Negative Psychology

The 'Negative Path' - simply put - comes down to 'the art of getting out of your own way'...

 In Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles (aka 'the Devil') famously says -  "All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green." 

The age-old 'war' between the Principle of Light and the Principle of Darkness (between Ahura Mazda on the one side and Ahriman on the other) may be seen as a metaphor for the war between consciousness and rational thought (which seeks to 'pull everything down to its level', so to speak). This way of understanding the essential dualistic myth is however not at all to our liking...

No strategy can ever help us become free from anxiety (or any other neurotic condition). We can't fight our way to freedom, we can never get so good at manipulation as to no longer NEED to manipulate (or control). The ego-concept is big on striving / controlling and what it is essentially trying to do here is to FREE itself from the need to keep on struggling and striving and scheming (becaus...

Instead of talking about 'pretending' [see Pretending Mode 1] we could talk in terms of bluffing - we bluff our way through life and we do so without facing the fact that this is what we're doing. If we 'faced the fact' then that would be the end of our bluff right there, so obviously that's no good! What we call 'neurosis' is where this bluff starts to disi...

An example of paradoxicality in mental health is found in 2 Corinthians 12:10 - "...for when i am weak, then I am strong."

If I can't drop my agenda then I am a slave to it - I have no autonomy in this situation at all. We see this backwards however - we see autonomy in terms of being able to push through our agendas, in terms of being able to attain all of the goals that we are being pressurized to attain. We don't actually know what the word 'autonomy'  means , therefore. We're clueless.... 

The basic 'ignominious thing' that happens to us as we adapt to society is that we take up the identities or roles that are provided for us and then - after this successful act of adaptation - we forget that this isn't who we really are....

Where power prevails then there is no love, and vice versa, says Jung, and the same can of course be said for connection . It's the same thing. Our culture is all about control, all about the use of power, and what this means is that there's no room left for there to be actual connection between people. That's the type of world we have created for ourselves...

We almost always 'live above ourselves', trying to anticipate what we can't anticipate, guessing what we can't guess, assuming what we can't assume. We exist in this thing called 'adult mode', in other words. The more we do this the more problems we make for ourselves however, since living above ourselves (and not be 'on the level' with ourselves) is th...

Once we move into alignment with the collective mind then all the jibes and digs cease and instead we get to feel that we belong , that we are accepted and approved of and all of that. If - for whatever reason - we aren't able to conform successfully (if we can't pull it off correctly) then the negative reinforcement (the 'punishment') will continue until we do. 

We know fair bit about physical sickness these days, but frighteningly little (if anything at all) about Jung refers to as 'sickness of the soul'. We don't acknowledge that there is such a thing. This doesn't mean that we won't 'learn about it in time', it just means that the 'learning' will occur against our will, via a shed-load of grueling mental suf...

Psychological work does not involve 'forcing ourselves to be a particular way'. That isn't psychological work - that's simply fear. Whenever we find that we are either trying to suppress or promote some particular state of mind then that's fear, then that's a 'mechanical reaction'. Psychological work is when we're actually interested in where we are, no...

We conflate 'mental health' and 'control' (or 'regulation') such that - as far as we're concerned - the more control we have the better off we will be, mental health-wise. This is clearly not the case - the more we try to control or regulate ourselves the more brittle, rigid and reactive we become. Control precludes spontaneity and without spontaneity life turns...

Western mindfulness is 'mindfulness with an agenda', the problem here being that when mindfulness has an agenda then it isn't mindfulness. It's not mindfulness but control .

Society pretends to be one thing, but really it's quite another.

No one ever improved their mental health - as we like to say - by 'seeking the advantage'. when we seek the advantage then this isn't to our advantage. 'Nothing fails like success', says Alan Watts....

There is no shame in being 'psychologically naive' - what we're doing in our culture is enforcing this state by trying to say that our ridiculous naivety in psychological matters is actually 'knowledge'. It isn't knowledge, however - it's a cultural artifact that is supported by ream upon ream of vapid pseudoscience...

Communication isn't what we think it is.

Any social interactions is usually an ambush - it's an ambush because what's generally going on is control not communication. We're being given someone else's mind, someone else's world-view, and this is control rather than communication. Conditioned human beings CAN'T communicate (because they aren't free to do so) - all we can do when we have been conditioned i...

Communication can only occur on a level playing field (which is to say, when no one voice is given greater weight of validity than any other), and this is precisely what NEVER happens in society! Society is all about conforming to the dominant narrative and the only way to be granted a voice is by proving our conformity, by earning the right to have a voice as result of 'successful social ada...

Self-blaming is a mechanical reflex that we are powerless to stop. It isn't really us blaming ourselves however, it's the thinking mind. The thinking mind is a mechanical reflex that controls us rather than vice versa. 

Self-blaming is a mechanical reflex that we are powerless to stop. It isn't really us blaming ourselves however, it's the thinking mind. The thinking mind is a mechanical reflex that controls us rather than vice versa.