Mental Health Isn’t About Control

Mental health can’t ever be the result of some kind of ‘high-tech’ intervention, much as we love high-tech interventions! Mental health can’t ever be the outcome of any technological intervention, for the simple reason that technology is an extension of the thinking mind and mental health essentially involves freedom from the thinking mind!

 

We can’t be mentally well unless we are disentangled in our essence from thoughts, ideas, beliefs, concepts, etc,  and there is no way in which this ‘disentangled’ state of mind can never come about as a result of any thought-based process. Blood cannot wash away blood, as the Zen saying has it. The more we think the more tangled up we get and there is no way around this; deliberately trying to untangle ourselves from the tangles that have been created by thought is not a ‘winning strategy’! Actually, as far as freeing consciousness from the conditioning effects of thought goes, there are no winning strategies…

 

The very idea of there being such a thing as a ‘successful strategy’ for freeing consciousness from the entanglements of thought is hugely ridiculous, although whilst we are in the grip of thought we can’t actually see this. It’s hugely ridiculous because of the polarity of success/failure is in itself a prime indication that we have been thoroughly conditioned by thought. Only thought believes in the polarity of success versus failure. Thought only knows one thing and that is control and control means the polarity of right versus wrong. Only when control is abandoned can we go beyond this absurdly narrow way of seeing the world.

 

For the most part of course, it’s not as if we give any thought at all to the question of freeing our consciousness from the insidious entanglements of our ideas, beliefs and concepts. It’s not merely that we don’t see mental health as being synonymous with ‘freedom from thought’, or ‘freedom from our own limiting mental constructs’, the actual suggestion of such a thing would itself be profoundly meaningless to us. It wouldn’t register at all in any way; we simply don’t see having ‘freedom from our thoughts’ as being a ‘healthy’ thing. If our thoughts were of a self-critical or anxious nature then we would of course want to be free from them; otherwise however we just don’t see any problem. Our thoughts – we might say – are part and parcel of who we are. Thinking is a reassuringly normal activity, whereas ‘an increase in mental silence’ might turn out to be rather uncomfortable. More than just uncomfortable, inner silence can often be downright frightening. We want our thinking to be running away in the background just as we might want the radio or TV to be left on in the background, so we don’t have to suffer too much from the unnerving silence.

 

The reason profound inner silence is liable to be uncomfortable or frightening is simply because our thoughts provide us with a kind of ‘validating context’ – we comfort ourselves with our thinking, in other words. The fact that we feel the need to ‘self-comfort’ in this way isn’t a sign of mental health therefore – far from it! If we have to create ‘a cocoon of self-validation’ for ourselves then this is because we are not ‘right’ the way we are, and so we’re try to ‘make ourselves right’ with our constant self-talk. This clearly isn’t what we would call ‘healthy’ because we are enabling ourselves to carry on indefinitely in this unhappy situation. The truth is that we would feel a lot better if we could actually ‘drop’ our current restrictive sense of identity and go beyond that safe-but-stale ‘comfort zone’ that we have created for ourselves.

 

The problem is that we tend to understand mental health in terms of what makes us more comfortable or functional in our current mode of being, rather than in terms of what can challenge us to move beyond this safe but sterile modality. This is not a good policy, needless to say; if we could actually see what we were doing then we would know straightaway that our strategy can only ever cause us more suffering in the long run, but we don’t see it – we’re just doing what everyone else is doing after all and so naturally we don’t feel the need to look any further. What we doing, with our ‘self validation’ is perfectly normal, so why should we ever question it? Why would we even bother to become aware of it? What is healthy is of course to become free from the need that we have to be constantly validated (either by ourselves or by others), which means ‘dropping’ the oh-so-familiar sense of who we are and what our lives are (supposedly) all about.

 

Our familiar sense of ‘who we are’ is created by the thinking mind, and this in itself ought to warn us to expect trouble ahead. A construct has to be maintained after all, and this is a full-time job. A construct needs to be continually validated; it needs to be continually validated for the simple reason that it isn’t who we really are. How could a construct (or an idea) possibly be ‘who we are’ after all? For the conditioned or thought-created identity ‘mental health’ or ‘mental well-being’ means that we are able to keep on validating our idea of ourselves without any alarming problems popping up. We’re ‘seeing everything backwards’, in other words. We’re seeing mental health in terms of ‘repairing the small sense of self’ rather than ‘growing into a larger sense of self’ (which is, as Jung says, the only way we can ever move beyond neurotic suffering). It clear therefore that our conventional approach to mental health (which equals as we have just said ‘repairing as best we can the ‘small sense of self’) is actually working against us. We’re doing ourselves a grave disservice; rather than growing, we’re ‘shoring up our defences’ against the unknown. We’re getting more and more entrenched in our habitual (constrictive) pattern of being.

 

This is where the ‘technology’ point that we made earlier comes in – high-tech responses, strategies, clever manipulations of all sorts can be used when we are trying to repair or shore-up our existing (mind-created) sense of identity, but they are of course counter-productive when it comes to growing beyond this limiting sense of identity. ‘Control’ is always about self maintenance; it has no other function. We can either get ‘better at control’ therefore (which is purely defensive) or we can get better of letting go of our controlling, which is of course the ‘healthy’ or ‘non-neurotic’ thing to do! Control only ever brings about the need for more control; it ties us into a task that can never be satisfactorily resolved since our true well-being lies in ‘taking the risk’ and growing as a result. We ‘take the risk’ simply by going beyond thought, by going beyond control.

 

Freedom from thought doesn’t mean that we never think anything, or that we go around in a state of profound inner silence all the time, it just means that we aren’t depended upon our thoughts in order to foster a (false) sense of well-being for ourselves. To think is one thing – to be addicted to the thinking process in order in order to feel secure is entirely another! When I am not dependent upon my thoughts then (and only then) can I have a healthy relationship with them – when I need my thoughts in order to feel okay about myself (or to fend off uncomfortable feelings) then this is an unhealthy collusion – it’s ‘a co-dependent situation’. Thought is more of a drug than anything else in this case, as Eckhart Tolle says; it’s an addiction we cannot break.

 

It could be said that we in the technologically-advanced nations are abusing our cleverness – we’re definitely abusing our cleverness if we think mental health falls within the remit of science and technology. All of our fancy talk of ‘evidence-based therapies’ is simply so much hogwash! There is no such thing as ‘a science of mental health’ and there never can be. There is no way for us to ‘control ourselves to be mentally healthy’. Mental health isn’t that type of thing and we really ought to be able to see that. The thought that we can develop a high-powered ‘technology of mental health care’ is of course immensely comforting to us; at the same time as being immensely comforting to us it also however the very height of folly on our part! He who is clever is foolish, as Gurdjieff says. Never was our lack of psychological insight more obvious than in our collective approach to mental healthcare. There is such a thing as ‘a strategy for holding on’, or ‘a strategy for postponing the inevitable’, but who ever heard of ‘a strategy for letting go’?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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