The Equilibrium World Of Our Thoughts
Just as ‘all art aspires to the condition of muzak’ (as Alvin Toffler says), so too can we say that all logic-based therapy — which is just about the only therapy we ever come across in the world of modern so-called mental health-care — aspires to the condition of toxic, all-pervading psychobabble.
All rational therapies — which is to say, therapies that make sense to us, therapies that take us, in a logical step-wise fashion, from Point A to Point B — ‘aspire to the condition of toxic psychobabble’, just as all our psychological theories, models, approaches, doctrines etc aspire to the state of infinite redundancy. They aspire to the state of hyperreality, in other words (hyperreality being a made-up type of reality which feeds on itself).
There can be no such thing as a doctrine or model in psychology that isn’t trivial, that isn’t 100% redundant! We can give up looking for a psychological theory or model that ‘fits the bill’, therefore; we can give up the search because there’s nothing there to find. We’re barking up the wrong tree, we’re staking all our money on the wrong horse. We’re being led up the garden path. Talk of finding a theory — a ‘rational picture’ — when it’s psychology we’re on about is the purest nonsense. We are being ridiculous.
Consciousness is a Disequilibrium State — it’s not just a state that exists ‘far from equilibrium’; it’s a state that exists completely independently from it. It’s a state of being that has nothing to do with any standard whatsoever. Consciousness isn’t caused, it isn’t the outcome of any formula, any series of logical steps, it’s not a thing that can be studied. In order for there to be an equilibrium state there have to be two things and when it’s consciousness we’re talking about there’s only one, there is only the one thing. There is only the Unus Reis (or ‘unus rex’) spoken of by the hermetic philosophers (which is the ‘final stage’ of the alchemical work).
Not to beat about the bush too much, the point is that consciousness cannot be represented and that it isn’t therefore helpful to try to do so. It’s not just that this ‘isn’t helpful’, it has the reverse effect to the one we might have thought it would. Trying to represent consciousness takes us further and further away from what we’re searching for, and deeper and deeper into delusion. All we’re doing is creating a voracious bubble of hyperreality for ourselves to get lost in, a realm of deception and illusion that we can’t outrun, which is constantly expanding all around us at an exponential rate. Attractive / repellent illusions expand at an exponential rate all around us because every single thing we think, and every single thing we deliberately do, multiplies it. To be locked into Purposeful Mode is to be locked into a state of unremitting hyperreality.
When we construct a model in psychology we are constructing ‘a cage of thoughts’, ‘a cage of concepts’, and these concepts / thoughts are constantly ramifying, constantly elaborating themselves further and further into unreality. To try to describe consciousness is to unleash a tornado of disquiet that won’t ever come to rest until the problem is ‘solved,’ which it never will. Disequilibrium can’t be ‘solved’. We need only think of Umberto Ecco’s warning in this matter. Trying to represent consciousness is to place our faith in ‘the apparatus that we have for representing things’, it is to place our faith in The System of Thought. ‘No one can serve two masters’ (Matthew 6:24). Or — as we might also say — we should not seek the assistance of the devil when it comes to the question of how we should understand reality! ‘The devil’ — by which we mean literal thought — will put us wrong every time.
To have a logical idea about consciousness, an ‘angle’ on it, will always take us in an unreal direction (if we can get away with using such a phrase, that is). An ‘unreal direction’ — which is to say, the direction of ever-increasing unreality — clearly not a real thing however (that being the whole point of what we’re saying, after all) so why are we still talking about it? If we were to keep things practical however then we would have to admit — if we were being totally honest about things, that is (which we generally aren’t) — that our default situation in life is that we have no connection with ‘the non-abstract’. We’re so caught up in our thinking, in our literal images of the world, that we aren’t aware that the world which thought creates for us is only an abstraction, only a simulation. We’re so caught up the game that we don’t see ourselves playing it. The game plays us, therefore…
Once we take a particular stance in our psychological studies then this stance straightaway becomes invisible to us, taken-for-granted by us, and then all we can do is ‘endlessly elaborate the basis that we have unconsciously assumed’. All we can do is elaborate our totally unreal starting-odd point without ever being aware that it is unreal. All we can do is keep on playing the game that we don’t know to be a game. This is our situation exactly. We’re basing everything we do (the whole of our ‘positive behaviour output’) is upon a ‘hypothetical / virtual platform’, which means that we are moving away from the truth whilst believing the whole time that we’re seeking it.
The ‘fixed basis’ (or ‘reference point’) which we are unable to question (and are on this account unable to ever depart from) can be seen in terms of either ‘the platform of logic,’ or ‘the self-concept’ (which are essentially two ways of talking about the same thing) — what we extrapolate from the basis of the invisible platform IS that platform and what we do or believe on the basis of ‘who I think I am’ (which is to say, on the basis of the Self-Concept) is a projection or extension of ‘who I think I am’, a projection or extension of the ‘Self-Concept’; we’re never going to crawl out from beneath our false assumptions as long as we remain in ‘the Projection Realm’ (which is Plato’s cave) and yet we’re convinced that we’re riding a mighty wave of technological advancement, intellectual / moral enlightenment, and scientific progress, and so on.
When we hit upon some kind of theoretical standpoint in psychology, some kind of definite angle, then there’s nowhere to go from here but deeper into delusion, therefore. The theoretical standpoint or angle was itself unreal (i.e., wholly abstract) and so all the elaborations made by thought on this basis are going to be equally fatuous, equally deceptive. As we travel in the direction of ‘ever-increasing unreality’ our ability to perceive this uncompromising fact correspondingly increases! The bureaucracy of thought grows ever thicker, ever denser, and the freedom we think we have within it exists only in our imaginations. The more the bureaucracy proliferates narrower our lives become, and this narrowness is the result of our ever-increasing inability (our conditioned inability) to see that the rules which hem us in are all made up. ‘Thought is the slayer of the real’, says Helena Blavatsky, and this is not stating the matter too bluntly. This particular point can’t be stated bluntly enough!
If we could see this — if we could see that thought annihilates reality (just as Madame Blavatsky says) then we would have no more time for the dreary rubbish of contemporary rational psychology, we would realise that — as Jung tells us — that psychological insight does not come from classrooms or lecture halls or from studying textbooks, but from venturing out into the world as it actually is, where our thinking — if we can keep an open, non-defensive mind — is going to be challenged. Life will eventually destroy (with supreme effectiveness) all our illusions, if we let it. If having our illusions utterly destroyed is what we want then we’re in luck…
‘Reality’ is just another word for the state of Total Disequilibrium, as we started off by saying. There’s no understanding disequilibrium, no way of analysing or predicting it, no way of meaningfully comparing it with anything else. It’s out of equilibrium, and that’s how come it’s real and not the output of some logical process. It isn’t like anything so we have to stop looking at at things this way. There is no ‘anything else’ — that’s a fantasy! Disequilibrium is movement but it’s not a movement that we can say anything about; there’s nothing to compare it (there’s no ‘starting point’ and no ‘end point’ that we can use to define it with) and so any ‘hooks’ that we have to hang stuff on in our heads are strictly imaginary, and when our life is hanging on a hook that is strictly imaginary then that life itself exists only in our overheated imaginations. Equilibrium values have been invented by our fearful, security-grasping minds, and the life that proceeds from this cautious basis is no life at all. Life doesn’t ever get to happen when all we care about is following rules and regulations.
Being stuck in the equilibrium world is no joke — no one’s laughing out loud in the Equilibrium Realm (or if they are then it’s bitter laughter, it’s the laughter of despair. We are compelled in this realm to engage in meaningless activities which are supposedly important, which are supposedly ‘our duty’. We are coerced into leading a meaningless generic life (which is the life that is encoded into us by the machine) and if we feel bad about this hollow life — the regulated life, the life that is given to us by system — then we are led to understand — in a subliminal way that can’t therefore be challenged — that the fault lies in us, that our mental ill-health is our responsibility to do something about it. Just as we bow down to the regulations and conventions that are the root cause of our unwellness, so too are we expected to bow down to the regulations and conventions that — so we are told — will restore us to a state of mental wellness.
Acting responsibly (according to the social system that we are part of) means that we are obliged to do what we’re told to do, what we’re encouraged and guided to do by ‘the experts in the field’. We are pressurized on all sides to ‘buy into the system,’ but the thing about this is that ‘mental wellness’ is a euphemism for ‘being obedient to the system that seeks to control us! It’s Double-Speak. Whilst this situation (the situation where we are unreflectively obedient) is ideal for the established setup, ideal for the hollow game that is being played, it is entirely detrimental as far as we’re concerned. It couldn’t be more detrimental — being dependent on the system for an analogue of MH (i.e., being heteronomous rather than autonomous) is inverted mental health. To be adapted to the Equilibrium World of our Thoughts (which we may also and equivalently call society) is to be anaesthetised, is to be rendered unconscious…
