Getting The Genie Back In The Bottle

Anything that comes out of the rational mind is ‘non-therapeutic’! There simply isn’t any possibility of the thinking mind coming out with anything therapeutic even if we waited around for a million years. That’s not its job – its job is to fix specific abstract problems in the outside world, not look at the psyche, or look at the big picture of what is going on in our life.

 

What we call ‘mental health’ is all about wholeness. It isn’t about anything else other than wholeness and it never could be – the word ‘health’ and the word ‘whole’ come from the very same root. No matter what is happening to us, no matter what our situation, as long as we’re whole (i.e. not divided against ourselves) we are healthy. Fixing loads of little things (or specific details) is never going to lead to better mental health – that’s only going to fragment us further. We can’t tackle the difficulties in our lives piecemeal – as if the problem lies in them – and we can’t use the ‘piecemeal mind’ as a guide to tell us anything useful – that is only increasing our suffering.

 

We can never think our way back to wholeness, in other words. We can never recover our wholeness via strategies, methods, via any sort of ‘purposeful effort’. We can never recover our essential wholeness via anything involving time, or goals! To make a goal of becoming whole is to hand the whole process over to the mechanism of thought, and this mechanism is never going to deliver it. The rational process is never going to ‘put us back together again’ – it can’t do because its movement is always in the other direction, towards fragmenting us further. Thought divides, it does not synthesize!

 

The fundamental mechanism of thought is to divide, to fragment reality. It focuses on its chosen particular field and ignores everything else – the one thing it can never do is ‘focus on everything’! The word focus means looking at one thing and ignoring everything else. ‘Focussing’ is a goal-oriented activity and so just as we can’t ‘make a goal of everything’ neither can we ‘focus on everything’. Goals only get to be goals by excluding what is not the goal (by saying what is not the goal) and the detail which the rational mind focuses only gets to be exhaustively defined in the way that it is because we have thrown away information relating to any other perspectives that we might have taken. ‘Knowing requires not knowing’, as Stuart Kauffman says.

 

This is how logic works – logic works by creating boundaries, or ‘polarities’, and wholeness – obviously enough – is not a polarity. Wholeness is not made up of two ‘opposites’ that work by excluding each other – that’s pretending that wholeness isn’t wholeness! That’s a game! The thinking mind, therefore, can differentiate but never integrate, it can analyse but never synthesize. It can take apart but never put back together. Rational mentation is an irreversible process, in other words; any process involving the production of entropy is always irreversible and thinking’ – by its very nature – always produces entropy. That is how thinking works, by producing entropy, just as Stuart Kauffman says. The more we know about the part the less we know about the whole from which that part was abstracted! This is good in way because there is a pay-off involved in knowing a lot about the part, but – psychologically speaking – there is a price to pay because we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture. We’ve become blind to what really matters, in other words – we’ve become ‘technically-proficient idiots’…

 

The point that we are making here is that the everyday thinking mind is good for solving specific problems in the outside world but not good for recovering ourselves, recovering who we really are when that awareness has been lost, as it almost always does get lost in everyday living! It’s not just that the thinking mind is ‘no good’ for this – it makes matters worse! It makes matters worse because the awareness of ‘who we really are’ gets even more obscured, even more hidden as we utilize the machine of the TM. This is actually the ‘danger’ of the TM – the danger that no one ever talks about. As children we are told about the danger of walking across the street without looking but we aren’t ever told about the danger of using the thinking mind without due care and regard! Fairy tales mention this danger, in their own metaphorical idiom, but our problem is that we don’t believe fairy tales – we believe technically-trained ‘experts’ instead!

 

The problem is that there is always a type of trade-off going on when we use the rational faculty to adapt to the structures that we have been presented with. The trade-off in question is the one between ‘functioning more effectively within the context of the structure or system that we have adapted to’ and ‘forgetting who we really are’! The more adapted we are to the system the more we lose ourselves in it; the more adapted we are to this ‘explicit or rule-based world’ the less we can know of ourselves as we are outside of it. We won’t actually know that there IS any aspect of ourselves that exists outside of the game that we have been taught to play. In practical terms, we can say that this thing that we are calling ‘the system’ or ‘the Designed World’  or ‘the game’ is simply a long list or sequence of logical tasks laid end-to-end such that there isn’t any gap or discontinuity between them. Or – we could also say – it is simply society. It is the ‘socially-constructed world’, which is the only reality most of us know.

 

On the smaller scale of things – leaving aside for the moment the question of being globally adapted to a determinate system – we can say that the danger of thought lies in the way that repeatedly fixing (or trying to fix) problems traps us full-time in the narrow (or ‘focussed’) frame of mind that is needed to solve (or try to solve) these problems. We don’t generally see ourselves as solving one problem after another the whole time but we are – every time we engage in thinking we are trying to solve a problem of one sort or another, even if it’s just the problem of how to describe the situation we find ourselves in to ourselves correctly. That’s what thought is – it’s a problem-solver. If everything was just perfect in itself and we didn’t on this account need (or want) to change anything, not even a little bit, then why would we need to think? We’d be content just to let things be ‘just as they already are’ and for this no thinking (no ‘problem-solving’) is needed…

 

To use thought in such a way that we don’t get trapped on a full-time basis in its frame of reference it is necessary not to get carried away by thinking. We need to remember what we’re thinking for, in other words – we need not to lose sight of the actual utility of the thought and not go beyond this and into whatever sort of ‘territory’ it is that lies on the other side of this point! [Which is actually the simulated ‘territory’ of the hyperreal, which is where thought feeds on itself] When we do go beyond this point (and into the realm of the hyperreal) then thought becomes not just useless, but worse than useless – thought turns against us at this stage and creates more problems than it solves. And quite possibly it doesn’t solve any problems at all! Society is full to the brim of this sort of thing – we’re always creating more problems than we’re solving and this of course means that we have to do even more thinking in order to solve (or try to solve) the problems that were caused by thought, and so the whole circus just goes on and on. We can’t banish the spirit that we have summoned! We can’t get the genie back in the bottle; we can’t prevent the enchanted salt-grinder from grinding salt; we can’t get the magic porridge pot to stop producing porridge, etc. As far as the thinking mind is concerned therefore this is the best news ever because now it has a reason to keep on being there; it has an excuse to stick around forever. As far as we’re concerned however this isn’t such good news because excessive thinking is degrading our quality of life and so creating suffering.

 

When our thought-created suffering grows beyond a certain point the chances are that we will look for help and the irony of ironies here is that it is to thought we look for help, which is the very cause of our woes! We look for answers from the thinking mind, as if this were a perfectly legitimate job for it. ‘Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?’ asks Jesus. If my quality of life has been downgraded by thought (which is what always happens when we can’t get the genie back in the bottle) then thinking about the problem is only going to exacerbate the situation. The only thing that does help is to be aware of our situation because consciousness does not fragment everything in the way that thought does. ‘The seeing is the doing’, Krishnamurti says. Being aware of our situation is a very different thing indeed to thinking about it, analyzing it, trying to control or change it – it’s as different as anything ever could be! It’s the difference between gentleness and sensitivity and violence and insensitivity, the difference between intelligence and insight and blind, fear-driven counter-productive forcing….

 

Saying as Krishnamurti does that ‘the seeing is the doing’ doesn’t make any sense at all to us, of course – the thinking mind can’t understand how ‘being aware of our situation’ can do any good. We imagine that we are only too aware of it already! But we’re not really aware of it – we’re only seeing it from the outside, we’re only seeing it via our resistance to it. We can’t ‘let it alone’, in other words. In order to see our situation as it really is we would have to let it be what it really is and that’s the one thing we can’t do with the TM. The TM can’t let anything be ‘the way that it already is’ – that just isn’t something it can do. The TM is a device for solving problems, not a device for allowing them! But something happens when we become aware of our situation, our pain, just as it is – we see something then, we get to understand something then. What we get to understand is that ‘the cure for the pain is in the pain’, as Rumi says. The cure isn’t ‘somewhere else’, which is what the thinking mind will always tell us. The remedy is in us, and it was never anywhere else. The thinking mind is always making us look in the wrong place for ‘the cure’ therefore, and this is why the rational faculty is not cut out to be ‘therapeutic’! How can it be therapeutic when it operates precisely by making us look elsewhere for the remedy that is never ‘elsewhere’, but only ever ‘here’?

 

 

0 comments

  1. goat777etc · April 28, 2018

    Really strong write-up! The simulated territory of the hyperreal, where the remaining ties have become severed and all becomes echo-chamber and feedback.
    The idea most frightening to me is ‘trans-humanism’. Imagine, to want to be trapped in the dream forever. “And gloomy browed with super fear their tragic endless lives…..A man would tear his brother’s flesh, a chance to die, to turn to mould.”

  2. zippypinhead1 · April 28, 2018

    Wow yes, all becomes the echo-chamber and the echoes do nothing else but chase (or avoid) other echoes. The ultimate ‘cheapening of reality’ – something worth selling your soul for!! had to look up the quote – it’s a good one…