Eric Berne makes the argument that the reason we play games is to avoid unstructured time. ‘Games’ and ‘pastimes’ are how we get through that space that exists between 'waking up in the morning' and 'going back to sleep last...
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There's no point in trying to fix the Extrinsic Self when it gets broken. It is meant to get broken, we could say - it has no future but to be broken. The whole point is that it should be...
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When we are inhabiting the Nominal Realm - which is the world of formal descriptions - then the one thing that is absolutely impossible here is for us to have any connection with reality. Such a thing is totally out...
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Psychological therapies of the rational kind are inevitably based on control and what this means is that we're guaranteed to get caught up in a sterile, self-conflicting (i.e., tautological) struggle. The attempted perpetuation of the self always traps us in...
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Our perception of the world is almost entirely ‘thought-based’. It's not that we’re aware that the world which we are relating to on a daily basis is ‘a representation created by thought’; on the contrary, we aren't aware of the...
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One of the most glaring misunderstandings we come across in what we might call ‘rational psychology’ is that we assume it to be the case that we can will change in ourselves. Even to call this a ‘misunderstanding’ isn't addressing...
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Everyone's always in such a hurry to create the Nullity. ‘Quick, quick, quick’, we say, ‘there's no time to lose - we have to create the Nullity!’ This is the message society is constantly giving it us - we hear...
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To think is to deny the infinite; to live our lives wholly within the remit of thought is to deny our own potential. To live exclusively within the remit of thought is – therefore - the Great Disaster. The whole point...
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We can't solve neurotic self-contradiction on the level at which the results of this self-contradiction are being experienced. That is a hierarchy of events no one can untangle! Furthermore, we experience the pain of neurotic self-contradiction without being aware that...
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Creativity is the key to everything - without it we ‘just aren't ourselves,’ so to speak. Without it we are simply machines, doing whatever our habits or reflexes are telling us to do. In the mechanical mode of existence all...
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Life isn't what we take it to be (or what we might be told it is) - life is a trap. This tends to come across as a rather nihilistic thing to say; the general view is that we ought...
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Heteronomy is that state in which the context for everything we do (and everything we think) is provided for us by some ‘arbitrary external authority’. It doesn't matter to us what this EA is, all that matters is that we...
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The Equilibrium World – which is, we might say, ‘a world in which everything has been standardized’ - is a place of forgetting. We forget that there is (or ever was) anything else apart from the Equilibrium World and we...
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Our awareness is perpetually stuck - it is stuck to our thoughts, stuck to our ideas and opinions, stuck to our beliefs. The point here however is that there is no space in the world of our ideas, no space...
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The Designed World is a set of possibilities that have been arbitrarily abstracted from the Undesigned World, and which – crucially – do not contain any reference to the fact that there is such a thing as ‘the Undesigned’ (or...
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Whenever we buy into some version of reality that excludes all other versions then what we end up with is the Nullity, and this turns out to be very bad news for us. This turns out to be the worst...
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Modern psychology is like an experiment gone wrong. There's no such thing as ‘an experiment gone wrong’ really, of course; when we don't have a hidden agenda to prove that our hypothesis is correct (which wouldn’t be very scientific) there...
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Society makes us depressed and then it comes to our aid with all sorts of remedies, all sorts of so-called ‘cures’ or ‘therapies’. They're not really cures at all however – they are only manoeuvres designed to offset the suffering...
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