Negative Psychology

Mental health and 'autonomy' are one and the same thing. Power compromises autonomy - it eventually destroys it entirely - and because we live in a world that is BASED on control, that is ALL ABOUT control, we completely disregard the whole topic. We won't talk about it...

To belong to a group we must conform to its rules, but this means we are 'putting the rules above ourselves', and doing this leaves us 'wide open to being abused and exploited by the system'... 

To paraphrase Alan watts: We try to instruct ourselves to change (so that we can be a way that is more to our liking) but the one who needs to be changed is the one doing the instructing.

Mental health can't be brought about in any sort of 'procedural' way, no matter how sophisticated the procedures may be. Mental health is not a goal, but rather it is something that appears by itself when we stop compulsively interfering...

When we disagree we agree without meaning to. 'Disagreeing' isn't empowering, therefore - it's a sucker move...

The measure of our lack of psychological insight as a culture is our deep conviction that it is possible for us to change ourselves, change our 'inner state', just because we want to! This is pure, dumb wish-fulfillment that is driven by our profound unwillingness to face reality...

Just because we don't accept someone's reality doesn't mean that we disagree with them. If we disagree with someone that means we are essentially in agreement with them.

Psychological insulation is psychic death, yet if we don't insulate we become subject to exploitation. The world we live in - we might say - is a predatory one that sells itself as being our friend... 

Our default reaction to emotional pain is either to repress it or act it out. The possibility of doing neither never occurs to us. 

If mental wellness is another way of talking about our autonomy then this means that society - without any question at all - is the enemy of our mental health.

To safeguard ourselves psychologically in everyday life we have to be able to 'bite back' - if we aren't for whatever reason able to do this then we will be exploited to the hilt by practically everyone we meet...

Everyday life is a war zone. Thought is at war with our essential awareness, seeking to manage and regulate it down to the nth degree. We could also make the point that it looks very much as if thought (the tendency to systematize everything, to put everything in classes) has already won...

 Everyday life is a war zone. Thought is at war with our essential awareness, seeking to manage and regulate it down to the nth degree. We could also make the point that it looks very much as if thought (the tendency to systematize everything, to put everything in classes) has already won... 

The more we try to 'fix' self-obsession the more obsessed we become and there is absolutely no way around this. If I try to be less self-obsessed I become more obsessed I become instead. This is why so much that passes for spirituality is merely an act. 

When we come into this world we aren't given unconditional 'permission to be', we are given conditional permission, which means that we have to spend all our lives trying to meet these conditions...

We live in a world where everything is about power (i.e. the ability to move other people without being vulnerable to being moved oneself) and this power - for the most part - works invisibly.

"We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will." - Simone Weil

Societal power is the key when it comes to imposing our (fake) reality on others...

Every time we think we create a virtual reality, and we don't know how to stop thinking...

Mental health is not a procedural type of thing, and yet procedures are all we know!

The one thing we can never ever do is change ourselves on purpose...

The addiction we never see as such is the addiction to our super-narrow system of thinking. We're addicted to this thinking because it provides us with our idea of who we are, which we are frightened to let go of. 

Our approach to addiction is strictly mechanical in nature (which is to say, it's all about obeying some sort of 'external authority') but the thing about this is that it necessarily involved being addicted to being told what to do by that external authority...

Everything about us is a bluff - it's a bluff that is automatically validated by the social system that we are embedded in, but it's a bluff all the same. It is - moreover - a bluff that is very hard for us to see... 

The way everyday 'normal' life works is that we are sublimely unaware that we are imposing a logical framework on the world and then only taking notice of stuff that agrees with this FW - if we were to start being aware of this covert action (which the mind is constantly carrying out) then our 'normal, everyday life' would quickly become impossible for us. Things would have to...