The point isn’t to fight the monkey mind and beat it or subdue it by a mixture of willpower and expedient means, which is how we automatically understand it. What we are pleased to call ‘willpower’ is merely our automatic resistance to mental pain or discomfort, whilst what we call ‘methods’ or ‘strategies’ are no more than cheap tricks being employed in the name of ‘reinstating the Equilibrium values’ (which is to say, ‘returning things to normal without reflecting on why we should want to do so’). We might claim to be following scientifically proven strategies but – really – we’re refusing to see the process that’s going on. We’re refusing to see the process that’s going on in neurotic mental health disturbances because – naturally enough – we can’t see any good in it, because we’re not interested in anything that challenges the status quo. Instead, we just we just want an approved method to shut the process down. We don’t want to know anything – we just want our comfort back. We just want to feel ‘in control’ (even if this is – ultimately – only an illusion) and we’ll do whatever we can to achieve this perception.
What we are pleased to call ‘scientific methods’ always shuts the process down – that’s all they ever can do. No method ever did anything different. A method – which is to say, the stepwise, calculated, calibrated, goal-orientated intervention launched by the thinking mind to bring what is essentially an ‘organically-arising psychological process’ (i.e., our neurosis) under its control – always acts against our own well-being. Thought always goes for ‘the satisfaction of being in control’ over actual well-being. Methods always act against the ‘healthiness’ (or ‘wholesomeness’) of which ungoverned or unprogrammed change is a manifestation. Methods are how we try to ‘get our own way’ in matters, they are how we get to ‘say what happens’, whereas as our actual genuine ‘inner’ life – which is the only real life, the ‘outer’ (or purposeful / deliberate) life being merely a theatre – acts independently of thought, independently of our personal beliefs or prejudices. The Spontaneous Psyche is both ‘who we really are’ and ‘nothing to do with who we think we are’; it is completely other to the mind-created identity and as such it has no sympathy for our personal agendas. We see it as being chaos therefore, we perceive it only in terms of its ‘disruptive’ effect on our plans, in terms of the ‘cognitive dissonance’ that it engenders in us. Jung refers to this aspect of the spontaneous Psyche as ‘the Trickster Archetype’ (who we meet in Norse as Loki, or in West Indian folklore as Anansi the Spider. The more seriously we take our socially-reinforced idea of ourselves (and all the nonsense it gets up to) the more the Trickster will be on our case – ‘the bigger the project the greater the disaster’, in other words.
We can’t take over the running of the Psyche ourselves, no matter how much better we might imagine we would be at the job, no matter what credentials we might imagine ourselves to have. What does the Psyche know, after all? We don’t even acknowledge (or get anywhere close to acknowledging) that there is such a thing as ‘a psychic Wholeness that isn’t the ego’ – to talk of the Psyche is to acknowledge a process that is greater than we are, an integrative process that is autonomous in its own right. It is to admit not only that ‘the Psyche has no ruler’, but – also – that it absolutely doesn’t need one! We – however – prefer to see the rational ego as being the one who ought to be sitting regally on a jewel-encrusted golden throne issuing all the orders, issuing all the instructions; everything (or anything) else exists merely to serve this all-important ego, we say. The ego – as far as we’re concerned – is the all-important ‘centre’. This is certainly the subjective impression that we are provided with in abundance as the self-concept, but it isn’t true in any other way. It’s a hot-air balloon fuelled by ‘runaway inflation’.
‘Wherever there is a method there is the I-concept’, says Wei Wu Wei. Methods act so as to ‘close everything down’ – there’s no way that this can’t be the case (given the fact that the only reason we utilise them in the first place to is to ‘avoid all unwanted outcomes’). That’s all thought ever does – it tries to make sure that things always work out the way it says they should do. It acts as ‘the Authority’, in other words – we are attempting to control what’s happening and that means that we’re shutting everything down. We’re certainly not ‘opening things up’ – there IS no method for opening things up (any more than there is a procedure for ‘letting go’). We of course see this as being ‘only right and proper’, we’re all in favour of bringing whatever it is that’s happening ‘under our control’. Everything – ideally – ought to be under our control, we say. When we’re the boss then the only stuff that’s going to happen is stuff that we ourselves want to happen (or stuff that we need to happen) and that – we assume – is going to be the best possible news for us. What we absolutely fail to see here is that control – in the psychological sense – is the very devil itself! Control is fear and fear is control. As Krishnamurti says, ‘Thought cannot solve any human problem, for thought itself is the problem’. Thought works by aggressively imposing itself (which is to say, its own patented brand of ‘order’) on the situation – it never doubts itself in this respect, it never doubts that it has ‘the required answer’. It doesn’t have the flexibility to be able to do this. Thought is incapable of questioning itself – all it can do is charge full-steam ahead. It’s a bluff for sure but it’s a convincing one.
When we’re operating in the rational /purposeful mode then we can adjust (and thereby ‘fine-tune’) our approach with regard to getting better results, we can ‘improve our performance’, but this isn’t real flexibility. Real flexibility doesn’t mean ‘getting better and better at doing what we’re already doing’ – that’s merely us ‘doubling down on our mistake’. Flexibility means ‘dropping our agenda’ (whatever that agenda was). The agenda doesn’t matter, dropping it does! It means – as Thomas Cleary says in his translation of Awakening to the Tao – the ability to change direction –
The gateway to the Tao is open – anyone can come in. if you know how to change directions, the goal is at hand.
Inasmuch as we automatically ‘go by what thought says’ (inasmuch as we are ‘ruled by thought’ in all things) we’re simply not able to change directions in this way. There’s no way that we can ‘free ourselves up by thinking about our situation’, there’s no way that thought can ‘drop everything at a moment’s notice because it sees the bigger picture’ – it just can’t do this. It can change tactics, but it can’t stop the war. Thought simply doesn’t have the ‘ability to let go’ – everything it does has to be deliberate, has to be calculated, has to be pre-planned. Everything it does has to be ‘nailed down in advance’, which means going through our repertoire of tactics to see what response fits best under the circumstances (as we understand them). Everything it does is in the name of some great ‘Cause’ or ‘Mission’ that can’t ever be questioned. Thought is thus inflexible in exactly the same way that bureaucracy is – in a bureaucracy nothing (absolutely nothing at all) can be allowed to happen spontaneously. Spontaneity is (by definition) the enemy as far as rules and regulations are concerned; every course of action entered into has to be passed by the committee first and – needless to say – nothing that comes out of a committee (or panel) is every going to be ‘new’.
Bureaucracy is all about ‘getting closer and closer to a fixed-or-unquestionable goal’. All it knows about is optimization. We don’t get better at scrutinizing or challenging the rules when we’re part of a bureaucracy, we can only get better at obeying them. Control systems can’t be challenged – that’s the whole point. In exactly the same way, thought can’t do anything without first consulting its blueprint, its template, and its blueprint or template it’s picture of the world, it’s theory or belief about the world. It brings this ‘unexamined belief’ with it wherever it goes, it assumes it in everything it does. Without a definite map or model to consult the Thinking Mind can’t do a thing – without the all-important, ‘taken-for-granted picture of the world’ thought can’t even exist. When we’re in Rational Mode then we are subject to an absurdity therefore – in order to act we absolutely need to ‘know what we’re doing before we do it’, but this is a problem because anything we ‘know’ is always going to be false… The map is not the territory, the idea is not the thing.
Optimization is the complete antithesis of what Thomas Cleary means by flexibility, therefore – what we’re looking for here is the complete absence of flexibility – this what is valued by thought, not anything else. We have no ‘flexibility’ when we’re in the Rational Mode because – as we’ve sad – no matter what we do or thing we always have to do it in relation to the unexaminable ‘belief’ (or ‘picture’) that we have about the world and this presented belief or picture is always going to be wrong. There is zero flexibility in an illusion because no matter where we go (or no matter what we do) we can never deviate – even by a hair’s breadth – from that illusion. We are ‘slaves of the thinking mind’ and the thinking mind is inescapably mechanical in its nature (mechanical in this context simply meaning that everything we do in Rational Mode has to come out of a formula, out of a set of pre-established procedures, out of a fixed template. That’s what it’s like when you’re a machine – you can’t ever go beyond the ‘world-view’ assumed by the logic than informs your mechanical mind, and this ‘world-view’ is simply that very same logic projected outwards in such a way that anything not correlating with its rules becomes effectively invisible or imperceptible to us. We are thus ‘locked into an unreal world’…
The point isn’t to fight the monkey mind therefore – going down this road turns out to be a big joke – the only one who ever fights the monkey mind IS the monkey mind. We become what we fight (because fighting comes out of thinking). There’s no point in arguing with the MM because it’ll win every time; it’ll win every time for the very simple reason that it’s the one who gets to make up the rules of the competition. ‘Never play cards with a psychopath’, as the saying goes, and this maxim applies equally well to the everyday thinking mind. It applies just as well to the manipulating mind, the controlling mind, the calculating mind – to try to counter the mind’s manipulations is itself manipulation, to try to ‘control the controlling mind’ is to be that very same mind, to ‘respond in a logical way to the reactive mind’ is merely to reflect it. To try to ‘out-calculate the calculating mind’ is to take it on at its own game. When thought tries to control itself, analyse itself, correct itself, then all that happens is that we end up (as Alan Watts says) attempting to outrun our own shadow, and this as we all know – is a struggle that never ends. If I do – temporarily – succeed in subduing the monkey mind (via some wonderful special ‘method’ or other) then my victory is hollow; it’s hollow since it is that very same monkey mind that is doing the subduing.
Image credit – “Monkey Magic” #streetart #graffiti #art
