The one thing we can’t ever do is ‘manage our thinking’, despite what we might be told to the contrary. This just isn’t going to work. The reason we can’t manage our thinking in the way we think we can can is because management always comes from the thinking mind (where else would it come from?) and so what’s happening they’re trying to manage our thinking with our thinking, and this is a knot that can’t ever be undone. The more who try to fix it, the worse it gets.
In one way, we all know this – issues never become less of an issue as a result of us thinking about them, no matter how rigorous in our logic we might be. The cure for a bothersome issue is simply to ‘let it be’ – as in The Beatles song – what helps is not to engage in trying to fix or analyse it, and ‘letting things be’ just happens to be the one thing that thought can never do. The thinking mind is ‘a fixer’, ‘an organiser’, ‘an analyser’- not ‘a let it be-er’. This is what it is thought fundamentally is – thought is a fixer just as a can opener is a tool for opening cans. It’s a tool for solving logical problems, not a tool for letting things be as they are. No tool is needed for that, obviously enough! If we don’t want to open a can then we don’t pick up a can opener – it’s as simple as that. The can opener has no role to play in not opening cans…
In this way therefore, the TM has no role to play in letting things be (which is to say, it has no role in allowing problems to be there). If there is no need to open any cans then we don’t take the can opener out of the drawer. Of course, we might want to argue that there actually is a need to fix the issue that we’re having trouble (since it’s causing us an awful lot of mental distress and pain). This brings us back to the point we started off with however, which is that no matter how much distress the issue is causing us, trying to fix it (or ‘manage’ it) will only serve to make our pain and distress worse. It’s not fixing that’s needed, it’s ‘allowing’ and the TM has zero ability to allow stuff. As we have said, that’s not its job and it never was. We don’t need to bring the ‘rational problem-solving machine’ into play when it’s ‘unconditionally allowing’ that we’re talking about. We don’t need strategies when there’s nothing to achieve.
This isn’t to say that the TM doesn’t believe that it has an important (if not vital) role to play in the business of ‘allowing the issue to be there’ (if we get to the point of seeing unconditional allowing as ‘the solution’) because it does believe this. Thought always sees itself as having an important role to play in whatever it is that’s going on – it’s a kind of compulsive busybody in this regard – and the very last thing that is ever going to occur to it is that not only is its input not needed, but that its efforts are compounding the problem. Thought is the fixer, and as ‘the fixer’ it cannot see that it itself is the problem. And even if it did come round to seeing that it is the problem then all that’s going to happen then would be that it will automatically to try to ‘fix itself’ (or ‘correct itself’) which is of course a wholly self-contradictory type of thing. Thought cannot fix itself, and its desperate attempt to do so merely perpetuates and exacerbates the problem (the problem that is itself). Thought is perfectly capable of perceiving itself to be working in a faulty or error-producing way, in a ‘wrong’ way (and needing to be tweaked so as to correct the problem and make everything ‘right’) but what it absolutely can’t see is that – when it comes to neurotic states of mind – there is absolutely nothing it can do that will be helpful. It is fundamentally incapable of taking this on board.
The incapacity of the rational mind to ‘gracefully step off the stage’ when the situation requires it, and let things unfold as they will, without its inept management, is reflected in our overly rational culture. As a culture we pride ourselves on our ability to have an objective picture or model of the world and then conduct effective purposeful action on this basis. In one domain – the Domain of the Physical World – we are (at least to some extent) justified in this; rational thought has proved itself to be a real power here and we could be excused for being super-optimistic and imagining that there are no limits to what we might achieve with it. The same is not true in the Psychological Realm, however. Physical medicine has had many great successes in the last one hundred and fifty years or so, but this has very clearly not been the case when it comes to the psychological side of things. The incidence of neurotic mental health conditions has been steadily increasing (rather than decreasing as we might hope), which brings home the point that we have no ‘great cures’ to point to here. Our ability to intervene successfully in the realm of mental health by ‘purposefully targeting neurotic symptomology’ simply does not exist (although we don’t as a rule address this uncomfortable truth and manage to cover it up in a fairly convincing way with a thick veneer of pseudoscience).
Success in ‘getting the world to be the way we want it to’ be comes as a result of increasing the specificity of our interventions, the precision of our technology. We are now able to engineer our environment down to the point where we can play about with individual molecules as if they were Lego bricks and it seems that the narrower the limits we can work within, the more powerful our technology shows itself to be. It might seem this way, but there’s a snag here that – culturally speaking – we’re none too keen to acknowledge. Stuart Kauffman talks about this snag in terms of the trade-off between ‘obtaining knowledge’ on the one hand and ‘incurring entropy’ on the other –
To be is to classify is to act, all of which means throwing away information. So just the act of knowing requires ignorance.
J.G. Bennett speaks of the very same trade-off when he says that the more we know about the specific case, the less we can know about the general (which is another way of saying that ‘an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less’). “When you focus on something you miss everything else”, says Michael Singer. Having detailed knowledge of the specific case induces a dangerous sense of complacency (if not arrogance) – not only do we lose sight of the fact that we don’t know anything about the Big Picture, we actually forget about it completely. The result of this is that everything is trivial, everything is ‘matter of fact’, everything is ‘only to be expected’ and there’s no Great Mystery to be seen anywhere… For us, it’s as if the small picture is all there is, which makes us very sure of ourselves when we really shouldn’t be. The way our rational hubris shows itself in practice is in terms of the well-known phenomenon of the ‘unintended backlash’, which is something that the human race is finding it progressively harder to ignore. When massed experts and government sources tell us that everything is ‘under control’ this doesn’t inspire the confidence that it once did, in a more naïve age. Our technological achievements are great indeed it is true, but the key point here is that this doesn’t in the least bit translate into an improved quality of life for us. The brochure is impressive, but the reality turns out to be the biggest let-down ever.
The Mechanical Paradigm – no matter what tremendous successes we might have chalked up with it in the External World – doesn’t get us anywhere at all in the Psychological Realm however. It’s a damp squib. It’s a joke. We simply can’t replicate our (apparent) success on the outside with parallel ‘success on the inside’, despite our best efforts and the reason for this failure is that we are looking at two complementary principles here – ‘the artificial’ versus the ‘organic’ or ‘natural’. In the artificial or designed world everything is about control – the more precise we are in our controlling the better the outcome we going to get whilst the exact reverse is true in the natural or spontaneous world. In the world of spontaneous (or self-organizing’) phenomena it turns out that the more we’re able to let go (or ‘not interfere’) the better things are going to work out for us. We would very much like to do some high-powered engineering in the psychological realm, and we believe that we ought to be able to do so, but this is just a sterile fantasy of the rational mind. We can’t see that the rational solution of our neurotic suffering only makes sense in a ‘fantasy realm’ because we have zero appreciation of spontaneous processes – in our hubris we can’t imagine that nature could know better than we do! Our belief – even though we don’t tend to articulate it – is that nature (which doesn’t function by being told what to do by thought) is essentially ‘stupid’.
The rational mind works by eliminating risk – when we have an idea about how things ought to be then it’s all about ‘minimising the risk that they won’t be this way’. The crucial thing in this case is to work on reducing the risk that what we want to happen won’t happen. To be averse to risk taking is to be averse to not being able to attain whatever it is that we want to attain. We can therefore see that being averse to risk is what the mechanical paradigm is all about. There are only two things in the mechanical world (i.e., the world of our ideas and their effective enactment in reality) and these two things are: [1] Obtaining the designated goal and [2] Not attaining it. Because hitting the target is all that matters to us when we’re operating in this modality risk becomes an infinitely undesirable thing – risk is bad and so we put all our energy into getting rid of it. The possibility of ‘zero risk’ becomes the sweetest thing there is – zero risk means that the machine is not going to be impeded in any way and is therefore free to do what it is has been designed to do, what is encoded in its structure to do. From the perspective of the machine in question ‘zero risk’ is thus the best news ever.
Our complete misunderstanding of what mental health is all about comes, we might say, from seeing everything from a purely mechanical perspective. We take it to be the case that promoting good mental health is something that can be brought about by mechanical means (which is to say, by proceeding with the policy of rigorous no-nonsense ‘risk avoidance’) and this seems to make perfectly good sense to us. The idea that methodologies and strategies and so on can benefit or enhance our mental well-being is never questioned, never doubted – there isn’t one amongst us who’s going to call this out as nonsense and – furthermore – it wouldn’t make any difference if we did since no one’s ever going to listen to us! Instead of saying that it is our tightness and rigidness and narrowness – which is to say, our ‘over-regulated lives’ – that is giving rise to the spectacle of ever-escalating neurotic suffering in the modern world, we proceed on the unexamined assumption that we simply aren’t managing ourselves well enough so far, and on the basis of this bizarre belief we make heroic efforts to regulate ourselves even more. We’re both ‘clever’ and ‘very stupid’ at the same time therefore and – because we’re so locked into our course – there seems to be zero prospect of us changing direction anytime soon…
Image credit – mikkitiamo.com
