We love talking about mental health and feeling that by doing so we are ‘tackling the issue’ – we have mental health awareness days, we run courses, we hand out leaflets, we put up posters, and so on. We can therefore rest assured that we are not ignoring the problem and letting it grow. We see no irony in this, in other words, and yet irony there is a-plenty. The fact that we are entirely oblivious to the irony in question doesn’t in any way lessen it.

This sounds rather harsh of course but to have our illusions pointed out to us is always going to be harsh – there’s no easy way to do this! There’s no easy way to learn that our comfort-giving illusions are nothing more than comfort-giving illusions. When the sticky plaster is pulled off it hurts like hell and there’s no other way to do it. The problem with us pontificating in the way that we do about mental health is that we don’t even know the first thing about what we’re talking about and – what’s more – if the truth were to be known we aren’t even really interested in the first place. We actually can’t afford to be interested because if we learned what was going on we’d have to stop playing our cherished games, and we absolutely don’t want to do that.

The game we’re playing – very simply put – is to pretend that the world actually is what we say it is, what we think it is, what the official viewpoint describes it as being when the one thing we know absolutely for sure is that this could never be the case. This is the only thing we ever can know in this relativistic universe of ours – that our descriptions can never be the same as whatever it is that we are describing. In the hypothetical world that is composed of absolute values there is of course the possibility of making ‘definitely true statements about things’ but such a world doesn’t really exist – it is only a projection of the thinking mind, which runs on absolutes.

We can quite undeniably go around being 100% convinced that the world is what we think it is (and that we are what we think we are) and this comes down to what we might call ‘a basic respect for reality’ – how could we possibly imagine that the world is ‘merely what we say it is’? How could we possibly take it for granted that reality isn’t different in kind from our wretchedly dull ideas about it? How could we be careless enough to let ourselves fall into such a dismal hole, and not just ‘fall down it’ but live out the whole course of our lives in it? The bottom line is that the act of mistaking our symbolic representations of the world for the world itself isn’t something that’s going to lead to a state of good mental health, no matter how many millions of us agree that it is. There is nothing even remotely healthy or wholesome about hyperreality, no matter how attractively it might be packaged…

It might not immediately make sense to say ‘the game we’re playing is to say that the world actually is what we arbitrarily describe it as being’ but on reflection we can see that this is exactly our situation – our main effort in life the task that we spend almost all of our time engaged in his conservative in nature rather than exploratory (which means that we act as if the most important thing were to protect and promote our idea of the world, our model or theory of the world). This ‘conservative urge’ can take the form of correcting things when they’re not right (or fixing them when they’re broken) or it may take the form of trying to achieve goals and build structures. We often say that we’re ‘being creative’ in this context but this simply isn’t true; this is a kind of a euphemism because pursuing a goal is – when it comes down to it – the same thing as fixing; in the Conservative Mode we are seeing everything that isn’t the goal as ‘an error’, which means that we will work away at eliminating it. We work away at getting rid of errors wherever we come across them and when we have successfully done this this equals ‘attaining the goal’!

We’re not being creative here (much as we might like to believe that we are) because all we’re doing is a obeying thought – the thinking mind has a view of how things are (or how they should be) and we are struggling to actualize that view. If we succeed then thought rewards us, thought gives us a pat on the head (or a quick squirt of dopamine) and if we don’t then it will punish us instead. We are controlled – we are being controlled via the time-honoured ‘carrot and stick principle’ which means that when we get it right then the reward system kicks in and when we get it wrong then the punishment system cuts it instead. The question is therefore, ‘How could creativity ever come out of something like this?’ We’re not being creative here, we’re being obedient, we’re doing what we’ve been told to do, we’re being good slaves of the system, we’re unconsciously enacting the dictates of the thinking mind, and so on. If we can see this then that in itself would constitute a creative act; it would constitute a creative act because we can’t be made to see the truth by mechanical forces, only by our own volition.

The mechanism of the thinking mind only ever does one thing – it only ever acts out the rules which inform it (which is of course true for all mechanisms). In more colloquial terms, we could say that thought only ever does one thing and that one thing is to try to get the world to conform to its blueprint for it, its theory of it, its image of it and in this it is quite blameless. We can’t blame a machine for doing what it’s designed to do. Thought is therefore a profoundly conservative sort of thing – all thought ever does is to keep bringing everything back to the equilibrium value, to the values that have been programmed into it. It out doesn’t matter what job it has being given, this faithful and hard-working servant will do its best to see it through to the end; there’s no flexibility here, no possibility of negotiation – whatever is written down always has to be enforced to the letter and the machine which is thought will never give up on this.
The mechanism of the thinking mind only ever does one thing – it only ever acts out the rules which inform it (which is of course true for all mechanisms). In more colloquial terms, we could say that thought only ever does one thing and that one thing is to try to get the world to conform to its blueprint for it, its theory of it, its image of it and in this it is quite blameless. We can’t blame a machine for doing what it’s designed to do. Thought is therefore a profoundly conservative sort of thing – all thought ever does is to keep bringing everything back to the equilibrium value, to the values that have been programmed into it. It out doesn’t matter what job it has being given, this faithful and hard-working servant will do its best to see it through to the end; there’s no flexibility here, no possibility of negotiation – whatever is written down always has to be enforced to the letter and the machine which is thought will never give up on this.

What we are essentially saying here is that thought functions as ‘a blind mechanical force’ – there is simply no arguing with it! There is only this one way to see things, only this one way to do things, and that’s the end of the discussion. This is where the compulsivity (or forcefulness) comes in, therefore. We don’t know that we’re being controlled by the System of Thought – we have no way to know this because we aren’t allowed to see that there is any other way than the way we’re doing things – that’s precisely what we’re being prevented from seeing, after all! Thought does not permit freedom of attention; on the contrary, by restricting our attention, by pointing us firmly in the direction of what we are supposed to be seeing. Invisible restriction equals ‘compulsion that we cannot see as such’, in other words. If we were allowed to see that there are actually an infinite number of ways of see things then there would be no compulsion – in this case we are no longer being presented with a predetermined way of looking at things (which is a set-up that is guaranteed to generate illusions) and so we are free to perceive what genuinely is true. We can only ever see ‘the truth of things’ when we are no longer being coerced or cajoled into a particular partisan position by our thoughts.

When we have only the one, fixed viewpoint then everything we do or think on the basis of this viewpoint constitutes a linearity – there are no breaks, no inconsistencies, no gaps, and so everything that happens from this point onwards is the logical projection of our starting-off point. This consistency (or linearity) is what allows us to be sure about things, certain about things, since we can compare everything that happens within the remit of a common framework and make statements about this or that. Being restricted to a linearity is what allows us to obtain positive knowledge in other words, but the flip-side of this is that our positive statements about reality aren’t actually true – they only seem to be true because of the way in which our attention has been covertly restricted or directed. The validity of our worldview depends upon our attention pointing only in the one direction and never looking the other way and this therefore is just another way of saying that the apparent truth of the positive reality we perceive depends upon entropy. ‘Entropy is the price of structure’, as Ilya Prigogine says.

Since the positive reality we believe in so totally is dependent upon us looking at the world in a strictly compartmentalised way, and since this compartmentalization isn’t really there (but only seemed to be there because of the one-sidedness of our attention) this means that the positive reality we operate withing isn’t real – nothing that comes out of one-sidedness can be real because one-sidedness is a gimmick. The linear dimension is a dimension that takes us nowhere therefore – it’s a trick, it’s a scam, it’s a revolving door that always brings us right back to where we started. Linearity – then – is that modality of being in which we are constantly trying to get things to be what we think they should be (or rather, what thought says they should be). Just as long as we’re in this mode we are always going to be kept busy therefore – we’re always going to be busy because what we’re actually doing (although we never realise it) is that we’re struggling to ‘maintain an illusion’ and this is a struggle that can’t ever end. What we’re so busy ‘conserving’ in everyday life is our false or misleading way of looking at the world…

This brings us back to the question of what mental health is or is not – according to almost everyone you ever likely to meet (and according to the experts in the field) MH is all about having ‘believing in ourselves’ and this belief has to do with our identity, with ‘who we think are’, along with our ‘belief in our ability to achieve our goals’ (which is sometimes known as ‘perceived self-efficacy’ in psychological circles). If we stop being interested in our prized goals or in our pastimes then this shows (we say) that we aren’t mentally well, and if we start to lose our belief in our ability to obtain the outcomes that we want then this too is seen as a sign of poor mental health. When we lose all interest in our goals this is called ‘being depressed’ and we’re to lose our confidence in our abilities to control effectively to the extent that we can no longer function in life then we will be diagnosed as suffering from clinical anxiety. Both conditions bring huge suffering in their wake and for this reason it’s easy to see why we would define anxiety / depression as being an illness.

This therefore means that ‘the way we were before’ was the right way to be, the healthy way to be and so ‘therapy’ becomes all about returning us to this happy and healthy state. But ‘the way we were before’ was to be completely under the control of a whole bunch of illusions so there’s a problem here! When we’re living in the Rational Mode then what this means – as David Bohm says – is that thought runs us whilst telling us that we are running it. What we’re calling MH therefore is that state of being in which we falsely perceive ourselves to be seeing reality as it is (and believe ourselves to be acting out of our own true unadulterated volition when we’re only seeing things as thought says they are). The machine runs us by utilizing a tailor-made illusion in other words, and this is the illusion that we don’t want to be broken, this is the illusion that we are trying so hard to return to… In short what we’re calling ‘mental health’ is simply the Linear Modality, which is where everything that happens was already contained in the starting-off point and – furthermore – where that ‘starting-off’ point is a nothing more than an arbitrary invention of the System of Thought…

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