To acknowledge (or become aware of) a mental limitation is to go beyond it – to not acknowledge it is to live an illusion. If this sounds too easy, too simple, it isn’t – it isn’t easy at all because – unconsciously – we have the greatest possible resistance to acknowledging the invisible limitations that are acting upon us. Secretly, unbeknownst to our ourselves, the mental limitations that define us (or ‘say who we are’) the very last thing we want to become aware of.

We don’t want to acknowledge the invisible limitations that define our day-to-day existence because that would put us in a highly embarrassing position! To knowledge the limits that define our existence would be to acknowledge that ‘who we take ourselves to be’ isn’t who we really are, but only what these limitations say we are. Our so-called ‘positive actions’ aren’t as positive as we would like to say they are therefore – they can never be any more than ‘extensions of the limitations that we chose not to see’, ‘extensions of our original act of denial’.

It is simply not possible to see who we have been compromised by arbitrary limitations and yet also feel comfortable about it. It is extraordinarily difficult, extraordinarily challenging to do this because our everyday mode of orientation, our everyday way of being in the world, is predicated upon the principle of what we might somewhat clumsily call ‘automatic mental pain avoidance’. If we can at all do so we will avoid seeing that the way we are is not the way we have to be. We simply won’t go down the road of seeing that we’re compromised and this way we don’t have to have feel any angst about it.

If we adopt this strategy of not paying any attention to the limitations that are defining who we are, then what this means is that we’re ‘flipping everything over’ by saying (implicitly rather than explicitly) that the limitations which are being arbitrarily imposed aren’t limitations but that – on the contrary – they represent who we really are. In general terms, when we adapt ourselves to the rule (i.e., to the defined situation) then the rule is no longer seen as a rule but becomes instead our ‘basis for everything’, it becomes our taken-for-granted viewpoint on the world and we’re not actually able to look at our ‘taken-for-granted viewpoint. That’s our blind spot.

This is the ‘flipping everything over’ strategy that we were referring to earlier and it isn’t just ‘a’ strategy, it is THE strategy – it is – we could say – the fundamental psychological mechanism in everyday unconscious life. This mechanism (or strategy) conditions us, it’s what ‘causes us to be the way that we are’, and so it makes sense that we should know something about it. It makes sense that we should want to know ‘what’s going on with us’ to cause us to be ‘limited without knowing that we are’.

It makes sense in one way that we should want to know what lies ‘behind the veil’ (how on earth could we not have any curiosity about the factors that are ‘conditioning us without us knowing it’?) but it doesn’t make sense in another way because if we had this insight then we wouldn’t be able to continue having the experience of ‘being the person we think we are’. We’d have to say goodbye to all that; we’d have to ‘move on’ and moving on is exactly what we don’t want to have to do. We’re ‘attached to the convenient illusion’, we want things to continue ‘as is’…

This strategy we’re talking about here is perhaps more familiar to us as passive identification – we identify with the force that’s controlling us (in classic Stockholm Syndrome fashion) and in this way there is no perception of being controlled – that uncomfortable perception has been neatly avoided! ‘It’s me that’s doing the controlling here,’ we say, and this feels good. We feel empowered by seeing things this way – it means that stuff can only happen when we say that it can, when it suits us for it to happen. Identification is, therefore, where we go along with being externally controlled or externally determined so thoroughly, so completely, that we get to feel that we are autonomous. This is the state of ‘false freedom’, as J.G. Bennett calls it –

We become the slaves of everything that we’re doing, enslaved by all the people we meet and all the situations we enter into, and yet there is this terrible absurdity that in all this we think we are free.

It’s not just the case that we are avoiding being aware of being externally defined (that we are being ‘told who we are’ by some external authority – we’ve ‘flipped this awareness over’, we’ve turning a vice into a virtue, so to speak. We’re as proud as punch to be serving a life sentence in the Prison of Passive Identification and we’ll fight tooth and nail against anything that threatens this nice cosy situation.

Even the smartest amongst us (or perhaps especially the smartest amongst us) fail to see the nature of the trap which is ‘false freedom’. Not only do we fail to see the trap, we take the deluded feeling that we are ‘the boss’, that we are ‘in control’, as being the measure of our mental health. Being mentally unwell – we say – is where we’ve lost control and the cure for this is for us to re-establish control by adopting various efficacious strategies. We’re convinced – therefore – that having these strategies (and knowing how to use them) is the key to everything. In the ‘World of Mental Health Care’ we’re all about the strategies, we’re all about the strategies, and we reckon that we’ve got some pretty good ones…

Were we to have any insight into the ‘process of passive identification’, into the phenomenon of ‘false freedom’, then we wouldn’t have this emphasis on control, obviously. We wouldn’t forever be trying to reinstate – by whatever means we can – the illusion of freedom, the illusion of autonomy, and we certainly wouldn’t make the perception of ‘being an efficacious controller’ into the cornerstone of our mental health.

Engaging in some sort of strategy will – at best, if it actually ‘works’ for us – only have the effect of ‘perpetuating the illusion of false freedom,’ but clearly the successful perpetuation of an illusion is hardly an ideal basis for good mental health! Trying to implement a strategy (or enact a method) encourages this business of ‘identification’; it reinforces this perception – the more we try to control the more we identify with the mistaken idea that ‘we are the controller’, which is what thought is constantly telling us we are.

We think that we are autonomous and that we are ‘using the strategy’ (or that ‘we are utilising the method’) but the truth of the matter is that the strategy is using us. The strategy is using us, but we don’t stand a chance of ever seeing this in our normal mode of consciousness since – as we have said – when we’re in this modality then we’re seeing everything backwards. The state of psychological unconsciousness is an inverted state – it’s the state in which we perversely see slavery as freedom, the state in which we deludedly see heteronomy as autonomy.

We take the position that it is our ‘purposeful doing’ that will free us, that will in some way ennoble or uplift us, but this gung-ho attitude is merely a reflection of our inverted state of consciousness – it’s a reflection of the fact that we’ve got everything completely backwards, in other words. All of our purposeful doing (and all of our rational thinking) comes out of our blind spot, as we have said, and our blind spot is ‘the limitation that we can’t see as such’. Just because we can’t see that our basis is limitation doesn’t make any difference to what happens when we act out of it however – when we act out of limitation we extend this limitation, we perpetuate it, we ‘bring it with us’ everywhere we go. Out of ignorance comes nothing else but ignorance, out of ignorance comes nothing else but that very same ignorance in disguised form. Our purposeful activity is the perpetuation of the blind spot which it comes from, and so it’s not going to free (or otherwise benefit)anyone, no matter how long we keep at it.

Positive action is widely seen as being muscular, effective, potent, and so on; ‘seeing’ – on the other hand (or merely observing what’s going on) comes across as an abdication of responsibility, a manifestation of reprehensible weakness. We can’t take this thing called ‘observing’ seriously; we just can’t see how it could possibly make any difference. It’s as if we’re weak or passive, inexplicably refusing – out of some pathological lack of confidence – to partake wholeheartedly in life in the way that everyone knows we should do. Merely ‘seeing the situation that we’re in’ comes across as being wholly inadequate; problems have to be met by taking decisive and masterful action, not by just looking at them – what good is limply ‘observing a problem’ going to do? What would a motivational speaker tell us about this ridiculous failure to respond in a properly robust fashion?

When we remember that what we imagine to be ‘our wonderfully robust and decisive positive action’ is an extension of the ignorance that we do not want to know about, the ignorance that we do not want to ‘own up to’, then this throws a different light on things, obviously! Anything that comes out of unacknowledged limitation is that limitation, avoidance is that avoidance (albeit avoidance that we can’t spot, avoidance that we are seeing in an inverted way). The ‘difficult thing’ (the place we don’t want to look) is acknowledging the invisible boundaries that are hemming us in – this is the ‘radical action’ that is called for, not pretending that these boundaries aren’t there.

‘That which you need most will be where you least want to look.’ says Jung. What we don’t want to look at is our grievous ‘lack of autonomy’; what we don’t want to be aware of is the way in which we are being controlled in everything we do by some arbitrary external authority – this is the fence we keep balking at. When we do find the courage to see this however then absolutely everything is changed…





Image – peakpx.com