Is it possible for us to live within the grooves that have been set out for us to live in, prepared in advance for us to live in, and yet be fulfilled and at peace? On the face of it, we might be inclined to say that it is possible, given that there seem to be many people who do just this and yet show no visible signs of being distressed. Most of us just ‘get on with it’, and we generally seem to be ‘getting on with it’ just fine…
We can – in an attempt to throw more light on the matter – rephrase this question and ask instead if it is possible for us to adapt ourselves to a mechanical system that does not have anything in common with our actual, true nature, and yet still ‘feel at peace with ourselves’? Can we live ‘the conditioned life’ and yet not be discomforted by any ominous feelings that might come along to tell us that we have neglected our true potential in return for ‘an easy life’, in return for not being hassled, in return for ‘getting on with everyone else’? We can be sure that such ominous feelings exist – even if they’re not evident on the surface – since the one thing that we can be absolutely sure of is that the mechanical system we have adapted ourselves to isn’t ever going to allow us to explore our potential. Not if we were to wait around for a million years is it going to allow us to know anything about our potential. ‘Realising our full potential’ is thus an impossibility when we’re playing the social game – growth is the one thing that simply can’t ever happen when we’re living the adapted life.
Playing by the rules isn’t going to allow us to express that part of us that is beyond all rules; fitting into the mould of what society says we are (and denying thereby the existence of any aspect of us that hasn’t been prescribed for us by the system) isn’t going to give us any room to actually grow. There’s no way that we can ever hope to fulfil our potential, or ‘bring out what is within us’, to paraphrase what Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, when we’re merely copying what everyone else around us is doing (or reproducing what others have done before us). There’s no way for us ever to be original when we’re afraid to go against the rules, when we’re too cautious to ever take a risk, and yet if we aren’t being ‘original’ then what are we being?
All manifestations of neurosis – across the board – come out of this refusal of ours to risk. This is the root cause of all neurotic suffering; we might think that we’re suffering because we did something wrong (because we broke the rules or failed to obey them in the correct fashion) but that isn’t the case – we’re not suffering because we did something wrong but because we’re too afraid to take the chance of being wrong. ‘Getting it wrong’ is how we grow – if we never do anything wrong (‘wrong’ according to the template that we’re running off, that is) then we’ll never grow, if we never break the rules regarding what safe, what is proper, what our peers will approve of, then we’ll never change, and ‘the refusal to change’ is what neurosis is all about. ‘Not changing’ means being stuck and the state of being stuck is, in itself, the pure undiluted essence of misery. Being afraid to embrace spontaneous change is the essence of misery; blindly and mechanically obeying an external authority is the essence of misery; doing the same old thing over and over again in the vain hope that one day we’ll get a different result is the essence of misery…
We won’t ever be able to find peace or contentment when we’re being cautious, when we’re living wholly within the groove that has been established for us to live in. That’s just not going to happen. That’s a nice crisp impossibility – we can’t smudge it, we can’t spin it. There isn’t a lawyer in the world who can help us get around this; if we could understand only one thing in life this would be enough, this would see us through – and yet this is the one thing that we never do understand. This is the one thing that no expert will ever tell us – whatever else our psychologists or psychiatrists or therapists may tell us, they won’t tell us that society is making us ill. This information isn’t part of the public domain – if I am a ‘qualified professional’ then what this means is that I have demonstrated that I can be trusted in doing carrying out society’s agenda and promoting awareness of how social adaptation causes mental ill-health (naturally enough) isn’t part of that agenda.
What this basically means is that when we look at the side of things that we’re supposed to look at – the ‘front end’, as it were – then what we presented with isn’t true. We’re being fooled, we’re being presented with fake information. In short, and not to put too fine a point on it, thing aren’t really as hunky dory as we are being led to believe… Or – as we could also say – there’s something fundamentally flawed with our game plan, but no one’s ever going to actually say this. We’ll do anything rather than look at the real problem. Were anyone to attempt to talk about it they would quickly find out this is it this is a viewpoint that no one wants to hear. It’s not a topic that ever gets any airtime. Unsurprisingly – given our educational system – there are very few independent voices in psychology – all genuine intelligence (which is to say, intelligence that isn’t secretly serving some unquestionable agenda) gets buried under an oppressive blanket of toxic group-think. We only want to hear voices that say what we have previously agreed for them to say; we only want to hear voices that parrot the official narrative. As Noam Chomsky puts it,
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.
Just as Ivan Illich says, our educational system is really no more than an advert for the social system as a whole, and just as John Berger says, when we see an advert in a magazine or online it’s not nearly that particular product in question that’s being promoted, but our whole consumer-based way of life, so too we can make the argument that the so-called ‘science’ of psychology is an extension of our unexamined ideology and as such has nothing whatsoever to do with any natural (which is to say, ‘non-ideological’) principles. It exists – in other words – purely to support and validate our superficial, image-fixated, over-rational culture so that it gets to seem right and normal and healthy to us (and not some bizarre kind of toxic aberration).
A more down-to-earth way of putting this would simply be to say that it’s all a cover up and that what’s being covered up is simply that our collective formula for life doesn’t work. It’s not fit for purpose. It doesn’t work because it’s all about celebrating ‘the false idea of ourselves’ and no matter what spin we might try and put on it, there’s no way that celebrating a false idea of ourselves is ever going to be conducive to any sort of good mental health! The thing about celebrating a false idea of who we are (and all ideas of who we are false, when it comes down to it) is that it only works when we abide by the rules, when we stick to the script, and when – therefore – when anything that doesn’t fit in with the official story gets repressed. We have to conform with the mechanical authority that exists on the outside of us and ignore the subtler, mysterious, non-mechanical truth of ‘who we are on the inside’ – we have to submit to the deadening state of heteronomy, in other words.
Heteronomy means that life can only take place ‘on the outside’ and the inevitable consequence of this is that what we’re living is a ‘regimented life’, a ‘regulated life’ – a ‘life that is the very same for all of us’. We’re all being moulded by the same template and what this means is that we are that template. The trouble with the uniform (or generic) life is very simple to point out (even though we take great pains not to point it out) – the trouble is simply that ‘the external life’ has nothing to do with who we really are (which is essentially ‘non-generic’ or ‘unique’) and if it has ‘nothing to do with us’ then the question arises as to who or what does it have to do with… The answer – we may say – is that the machine (or system) is living its mechanical version of life through us, whilst at the same time creating the plausible illusion that ‘who it tells us we are’ is the very same thing as ‘who we actually are’, and that what it tells us we want or don’t want is the very same as what we genuinely do want. Essentially, we’re being possessed – we are being possessed by our idea of who we are (only it isn’t really ‘our’ idea but rather a generic ten-a-penny idea that sells itself to us as being ‘our own unique or original idea’. As is the way with all ideology, once it ‘takes’, once it has ‘a hold on us’, then we obediently take ownership of it in this way then we’ll do all the work ourselves – we will become our own accusers, our own police, our own gaolers…
Of course we can’t ever find fulfilment or peace when everything we do is for the benefit of the idea of who we are (and when this idea – as we keep saying – has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that’s actually real. There’s no wellness to be had in conforming to a lie. That’s not going to work. What is a possibility for us is the situation where we spend all our time chasing the idea of fulfillment, the idea of peace, the idea of happiness, and so on. We can ‘pursue tokens’ and the continuous striving for (and celebration of) these token becomes a substitute for the reality that is being tokenized. We can’t ever be genuinely happy – that was never an option – but we can plan to be happy; we can engage in the type of goal-orientated activities that we believe will lead to our happiness and well-being and fulfilment and all the rest (if we strive determinedly enough, heroically enough, singlemindedly enough). And – what’s more – when we do all the right things (and obtain the official validation for having done so) then we can imagine ourselves to be happy – we can fool ourselves (and others) that we’re having a great time, that we’re not neglecting our potential, that everything is rosy in the garden. When the less-than-inspiring truth is that we have merely been institutionalised.
When we’re institutionalised then all we’re able to do is to ‘blankly reflect back the image that we have been provided with’ – we ‘obey the script’.. To be institutionalised by society is to be enslaved to the image that we have given been given of ourselves. If everything is running smoothly as far as the game is concerned then will appear quite content, and if we’re doing well again in terms of the game, our appearance will appropriately reflect this. Will be upbeat, will be in good form. We will when we’re living in the conditioned life faithfully reflect back whatever it is the narrative says tells us is going on. A mood will be narrative congruent, in other words when we’re winning will be over the moon and when we’re losing will be down in the dumps in true mechanical fashion, but the point is that whatever mood it is we’re expressing, it’s congruent with the conditioned way of seeing the world, it’s congruent with the script that the thinking mind is running for us. There’s no consciousness in it, in other words. It’s purely mechanical. Just because we superficially seem to be in good form and are reacting appropriately to our circumstances doesn’t mean that we are mentally well however it just means that we’re not conscious of our true situation. We are asleep but we’re having pleasant dreams, and so everyone’s happy; we are fully adapted to society’s (mechanical) version of life and so society’s appointed experts – if asked – will tell us that we are ‘mentally well’.
The point is that there are two very different things here that we’re calling ‘mental health’ – there is mental health (or mental wellness) in terms of the game that is being played (and which we don’t, therefore, know to be a game), and there is ‘the real deal’ (which isn’t just a theatre, which isn’t just ‘a meaningless act that is being put on’). Or if we want to put this another way, we could say that we have genuine mental health on the one hand and the artificial surrogate for it on the other. There is the artificial sense of well-being that we are provided with when we’re able to play the game as it is supposed to be played, and there is the natural type of well-being that arises when we’re able to ‘live freely (or ‘spontaneously’) – which is to say, when we are able to live in a way that is in accordance with ‘who we really are’ (rather than in accordance with the idea that we have in our heads). There is of course going to be an inverse relationship between the one type of mental wellness and the other type in that ‘the artificial always drives out the natural’ – to be addicted to heroin is to be unable to enjoy life without it. The more we buy into the conditioned sense of well-being (which is ‘the good feeling that we’re rewarded with for conforming correctly to the game’) the less we are going to be able enjoy any natural sense of well-being (which is why we become so dependent upon ‘the system’). To be conditioned is to be unable to feel good in a natural way, and – contrariwise – to have some degree of actual awareness is to be unable to enjoy the type of ‘fake mental well-being’ that the game provides us with.
This is where our ‘backwards’ way of looking at mental health comes from – when we find ourselves unable to function fluently and unproblematically in the conditioned realm – because actual awareness has somehow started to come into the picture – then according to the standards of society we are mentally unwell and are in legitimate need of psychological treatment. The aim of the treatment is therefore to facilitate the person to become ‘unconscious’ again (so that we can ‘resume where we left off’, so to speak). When we get evicted from the dream, evicted from the make-believe world that we thought to be the real thing, evicted from the ‘collective play pen’, then we all we want is to go back there and resume the nice untroubled life that we were leading. We’re ‘homesick’ for that life – we experience massive nostalgia for what we’ve ‘lost’ and all we want is to find some way of getting it back. We want to ‘recover’ that life and everyone we meet is going to be looking at our situation in the same way we are. We want the health (or ‘functional integrity’) of ‘who we thought we were in the conditioned realm’ to be restored so that we can carry on living in this realm, along with everyone else we know. We want to reinstate our old way of life. What we don’t see however (what hardly anyone ever sees) is that ‘who we thought we were’ isn’t us at all but merely ‘a bunch of ideas that had possessed us’. We are experiencing ‘loyalty to our captor’, ‘loyalty to our possessor’, ‘loyalty to the dark force that is denying us’…
Image credit – reddit.com
