The Snake That Cannot Cast Its Skin
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 sterile, self-conflicting tautologies — we’re hoping to get somewhere by it, to be sure, but this — quite simply — is never going to happen (and the sooner we can see this the better it’s going to be for us). We’re barking up the wrong tree entirely here; far from being ‘the answer’, control is the problem itself.
There is no place for insight in rational (or ‘positive’) psychology, odd as this might sound. There can’t be because insight and rationality are opposed. When we are in rational / purposeful mode then everything is about ‘completing the task’ — anything that might help us in this regard is of the greatest interest to us, while stuff that isn’t relevant isn’t interesting either. This closes the door to insight (or intuition) because this non-rational modality isn’t ‘about finding solutions to our problems’. We can’t harness intuition because intuition has nothing to do with what we want or don’t want; We might be super-interested in finding the solution to what we see as ‘our problems’ but the intuitive / insightful side of our nature isn’t; it is — we might say — completely unconcerned. Reality is ‘divinely indifferent’, as Richard Bach says, and insight has to do with reality, not with the ten-a-penny games that we are continuously playing.
In short, when I’m in rational / purposeful mode then everything has to be about ‘completing the task’ and seeing that the task <may not be as important as we like to think it is> just isn’t on our agenda. From the rational point of view, gaining the awareness that the game we’re playing is ‘only important because we say it is’ would constitute an utter disaster. From the rational POV, completing the task (or ‘attaining the goal’) is the supremely important value and everything else must serve it; if there’s something there that doesn’t serve this master then we have no time for it. A simple way of expressing this is to say that rational / purposeful mode of existence is a closed mode. It has to be a closed modality because if it wasn’t then there would be nothing to preserve the integrity of the operation. There would be nothing, in this case, to stop us changing our mind about the whole thing. Who knows — we could simply lose interest in the goal and where would we be then? The thing about having some sort of major goal that we are aiming at (and that we’re orientating everything around) is that if we ‘let go of it’ then the project or endeavour that we’re engaged in will fall by the wayside, unnoticed. It will count for nothing — we will have moved on. Thought can never let go — letting go is simply ‘not its thing. It has to be engaged in a project or else it will find itself ‘unemployed’ and thought doesn’t want to be unemployed…
‘Moving on’ is what happens when we outgrow the issue that we had become so bogged-down in to move on to something else, something ‘completely unconnected’. The goals that used to excite us so much no longer seem relevant; they might even seem ridiculous — we might not be able to understand what it was about them that seemed so incredibly important to us, before we got unstuck. If this shift doesn’t happen to us then what this shows us is that we simply haven’t grown, it shows that we are the very same person we used to be, however many years or decades might have past. It shows that we are ‘in stasis’, it shows that we haven’t been living all that time, but merely ‘waiting to live’, and this business of ‘waiting to live’ is the norm. Being stuck in a groove that no longer serves us is far from being an unusual thing! In our culture, for reasons that we will go into shortly, growth of the type we are talking about is not only ‘not encouraged’, it’s actively discouraged…
If I am suffering from a mental health condition such as anxiety, OCD or depression, then I’m not going to be impressed by talk like this. I am (of course) not going to be in the least bit interesting outgrowing my problems in this case — what I want is to fix them. What I want is to ‘rid myself of them as quickly as possible’; I am — if questioned on this point — likely to be very emphatic on this point. This however is the very crux of the matter — contrary to popular opinion the more intensely we are motivated to find the solution, the more we’re going to be stuck. We very much tend to think that what keeps us ‘stuck’ (mental health-wise) is the lack of determination, the lack of motivation, the lack of the ‘correct positive attitude’, and so on (which is basically a way of saying that we’re just not trying hard enough) whilst in reality what keeps us stuck is the fact that we’re ‘trying too hard’. We’re too determined. We’re trying too hard — we actually don’t know how not to try. We’re locked into a particular posture — the posture of ‘straining towards an unattainable goal’ — and we don’t know any other way to be.
No matter how inconvenient it might be (to everyone concerned) neurotic conflict cannot be ‘resolved on its own terms’, as Jung tells us, and so the more we give into the temptation to do just that the more we’re going to find ourselves banging our heads against a brick wall. The attempt to fix the neurotic conflict is what fuels that conflict, the attempt to ‘fix the conflict’ IS the conflict. ‘All effort to bring order into disorder is disorder’, says David Bohm. The temptation to fight that we’re talking about here is pretty much overwhelming however, so it’s not as if we ‘can get the message’ and then — having successfully gained this awareness — stop trying to fix or control the situation. The resisting or the struggling happens automatically and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. We have no control — we can’t ‘decide to stop resisting’ because this ‘decision’ is itself the resistance. We can’t ‘say NO’ to our aggression, to our fighting, because ‘saying NO’ is aggression, because ‘saying NO’ is fighting. ‘Letting things be’ is the only thing that helps but we can’t ‘let things be’ on purpose; if we try to ‘let go on purpose’ then our supposed ‘letting go’ becomes a strategy and strategies are control, strategies are manipulation. Letting go doesn’t come out of the head but the heart and the heart is not under the head’s control! The heart does its own thing. The psyche has no ruler, as Jung tells us. No one has to ‘tell it what to do’…
No matter how important it might seem (and — very understandably — it seems extraordinarily important) we can’t ‘compel ourselves to be non-neurotic’; even with the whole of our technological resources and ‘know-how’ behind us we can’t compel ourselves to be non-neurotic. This simply can’t be done, no matter how ‘scientifically advanced’ we might fancy ourselves to be! The very fact that we want to do this is itself evidence of our lack of wisdom — if we try to use science or technology to accomplish something that is flatly impossible (and science is nothing if not the recognition of impossibilities) then this says something very important about us, obviously. It shows that we’re in flat-out denial of the truth and that we’re fantasising about using the scientific method — which is all about seeing the truth whether that truth suits us or not — to prove that something which is plainly untrue (i.e., that neurotic conflict can be solved via rational/technological means) actually is true. That’s our agenda. Our game — in other words — is ‘magical wish-fulfillment’ and we’re hoping to use science to do this…
What we’re trying to do with our bogus psychology — as we’ve said — is to ‘perpetuate the self’. However (or whatever) we understand ourselves to be, we want to preserve it, we want to allow it to continue on indefinitely in an undisturbed way, we want to ‘extend it into the future for as long as we possibly can do’. It should come as no surprise to learn that this is our fundamental agenda — the self always wants to extend the self. The nature of the ego is that it is only ever interested in one thing and that ‘one thing’ is to project itself indefinitely into the future. The ego wants to ‘project (and protect) the ego’ — what else does it ever do? It can’t be expected to understand anything other than this ‘viral imperative’ but that doesn’t mean that we should try to make a science out of this blind, mechanical urge. That we should be taking this nonsense seriously is holding up a mirror to our faces and what that mirror is showing us is far from flattering.
‘The snake that cannot cast its skin has to die.’ says Nietzsche. Our current psychological technology — if we may call it that — is geared towards enabling that snake to live; it is geared towards finding ways by which this fundamental principle of life can be ‘hacked’, or ‘bypassed’. If we are smart enough and have enough technical knowledge then we will be able crack this problem once and for all (or so we believe). It is of course perfectly natural that the ego should be striving to perpetuates itself in this way (that’s simply ‘what it does’, as we’ve just said); it’s also perfectly natural that it should not be able to do so. This is what neurosis is — it is the attempt to preserve a viewpoint (or an identity) that cannot be preserved. It is the attempt to do something that is frankly impossible. The reason neurotic conflict is ‘non-terminating’ — the reason it can never resolve itself — is precisely because what is being attempted is a flat-out impossibility we won’t give up, and ‘the impossible thing that we’re trying to achieve’ keeps on being impossible!
Rational thought isn’t the only player here however — there is also consciousness. Through the interminable sufferings that have been brought about by neurotic conflict (which is ‘the struggle against reality’) we very slowly learn the lesson that we absolutely don’t want to learn and as we learn if we stop believing — very, very gradually — that it is possible to win this fight. We become disillusioned — our heart goes out of the struggle as we gradually become aware everything of the crushing futility of what we are trying to achieve. This awareness is very bitter to us — there is nothing bitterer in the whole world than this particular lesson — but when we have learned it then this very bitterness turns into sweetness — the sweetness being the discovery that life is profoundly paradoxical, the paradox being that ‘what we hold onto we lose, whilst what we give away we gain’. Or as we read in John 12:24–26 (NKJV) –
Most assuredly, I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; But if it dies, it produces much grain. He who loves his life will lose it, and who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
