it shows me that I am sweating blood in order to maintain a position that actually has nothing to do with me in the first place. I suffer because I am attached to illusions, and even if I could manage to maintain those illusions it would do me no good. In reality, the painful process of divesting myself of these false ideas is the best thing that could ever happen to me, and yet here I am fighting the process of becoming aware for all I’m worth!

The key to everything is seeing the inherently prejudicial nature of the rational self, the fact that it has to see everything in a distorted way. Once I see that I am engaged in maintaining a fiction, that I am constantly endeavouring to win out over reality, then this marks the beginning of the end of my struggle. If my prejudice is acknowledged, then this means that I am able to see the ‘other side of the story’, i.e. I am able to see the other guy’s right to exist. To put this another way, when the ‘part that represents itself as the whole’ sees that it is only a part, then it is related back to its wholeness, the wholeness that it itself had hitherto denied itself. The self-distracted or rational self gets to perceive itself as being the whole story by preoccupying itself the whole time in its games; and when it comes down to it just about everything we do comes down to this unacknowledged ‘game-playing’. The rational self is ‘an arbitrary mental construct that sees itself as an independently existing entity’ and it ceaselessly engages itself in its web of self-deception, in order that it might not find out that it does not in itself represent any kind of ‘final reality’. For it to remain ‘king of the castle’ it is prepared to pay a very high price, even when that price is its own interminable misery.

We can sum up what we have been saying in this introduction by stating that there is not one self, and one definition of what metal health is for that self, but two selves and two corresponding definitions of what mental health constitutes for each self. The first self is a self which is very clearly defined and ‘concrete’ but which suffers from being ‘incomplete without knowing that it is incomplete’. It is a fragment which does not know that it is missing anything. This state of affairs is unavoidable just so long as the self in question is to be clearly defined because where it to recover its missing ‘wholeness’ it would at the same time be plunged into the state of ‘non-definition’.

The reason for this is very straightforward: the way the rational faculty works is to take certain rules as being ‘absolute givens’ (which is to say, utterly unquestionable) so that it can charge ahead and construct for itself a positively defined reality on this basis. Alternatively, we could say that rationality works by taking certain ‘rules-for-evaluation’ as being absolute givens, so that it can charge ahead and definitively assess (or analyse) the world on the strength of their unquestionability. Either way, a robustly positive description of the world is obtained. Once we understand the way in which rationality works, we can see straightaway that this must also be the way in which the ‘rational self’ is constructed or described. If we move off into the direction of ‘increased relativisation of all descriptions’ - which is where our descriptions become less and less literal, and more and more ironic, (or perhaps metaphoric) – then we come to a view of the world in which all ‘rules of evaluation’ are equally arbitrary and where there is no ‘right way’ to look at things. When no one rule is better than any other rule, then we find ourselves in a symmetrical situation with regard to whatever it was that we were talking about. Symmetry means wholeness, but it also means that there is no foothold for rational analysis (or indeed any other kind of analysis), and this means that there is absolutely nothing we can say about this wholeness. It is ‘whole’ (meaning there is nothing whatsoever that is excluded), but it is not positive.

To put this another way, if we take a partial view of things (without admitting that this is what we are doing), then we can ‘split off’ a positive object and relate to it as some sort of objectively external feature of the world, something that has no dependence at all on our way of conceptualising it to ourselves. But if we do not avail of the abstracted viewpoint (or ‘platform’) which is afforded us by the process of rational thinking then obviously there is no possibility of obtaining a positive object which we can relate to in an abstract sort of a way. The world is now too ‘up close’ to me, it is too personal and I cannot treat it as if it is something separate to myself. The spurious safety that I gained by handing over responsibility to the system of thought is gone and I am ‘in the thick of it’ – it is a direct, personal and completely unprecedented experience, rather than being a ‘run-of-the-mill’ account of the world which is the way my rational-conceptual mind usually explains it to me.

When there is maximum perspective (or ‘maximum complexity’) what we relate to through our sense organs is not an external, ‘split-off’ object (which is knowable) but the very ground of our being, which is actually ‘groundlessness’. Groundlessness simply means that there isn’t any convenient raft of assumptions that we can perch upon in order to survey our situation, and so this is basically another way of saying that ‘wholeness is essentially unknowable’. There is a simple kind of an argument that we use to show why wholeness should be ‘unknowable’ and it goes like this: if the whole really is the whole (and we will say that it is) then there is nothing left out – there is nothing ‘outside the whole’, in other words. Now if there is nothing outside of the whole of everything, which clearly there cannot be, then there is no external vantage point from which we can observe, in an objectively detached sort of a way, the whole. Therefore, I can be the whole, but I cannot see the whole; I can be ‘conscious’ (i.e. I can attain the state of maximum perspective), but I cannot turn around and look at this consciousness to see what it ‘is’. Actually, if I do say that consciousness ‘is’ something then I have committed an error because when I use the word ‘is’ that means that I am relating incoming data to a pre-existent category of thought, and so any information that is in the incoming data that is not logically relatable to the criteria governing what does or does not match up to the category is simply ignored or disregarded. What we are talking about there therefore is conditioned perception (‘seeing what you want to see’) rather than the unconditioned (and unconditional) perception which is what we have designated as ‘consciousness’. Consciousness means that I am seeing something radically NEW, rather than simply seeing something that matches my expectations of what I thought I might see.

In effect, of course, we do utilize an external vantage point in order to obtain objective knowledge of the world, but the problem is that the vantage point is an abstraction, and therefore ultimately unreal. When I see the world from an unreal vantage point what I see is also unreal, and this is the system of thought in a nutshell – an unreal subject relating to an unreal object, where both subject and object are the two poles of the same abstract set-up. Rational knowledge about myself is thus a completely different kettle of fish than the conscious awareness of being myself – instead of understanding myself from an ‘unreal’ external (or extrinsic) viewpoint, which is a task (and therefore an ‘issue’ for me), I have nothing to do with it at all. When I have ‘no issues’ (i.e. when I am able to look at things in a non-attached way) then the unknowable self expresses itself as it will, which necessarily comes as a surprise to me. This is in contrast to my rational understanding of myself, which as a form of ‘hidden control’ always comes as a confirmation of my underlying prejudices.

Unknowable really means ‘free’ because when I make myself into the object of my own knowledge all I am doing is limiting myself to being whatever it is that the static abstraction which my framework of thinking says I can be. The possibilities allowed by the system of thought constitute a finite and self-referential set of elements, a logical fragment of an a-logical whole which implicitly takes itself to be ‘the be all and end all’ - the whole of what is possible. This is the ‘false god’ spoken of the by the Gnostics: the Father of Falsehoods, the Lord of Lies, the Great Deceiver who pretends to be the One True God. The known self (which is my perception of myself as conditioned by the invisible assumptions on which my rational mind is based) is therefore finite, self-referential, unfree and essentially unreal (except on its own unreal terms). Yet it is this paltry self that we seek to understand better through rational psychology, under the pathetically erroneous impression that we actually stand to learn something useful from this search. If we wanted to psychologically benefit ourselves, we would do better to learn to be free (or realize the freedom that we already have) rather than enslave ourselves further by thinking about ourselves. This is the point made by Zen master Linji who is translated and quoted as follows by Thomas Cleary (1989, p6):

In the classic Buddhist treatment of psychology the two types of self are often spoken of in terms of the conditioned versus the unconditioned self. When I am conditioned I am unfree, but more than this, I am unfree without knowing that I am unfree. It could also be said that I am conditionally free, I am free to obey my conditioning without realizing that this is what I am doing. I have mistaken conditional freedom for the real thing, which I cannot even imagine. I have only my ‘idea of freedom’, which is my conditioning because my thinking is my conditioning in disguised form. Another way to explain the relationship between thinking and conditioning is to say that I am only able to accept that what my thoughts present to me as being real (or meaningful) are in fact real or meaningful because of the evaluative criteria which I take for granted. These evaluative criteria are the information processing rules that I use to make rational sense of the world, and these hidden or implicit rules are the same thing that we have been referring to as my conditioning.

Conditioning is essentially the finite and endlessly repeating pattern that is being imposed on the underlying medium. It is the pattern on the wallpaper, and when we lie in bed looking at the wallpaper it is the pattern which reaches out and grabs us, it seizes our attention and takes it away from the ‘formless medium’ of the actual paper. As beings functioning in the rational mode, our attention is completely taken over by the pattern, which is the whole world for us. As the conditioned beings that we are, we have absolute attachment to our conditioning – I am, in other words, unconsciously driven by my need to validate my own conditioning, (and therefore myself, which is no more than a construct of that conditioning). If the conditioned self is the pattern on the wallpaper, which is what I unconsciously or automatically identify with as ‘myself’, then the unconditioned self is what carries the pattern. In this sense, the unconditioned self is more potentiality than concrete fact - it could be anything at all (i.e. it is unconditionally free), but it is not bound to be anything. To put this another way, the unconditioned self is the one who wears the mask, the mask in question being the conditioned self. The relationship between the conditioned self and the unconditioned self is exactly the same as the relationship between what I think of myself and whatever it is that I am.

The relationship (if there may be said to be one) between the pattern and the carrier of the pattern is worth looking at for a minute or two. In the context of this discussion we will define a ‘pattern’ as a indefinitely repeating arrangement of a finite number of basic (i.e. predictable) units. If the pattern in question is my pattern of living, which is to say the habitual way that I have of interacting with my environment, then we can say that there exists a very strong (if not totally over-riding) tendency for me to identify with this specific regime of interaction. I get caught up in the particular pattern of my life so that it seems to me as if that pattern is me, and this identification goes on to cause all sorts of insoluble problems for me. The key point is that my pattern of living, and life itself, are not the same thing – the former is the modulation, and the latter the medium. My life could in theory take any pattern; it doesn’t in the least matter which pattern it is that gets to be enacted. One is as good as another really.

If I look at the pattern of my life with a bit of perspective then I can see that the actual pattern itself is quite arbitrary, which means that the pattern is not worth getting ‘hung up’ on. Being ‘hung up’ means being attached, and when I see that life can take any pattern and still be life, then it is natural that I do not get attached to any particular ‘way of doing it’. The pattern is not the thing, in other words, even though it is the thing which most readily grabs our attention. Without perspective however, it is a very different story. When I am in the state of passive identification (as the esoteric psychologists call it) then I automatically construct myself in terms of the particular pattern that I am enacting at the time – the pattern isn’t just ‘a pattern’, it is something very special, it is me. Being passively identified in this way means that I am a slave to an arbitrary way of looking at the world without realizing that I am a slave – I cannot see that I am a slave to the pattern because I think that the pattern is who I am. I think that its inherent bias is an expression of my own true nature; I think that its ‘likes and dislikes’ are my likes and dislikes and so I don’t them as enslaving me. This is like an alcoholic who thinks that it is he who wants a drink, when the fact of the matter is that it is the pattern of addiction which wants to perpetuate itself. I have been conditioned to want to drink alcohol, but who I really am doesn’t want (or need) anything since the unconditioned self - as we have said - is free.

We can also say ‘the pattern’ is thought, since all of our purposeful behaviour comes out of thought. Thoughts are modulations in other words, they are waves travelling across the ocean of consciousness. The wave is the particular, whilst the ocean is the universal. On the one hand, the wave and the water which the wave travels on seem to be intimately related – they seem to be caught up in each other. In a way this is true, but in another way it isn’t so true because the two are essentially unconnected. After all, the medium can carry any modulation (or ‘message’) without compromising itself in the least; the message doesn’t actually make any difference to the medium. To be anthropomorphic about it - the ocean doesn’t care about the type of waves that travel on it.

We could explain this a bit further by saying that the medium presents exactly the same face to all possible messages – it plays no favourites, it sees all messages as being the same, it doesn’t take any one message any more seriously than any other. As Richard Bach says in Illusions, “Reality is divinely indifferent”. This lack of bias would be profoundly disturbing to the particular message or pattern (if the pattern in question could see it, that is) because a pattern only gets to be a pattern by taking itself seriously. All patterns are inherently prejudiced – ‘pattern’ is just another word for bias, when it comes down to it. If I am unbiased - which is to say, if I see all ways as being equally good – then I am not a pattern, I am the medium. The relationship between the modulation and the medium is therefore the same thing as the relationship between ‘bias’ and ‘non-bias’, so what does that tell us? We can think about this in terms of two people, one who is prejudiced in his outlook, and the other who is not. Now, the prejudiced person cannot see the lack of prejudice in the other because if he could see this then he would also see that he is prejudiced, and if he could see this, then he would not be prejudiced. For this reason, the message is blind to the medium, just as the conditioned self is blind to unconditioned self; by definition there is no way that conditioning can see beyond itself. The unprejudiced person can see the prejudiced guy, but he doesn’t take this evident prejudice seriously – if he did take it seriously, then he would be prejudiced against prejudice, which would mean that he was prejudiced after all! What we are saying, then, is that the message is blind to the medium, and the medium doesn’t specially care about the message (i.e. it doesn’t elevate one rule over another).

We can also approach this matter of how bias and non-bias are related by saying that the message is exclusive, being based on strict Aristotelian ‘either/or’ logic. Ether the element under consideration is allowed or it is not allowed, and it is this strict discrimination (or prejudice) that produces a positive (or ‘defined’) reality. The medium, on the other hand, is all-inclusive, being based on ‘both/and’ logic, and what this means is that any element whatsoever is ‘allowed’, no questions asked. You are ‘in’ no matter what because everything is ‘in’; there simply isn’t any way that you can be left ‘outside’ of the universal set of everything because the universal set of everything only gets to be the universal set of everything because nothing at all is excluded. Straightway we can see that this way of looking at things shows us that the message is both partial and defined, whilst the medium must be both whole (because nothing is left out) and undefined (because defining means ignoring what doesn’t fit our criteria). We can say that inclusivity is the natural (or ‘intrinsic’) law because it is the way things are in the absence of any outside interference, and similarly we can say that exclusivity is the imposed (or ‘extrinsic’) law because it has to be put in place by some external agency.

A disarmingly simple and straightforward angle on all this is to say that the message is inherently selfish, caring about nothing but itself and its own way of looking at things, whilst the medium is utterly and completely unselfish, having no conception whatsoever of ‘self’ (i.e. dissymmetry). ‘Self’ can defined in terms of the basic Aristotelian discrimination between ‘what is allowed’ and ‘what is not allowed’ (i.e. I am this, but I am not that), and it can also be understood in terms of a definite centre or location (i.e. I am here, but I am not there). The state of selflessness, on the other hand, would be concomitant with non-duality (non-discrimination) and non-locality. The former makes sense within a map or framework of reference, whilst the latter state of affairs is unconditioned, having nothing to do with any externally imposed context of meaning.

The conditioned self, we have said, is a slave to the pattern that defines it, and it obeys no higher master than this arbitrary prejudice. The ‘bias behind the pattern’ is constitutionally unable to question itself, and it is this blindspot (this in-built inability to see the truth) that makes the conditioned self function as ‘a self’. When we were discussing the relationship between message and medium we said that the message is oblivious to the medium, and so the implication is that the conditioned self is oblivious to the unconditioned self, which is its own true nature. This is evidently true, as we can see from the great (sometimes apparently insurmountable) difficulty that people have in grasping this sort of idea. But at the same time it is also true that we acknowledge the all-inclusive ground of our being in an indirect sort of a way – we acknowledge it through our repressed fear of it, which is to say through our denial of it.

Abraham Maslow, as we noted earlier, asserted that the root of neurosis lies in our ‘fear of novelty’ and novelty happens to be a very good way of describing the way in which the medium would appear to the message – if it did manage to show itself, that is. Ernst and Christine von Weizsacker define novelty in their (1973) Model of Pragmatic Information as information that does not correspond in any way to our evaluative (information processing) criteria. Novelty is disagreeing information, information that has zero congruency with the structural bias of the receiver. Now on the one hand this means that the information is invisible, since it is – according to our information processing apparatus – meaningless noise and therefore not worthy of our consideration. But on the other hand the capacity of our rational minds to screen out irrelevant information is not total. I am not entirely identical with the ‘conditioned self’ - I am contained within its narrow confines most of the time, but there is a thin trickle of novelty-type information coming into the picture from time to time. A big shock or a particularly exhilarating experience will help in this. This novelty-type information is ‘strangeness’, it is when we register a sense of wonder about what is going on around us, and at such times it is intuitively obvious to us that there is more to life than our philosophies would have us believe. It is not just that we don’t have ‘the full picture’, but rather that there is absolutely no connection between our thinking and the medium upon which this thinking propagates. We were ‘dead wrong’ the whole time; we were barking up the wrong tree entirely, and what is more all trees are the wrong tree. It is the medium which is ‘life’ (or ‘reality’), rather than our thinking which constitutes no more than an oversimplification, a crude simulation. A particularly succinct way of explaining this point is to say that the medium is an absolute logical discontinuity. What is more, we cannot afford to assume that we can safely ignore it just because it is so horribly awkward, just because it won’t play ball with us as we want it to .We can’t afford to ignore it (even though in practise we do) because this absolute logical discontinuity is reality itself and anything else (anything that is not the logical discontinuity) is mere empty abstraction.

The medium is novelty precisely because it is sublimely unconcerned with the particularities of the messages it conducts; it is novelty because it never confirms what we would expect to see from the inside of the mental grooves within which we are ensconced. The medium is always ‘outside the groove’ and since it is so perfectly and delightfully impartial with regard to ‘the slant associated with any particular groove’ it is outside all grooves. It is the fact that the medium is so utterly irrelevant (or so non-agreeing) to our cherished beliefs that we find it so disturbing; there is no support for me there at all, which means of course that there is actually no way in which I can hang onto the idea of ‘me’. As a conditioned self, I am the bias, and so the idea of this bias not being of central importance, or (God forbid) of being of no importance at all, is anathema to me. I find this possibility absolutely unacceptable, and so out of the ‘reflex reaction’ of saying a big “NO” to anything genuinely new is born the whole neurotic defence of the conditioned self. The consequences of this automatic denial mechanism are bizarre but at the same time ubiquitous – the repression of novelty inevitably means we spend our whole lives staying within ‘the known’, never venturing out into the dangerous, uncharted zones of life. Of course, we could never do this consciously, in full awareness of what we were doing, because the ignominy of it would naturally appal us. If I knew that I was spending the whole of my life deliberately limiting myself (and limiting those around me), then there is no way that I could escape feeling very bad about this. I get around this by a sneaky sort of a dodge: firstly, I take it for granted that the banal merry-go-round of my finite world is in fact all the world there is, and secondly, I substitute trivial uncertainty for radical uncertainty so that I always feel as if ‘something new is about to happen’ even thought that ‘something new’ is in fact no more than a rehash of the same old basic building blocks.