The most glaring misunderstanding in what we might call ‘rational psychology’ is that we assume it to be the case that we can will ourselves to change. Even to call this a ‘misunderstanding’ is not addressing the matter correctly – the belief that we can will change in our mental state is isn’t just getting it wrong (because that way the implication is that it could be corrected, if we worked at it) it is a perfect inversion of the truth. We couldn’t get it more wrong if we tried. We’re talking about pure disinformation here, nothing less…
This point isn’t something that needs to be worked out by advanced psychological research, by gangs of intellectual academic heavyweights – it’s a matter of direct personal experience. If we took the time to notice what’s going on with ourselves, from moment to moment, then we’d see – very plainly indeed – that ‘willing change’ is the one thing that we can never do. This is a fundamental impossibility and we’re free to test it out as much as we need to in order to make it clear to ourselves. Experience always shows that we simply can’t change ourselves on purpose any more than we can will ourselves to float around in mid-air. No one ever changed their mental state on purpose, and no one ever will. The suggestion is absurd.
Having said this, we also ought to acknowledge that – in practise – we never do learn this. We don’t notice it ourselves and so naturally we go along with what the experts have to say (we go along with what our culture says since accredited experts (in psychology, for sure) are no more than mouthpieces for the cultural bias. There are two ‘impossibilities’ here not just the one, we could say: there is the impossibility of changing ourselves on purpose and there is also (or so it seems) the impossibility of us bothering to try to find out anything for ourselves. There is a very good reason for this second apparent impossibility and that’s the fact that we live our lives almost entirely within a state of delusion, the state of delusion that comes about as a result of us uncritically accepted the output of the rational mind as if it were gospel. Another way of putting this is to say that we live our lives on the basis of bias-confirmation – we have a big fat prejudice as to what we’d like to believe to be true, and then – surprise, surprise – we allow ourselves to be convinced that what we want to believe to be true really is true. As Robert Anton Wilson puts it, ‘What the thinker thinks the prover proves’.
Bias-confirmation is the deadliest trap there is – this is how we imprison ourselves. ‘Your greatest enemy is the one who dwells between your two sides’, says the Prophet. All of our energy goes into fighting the enemy without, and the whole time the enemy is the one who is secretly hiding behind this misdirected attention. What bias-confirmation comes down to is of course fear – prejudice is always another word for fear. We are afraid of what might really be the case, what might really turn out to be true, and so we seek refuge in self-serving, self-maintaining delusions. If we were honest with ourselves then we’d be interested in what is authentically true, whether it suits us or not. History shows that this sort of inner honesty is extraordinarily rare – being interested in truth for its own sake is pretty much an alien concept to most of us and anyone who does show themselves to have this unusual trait is almost certain to be persecuted without mercy by their ‘ignorance-loving’ brethren. The only way they won’t be persecuted is if they keep their interest in the truth (their love of the truth) to themselves.
Humankind has not changed psychologically in any appreciable way over the centuries; we pride ourselves on belonging to the modern Scientific Age which – or so the self-serving inference goes – means that we are now free from the superstition and ignorance of our misguided forebears. There is of course not the slightest basis for making such an assumption – it’s an appealing idea for sure, but all the evidence is pointing the other way! We personally haven’t done anything at all to emancipate ourselves from the ignorance, superstition and foolish prejudice that is humanity’s lot, and yet – somehow – we feel worthy of sharing the glory. We feel entitled to the glory. The truth is that we’re perfectly happy to believe what everyone else believes, which is of course how things have always worked. In the so-called ‘Scientific Era’ we are happy to call ourselves scientifically minded; the truth is however that we are happy to believe what everyone else believes and persecute the hell out of anyone who doesn’t, and this is just as much the case in the twenty first century as it ever was. We live in the ‘lowest state of consciousness possible’ *the ‘bargain basement’, which is the state of collective consciousness – that odious state in which – as Jung points out – there is no individual consciousness at all. This is the default mode of existence – the state of existence where we simply go along with everyone else for the sake of convenience, for the sake of an easy life. Any ‘glory’ that we might imagine ourselves to possess – as a result of us living in a more enlightened era – is entirely hallucinatory, therefore. We’re patting ourselves on the back for nothing. We’re patting ourselves on the back for selling ourselves short.
This being the case, it can hardly come as a surprise to learn that we consistently ignore the evidence that is pretty much staring us in the face every day, which is that we are the resultant or product of our mental state, not the chooser of it, not the creator of it. Who after all can will themselves to be happier when they are sad, calm when they are anxious, peaceful and benign when they are eaten up by anger? We have no choice as to what mental state we are in, as Krishnamurti for one keeps telling us; when we are in the mental state of anger we cannot choose to be not angry. A sorrowful mind cannot choose to be joyful; a fearful mind cannot persuade itself to be courageous. For all our insistence on the importance of control – which the mental health industries have doubled down on to an extraordinary degree – we do not ‘control our state of mind’, we are controlled by it. Likewise, we do not control our thoughts (which is to say, how we see the world) the thoughts control us. This is the ‘universal delusion’ – the delusion we all share. As David Bohm has said,
We don’t decide what to do with information. Thought runs us, thought however gives false info that we’re running it, that we’re the ones who control thoughts. Whereas actually, thought is the one which controls each one of us.
We like to talk about ‘cultivating a positive mindset’ – it sounds good to us to imagine that we can go about doing this. But it isn’t us who us doing the so-called cultivating (as Bohm tells us) – it is thought giving us the misleading information that we’re doing it when really everything that happens is being directed in a purely mechanical way by the thinking mind. What’s being ‘cultivated’ here is a delusion a delusion that serves to prevent us from seeing what’s really going on. There’s no such thing as ‘a positive mind set’ – we’re slaves of what Bohm call ‘the System of Thought’ no matter what type of thoughts we might be thinking. A slave is a slave no matter what; there is no ‘positive’ way to look at this.
No one ever ‘stopped thinking on purpose’ and to try to do so is practical lesson in ‘what we can and cannot do’. This isn’t a mere ‘technical problem’ – as we have said – but a profound impossibility that it is hugely helpful to learn about. Moreover, it’s an impossibility that we ourselves have to learn about; no one else can tell us about it – it can’t be ‘second-hand knowledge’ because second-hand knowledge can’t help us. Far from helping us, second-hand knowledge (when it’s to do with psychology) imprisons us – it makes us the slaves of someone else’s thoughts. Someone else’s truth is always a lie. Seeing that we aren’t in control of ourselves in the way that we like to think we are is liberation (even though we can’t help assuming that this has got to be ‘the worst news ever’) This is why we resist the insight with all our strength and are – therefore – our own worst enemy. We’re our own worst enemy because we stubbornly reject what can free us. The ego isn’t just attached to the illusion that ‘it is the master of its own house’, its continued existence depends upon it. In order for the ego to function at all, it needs to perceive itself to be the masterful author of its own actions, the creative originator of the activity that it is engaged in (rather than being a product of it).
When things go the way that we want them to go then we are nothing if not generous in our congratulation of ourselves – the ego takes a bow. This is called success and success is pure glory for the ego-construct. It’s rocket fuel. When things go against us – on the other hand – we see this as a failure of our will and condemn ourselves for it and this too feeds the illusion that we have actual agency in the situation. Praise and blame both feed the cherished illusion. When on the other hand the ego learns that it is merely the puppet of the System of Thought, that it is being run by this system (just as David Bohm says) and that it has Zero Volition of its own (in anything), then the illusion that is the Self-Concept is irreversibly shattered. When the illusion of agency is shattered then so too is the brittle little illusion that we call ‘ego’. This is therefore more than enough motivation for us to have zero interest in ‘looking under the bonnet’ to see ‘what’s making the machine tick’. This is why the rational ego’s idea of psychology is such a sham. The thought-created idea of who we are has absolutely no motivation at all to see the truth. The go has no motivation to see the truth about anything. – the truth is simply not its game – its game is the avoidance of the truth, and it is the product of this game.
To learn that ‘the system is running us rather than vice versa’ isn’t bad news for who we really are, it’s only bad news for the self-concept, for the idea we have of ourselves. Because the world that we live in (the artificial world not the ‘natural’ one) has been created for the sake of this self-concept, for the exclusive use and benefit of the thought-created ego (which is of course something that seems perfectly reasonable to us since we think we are this ‘artificial pseudo-entity’) the message that ‘the system is running us’ is not going to find fertile ground. It’s not going to get much of a favourable reception, to put it mildly. The whole setup is geared towards the well-being – if we can use that term in such a dubious connection – of the concept that we have of ourselves, the ‘self-image’ (as Eckhart Tolle calls it). Once this becomes clear then our remarkably obtuse approach to psychology (and what we see fit to call ‘psychological therapy’) starts to make more sense – it’s not that we’re stupid, but rather that our efforts are entirely directed towards providing first aid to the self-concept, the illusory ego, rather than who we actually are. We don’t know who we really are and we don’t want to know.
‘Rational psychology’ was never meant to benefit our true nature – the whole point of it is to prop up (as best we can) the conditioned self, which is what thought says we are. We’re doing the very best we can – given what’s actually possible, which isn’t very much because we’re backing a losing horse – to bring succour to the beleaguered self-image, and get it back on its feet again after it takes a knock. This is in line with what we want of course since we understand ourselves to be this entity (or rather pseudo entity) – I want very much to recover from the mental health condition that I have been afflicted with and ‘come back to myself’ (which is to say, I want to ‘come back to who I mistakenly imagine myself to be’). The problem with this scheme of things – the problem that the conditioned self is constitutionally unable to appreciate – is one that we aren’t, and never were, who we imagined ourselves to be and who everyone else (including our therapist or partner or family member) imagines we are, and for this reason what we want so very badly isn’t a realistic thing. ‘Recovery’ means ‘returning to who we were who we thought we were’ and this is simply misdirected effort. The Self-Concept can’t be ‘fixed’ because it was never real in the first place. Humpty-Dumpty – as the nursery rhyme tells us – can’t ever be put back together again…