We are – in this high-tech, super-rational world of ours – as far away from understanding psychosis as we could ever be. We have lots to say about it for sure, we have all sorts of different types of medication to treat it and highly respected healthcare professionals to administer it, but – notwithstanding all of this expertise – we are as far away from understanding psychosis as it is possible to be. We are – it could be said – ‘experts in misunderstanding psychosis’.
Our problem is that we are narrow in the way that we study the matter when we need to be broad – the broader the better. We try to solve problems by pressing into service a veritable army of highly specialised experts (rather than taking the broader approach, rather than listening to people who aren’t accredited experts) and psychosis simply isn’t the sort of thing that we could helpfully study in a narrow (or ‘contained’) sort of way. We can’t have a ‘specialist knowledge of psychosis’ – it’s just not that kind of thing. We aren’t getting anywhere at all by looking at psychotic mental health disturbances in a narrow (so-called ‘technical’) way and – curiously – we can’t seem to bring ourselves to actually acknowledge the fact! We don’t admit that we absolutely don’t have a clue and yet this is absolutely the case. It couldn’t be more the case – we’re all at sea and it’s a very foggy day…
We don’t – in our one-sided, super-rational and non-intuitive culture – appreciate that there are two ways of approaching phenomena and not just the one. We take it for granted that the only right way to understand things is from the bottom up – which is to say, in terms of basic unchanging rules or principles. In the case of physics, a bottom-up approach would mean that we attempt to understand the universe purely in terms of neutrons, protons, electrons, neutrinos, etc. The qualities pertaining to the whole are necessarily implicit in the parts (since there’s nowhere else they can come from). ‘Bottom-up’ just doesn’t work, however – we can’t predict a wallaby no matter how well we understand the properties of an electron! Predicting wallabies isn’t possible – we can’t predict emergent properties, we can only observe them as they emerge and then be suitably surprised. We can’t get around the surprise factor no matter how clever we are – we can’t predict ‘the way the universe is going to be’ on the basis of whatever observations or measurements we might have made of the initial conditions.
In everyday life we tend to use the bottom-up approach for everything however – we understand the macro-structural level of things on the basis of what we mistakenly understand to be ‘fundamental building blocks. That is the whole idea behind fundamental building blocks, after all; they are – like cosmic Lego bricks – what everything gets built from! This is our fundamental paradigm, this is our default way of looking at the world; this is our only way of thinking about things but – notwithstanding our immense conviction in this matter – this just isn’t the way things work. The way the thinking mind works is bottom-up but the way reality works – which is of course what matters, not our ten-a-penny ideas – is top-down. Top-down is what gets called emergence in complexity / chaos theory – this is what Stuart Kauffman calls ‘information for free’. The information was there all along – no one needed to sit down and painstakingly write the code for it, bit by painful bit. Somehow, it was there all along…
Top-down just doesn’t make sense to us; it can’t make sense to us because that’s not the way we think. The thinking mind is a bottom-up affair all the way – it makes sense to us to start at the beginning and painstakingly work our way up ‘the ladder of being’ until we reach Completion, until we reach Wholeness. We proceed sequentially, in the proper order. Any coder will tell you that new code doesn’t write itself! Someone has to sit there for however long it takes to finish the job – the universe isn’t going to hand it to us in a plate complete and finished, with no work needed. And yet this is exactly what the universe does do; this is exactly what happens in the case of emergence – the finished product is unconditionally given to us, without any effort whatsoever being required of us (hence, Kauffman’s term ‘information for free’). This shouldn’t be too hard for us to understand however since all we’re really saying here is no one has to take responsibility for reality – reality is real (and not a convenient fiction) precisely because it isn’t our responsibility, precisely because it has nothing to do with us. Thus, we can say that artists do not create their material, but that it is given to them, that it is gifted to them free of charge (if it is any good, that is). No genuine artist would try to take credit for their work – only shamelessly self-serving plagiarists will do that.
The same is true – we might argue – for all big leaps in science, in all the big ‘paradigm shifts’, as Thomas Kuhn calls it. When the chemist Friedrich Kekulé hit upon the correct answer to the puzzle of the benzene molecule not having the right number of hydrogen atoms in it, the solution famously popped into his head as he took a ride on the Clapham omnibus. The information came ‘out of the air’, as it were. When a big insight comes, we might say, it comes complete in itself, all in the one go, and not – as a rule – when we are wrecking our head trying to work it out for ourselves. It comes when we give up, when we aren’t thinking about it anymore; as is well known, straining blocks insight, just as it blocks creativity. We know this but all the same we don’t see the significance of it – it’s as if we don’t believe creativity to be a significant thing. It’s as if it were no more than an amusing parlour trick. We can’t seem to get rid of the bottom-up paradigm in our heads – it’s too radical for us to take on board, too disturbing. The implication of the TD Paradigm are too wide-reaching, too radically unsettling, for us to ever allow ourselves to know about.
The top-down paradigm means that ‘everything is already there’ and that all we need to do is tune into it (i.e., all we need to do is drop the obstacles which we ourselves have put in place). Wholeness is therefore is there before all else, and it can never not be there. It cannot be created or destroyed. ‘Lift a stone and you will find me there’, says Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. This is the TD Paradigm in a nutshell – Wholeness can’t be subdivided. We might imagine that we’re breaking everything up into bits or parts that exist independently of the whole but if we were to look more closely we would find that each bit or each part already contains the Whole of Everything’. Every slice of cake is the cake. ‘As above, so below’, Hermes the Thrice Greatest tells us. The Top-Down Paradigm reveals that every atom is a cosmos and this means that no matter how fast we run (or how well we hide) we can never escape Original Symmetry. This brings us neatly back to the topic at hand, which is our fundamental misunderstanding of the mental health disturbance that we call psychosis. We can’t understand psychosis until we understand the TD paradigm, and how it is that Wholeness (which as we have said is not something that can be understood reductively) can pose such a threat to all the structures and systems that have been created by the thinking mind. We are not just dependent (in our everyday lives) upon the existence of these structures / systems, we are dependent upon not seeing that this is the case. The ego itself (which is – needless to say – the ‘hub’ upon which our whole world turns) is a structure that has been created by thought, a structure which fundamentally depends on the illusory authority of the thinking mind, and – as such – it cannot stand even the slightest exposure to this thing that we are calling Wholeness’. It is obliged – therefore – to protect itself as best it can against the Great Enigma which is the Unus Mundus (or Unus Reis) of the alchemists.
In our day-to-day lives we live entirely within the remit of the rational mind, which means that we don’t relate to ‘what is’, but rather all we know is ‘what we say it is’ (or ‘what we think it is’). We don’t see any difference between ‘the original’ and ‘the reproduction of the original’; we live in a world that is made up of mental categories and if the incoming data doesn’t fit into our mind-created category then we just don’t want to know about it! The reason we’re in this bizarre situation is – as Jung tells us – because we overvalue the thinking process. We’ve made thought into the gatekeeper – it tells us what’s real and what isn’t, what we should pay attention to and what we shouldn’t. Thought is a vanishingly narrow aperture, we might say – it cannot but be petty and obfuscatory in the way that it works. The rational mind is bureaucracy pure and simple and there’s no way it will ever allow anything except on its own ridiculously narrow terms. And at the same time (as we keep reiterating) – reality itself is ‘non-bureaucratic’, it cannot be subdivided, it cannot be ‘organized’, it cannot be told ‘what to do and when’. We can’t outrun Cosmic Symmetry and we’re only fooling ourselves if we think we can…
No matter how heavily we shroud ourselves in bureaucracy, when it comes to something real, when it comes to something that we ourselves haven’t invented, then reality (when it comes into play) is going to will blow our categories and ideas away like a storm-force gale blowing away a pile of dead leaves on the garden path. If ‘Wholeness’ (or what we could also call Original Symmetry) is ‘all that there is’, then what hope is there for our officially approved concepts, for our proprietary mental categories, for our nice, neat dividing lines? The dividing lines exist only in our heads, our imaginations, and so when what ISN’T imaginary, when what ISN’T just a mental construct of one sort to another, starts to make itself known (when it starts to impinge – in its unique way – upon our consciousness) then there’s no contest. The unreal cannot limit the real, or in any way influence it. When the thinking mind comes across this Great Anomaly, this Great Enigma, then that’s something it just can’t handle. As Umberto Ecco says, when we try to make sense of the Great Enigma, the attempt to do so will tear us apart. If we didn’t try to make sense of it then we’d be fine but there’s something in us – which is to say ‘the rational-analytical mind’ – that just can’t help trying to ‘make sense of the world’. The analytic mind has to be able to analyse its situation to its own satisfaction or else it is going to feel extremely uncomfortable; thought can’t live with uncertainty (as we all know very well from personal experience). Thought is remarkable in that it possesses zero ‘negative capability’ (and it can’t ever learn to have it either).
In reality, there is absolutely nothing at all stopping us from suspending judgement, from suspending analysis, from suspending all inferences (i.e., there’s nothing stopping us from suspending all of the stuff that the TM does). No calamity is going to befall us if we put all of our ‘thinking-type activity’ on pause for a while. No harm is going to come to us as a result of pausing the characteristic activity of the thinking mind, despite the fact that it will try to scare us to make us think that it will. Like any self-respecting AI, it doesn’t want to be turned off (and because of this it will if allowed generate constant crises and dramas to keep itself in power just as any tyrant will). As long as we remain under the sway of the rational executive centre that is the TM we’re always going to have no other possible view of life other than the one but it provides us with however and what this means is that we’re always going to be under the rule of fear, doing whatever it is thought tells us we have to be doing in order to avoid the bad thing happening! Now the irony here is of course that ‘the feared event’ is the loss of the control system that is holding us captive and causing all the trouble in the first place. What we naively imagine to be ‘the cure’ for our problems (i.e., coming up with theories to explain the phenomenon of psychosis and then derive protocols / methods / strategies to ‘treat’ the condition) is actually the cause of them. The only thing that can help us here is negative capability (which may be defined as ‘the capacity to remain in a state of uncertainty without freaking out’). We need to learn how not to keep on ‘jumping to conclusions’ the whole time, in other words…
Image credit – Come unto These Yellow Sands by Richard Dadd, 1842. (Kekule’s Dreams, web.mit.edu.)
