We Can’t Force Peace Of Mind

Whenever we’re happy or have some kind of peace of mind then experience will show that this is always because we have ‘forgotten about ourselves’, not because of anything special that we’ve done, not because of any special method that we have learned and then applied. This is fairly obvious once we actually come out and say it – whoever heard of a ‘method for happiness’, or a ‘strategy for peace of mind’, after all? If there was such a remarkable thing as ‘a method for happiness’ then you can be very sure that we’d have heard about it by now…

 

Intuitively, we know that there is no way to wangle genuine happiness or genuine peace of mind for ourselves and yet – at the same time – we all buy into a technological culture that rests fair-and square on the notion that happiness/well-being/peace of mind can be brought about by technical means. Trying to obtain happiness for ourselves’ is what drives most of what we do – this is what drives this thing we call ‘the consumer society’ – we’re ‘doing the things that we’re supposed to be doing’ in order that we might (hopefully) be happy as a result! So how is it that we buy into something that – on another level of awareness – we know perfectly well to be nonsense?

 

Leaving aside for the moment our crude ‘materialistic’ efforts to bring about happiness and fulfilment for ourselves by partaking in ‘the consumer game’; we can spot another version of this same anomaly in our collective approach to mental health care. Mental health care is full of methodologies for (supposedly) achieving well-being and no one ever seems to question this. But if genuine well-being can only happen when we forget about ourselves (and not when we ‘do something special’ so as to hopefully obtain good mental health as a result) then just what the hell are we doing with all of our therapeutic methodologies? If the key is to ‘forget about ourselves’ (so to speak) then how is all this ‘purposefully trying to fix ourselves’ – type of business supposed to do us any good?

 

Once we understand this key point then this clears up everything. When we are able to see clearly that peace of mind only comes about when we forget all about ourselves then we can finally stop confusing and annoying ourselves with all these methods, all of these helpful ‘mental health tips’, all of this advice, all of the ‘things that we’re supposed to ‘do’. This preoccupation with technical means (or ‘control’) is society’s craziness, not the road to good mental health! We keep on bringing ourselves into the picture and the more we bring ourselves into the picture the more tangled up we get. Happiness or peace is when we don’t bring ourselves into the picture!

 

Whatever we ‘do’ in order to gain peace of mind merely ties us up in knots even more; we’re treating mental health or peace of mind as a game that we have to play in order to win but things don’t work like this at all. Nobody ‘wins’ well-being; nobody ‘wins’ peace of mind or happiness. This isn’t one of society’s games. What we need to do therefore is to see this because when we see it we will naturally stop putting so much energy and conviction into ‘enacting the methodologies’ (or ‘following the advice’) It is personal insight we need not expert advice. What do the so-called ‘experts’ know anyway? All they know is what they have been told by other so-called ‘experts’.

 

The trouble is that what we are talking about here (i.e. not trying to fix ourselves) is too simple and we find it very hard to believe anything as simple as this could actually be true. It doesn’t sound right to us. We’re all geared towards believing that if we are ever to gain anything worthwhile in life then it has to be as a result of hard work. This message has been beaten into us from an early age. In the same way therefore, we can’t believe that regaining mental health (particularly when were suffering from chronic ‘mental ill-health’) has to be the result of something complicated, something clever, something impressively ‘high-tech’, something that only highly trained professionals can know about. We have been very effectively disempowered, in other words!

 

Not only have we been disempowered, we’ve been very thoroughly ‘jinxed’!  We have been put into a double-bind. Far from facilitating us in ‘forgetting about ourselves’, anything ‘complicated’ or ‘clever’ that we (supposedly) have to do just reminds us of ourselves (and the fact that we’re ‘not right’) all the more. The existence of the procedure means that we then have the onerous responsibility of ‘carrying it out correctly’ and this responsibility causes us to be more preoccupied with ourselves rather than less. We’re under pressure because we have to ‘do the thing’ (whatever that thing is) We have to ‘do the thing’ and this makes it even more neurotically controlling of ourselves than we were before. It doesn’t free us up at all… Being neurotic means that we take on responsibility for what we don’t need to, says Morgan Scott Peck, and so leading us to believe that we need to take responsibility for our own mental state before we can feel better feeds our neurosis rather than curing it.

 

‘Distracting ourselves’ isn’t the answer either – naturally we think that forgetting about ourselves means ‘distracting ourselves’ but this is not the case at all. ‘Self-distracting’ is purposeful doing, it’s something we have to do ourselves and – moreover – it’s something that we have to keep on doing. If we ever stopped distracting ourselves then that would mean that we’d be ‘right back where we started’ in no time and this knowledge, even if it isn’t at the forefront of our attention, keep us very far from ‘forgetting ourselves’. This unconscious knowledge is a pressure that never goes away…

 

When we talk about forgetting ourselves what we really mean is ‘forgetting to control ourselves’ or ‘forgetting to be forever thinking about ourselves’ and this has nothing to do with any cheap self-distraction techniques. What it really means is ‘not being so self-conscious in the way that we almost always are self-conscious’, and obviously this is not as easy as it sounds. It’s not as easy as it sounds because we are going against the habit of a lifetime. We are so very reliant on methods but this happens to be the one thing that methods can never help us with!

 

As we have been saying, there can’t be any such thing as ‘a method for helping us to be less self-conscious’ since the very moment we even think of a method (or think that is a need for a method) we become self-conscious! This is like saying that we will float perfectly safely in deep water even if we can’t swim just as long as we don’t try to float, but the moment we start trying to make sure that we don’t try to float then we will sink straightaway. Merely knowing this doesn’t help us any therefore because this knowledge feeds right back into our panic as something we have to do – even though it’s actually something that we don’t have to do! Ceasing to react to the perceived need to control ourselves (or to our situation) isn’t by any means as easy as it might sound – such is our reliance on controlling that we will immediately start trying to control ourselves to make sure that we don’t control ourselves. We do this unconsciously, automatically, inadvertently. This is what the alchemist call ‘the way of error’ – we’re trying to save ourselves by our own efforts, we’re trying to rescue ourselves with our own non-stop struggling.

 

Changing unconscious patterns of thinking and behaving isn’t something we can fast-track, it isn’t something we can force to happen. We can’t ‘change our own minds’ on purpose. ‘Forcing’ is the very habit we want to change, after all. Really, what we’re talking about here is a whole new approach – a process is based on insight and patience rather than any sort of technological ‘know-how’. There is no technological know-how when it comes to patience, obviously. Technology is very opposite of patience – the technological approach is the ‘quintessential impatient approach’ because we’re trying to force things to happen on our own terms. We want to get to the desired destination ‘in no time at all’.

 

Patience is the one thing we need and insight is the other. Insight changes the ‘balance of power’ between us and the mechanical mind so that we stop buying into the ‘forcing approach’ quite so much; we see through it and seeing through the forcing approach is what makes all the difference. We can’t force patience and we can’t come up with some sort of ‘technology for catalysing insight’ either – there is simply no way to make insight happen just because we want it to happen. The idea of forcing insight is preposterous! We can of course purposefully ‘impart information’ and this is what we as a technologically-minded culture are good at; ‘providing information’ in the field of mental health is all but meaningless however – what is needed for change to take place is insight not so-called ‘psychological education’ and just telling someone what it is that we think they need to know is not going to help them when it comes to gaining insight.

 

What we need when it comes to our true well-being is philosophy not the cheap tricks of technology. Philosophy doesn’t have much credibility in this rational-purposeful world of ours. In our hubris we scoff at philosophy – we certainly don’t see it as having any crucial role in life. Philosophy means ‘love of the truth’ in ancient Greek. Philosophy means ‘love of the truth’ and the truth is that happiness (or well-being or peace of mind) come about when we forget about ourselves, not when we try to work towards them as goals. We don’t become happy as a result of cherishing or controlling or managing ourselves, we become profoundly miserable instead. Actually, peace of mind or happiness is none of our business – it’s got nothing to do with us, and seeing this is wisdom.

 

 

 

Art: Banksy, ‘Soldiers Secretly Want Peace’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2 comments

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  1. negativegeography · April 12, 2020

    Great thanks. Puts me to mind of so many passages in The Unnamable. But here’s one: “miracle is the spirit of method to which I have perhaps been a little too addicted. The fact that Prometheus was delivered twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and seventy years after having purged his offence leaves naturally as cold as camphor. “

  2. negativegeography · April 12, 2020

    That should have been “What prevents the miracle…”