Reflect Mode is where we take a break from what we’re doing and ask ourselves what exactly we are doing and why. It’s not that we have to literally ask ourselves the question; that would be too formulaic, too mechanical to do us any good. Mechanically repeating some sort of therapeutic formula to ourselves isn’t being reflective – that’s just ‘ticking the boxes’, that’s just ‘going through the motions’. Switching to Reflect Mode isn’t something we deliberately ‘do’, it’s what happens when we take a break from deliberately ‘doing stuff’.
Reflect Mode isn’t something that we do – it’s leaving a gap or space and then seeing what happens, if anything. The value of RM is that we aren’t ‘doing it ourselves’, if we were doing it ourselves that would just be more of the same, that would be just ‘us doing something’, which isn’t really that interesting. An example of RM might be where we are deep in conversation with someone and we stop talking so as to see what they have to say on the subject. It takes a degree of awareness (or detachment) for this taking a break to happen. In the absence of awareness (in the absence of detachment) we will stay in mechanical Doing Mode, and the absence of detachment what’s happening for us is guaranteed to be the same old ding-dong every time. Switching over into RM (which means not jumping to conclusions the whole time) is the only way things can change, the only way we can ‘break free from the pattern that contains us’. Becoming free isn’t a choice therefore, it isn’t a choice because it can’t come about as a result of us chasing our goals, us engaging in purposeful activity. No one chooses to be free – that simply isn’t within our power. Freedom is beyond us.
Our culture doesn’t support Reflect Mode – it certainly claims to (since never stopping to question what we’re doing is clearly a pathological sort of thing) but at the same time it absolutely doesn’t. We are – as small children – allowed to go around asking annoying questions from all the adults we meet but we are supposed to have gotten all that out of our systems by the time we hit double digits, age-wise. Or – if we haven’t got it out of our systems yet – it is expected, at the very least, that we will have learned to suppress our question-asking. As adults, we learn that asking the wrong sort of questions is never a good idea – it upsets people, it ruffles feathers, it gets peoples’ back up every time… The point here is that we’re all invested in some system or other, some fixed pattern of existence or other, and for this reason we don’t welcome anything that might threaten to jeopardize this investment of ours.
What institution ever welcomed too many questions? If we are a member of a club, a group, a religion, a political affiliation etc then the key thing about this is that we don’t ask questions. To question the rules that lie behind a group is to challenge that group’s existence and that’s not going to be tolerated. The only way a group gets to be a group is by everyone involved tacitly agreeing not to question the core tenets by which it all hangs together. It’s an agreement (even though we won’t acknowledge this); agreeing not to question stuff is how groups are created and maintained, whilst persistently asking awkward questions is how we destabilize them. All of our systems are based on values that we tacitly know never
When an institution (or organisation) claims to support the practice of reflection in its inmates (or staff-members) this is highly ironic, therefore. It’s a transparent pretence and yet none of us will admit this to ourselves, not even in the privacy of our own thoughts. It would be too uncomfortable for us to realise how much we have had to compromise ourselves in order to be accepted into whatever group it is that we are a member of, and compromising ourselves is what being a member of a group always comes down to. Agreement always means compromise. As Philip K Dick says in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,
You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.
To exist within the structures that have been created on earth is to ‘do wrong’ (in a deep-down spiritual sense) and yet we won’t get anywhere in society (or in the organisation where we work) unless we agree to sell ourselves out – we all know this perfectly on some level, even if we don’t like to think about it too much. When it is claimed that an organization or institution has the capacity within it to facilitate or support a ‘reflective state of mind’ this is a trick; it’s a trick because the organisation or institution we are a member of hasn’t the capacity to question itself and if it hasn’t got the capacity to question itself (because it is built upon ‘non-questioning’) how can it facilitate or support reflectiveness in us? It suits an organization very well indeed to give the impression that it is ‘open to change’ – by claiming to be open, fair, unbiased, and so on, the system shifts all of the responsibility onto us. If there are problems (if we are stressed out at work, for example) then it must be our fault because we have been provided with the relevant tools and the opportunity to use it. In this way the system washes its hands of all culpability, therefore. Systems aren’t in the least bit interested in change, but they can pretend to be if it suits them.
It might sound unreasonably cynical to say this sort of thing, but this isn’t cynicism, it’s simply reality. From the point of view of the system, from the point of view of the organisation or institution, it is providing us with what it needs to, it’s ‘ticking all the relevant boxes’, it is fulfilling all its responsibilities to look after the health of its employees. The point of view of this system is always skewed however there’s no way that it can’t be and so this isn’t something we can blame it for. An organisation such as a hospital or school might for example introduced weekly mindfulness sessions for its staff as a means of supporting damn, as a means of reducing this stress that they’re having to put up with. No one’s going to argue that this isn’t a beneficial and helpful thing to do. What we can’t see however is that this is inevitably done for the sake of the institution, for the sake of the organisation. There’s no way that this can’t be the case since a system can’t ever do anything that isn’t ultimately for its own benefit.
If a giant supermarket chain does its bit for the community upon building a new outlet by building a playground for the local children, or by making regular donations to various worthy charities, then whilst this might superficially look like altruistic behaviour (i.e., behaviour that is driven by something else other than self-interest) it actually isn’t. The company in question is simply engaged in ‘improving its profile’, which it does entirely for its own sake, not for anyone else’s. This may sound like ‘splitting hairs’ but it’s a massively significant point we’re making here, which we can express like this – Only an individual can act with sincerity and integrity – a group never can.
A system can never see things the way an individual can. Even with the best will in the world a system can’t do that, no system could do that, and – what’s more – systems don’t have the best will in the world! Logical systems don’t care about us at all, obviously enough. The reason a system or a collective made up of people can’t see things the way an isolated individual can is because whilst an individual can let go of their agenda, a system or group can’t. A system is its own agenda and so of course it can’t let go of its agenda, of course it can’t switch into Reflect Mode. No system (or as we could also say, no machine) has the capacity to let go of itself.
Let us suppose for example that I am a staff member working in some large organisation and this organization is providing me with access to mindfulness sessions in order to help me cope better with work-related stress. On paper, the idea is that by learning to practise mindfulness I can significantly reduce the stress that I’m under, which will make me both happier and more productive. The system is therefore only interested in my happiness because it knows that ‘happy’ workers (workers who aren’t totally burnt out) are going to be better at doing their job. This shows the system’s true nature – The mechanical system doesn’t care in the least bit about us, but – rather – it only cares about itself. It might consistently act as if it’s our best friend in the world, but it isn’t.
Machines can’t help being fundamentally ‘selfish’ – they can never ‘self-transcend’, they can never ‘let go’. They don’t have the freedom to be altruistic. No machine ever voluntarily dissolved itself because it saw that it itself was the problem. That will be like a government voluntarily stepping down from office, a corporation going into liquidation of its own accord even though it is still making record profits, or a highly infectious virus deciding one day (for no particular reason) to stop infecting people. A genuine individual – on the other hand – can drop their agenda – the possibility is always there. A logical system is locked into its doing; as we’ve just said, a system is its own ‘doing’ and as a result it perpetuates itself in everything it does – even if when it tries to undo itself it perpetuates itself. ‘The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive’, Jung tells us.
We’re looking at two machines here, we might say (or two aspects of the same machine) – there is ‘the machine on the outside’ (which is society) and there is ‘the machine on the inside’ (which is ‘the thinking mind’, which is ‘the socialized or adapted human being’). The thinking mind isn’t who we are, it’s simply ‘who we think we are’ and ‘who we think we are’ is of course just another thought – most of our lives are spent going here and going there whilst at the same time believing 100% that we are this thought, that we are this idea, and acting accordingly (which is to say, ‘ in a machine-like fashion’). To quote Gurdjieff,
Man is a machine, but a very peculiar machine. He is a machine which, in the right circumstances, and with the right treatment, can know that he is a machine and, having fully realised this, he may find the ways to cease being a machine.
As individuals we have (in contrast to the collective) the potential to reflect on ourselves and seethat we are functioning as machines. We have the capacity to observe that we are repeating futile and dysfunction patterns over and over again and that we’re quite powerless to do otherwise, and the ‘letting go’ of these mechanical patterns of behaviour is in the seeing of it, as Krishnamurti says. No intention is needed to drop the mask (or the identity); no pressure or coercion need be applied – once we see the machine for what it is the rest will happen by itself. To see that we are trapped in Doing Mode is straightaway to be in Reflect Mode. The thing is that a machine can’t see itself for what it is and so if I can clearly see my own mechanical nature then this means that I am free from it. We are however nevertheless convinced in the West that psychological therapy should involve lots and lots of high-powered ‘purposeful doing’ – we’re convinced that Purposeful Doing is what’s going to save us, we’re obsessed with strategies and methods and procedures and skills and so on and so forth and as a collective, we’re not able to question this conviction of ours. Only the individual can do this and – as Jung says – the individual carries no weight in society.
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