Rational Therapy Equals The Avoidance Of Risk
Rational therapy equals the ‘avoidance of risk’, the ‘avoidance of uncertainty’. RT involves the creation of a positive reality, in other words. We never hear anyone actually say this, but that’s because the positive (or ‘stated’) reality is all we know, all we are able to acknowledge. If we ever did hear mention of a negative reality, we’d dismiss it as being nothing more than a peculiar philosophical notion. Negative reality — or as we might also say, negative space — isn’t any type of notion at all, however. ‘Negative space’ isn’t a mere philosophical notion — it isn’t any type of ‘notion’ at all, it is reality itself!
Positive space (or ‘positive reality’) is a straightforward projection of our template for understanding the world, a straightforward projection of our ‘arbitrarily obtained viewpoint’. It is our understanding mapped out all around us so as to create a world. Positive space is therefore basically just what we say it is and so it’s very telling that this is the only type of reality we take seriously — from a psychological POV this tells us a lot! It tells us that what we’re interested in isn’t the real world — whatever that might turn out to be — but the ways in which we might avoid knowing about this world (or avoid knowing that it’s there at all). When we talk about the overwhelming prevalence of rational therapies therefore this shows with perfect clarity that we are in the business — collectively speaking — of hiding from the bigger picture, not investigating it, as we like to believe. It shows that we — as a culture — are ‘on the run from the truth’…
The collective of us — society, that is — is based on denial, not curiosity. The positive world exists purely to prevent us from seeing the bigger picture and so our exclusive concern with ‘the known’ is utterly ridiculous. How can we not be curious about the bigger picture? There can’t be any state of mind that is less healthy than the state of mind in which we are profoundly uninterested in ever learning about the truth of what’s going on, and yet this is the way we all are. This is ‘the norm’. People will laugh at us and think us strange if we start taking an interest in anything that isn’t our own construct, that isn’t our own narrative, our own ‘made up version of reality’. They will think that we’re troublemakers, or that there’s something wrong with us. No one will want to have anything to do with us.
Psychological ‘therapy’ — for us — means reestablishing this denial, therefore. It means reinstating the status quo and getting us re-engaged in the pointless activities of the sterile analogue world. It means ‘returning us to the way we were before’. We don’t see it as a sterile analogue world of course, we see it as the proper and right thing to be engaging with. We see it as being where our duty lies, the only possible place where our duty could lie. We’re all busy playing the game that we can’t see to be the game, and we think everyone else should be doing this too. We don’t (or can’t) recognize anything else.
Rational psychology is all about adaptation to the construct, adaptation to the simulation, therefore. This is the bottom line. Our lack of curiosity about the bigger picture, our profound lack of interest about what we’re doing here and why we’re doing it (and why what we’re doing seems so very important to us) shows that there’s nothing remotely scientific about our endeavours, despite the big song and dance we make about it. Science can only be science if we question everything, if there’s nothing on the table that isn’t open to rigorous unbiased interrogation. This artificial way of life that we have inadvertently invented for ourselves is never questioned; Instead, all our attention goes into the technical question of how we can fix ourselves when we fail in our adaptation to the pointless artificial world that we have designed for ourselves. To call contemporary psychology a ‘science’ is simply absurd!
Contemporary rational psychology is all about facilitating us in our adaptation to the World of the Known (which is only ‘known’ because it is our own device, our own construct) and the assumption that we are so very unconscious of is that this is where our health and well-being is to be found, that this is ‘where it’s at’. All good things are to be found in the Domain of the Known; a meaningful and fulfilling life can’t be found anywhere else, obviously! We don’t admit that there is anywhere else, after all, and so if it’s anywhere then it’s got to be in the super-bland consensus world of our generic thoughts. This is the assumption but there’s a problem, the problem being that the more we adapt to the Designed World, the more we optimize our behaviour and cognition with respect to ‘the game that we won’t admit to be a game’ the more unwell we become. To adapt to the artificial is to move away from the natural, after all, and it is the natural that is the source of our well-being, not in the viral, all-consuming hyperreality that we have created for ourselves to live in…
If we had ever read anything by Joseph Campbell we would pretty soon smell a rat here, however — when we talk about ‘the Hero’s Journey’ it is precisely this business of ‘going beyond the known’ that we are looking at. There’s no Hero’s Journey if we stay confined to the playpen, after all! There is no adventure here, only the ‘negative adventure’ (as Joseph Campbell says) of being walled in on all sides by our own opaque constructs. ‘Knowing no world other than the playpen’ is the real problem, the problem underlying all our other problems, and so striving unconsciously to be more adapted to it, more at home in it, is hardly going to help matters! The only cure for the malaise of social conformity is to take the Hero’s Journey and see where it leads us as a result and this — needless to say — constitutes a very big risk. It constitutes the ultimate risk and risk (in the sense of uncertainty of outcome, or loss of control) is the exact thing that the thinking mind is averse to. The ‘rational module’ of the thinking mind functions precisely by avoiding risk; this is how it works — by converting negative into positive space.
We play safe by ‘going along with everyone else who wants to play safe’, we play safe by ‘going along with what everyone else who wants to play safe is going along with’ (we are of course very much all in the same basket here), but the Hero’s Journey can only be undertaken on our own, without any artificial aids, without any handy tactics or strategies. It wouldn’t be ‘the Hero’s Journey’ otherwise — it would just be another gimmick, just another act of collective avoidance. There’s absolutely no one who can help us with this, no one who can tell us what to do, no highly qualified psychological experts who can guide us through the process. Heros do not travel in herds — the whole point is that we have to make the journey alone, with no certainty about the outcome, with no certainty about anything at all. The whole point is that we have to make the journey alone, with no certainty about what is going to happen on it. This isn’t a ‘calculated risk’ either — it’s not that we’re making the journey into the Radical Unknown because we’re hoping to get something out of it. There can be no ‘reason’ to venture beyond thought, beyond the world that we know and are so familiar with! We cannot have an agenda for why we want to go beyond agendas…
If rational therapy is all about helping us adapt better to the Positive World which is the projection of our own unexamined expectations (which it absolutely is) then this makes the endeavour ridiculous! The whole thing is a complete joke. If rational psychology is all about elucidating the workings of the conditioned mind from the viewpoint of its own conditioning — which, again — it absolutely is — then this makes the whole exercise fantastically absurd. This utter absurdity finds expression in our heedless preoccupation in becoming ever more adapted to the Positive World that we ourselves have created in lieu of the real one. This — for us — is the answer to all our problems. It is the ‘solution’ to all our ills. It’s not the answer to the problem at all however; optimizing our behaviour with regard to an unreal world (that we only created in the first place because we’re mortally afraid of the Unknown Reality) isn’t ‘the solution’, it’s actually the problem itself…
