This Over-Regulated Life
The one thing we can’t ever do is ‘manage our thinking’, despite what we might be told to the contrary. Managing our thinking just isn’t going to work, not ever. The reason we can’t manage our thinking in the way we like to imagine we can is because management always comes from the thinking mind (where else would it come from?) so what’s happening is that we are trying to ‘manage our thinking with our thinking’ and this is a knot that can’t ever be undone. It’s a knot that just keeps getting bigger — the more we try to fix the problem the worse it gets. It’s like trying to help an institution that is moribund with excessive bureaucracy by bringing in yet another tier of policy and procedures.
On an intuitive level we all know this — we know that issues never become less of a bother as a result of us thinking about them, no matter how logical we might strive to be. The cure for an issue is simply to ‘let it be’ — as in the Beatles song — the cure isn’t to engage ourselves in trying to fix or correct or analyse it, but rather in letting things be as they are. This however just happens to be the one thing that thought can never do! The thinking mind is ‘a fixer’, ‘an organiser’, ‘an analyser’ — it’s not ‘an allower’ or ‘a letter be’! This is what thought is — thought is a tool for fixing, just as a can opener is a tool for opening cans. If we don’t want to open a can, then we don’t pick up the can opener — it’s as simple as that! The can opener has no role in not opening cans. Thought is a tool for fixing problems and if we don’t want to fix the problems then we simply don’t need it.
In this way, therefore, the thinking mind has no role to play in letting things be, in allowing problems to be there. If there’s no need to open the can then we don’t need to take the opener out of the drawer. Of course, we might want to argue that there is a need to fix the issue that we’re having — there absolutely is a need to do something about the issue we might say because it’s causing us a whole heap of misery and distress. 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 or manage it will only serve to make the pain worse. It’s not fixing matters allowed. It’s not fixing that’s needed, it’s ‘allowing’, and the TM simply has zero ability to ‘allow stuff’. As we have said, that’s not thought’s job and it never was. We might as well use a sieve to try to carry water.
This isn’t to say that the thinking mind doesn’t believe that it has an important role to play in allowing the issue to be there, because it absolutely does believe this. The TM 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 respect, and the very last thing that’s ever going to occur to it is that not only is its input not needed, but that — in addition — its interference is actually compounding the problem. Thought is the fixer, and as the fixer it cannot see that it itself is the problem (which is always the case in neurosis). And even if it did come around to seeing that in some sense it is the problem, then all this would mean is that it is now going to try to ‘fix itself’, which is of course completely self-contradictory. Thought is capable perceiving itself to be working in a less-than-effect way, and needing therefore to be tweaked in some way, but what it absolutely can’t see — in situations of neurotic distress like anxiety, for example — is that there is absolutely nothing it can do that will be helpful. It can’t see its own redundancy.
This inability of the rational mind to gracefully ‘step off the stage’ when it is no longer needed and allow things to unfold as they will (without its management, without its interference) is reflected in our overly rational culture. As a culture we celebrate our ability to have an objective objectively true picture or model of the world and then conduct effective purposeful actions on this basis. We are — in the domain of the external world justified to some extent in this; rationality has proved itself to be a real power here and there seems to be no limit to what we might achieve with it. The same is not true in the Inner (or Psychological) Realm however. Physical medicine has had many great successes in the last one hundred and fifty years or so, but this is clearly not been the case when it comes to the psychological side of things, the mental health side of things. The incidence of people presenting to services with neurotic health mental health problems has been increasing rather than decreasing over this period of time, which brings home the unavoidable point that there have been no miracles to celebrate here. We just don’t have the ability to intervene successfully in the Psychological Realm via the purposeful targeting of neurotic symptomology (although we don’t address this uncomfortable truth, and cover it up fairly convincingly with a dense layer of pseudoscience).
Success in terms of ‘adapting the world to be what we want it to be’ comes as a direct result of increasing the specificity of our interventions, of our technology. We can engineer our environment down to the limit of two to three nanometers in the case of silicon chips for example, and as time goes on we’re getting more and more precise. We’re ‘chasing narrowness’, so to speak, such that that the narrower the limits we can work within, the more effective our technology. This is ‘the paradigm of control’. This paradigm doesn’t hold good for the Psychological Realm however — we can’t replicate our success in the external world in the inner world, no matter how hard we try. We’re looking at two complementary principles here, we’re looking at the Artificial (or Designed) World versus the Organic (or Natural) one. In the Designed World everything is about control — the more precise we are in our ability to manipulate the better the outcome is going to be, whilst In the Spontaneous World it’s exactly the reverse — the more we’re able to let go (or ‘not interfere’) the better things are going to work. Maximised control makes everything grind to a halt. We would like to engineer the Psychological Realm to suit us, and we believe that we ought to be able to do so, but this is just a sterile fantasy of the rational mind. We have failed to differentiate between ‘what is’ and ‘what thought says should be’ and this is where all our problems begin. This equals ‘fundamental confusion’.
Once we make this point then what we’re saying becomes abundantly obvious — the natural world of which we are a part cannot be controlled and the attempt to do so only brings more problems that then need to be dealt with. When we have an idea about how things should be then this all about minimising risk — 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 just 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 (which is the world of our thoughts, the world of our ideas, the world of our constructs) and those two things are — [1] obtaining the designated goal, and [2] not obtaining it. Because [1] is all we care about (because hitting the target is all that matters to us when we’re in this goal-orientated modality) risk becomes an entirely undesirable thing; risk is ‘bad’, risk us ‘an unqualified evil’ and so we put all our energy into getting rid of it. The possibility — however illusory — of Zero Risk becomes the sweetest thing there is, Zero Risk means that the machine is not impeded or impaired in any way, and that it is therefore ‘free to do what it has been created to do forever and ever’ and from the machine’s perspective this is of course the best thing ever.
Our complete misunderstanding of what ‘mental health’ means comes from seeing everything from a purely mechanical perspective therefore — we take it to be the case that promoting good mental health is something that can be done via technical means, via proceeding with our policy of risk avoidance, our policy of ‘getting things to be what we think they should be’. This seems to make perfectly good sense to us — the idea that methodologies and strategies can enhance or support our mental well-being is never questioned, never doubted. There isn’t one amongst us who’s ever going to call this out for the nonsense it is (and it wouldn’t even make any difference if we did since — collectively speaking — we’ve already got our way of thinking and we’re going to stick with it). Instead of seeing that it is our pathological rigidity and narrowness (which is to say, our ‘over-regulated’ lives) that is behind the escalation of our neurotic suffering, we proceed on the unexamined assumption that we haven’t got enough control in our lives, and — on the basis of this absurd belief — we take steps to regulate ourselves even more.
