The rational-purposeful mind is a ‘blocker’, not an opener (or facilitator). It shuts doors rather than opening them (which is what it implicitly claims to do). The rational-purposeful mind blocks everything that doesn’t fit into its format, anything that doesn’t agree with its taken-for-granted picture of how things are or should be. Thought only cares about ‘the ideal case’, in other words – it cannot tolerate what it sees as ‘error’. The Rational-Purposeful Mind can never get away from the ideal, and the big problem with this is that ‘the ideal is not the real’…

Whether we talk about ‘the purposeful mind’ or ‘the thinking mind’ makes no difference. It’s the same thing – first comes the thought and then comes the purpose. It is therefore inevitably going to be the case that when we’re operating in this mode we’re going to ‘fixate on the ideal’ (which at the same time means dismissing or not valuing anything that is not the ideal case, of course). Thought only concerns itself with the generic, we might say, which proves to be a disaster – mental health wise – since life is only to be found in the non-generic. When we let thought dictate terms then we’re ‘trying to find life where it isn’t’ and this – needless to say – isn’t going to us anywhere. This The more rational we are, the more purposeful we are, the more we’re going to miss the point of it all. As Leo Tolstoy has said –

The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.

Only the generic exists for thought – the idiosyncratic or the random is always going to be dismissed as an aberration, therefore. The only way a rule-based system can register reality is if it corresponds to the assumptions it makes about what that reality is (which is to say, if it exactly matches the rules that make up the system). If there is no ‘matching’, if there is no ‘correspondence’, then thought will act as if there is nothing there. This presents an insurmountable obstacle therefore; tt presents an insurmountable obstacle because the only thing that matches in assumptions is itself, and itself isn’t a real thing. This is always the case with the ideal, with the projection – it looks ‘right’ to us for sure but the only reason for this is because we already had the ‘general idea’ of it in us to start off with, and so what we’re responding to is the confirmation of a pre-existing bias rather than a genuine intuition regarding the nature of our situation. ‘Right’ means ‘what I want to be true’ and not what actually is true (because what actually is true isn’t generic and doesn’t correspond to our assumptions). Reality itself actually annoys us, therefore…

Thought will green-light itself (i.e., it will give itself the authoritative ‘go ahead’) and in so doing it denies its own fallibility (so to speak); it denies its own fallibility because – without ever reflecting on the matter – it takes itself as being the ‘irreproachable gold-standard’. Our viewpoint on things is thus something that can’t ever be challenged. What this means – although we can’t see it – is that the rational-purposeful mind acts as an insurmountable obstacle, continually repeating the spuriously validated error that is itself to the exclusion of anything else. Thought is the gatekeeper, in other words, and since thought recognises nothing but itself this very effectively excludes everything that is ‘non-ideal’, everything and anything that isn’t ‘a mental projection’. The gatekeeper only recognises that which has been accepted as real on the basis of our hidden prejudices, on the basis of our pre-existing biases. To be living in Rational-Purposeful Mode is thus to live in a world that has been put together by our assumptions, our guesses; it is to exist in a world that has been brought into being via the ‘reification of our unexamined assumptions’ To ‘reify an assumption’ is to make it real for us, and the on-going reification of unexamined assumptions is the only type of business that ever goes on within the sphere of thought, within the sphere of purposeful action.

What we fundamentally DON’T understand is how our guesses or assumptions can’t ever be true. This very simple understanding is way, way beyond us. Thought is a positive phenomenon. whilst what thought is supposedly about in the first place (i.e., ‘the territory’) is a negative one. This might sound like rather an obscure philosophical point to be making (and not therefore something that is necessarily going to be of any practical, down-to-earth help to us) but what we’re saying here is actually very straightforward – Positive Reality is made up of everything that can be described or defined, everything that can be ‘said’, whilst the Negative Reality is the reality that is made up of all the stuff that can’t be said, that can’t be routinely expressed in the form of ‘literal statements of fact’.  +R is thus the routine reality, the reality we are deeply familiar with (because we never go beyond it) and implicitly believe ourselves therefore to ‘know’ everything about. The routine reality might be comfortable (since it never goes anywhere that we don’t know about, since it never challenges our basic understanding of our situation) but there’s no life in it (only the endless sterile confirmation of existing patterns). We carry on with our routines to be sure (we’re not free NOT to!) but they never take us to a space that isn’t routine, a space that isn’t simply ‘more of the same’.

Neg R is the space within which describable objects things can exist (if they want to) and not exist (if they don’t) – there is in other words perfect freedom here. +R – on the other hand – is comprised exclusively of these ‘defined objects’, of these ‘known or knowable units’. Everything in the Positive Domain is describable in other words, and this means there is no ‘space’ (since intrinsic space isn’t exclusive or prejudiced in the way that the extrinsic variety is and it doesn’t ‘pick and choose’). There is no specificity whatsoever in unconditioned space, only ‘universality’. To define is to exclude and so we can only have it one way or the other – we can either have a spacious reality with no reified things in it, or we can have a rigid / non-spacious space with ‘wall-to-wall’ knowable things. Negative R doesn’t pick and choose what’s real or not in the way that +R does – it isn’t predisposed to saying that ‘some things are valid whilst others are not’ – and this is another way of saying that it doesn’t validate any particular ‘thing’ as being real (which is what we don’t like about it, since we are partisan, since we want to be able to ‘play favourites’). There is no ‘mental health’ to be had in the predetermined type of space that is provided by thought because it is so unnaturally inflexible – we are stuck and have to obey a whole bunch of restrictive rules (a whole bunch of restrictive rules that we can never successfully obey). Negative (or ‘open’) space – on the other hand – genuinely DOES facilitate movement, or ‘change’. The unspecifiable emptiness is the ‘functional’ part, not what has been specified Thus, in Ursula Le Guin’s translation of the Tao te Ching (Chapter 11) we read –

Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.

Everything we have so far said may be said to be ‘intuitively obvious’ (if there is such a thing) – how can we possibly describe or define space, after all? If we could define it then it would no longer have any spaciousness in it (since the defined or stated object is the very antithesis of space). The latter is quintessentially open, the former fundamentally and irrevocably closed. There is no comparison between the two, in other words open – ‘openness’ isn’t a special type of ‘closed’, isn’t a development or modification of ‘closed’. <Open> cannot be inferred from <closed>. This is a pertinent point – to say the least – since all we know is <closed>,since the world we have designed for ourselves is entirely made up of defined (and therefore reproducible) units. Jung argues that we ‘overvalue’ rational thought and that this can be seen as a type of sickness, and the other way of putting this is to say that we over value things (whether we’re talking about the physical objects that make up our world or the systems we have put in place to organize our activities. All we know about are dead ‘things’, we only value ‘the definite’, ‘the certain’, and as a consequence we ourselves become ‘thing-like’. We get ‘frozen’ into being ‘mere ideas’; we become ‘things in a world of things’, just as Colin Wilson says. To be ‘a thing in a world of things’ is not a happy situation to be in. To say it doesn’t suit us is putting it very mildly indeed – there’s nothing for us in the Stated or Positive World apart from pure misery and frustration. There’s no life here, no genuine freedom, and so we can only survive by fooling ourselves (or by allowing ourselves to be fooled). If we accept the narrative that there is a ‘prize’ (of some sort) waiting for us at the end of it all then that will (for some of the time, at least) make the interminable tedium ‘half-way bearable’. We can ‘look forward to the good stuff’, and this is where the euphoria is, where the ‘good feeling’ is. The actual truth of what’s going on doesn’t come into it..

The Purposeful Life is a life that is devoted exclusively divided to chasing advantages that don’t exist, giving up our real freedom for benefits that don’t exist, and all of this is for the benefit of a ‘self-construct’ (or ‘Doer‘) which doesn’t exist either. The Purposeful Life is the type of life which is dedicated to the world that thought says is real (since the only place purposes can come out of is the Thinking / Doing Mind, and the world that thought is real not so much a ‘world’ but a hollow simulation thereof. We’re playing the Shell-Game’ – the game in which we say that the shell isn’t just ‘a shell’, isn’t just a façade. To think is to simulate reality, to chase goals is to assume that this simulation of reality goes actually means something. Our very attempt to benefit ourselves us shuts the door on what actually can help us, therefore. We’re ‘self-sabotaging’, in other words. This – the attempt to help ourselves with our thoughts, with purposeful actions – is the via erratum of the alchemists – we are trying to extricate oneself from our mental suffering through thinking and purposeful effort), oblivious to the fact that this reliance on the rational-purposeful mind is the very thing that has created the problem in the first place.

So we can say that the purposeful mind which expresses itself through its purposes is a ‘door to the world of things’ and that when we go through it we ourselves become ‘things’ too. When we relate exclusively to our own mental constructs, our own ideas, our own beliefs (or whatever) then this necessarily means that we ourselves must be relating as a mental construct, as an idea, as ‘a belief’. The core construct that we call ‘the self’ is necessarily incapable of registering anything that is not also a construct – everything has been subsumed within the same abstract framework of logic. The self-concept can’t relate to anything outside of the continuum of logic (since anything outside of thought’s remit isn’t an idea, isn’t a mental category). The other way of approaching this is to say that the self-concept (or identity) is a closed system (and cannot be otherwise) and that as a closed system it can only relate to itself. We don’t have the perspective to see this however – perspective being the one thing that cannot ever be found inside of a closed system! In order to have perspective we have to move beyond that system, and – as we keep saying – the system does not acknowledge that there is such a thing as ‘a beyond’, as ‘something which is not the system’. That’s the whole point.

The thinking / doing mind is therefore a blocker of reality, a shutter-down of reality, but we don’t understand it as being such. On the contrary, we see it as the gateway to everything, the key to everything, the door to reality itself. That’s why we never question it, that’s why we put it on a pedestal. What we have placed on a pedestal in this way (to make it of supreme importance) is a revolving door however – it’s a gateway that always leads straight back to itself. We take everything thought tells us with the utmost seriousness, with a ridiculous po-faced seriousness that is both entirely unnatural and entirely unnecessary. We take ourselves much too seriously for the same reason; we become ridiculously self-important because by putting thought on a pedestal we also – in a backhand way – exalt ourselves (or ‘the idea of ourselves’). Our dogmatic humourless acceptance of everything the rational – purposeful mind or tells us condemns as to it an existence that is similarly rigid, similarly humourless, similarly mechanical, therefore. We’re either full of arrogance and self-adulation (on account of what or who thought tells us about ‘who we are’) or we are full of bitterness and self-condemnation. We take this business of ‘success versus failure’ very seriously indeed – even though it isn’t actually ‘serious’ at all. Our situation is ‘hopeless, but not serious’, just as psychologist and communication theorist Paul Watzlawic tells us…

Image credit – campaignlegal.org