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Psychiatry constructs depression within the supposedly meaning-free paradigm of 'objective knowledge'. Depression is therefore said to be a wholly valueless experience, a 'disease'. This is part of a wider prejudice lying deep in the roots of the new global 'technoculture', a prejudice that sees all painful or undesired experience, even including death, as unnecessary evils which we will (hopefully) eventually eliminate by continually improving our understanding of ourselves and the universe we live in. Civilization - as a rational utopia - is thus identified with the power to have everything the way we want it. This is what Illich meant when he spoke of the 'anaesthetic society' - a society that uses pharmaceutical technology to blank out experiences that it does not value. The flaw in the 'meaning-free' paradigm is easy to see: to say something is meaningless is to perform an act of assigning meaning since it was clearly important (or 'meaningful') for us to see it as 'meaningless' from the very start. To think that one can obtain a definite description of reality without making unsupported assumptions is itself an unsupported assumption, and the typical 'objective' scientific statement to the effect that 'reality is definitely meaningless' is subject to this criticism. In this article it is argued that depression actually does have a meaning, and that to be healed of depression it is necessary to understand this meaning. However, in order to understand the meaning of depression it is necessary to totally drop all rational perspectives on reality. To do this is extraordinarily difficult since we do not believe that there is an alternative to our conceptual models, and, what is more, without conceptualization the self or ego which is the centre of all our conscious activity ceases to exist. This argument is not a new one, and parallels are drawn with various non-scientific (in the Popperian sense) traditions of self-knowledge, including Jungian depth psychology. The model of depression that is outlined in the following article is constructed within the paradigm of Self-Organization, and is therefore a theory based on the new sciences of complexity.
CONTENTS
There is a particular sort of language that one encounters in the medical literature on depression,
which appears which greatest frequency in popular self-help books. The problem is often couched in terms
of a failure in control. This might be by subtle inference, or it might be downright blatant. For example, in a commercially available 'information video' on depression, designed to be distributed by health care workers to depressed people, we read:
For the millions of Americans who suffer from clinical depression, take heart. It is a controllable disease
and not a frame of mind. Take control of your life and learn......
The idea that depression can be 'controlled' is linked with the idea that it is a 'disease,' and to call
something a disease is in itself the first step in gaining power (in a magical rather than a scientific sense!)
through purely terminological means. 'Disease' implies that we are talking about some sort of biological process that has 'strayed' of its normatively defined boundaries, so all we have to do it return the relevant functions of the organism back to normality, i.e., it is a simple matter of correcting a homeostatic system that can no longer correct itself. Professor of nursing Margaret Newman (1986) refers to this as linear interventionalism: we know what the parameters of healthy functioning are; we know that you are outside of them; we intervene to return you to where we know you should be.... Everyone knows that in practise 'return' is not always possible, but, all the same, we feel more in control by having some sort of conceptual handle on what is going on. We can sum up all of this by saying that both the problem and the solution are construed within the paradigm of control, i.e. directed change.
It is not only depression that is approached in this way. Publishers David and Charles have produced a series of books under the banner TAKE CONTROL, which cover such topics as alcoholism, grief, relaxation and fertility. For some of these topics control might, of course, be a highly appropriate choice of language. For others, such as grief or relaxation, we will argue that it is entirely inappropriate. The objection may be raised that one should not get too excited by a single word, after all 'control' may be taken in all sorts of ways. In this article we will attempt to show that this type of language is crucially important because it indicates the unconscious paradigmatic framework that lies behind our thinking. It will be argued that approaches based on managing mental illness, whilst useful in certain situations, are more often counterproductive simply because medical science does not recognize the complementary way of understanding dynamical systems, namely self-organization.
We will examine an argument that says that depression is actually caused by an over-emphasis on
directed change (or control), and that in essence depression is a loss of meaning which occurs when we
believe that assigned meaning is the only sort of meaning that exists, i.e. when we get trapped in a world
that we ourselves designed. Utilizing terminology taken from Ernst and Christine's Weiszacker's (1973)
Model of Pragmatic Information, we will define assigned meaning in terms of an organizationally closed
system, and intrinsic meaning in terms of an organizationally open system.
DIRECTED CHANGE VERSUS SPONTANEOUS CHANGE
The intellectual tradition of which we are the heirs is based on thinking that is slanted in a
particular way: it values the predictable and well-defined, and devalues the random and the ill-defined. If
the world appears unpredictable and uncertain, so that it is without neat boundaries, then this represents
a failure - either of ourselves in our understanding, or of God in his work of creation. Einstein himself
articulated this bias when he made his famous comment about 'God not playing dice'. Rudy Rucker (1995,
p 2-3) traces this predilection for the predictable back to the ancient Greeks:
The Greek word for infinity was apeiron, which literally means unbounded, but can also mean infinite, indefinite,
or undefined. Apeiron was a negative, even pejorative, word. The original chaos out of which the world was formed
was apeiron. An arbitrarily crooked line was apeiron. A dirty crumpled handkerchief was apeiron. Thus, apeiron
need not only mean infinitely large, but can also mean totally disordered, infinitely complex, subject to no finite
determination."
In the light of chaos theory and complexity theory, we have had to readjust this slant, in fact we
have had to make a 180 degree turnabout: the unpredictable, indescribable and unaccountable aspect of
the universe is now recognized to be the main part of it. Chaos rules! In biology this has lead to the
understanding that directed processes are only part of the story and that self-organization - the spontaneous
emergence of order - makes up the rest. Just as order is more palatable to us, and therefore more visible, than randomness, so is self-organizing activity is much more obscure to our minds than directed processes; it seems that we find it very hard to believe (or trust) that living processes don't have to be told what to do every step of the way. So how does self-organization work, and what is its connection with randomness and chaos?
THE PRESERVATION OF PROPORTIONALITIES
A useful first step might be to look at the difference between linear and non-linear transformations.
Davies (1987, p 23 -24) defines the former:
A linear system is one in which cause and effect are related in a proportionate fashion. As a simple
example consider stretching a string of elastic. If the elastic stretches by a certain length for a certain pull, it
stretches by twice that length for twice the pull.
In non-linear processes the original ratios are lost, because, as Davies (p 54) explains later on, whatever
uncertainty was originally present (and there is always some!) gets explosively amplified:
Typically the errors in these ordinary dynamical systems grow in proportion to time (i.e. linearly). By
contrast, in a chaotic system the errors grow at an escalating rate; in fact, they grow exponentially with time. The
randomness of chaotic motion is therefore fundamental, not merely the result of our ignorance. Gathering more
information about the system will not eliminate it. Whereas in an ordinary system like the solar system the
calculations keep well ahead of the action, in a chaotic system more and more information must be processed to
maintain the same level of accuracy, and the calculation can barely keep pace with actual events. In other words,
all power of prediction is lost. The conclusion is that the system is its own fastest computer.
We can tie linear changes in with control and non-linear changes with lack of control, control being
inextricably linked with the property of predictability. Control tends to be associated with self-correction,
as we have said, and it is true to say that cybernetics, the science of controlling systems, is rooted in
homeostasis, or negative feedback mechanisms, which naturally means that positive feedback is seen in
an unfavourable light as a 'cybernetic disaster'. Control may be seen more broadly as 'directedness,'
which means that it is not negative feedback that is the key feature but rather the power of prediction. Thus,
a system that changes its parameters in a linear fashion, unlike a simple homeostatic system which stays
the same, is still exhibiting controlled change in that it is not escaping our capability to compute its
trajectory. In fact one could say that the change involved is trivial, more apparent than real. A non-linear
system, on the other hand (which is associated with positive-feedback loops) does escape our control
because, as Davies says, all proportionality is irrevocably lost. Prigogine and Stengers (1984) speak of the
first type of change as 'timeless' or 'tautological' and the second type as 'irreversible' or 'radical'; one
could also say that the former represents change that is quantitative in nature, and the latter qualitative.
One might follow all that has been said above, and yet still be baffled as to what the positive
property of chaos and randomness might be. A system that gets caught up in a positive-feedback loop, will
obviously be altered beyond recognition, but where is the value in such drastic change? This is where is
the real surprise comes in: out of radical change comes not endless chaos, but new order - often order of
a higher level of complexity than the system exhibited before. This is the phenomenon of emergence. Davies
uses as one example of emergence the situation where a video camera is faced with a monitor displaying
its own output. The resulting positive-feedback distorts the original image out of all recognition, as might
be expected, but as well as blank visual static one also gets all sorts of highly coherent, fractal-type
patterns. These patterns are emergent because the information specifying them was not programmed into
the system in advance - the video feedback system is demonstrating self-organizing behaviour.
Prigogine and Stengers (1984, p 13) give a chemical example of self-organization:
.....when we move from equilibrium to far-from-equilibrium conditions, we move away from the repetitive and the
universal to the specific and the unique. Indeed, the laws of equilibrium are universal. Matter near equilibrium
behaves in a "repetitive" way. On the other hand, far from equilibrium there appears a variety of mechanisms
corresponding to the possibility of occurrence of various types of dissipative structures. For example, far from
equilibrium we may witness the appearance of chemical clocks, chemical reactions which behave in a coherent,
rhythmical fashion. We may also have processes of self-organization leading to nonhomogenous structures to
nonequilibrium crystals.
We would like to emphasize the unexpected nature of this behaviour. Every one of us has an intuitive
view of how a chemical reaction takes place; we imagine molecules floating through space, colliding, and
reappearing in new forms. We see chaotic behaviour similar to what the atomists described when they spoke about
dust dancing in the air. But in a chemical clock the behaviour is quite different. Oversimplifying somewhat, we
can say that in a chemical clock all molecules change their chemical identity simultaneously, at regular time
intervals. If the molecules can be imagined as blue or red, we would see their change of color following the rhythm
of the chemical clock reaction.
Obviously such a situation can no longer be described in terms of chaotic behavior. A new type of order
has appeared. We can speak of a new coherence, of a mechanism of "communication" among molecules. But this
type of communication can arise only in far-from-equilibrium conditions. It is quite interesting that such
communication seems to be the rule in the world of biology. It may in fact be taken as the very basis of the
definition of a biological system.
Thus, we can say the following. Emergent order is not obtained through directed change, but through the
relinquishing of control. The existing structure does not provide the means of transcending the old identity,
but, on the contrary, random environmental fluctuations are the trigger for radical change. The question
this brings us to is "Can we model the human mind as a dynamical (or non-equilibrium) system?" If we
decide that we can, then straight away we have a theoretical crisis on our hands, since up to now all of the
medical interventions used in psychiatry are based on directed change, which is to say linear
interventionism.
Let us make an assumption. Let us assume that depression, far from being an essentially
meaningless aberration from the norm of healthy mental functioning is actually the reaction of the mind
when it is restricted too long in particular pattern of interaction with its environment, (we will introduce
terms with which to describe this 'closure' a bit later on). Following Newman (1986), we could then say
that it is 'healthy to be depressed', meaning that it is the helpful and appropriate response of a system that
is being blocked in its dynamical evolution. It is helpful because it is the way by which we finally get to
relinquish our previous, no longer useful, way of doing things. If this were so, then orthodox treatment
would not be seen so much as 'a cure for the disease', but a further manifestation of the root cause of
depression since it represents a 'normalizing' reaction to a healthy and necessary process of change.
Such a view of depression and our treatments of it is likely to be dismissed fairly quickly by most
psychiatrists. There are three objections that immediately spring to mind:
1/ The model implies that depression is self-curing, yet certain individuals - not remarkable in any other
respect - seem to suffer from clinical depression for most of their lives, a fact that tends to support a
genetic/ biochemical model. Furthermore, we know that some people who lived well before the advent of
antidepressants also led lives that were dogged by melancholia, which means that chronic depression isn't
just an artefact of modern pharmacological treatments.
2/ There is evidence of the involvement of hereditary factors. This suggests that research ought to be
directed towards identifying the gene(s) which are the culprits, a conclusion that fits very well with the
current dominant approach in psychology, see for example Pinker (1998) .
3/ Depression can be shown to have biochemical correlates. One can actually make oneself very
depressed by taking certain drugs. Reserpine, for example, is likely to result in acute depression if it is
taken every day for a couple weeks. It does this because it depletes the neurotransmitter 5-HT.
Furthermore, just to underline the point, if you were then to ingest large amounts of pumpkin seeds you
might be able to reverse this effect since pumpkin seeds are the richest natural source of the amino acid
tryptophan, a precursor of 5-HT. So, if we know that altering 5-HT concentration in certain synapses
results in mood change, where is the need to look for more fancy, 'chaos'-based explanations?
These are good solid objections which ought not to be ignored, but at the same time, they are not
reasons for refusing to explore alternative perspectives. Forty years ago, Arthur Guirdham, a consultant
psychiatrist involved in advising the Labour government of the time in the planning of the NHS, expressed
exasperation at the type of thinking which assumes that just because a correlation is established, one set
of variables can be used to explain the others. We have physical bodies, Guirdham pointed out, so it is
hardly surprising that there are physical correlates to mental phenomena, this does not mean, however, that
we can explain our conscious life in terms of biochemical reactions! Traditional (linear) logic tells us that
phenomena are preceded by a cause, which determines them. Deterministic (or 'specifying') causes boil
down to laws, like the law of gravity which determines the way in which fruit falls from trees; it is in this
sense that classical physics seeks the holy grail of the 'fundamental description' or 'universal algorithm'.
Linear logic is fine in a universe which runs on the rules of classic Newtonian physics, but it lets us down
badly in a universe that is, as Davies (1987, p 55) says, behaves as 'a chaotic system'. Laws don't specify
emergent order, which means that we cannot explain emergent patterns of behaviour in terms of simple
algorithms. No matter how long you stare at the simple algorithm for producing the Mandelbrot set, Z
Z 2 + C, you will not be able to see the Mandelbrot set in it. If you can't predict what follows, you certainly
can't explain it!
Linear explanations are actually tautological. If X causes Y, in a deterministic sense, then X is Y.
One isn't saying anything new. So, whilst we can allow that genetic, biochemical, and neurological
approaches have something to say about depression, they can't say everything about it; in fact the self-organization paradigm does not ever allow us to say everything for no matter how may perspectives you
employ, there will always be something missed out. Prigogine and Stengers (1984, p 225) put it as follows:
.....No single theoretical language articulating the variables to which a well-defined value can be attributed can
exhaust the physical content of a system. Various possible languages and points of view about the system may be
complementary. They all deal with the same reality, but it is impossible to reduce them to one single description.
The irreducible plurality of perspectives on the same reality expresses the impossibility of a divine point of view
from which the whole of reality is visible.
Physicists have come around to accepting that their objects will always, in some way, escape them. To
realize the roundedness of all phenomena, i.e. their infinitely high complexity, is, one might say, an
indicator of our maturity as scientists. We accept that our rudimentary models cannot encompass the whole
of reality, but that does not stop us trying to understand it, in fact it encourages us to keep looking for new
angles. The type of approach where one uses different perspectives is variously known as 'model
agnosticism' or 'bootstrapping,' after Chew.
There is another reason why we should not be too complacent that our approach to depression is
the right one, and that is our spectacular lack of success in eliminating it. Despite the breezily confident
tones of the mental-health industry, depression is a fairly intractable problem that is actually getting more
and more prevalent in our society. We can 'squash the symptoms down' with pharmaceutical therapy or
ECT but they have an unfortunate habit of popping up elsewhere. This is a damage limitation exercise more
than anything else. Gleick (1987, p 298) reports psychiatrist and dynamicist Arnold Mandell's appraisal
of the current state of play, delivered at the 1986 Conference on Chaos in Medicine and Biology:
To Mandell, the discoveries of chaos dictate a shift in clinical approaches to treating psychiatric
disorders. By any objective measure, the modern business of "psychopharmacology" - the use of drugs to treat
everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia - has to be judged a failure. Few patients, if any, are cured.
The most violent manifestations of mental illness can be controlled, but with what long-term consequences, no one
knows. Mandell offered his colleagues a chilling assessment of the most commonly used drugs. Phenthiazines,
prescribed for schizophrenics, make the fundamental disorder worse. Tricyclic antidepressants "increase the rate
of mood cycling, leading to long-term increases in numbers of relapsing psychopathologic episodes." and so on.
Only lithium has any real medical success, Mandell said, and only for some disorders.
Gleick goes on to explain why traditional approaches must inevitably seem inadequate to a psychiatrist,
who, like Mandell, is able to think in non-linear terms:
As he saw it, the problem was conceptual. Traditional methods for treating this "most unstable, dynamic,
infinite-dimensional machine" were linear and reductionist. "The underlying paradigm remains: one gene one
peptide one enzyme one neurotransmitter one receptor one animal behaviour one clinical
syndrome one drug one clinical rating scale. It dominates almost all research and treatment in
psychopharmacology. More than 50 transmitters, thousands of cell types, complex electromagnetic phenomenology,
and continuous instability based autonomous activity at all levels - and still the brain is thought of as a chemical
point-to-point switchboard. To someone exposed to the world of non-linear dynamics the response could only be:
how naive. .....
It is one thing to draw attention to weaknesses in the way we currently model and treat depression,
but does self-organization really offer anything better? Earlier, we made the suggestion that depression
might be what happens when the dynamic system of the mind gets too restricted, too closed in the way it
organizes itself. This 'excessive stability,' we further suggested, is due to too much 'purposefulness', too
much design, since purposefulness (i.e. control or linearity) cannot ever escape its own premises. What we
need to show is that the mind needs a degree of organizational fluidity, that its 'proper operation' requires
that it not be frustrated in this respect. This is not as hard to argue as it might seem, but what we have to
do then is to make a plausible link between this (which is an information-processing issue) and the actual
emotional experience of depression. First however, we will spend a little time trying to demonstrate just
how far reaching the difference between purposeful and purposeless change is, and how little we understand
it in our everyday thinking. We can do this using cognitive behavioural therapy as an example.
Cognitive behavioural therapy is used to change behaviour and thinking. This is stating the
obvious. But what type of change are we talking about, directed or spontaneous? The way to work out
whether change is of the first or second variety is by considering whether criteria are involved. Cognitive
criteria are rules of information processing and although we use them all the time, we don't actually
experience ourselves as performing logical operations as we think. We perceive the process as being
spontaneous, although it clearly is not. This means that it is hard to see whether we are using 'rules-for-thinking' at all, let alone what these rules might be. If someone asks "Is that car yours?" the answer
appears immediately, yet in order to arrive at an answer you would presumably have had to carried out a
rule-based sequence of information processing steps. If you are asked a really difficult question in
mathematics, on the other hand, you would be more aware of the steps that lead to an answer. The upshot
of all this is the statement that in cognitive change, we have two levels to consider. The following is a rather
simplistic example, but it illustrates the basic principles perfectly well.
A depressed patient is asked "Do you value yourself as a person? and they answer "No, I am a
worthless individual, a waste of space...." If you as a therapist want to change that, you might suggest to
them that they try to get into the habit of substituting a more positive answer, such as "I am a worthwhile
person, and I have as much right to live as anyone else." Similarly, if your client tends to talk themselves
down before engaging in a task, saying to themselves "I am going to mess it up!" you might encourage
them to try out the thought "I am able to do this!" This is criterion-based, or quantitative change. A
system has a number of possible states possible for it (i.e. that agree with the rules organizing it), and it
is possible to swop one state for another through the operation of directed change. An electric kettle, for
example, has two states availlable to it, 'ON' and 'OFF'. In general terms, if one asks a person a question,
and they give an answer you consider erroneous, you may respond by suggesting an alternative answer.
What you are not doing is actually questioning the validity of the criteria they (and you) are using.
This may not be immediately apparent. In essence, what we are saying is that substituting 'YES'
for 'No' is no change at all, since both answers agree with the criterion that you used to arrive at it. If
someone says something to you and you contradict with them, you are agreeing with them in that you are
tacitly accepting that the issue is as important as the other person thinks it is. You are both playing the
same game, since you are playing by the same rules. In the language of Pragmatic Information Theory, the
two of you have formed yourselves into an organizationally closed system because there are only the two
answers possible, 'YES' or 'NO'. This means that both of you are equally definite in how you see the
problem. R.A. Wilson (1990) describes this situation in terms of Aristotelian logic: according to this way
of thinking, all questions about the universe can be answer either in the affirmative or in the negative. It
can't be both, and it can't be neither..... Aristotelian logic, however, presupposes a positive or definite
reality that correlates (or agrees) exactly with the rules that are being used to interpret it. Wilson points
out that what this means in practice is that when a definite model is used to interpret reality, the answers
that come back always affirm the validity of the rules that were involved in obtaining them. Reality, as
post-classical physics has now discovered, is an uncertain business, so what we really need is a logic that
has three possible categories (or solutions), namely 'YES', 'NO' and 'MAYBE'. Wilson, following John
Von Neumann, calls this Quantum Logic. It can be seen that MAYBE doesn't actually agree with any
evaluative rules; unlike YES and NO, it is open.
To come to the point of this discussion, swopping [+] for [-] is quantitative change, both values
agree with the underlying criteria - no new perspective is required to make sense of the universe. This can
be done deliberately, by an act of will, you just have to 'crank the handle' on the logic machine. Turning
firm YES or NO into a MAYBE is qualitative change, and it cannot be done on purpose, since there is
no logical criterion that can generate a MAYBE. Qualitative change is criterion-free change and it throws
the original information-processing criteria into question - there is the possibility of new perspectives on
the matter, which means that previously irrelevant information is now accepted as being potentially
meaningful. Quantitative change restricts one to a narrow segment of the 'space of all possible
perspectives' - it locks one into one view. Qualitative change, because it is based on uncertainty, has the
property of ergodicity, there is no part of the Universal Set of rules that cannot be visited, no territory that
is 'out of bounds'. For this reason it is both 'perspective expanding' and involuntary (i.e. spontaneous).
This allows us to see that there are two completely distinct types of therapy. One corresponds to
a therapy for increasing 'equilibrium' (or 'social adaptation'); the other to a therapy for increasing
'disequilibrium', (or 'individuation'). It is probably fair to say that CBT can be used in both ways. Going
from MUST to COULD is an example of relativization (increasing uncertainty) that therapists typically
try to encourage. Beck, Shaw, Rush and Emery (1979, p 15) are quite explicit about this process,
contrasting 'absolutist and moralistic' statements such as "I am a despicable coward" (depressogenic) with
the suggested 'relativistic and non-judgemental' self-appraisal: "I am more fearful than most people I
know" (non-depressogenic). Yet, alongside insight regarding the absolutist/ relativist continuum there is
also continual reference to 'erroneous' thinking (for example, in the key notion of the cognitive triad of
errors), which carries with it the assumption that there is a 'non-erroneous' type of thinking, which means
that absolutism in reality-description is being invoked. The assumption that depression is caused by the
wrong sort of thinking, and that it can be cured by learning the right way of thinking forms, lies deep in
the theoretical core of CBT, as can be seen from the following passage, where Beck (1976, p3) is
introducing his ideas:
......This new approach - cognitive therapy - suggests that the individual's problems are derived largely from certain
distortions of reality based on erroneous premises and assumptions. These incorrect conceptions originated in
defective learning during the person's cognitive development. Regardless of their origin, it is relatively simple to
state the formula for treatment: The therapist helps a patient to unravel his distortions in thinking and to learn
alternative, more realist ways to formulate his experiences.
The crudest (and most obviously problematic) formulation of directed change as a therapeutic cure-all is
in the popular conception of 'positive thinking'. For example, an advert for a 'Successful Living' seminar
(in the Galway Advertiser, Vol. 29, No. 17) we read the following:
Research shows that if a person can relax completely and push aside all opposing negative thoughts, they can then
focus their mind to improve any area of their life.
The contradiction here is the suggestion that one can, at the same time 'completely relax' and 'push aside'
unwanted thoughts! The absolutist notion of 'positive thinking' actually translates as asserting one's
agenda, since there are no 'positives' and 'negatives' outside of our arbitrary construction of reality.
Similarly, the phrase 'improving one's life' assumes that there is a correct, objective way to do this. Yet
what purposeful self-improvement boils down to is simply the channelling of one's efforts into the
achievement of already existing goals - one becomes more trapped than ever within the sterile confines of
the rational mind. True relaxation means losing one's agenda, and thus gaining freedom from one's mind.
This is a spontaneous process, not one that is guided by previously existing assumptions. We may note in
this connection the inherent self-contradictoriness inherent in all social rules (see Carse 1986, Watts 1961).
The result of this is that when, for example, sexuality is severely constrained, problems associated with
sexual behaviour become exaggerated. As celibate monks throughout the ages have discovered, not thinking
about sex is the same as thinking about it - we cannot control our minds by force of will. Directed change,
one might say, is fine for mechanistic or equilibrium systems, but no good at all for self-organizing, non-equilibrium systems.
There is therefore an important change of emphasis in the approach that we are outlining. We are
saying that all 'absolutist' (or closed) descriptions of reality are depressogenic, and that therapy should
consist not in exchanging one 'false' absolutist view of reality for a 'correct' absolutist view, but in
relaxing to an equal extent our grip on (or 'attachment to') all views. This would mean that the depressed
persons' absolutist tendency towards a closed way of interacting with his or her environment would be
relativized. Relativized science asserts that all assumptions and premises regarding reality-interpretation
are necessarily distortions. We will develop this idea and say that such distortions have the potential to
be depressogenic (and anxiogenic) when there is a confusion between our abstract cognitive models
and the concrete universe that they are modelling.
This formulation of the problem is not new. Jung (1958, p 80 -81) traces back the source of many
'psychic disturbances and difficulties' to what he calls man's 'identification with his conscious knowledge
of himself.' These problems arise, paradoxically enough, as a consequence of our great success in
adaptation:
... His consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the world around him, and it
is to its peculiarities that he must adapt his psychic and technical resources. This task is so exacting, and its
fulfilment so advantageous, that he forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting
his own conception of himself in place of his real being. In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual
world where the products of his conscious activity progressively replaces reality.
It will be noted that Jung still alludes to a 'correct' mode of orientation in that he invokes 'man's instinctual
nature'. We will diverge from Jung in this and try to develop a case for saying that the only authentic mode
of orientation is that of organizational openness, which is to say cognitive indeterminacy. If the only
correct interpretation of the universe is no (one) interpretation, then an indeterminate state of mind is needed
for genuine insight into reality. The assumption being made here is that the basis of consciousness lies
in the unprogrammed spontaneity of 'infinite instability ' (i.e. it is a skyhook!), rather than in a causal
sequence of events (a crane). Proponents of the former paradigm include Bentov (1978), Jantsch (1980),
Newman (1982) and Groff (1998); the latter just about everyone accepts - in fact hardly anyone realizes
that they actually have a choice! The possibility that consciousness might be something that is not
produced, or created, seems downright preposterous to us - yet there is no real reason why it should. The
same argument applies to the universe itself: either we assume that it was created by something outside
itself (Christian paradigm) or we assume that it is spontaneously arising (Buddhist paradigm). Yet saying
that the universe was produced leads us into an infinite regress. The skyhook model of consciousness is
articulated here by the Zen master Linji (trans. by Thomas Cleary, 1989, p 6):
If you want to be free, get to know your real self. It has no form, no appearance, no root, no basis, no abode, but
is lively and buoyant. It responds with versatile facility, but its function cannot be located. Therefore, when you
look for it you become further away from it, when you seek it you turn away from it all the more.
Alan Watts (1957, p 47-48), possibly less fettered than Jung by the Western bias towards determinate
realities, expresses the same idea in a somewhat clearer form by drawing our attention to the Second Noble
Truth of Buddhism:
The Second Noble Truth relates to the cause of frustration, which is said to be trishna, clinging or
grasping, based on avidya, which is ignorance or unconsciousness. Now avidya is the formal opposite of
awakening. It is the state of mind when hypnotized or spellbound by Maya, so that it mistakes the abstract world
of things and events for the concrete world of reality. At a still deeper level it is lack of self-knowledge, lack of the
realization that all grasping turns out to be the futile effort to grasp oneself, or rather, to make life catch hold of
itself. For to one who has self-knowledge, there is no duality between himself and the external world. Avidya is
"ignoring" the fact that subject and object are relational, like the two sides of a coin, so that when one pursues, the
other retreats. This is why the egocentric attempt to dominate the world, to bring as much of the world as possible
under the control of the ego, has only to proceed for a little while before it raises the difficulty of the ego's
controlling itself.
This formulation of the source of neurotic suffering, i.e. saying that it is the situation where one believes
the relative to be absolute, yields a very simple solution to the problem of unhappiness, and yet, as Watts
says elsewhere, we don't want simple answers, we want sophisticated answers. We want answers that are
based on the idea of ourselves as effective agents, as 'doers', as 'rational thinkers' who are able to come
up with highly intricate theories of ourselves and the universe. The ego (or rational mind), as Watts goes
on to say, doesn't want a simple answer that doesn't involve itself. It is in this context that he quotes to
Taoist sage Tao-wu:
If you want to see, see directly into it; but when you try to think about it, it is altogether missed.
What we have here, therefore, is a perfectly straightforward model that links depression with an
over-investment in directed processes. Directedness always proceeds from models, so we can make the
equivalent statement that depression is the result of exclusively identifying oneself with one's abstract idea
of oneself. So, rather than saying that loss of spontaneity is a mere symptom of depression, we are now
in a position to see depression and loss of spontaneity (spontaneity = 'model-lessness') as being directly
related, if not the same thing.
Leaving the issue of directedness versus spontaneity to one side for a moment, there is another
angle that we can take when analysing depression, and that is the question of experienced meaning. From
the point of view of the actual experience of clinical depression, the whole thing is very much comes down
to meaning, or the lack of it. When life is good it is good because we are keenly aware of the meaning in
it, the value of it. There is an immediacy and a non-referentiality, a lack of cognitive reflexivity (self-monitoring) to the experience. Life lives itself through us! When we are down we feel as if there is no point
to anything, the whole business of being the person who we were so happily beforehand has now collapsed
into as a sickening sham, a mockery of what we know it should be. We sit there, grimly monitoring
ourselves and our situation, and the more we reflect on it the more hopeless it looks. Our conscious
activities have to be mechanically forced, everything is an effort.
When our enjoyment of life is at its fullest, we live out life's meaning without questioning it, a
mysterious zest for life animates us and carries us ever forward, and when that meaning or zest dries up
the motivation for the business of living goes with it. One might say that life is so good that we can't resist
taking total charge of it oneself, but what happens when we do this is that we discover we have killed the
joy that was in it. As Jesus is reported as having (somewhat cryptically) said: "Those that loveth their life
in this world shall lose it...."
The therapeutic 'answer' that this model provides us with is simple. The 'cure' for depression (as
for all neurosis) is an expansion of perspective, an increase of consciousness, that allows us to see that what
we previously understood to be a final description is actually only provisional in nature, and that the world
we see has more to do with the set of assumptions we use to picture it than anything else. This 'expansion
of perspective' is not obtained as a result of doing (self-willed development) but growing (the successive
relinquishing of outworn models concerning who one is, what the universe is, and what life is about).
This formulation makes intuitive sense, but it presents us with a problem - how do we squeeze
emotion from a model based on information-processing, how can we derive meaning from the dry rules of
logic? Straight-away we have to acknowledge what seems to be an unsurmountable difficulty: the
qualitative cannot be explained by the quantitative, we cannot use a system based on linear transformations,
which is to say rational thought, as a springboard to understanding qualitative or complex realities. There
is a way around this though. In order to make use of this way we have to be willing to make a central,
unsupported assumption. This, although unscientific on the face of it, is not actually the abdication of
reason that it sounds since we are only making a provisional attempt at understanding reality - we are
saying "What would it be like if I make such and such an assumption...?" We might find that the exercise
generates useful ways of looking at things, or, then again, we might not. Either way, epistemological
pitfalls are avoided as long as we don't start imagining that we are in the business of making definite (i.e.
closed) assertions about the nature of reality.
The big assumption that we are going to make is that there is such a thing as 'intrinsic meaning,'
or 'intrinsic value'. We will assume, in other words, that it is possible to be aware of a concrete (i.e. non-abstract) reality without actually describing it to ourselves; that there is an unconstructed or uninterpreted
reality which has a quality to it that is capable of directly (i.e. non-conceptually) affecting us. Intrinsic
meaning can be equated to Jung's 'numinosity': the uncanny feeling one has when one experiences a
'psychic content' that was not created by one's own conscious mind. In Vol 11 of the Collected Works
Jung (par 6) says that the numinosum is "a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of
will." For the thorough-going rationalist, there is no such thing as numinosity or intrinsic meaning - the
only type of meaning that he or she believes in is assigned (or extrinsic) meaning, i.e. the meaning that we
ourselves give to a situation. Jung himself found, naturally enough, that his rationalistic fellow
psychologists had the greatest difficulty in accepting his assertion that the most basic property of the
unconscious was this awe-inspiring numenosity!
Rather than going into discussion about what mysticism might be said to be, and what possibilities
there might be for an interface between science and mysticism, we will look at the matter from the point
of view of game theory. Assigned meaning is easy to see in a formal game such as football: it is not
(usually) problematic for us to become aware of the fact that all the rules that go to make up the game of
football have been created by us. The meaning of various occurrences on the pitch is thus determined by
the rules that we have previously agreed upon. Ultimately speaking , if we can go outside of the context
of what has agreed about football, the action of kicking a ball into one of two nets has no special
significance whatsoever - one might as well kick the ball into one net as the other, or somewhere else
entirely, or not kick it at all. One might equally well eat it, or try to make a hat out of it....
In mathematical terms, therefore, we can say that assigned meaning is when we select out one set
of rules out of the universal set of all possible rules and exclude the others; this type of meaning is clearly
arbitrary in that it is dependent upon choosing. We can use the same approach to obtain a handle on
intrinsic meaning. By definition, intrinsic meaning is the meaning that was there before a choice was made,
which means that it can be equated to the situation where all rules have equal precedence, i.e. none are
excluded.
This, it will be noted, is not the same as saying that intrinsic meaning is 'no meaning,' although
it may, on the face of it, tend to look like that. Although someone who is not fond of football might declare
that it is entirely meaningless for grown men or women to spend their time kicking an inflated bladder
around a field, it isn't. To say that is to invest the game with negative meaning. The thing to say (if you
really want to annoy a football fan!) is that kicking a ball around is just as meaningful as anything else that
one might do with (or without) it - its all equally meaningful! Such all-inclusiveness is infinitely
destabilizing to all structures, it falsifies them irrevocably, yet all-inclusiveness isn't saying 'NO' to things,
but saying a very hearty 'YES' to everything without exception. In terms of linearity and non-linearity,
it is clear that linearity preserves proportionalites through its exclusitivity, and that the chaotic nature of
non-linearity derives from the fact that chaos (or randomness) excludes no possibilities. In thermodynamics
this property is known as ergodicity.
- Assigned meaning is the meaning pertaining to the part; it is conditional since it only makes sense if one
arbitrary selected set of rules are followed and all other, disagreeing, rules are ignored. It is referential, i.e. it can
be determined by reference to a set of criteria. It corresponds to the exclusivity of 'YES/NO' (Aristotelian logic).
- Intrinsic meaning is the meaning pertaining to the whole; it is unconditional since it corresponds to the
'unmodified' situation. All possible rules are allowed equal validity. It is non-referential, or unique, since there
is nothing to compare it with. It can be equated to 'MAYBE' in Quantum Logic.
We may note that intrinsic meaning is unprovable since it is without precedence: there are no
standards that may be applied to verify it. This is the implication of linking it with the 'MAYBE' category.
However, we can counter the obvious objection "if it can't be proved why should we accept that it exists"
by answering as follows. By demanding proof that an answer should fall neatly into one category or
another one quietly assumes that the question itself is a meaningful one, when, as we have already argued,
any question is only meaningful if we choose to accept the perspective it arises out of. Demanding that
something should either 'exist' or 'not exist' is pure Aristotelian Logic - it assumes that 'YES' and 'NO'
mean something outside of the evaluative framework being used. Thus, to say that there 'IS' (or 'IS
NOT') such a thing as intrinsic meaning is merely an operation of assigned meaning! This is of course the
case with all rational statements.
We have now succeeded in relating assigned meaning to linear functions (order), and intrinsic
meaning to non-linear functions (chaos). The reason why we find it so hard to accept the notion of intrinsic
meaning (i.e. meaning without evaluation) might, perhaps, be related to the difficulty we have in seeing
anything positive about chaos or randomness (i.e. noticing the irrelevant). We might surmise that this
prejudice might be due to the fact that chaos has no utilitarian, or adaptive value; what is worse, if we were
to dwell on it too long we would notice that our (linear) conceptual apparatus, and hence our cherished
ideas of who and what we are, start to feel the death-dealing sting that comes from the falsificatory
property of all-inclusivity. Cognitive stability - upon which rests our only hope of understanding the world -
is irreparably jeopardized by intrinsic meaning.
It might be worthwhile, at this point, taking a little detour from the main strand of our argument
to examine a little closer what exactly we mean by 'understanding'. There are, as we have said, two types
of changes involved in the activity of a self-organizing system: 1/ linear transformations and 2/ non-linear
transformations. What we normally refer to as 'knowing' and 'understanding' involves the former, hence
'ratio-nality' (see Bohm (1980, p 22-3). Linear relationships can obviously be used to model linearity in
the external environment: when there is a correspondence between the two, which allows prediction, we say
that there is understanding. Thus, understanding, although very useful, is valid only as a special case, since
the universe as a whole, as Davies and Bohm respectively say, is best pictured as 'a chaotic system' or
'groundless flux'. Understanding only works where the rules are well-defined, in other words. We can
know that double yellow lines means not to park there; we can know where Marks and Spencers is on the
high street; we can know the name of our friend - all these are 'facts'. We can also know stuff outside of
social 'game-reality', we can know that certain red berries are not good to eat, or that dogs can bite; we
also know that nothing can exceed the speed of light and that the circumference of a circle divided by its
diameter always gives the same answer. When we start to enumerate the extent of our knowledge the list
seems to go on and on...
Even so, the domain of the known would seem to be a vanishingly small island in a vast ocean of
unchartable chaos. What is more, this does not spell failure on our parts: the unknown, we might say, is
actually the 'juiciest' part of life, the part that makes it all worthwhile. The unknown is health, it is the
zzzing, the zest, the numenosity, the 'fear of God', the 'sense of wonder', the feeling of fullness, the
unconditional sense of meaning that makes life the infinitely deep phenomenon that it is. Without it we are
shallow creatures, continually irritated and frustrated, plagued by petty problems that nevertheless seem
important to us. Oblivious of the true nature of the chasm that we are suspended over, we are dogmatic and
incurious, smug but restless, bored both by ourselves and our world. Understanding is good, one might say,
but only in its place; only when one knows that - ultimately - one doesn't know anything at all...
Although we have said that understanding can be useful, it can also be 'non-useful', because, just
as algorithmic change doesn't result in an information jump, so too does assigned value preclude intrinsic
value, which means that the ergodicity (or fluidity) needed for cognition not to become frozen into one
mode just isn't there. One may be happy to accept this, yet fail to see what the big deal is about changing
from one set of cognitive rules (one assigned value reality) to another, or, perhaps, in dropping all
perspectives altogether. If the way you are doing things no longer works, surely you would just stop it, or
try something else. Where is the need for all this suffering? We need to do two things at this point. We
need to show why suffering, specifically, depression, should be linked with goal-orientated behaviour (or
assigned meaning systems), and we need to show why it should be so difficult to 'drop' or 'let go' a model
of reality that one is utilizing, when that model becomes counterproductive in terms of one's well being.
We will start by quoting Fritjof Capra (1982, p 421):
A person functioning exclusively in the Cartesian mode may be free from manifest symptoms but cannot
be considered mentally healthy. Such individuals typically lead ego-centered, competitive, goal-oriented lives.
Overpreoccupied with their past and their future, they tend to have a limited awareness of the present and thus a
limited ability to derive satisfaction from ordinary activities in everyday life. They concentrate on manipulating
the external world and measure their living standard by the quantity of material possessions, while they become
ever more alienated from their inner world and unable to appreciate the process of life. For people whose existence
is dominated by this mode of experience no level of wealth, power, or fame will bring genuine satisfaction, and
thus they become infused with a sense of meaningless, futility, and even absurdity that no amount of external
success can dispel.
Capra's 'Cartesian mode' can be taken as being synonymous with what we have been calling the
'paradigm of control' since it refers to classical mode of understanding mechanical (reversible) interactions,
i.e. linearity. We can illustrate 'goal-orientatedness' by considering the typical city behaviour of the early
morning rush to work. For an anthropologist or ethnographologist (or a visitor from outer space) this
presents a most intriguing behaviour: a crowd of people surge through the streets and in and out of tube
trains, intent only in getting to work. All other considerations have no weighting at all - if something isn't
relevant in terms of fulfilling this one overriding aim, then it is useless information. When we are in
'Cartesian mode' we have everything partitioned, work is for work and enjoyment comes later - certainly
one doesn't look for enjoyment in that grey early morning period that unfolds so repetitively every weekday
between seven and nine-thirty. Yet, if we can escape our agenda, we see that every day is a one-off, a
unique occurrence. Every morning is brimming over with pointless, unimportant details to inspire and
delight the poet in us; every facet of existence is already complete, existing gloriously for no reason at all.
This wealth of irrelevance, however, is wasted on the average commuter, simply because intrinsic value
is blocked out by the urgency of assigned value. Intrinsic value is the 'eternal now' spoken of by poets and
mystics; assigned value is when our plans and memories exclude what Krishnamurti (1970) calls the
'innocence of the moment'.
The crux of the matter is that for the seasoned commuter, the journey is one of many. It is a regular occurrence and so the same each time. Because of this the information content of the experience is near enough zero - information being a reciprocal measure of predictability. This means that the time spend travelling to work is 'dead time,' one assumes that nothing can happen during that can be of value; one tends to be bored by it and so to concentrate on something else. Let us now imagine a someone else amongst the throng of commuters, an unadapted (or naive) 'idiot'. This is a person rather like the youngest brother in certain fairy tales, who doesn't have the good sense of his older brothers and yet who succeeds where they fail. A simpleton like this doesn't know 'what is important and what is unimportant,' to such a one everything is relevant because they simply don't know what to concentrate on and what to ignore, they have no agenda, in other words, and for this reason all occurencies are of equal importance. There is an ergodic component in the idiocy of this person which allows him to escape the pernicious danger of 'model-blindness' that inflicts his brothers. Every journey the idiot makes is different - it is a new experience every time; 'surprise factor' (that is, information) is at a maximum.
Relating this to assigned and intrinsic meaning, we can say the following: for the commuters in our
example, the Meaning of Life = GOING TO WORK. This is not entirely correct of course, the meaning
of life also includes BEING SUCCESSFUL, GETTING PAID, GOING ON HOLIDAY, HAVING A
RELATIONSHIP, BEING A PARENT, and much else besides. The point is, for this hyperthetical, totally
goal-orientated person, meaning is ordered. When the meaning of your life is ordered everything is
compartmentalized, there are boundaries everywhere: what you do as a worker you don't do as a parent;
what you do on holiday isn't what you do at home. What you expect out of different parts of your life is
different in each case, everything is conceptually packaged or 'closed'. More fundamentally, we can say
that the meaning system is based on criteria, and is perceived in terms of polarities, as Jung noted:
good/bad; happpy/sad; rich/poor. It is referential because it can be evaluated via an act of comparison.
Intrinsic meaning, in contrast to this, is not ordered, not partitioned, not criterion-based and not made up
of polarities. It is also non-referential: for the simpleton the meaning of life is that HE DOESN'T KNOW
WHAT THE MEANING IS; life is a mystery - it obviously means something, but he's not smart enough
to know what exactly that something could be. It could mean anything. In Pragmatic Information Theory,
information that supports the underlying criteria (or categories) of the system that is receiving it is known
as confirmation, and information that does not agree is novelty. The former is related to order and
determinacy, the latter chaos and indeterminacy.
It is important to note the essential discontinuity between assigned and intrinsic meaning - one
cannot use an information processing rule to go from the YES/NO answer of confirmation to the sphinx-like MAYBE? of novelty. To quote mathematician J.G. Bennett (1956, p 17): "We have been forced to
admit that precision and generality are to be achieved only if one is sacrificed to the other."
An alternative formulation is to speak in terms this of the crudeness of the models that one uses
to interpret reality. As we said, the stance taken in CBT is that there is a mismatch between model and
reality that creates erroneous thinking and therefore depression. What we are saying is that there is a
'mismatch' between all models and reality, because linear mapping cannot be used to accurately represent
a chaotic universe So, no matter how fine the mesh of one's conceptual filter is, there will always be
something left out. Reality always eludes us; all we actually learn about are the 'mesh characteristics'; in
terms of complexity (or information content), one can say that the universe is always more complex that
the models used to apprehend it.
We have already made the assumption that there 'is' such a thing as intrinsic meaning. What we
now need to show (if this model of depression is to get anywhere) is that intrinsic meaning is essential to
our well-being; that life itself turns into a charade without the well-spring of spontaneity, that we become
little more than a mere collection of routines which have no real (dynamic) relation to the world around us.
Intuitively speaking, there does seem to be some sort of truth in this approach, but one cannot build a
theory just on intuition. In an attempt to derive a more systematic basis for making statements such as the
one above, we will outline a number of possible arguments:
1/ 'Meaning Exhaustion' -
As is well known, if you were to repeat a phrase or word over and over, the sense of what you are
saying tends to evaporate, leaving just a rather absurd sounding noise. We can explain this in terms of
assigned and intrinsic meaning by saying that a word has special significance that differentiates it both
from other words and mere sounds. When repeated at great length this 'specialness' is lost: the word you
are saying becomes as good as (or as bad) any other combination of noises you might make using your
vocal equipment. It doesn't so much become meaningless as 'equally meaningful to everything else'. There
is nothing to stop us taking this principle and applying it to actions, and indeed, all procedures. We can
even apply it to life in general - if you keep on living it in the same procedural way, its specialness will pale
on you. Thus, if your interactions with the environment are of a repetitive or regular nature, they will
eventually come to constitute a farce, a formality, not something that engages your whole being.
2/ 'Self-actualization' -
Psychologists such as Jung, Rogers and Maslow have all postulated that we have an innate need
to 'self-actualize' - to be 'all that we are capable of being'. If one accepts this as a general principle (which
systems theorist Erich Jantsch (1980) formulates in terms of the tendency of self-organizing systems to
increase in complexity with time) and one is also happy to go along with the idea that assigned meaning
is the meaning of the part, and that intrinsic meaning is the meaning pertaining to the whole then it naturally
follows that need to self-actualize corresponds to the need for intrinsic meaning.
3/ 'Aesthetics' -
Oscar Wilde noted that 'all art is quite useless'; one could also say that 'all beauty is quite
accidental', i.e. irrelevant to your purposes. Art can of course be utilitarian, like Soviet art used to be,
and beauty can be linked to function, but as such they represent assigned meaning, which means that the
art is only 'good art' and the beauty is only 'good beauty' for as long as the evaluative criteria remain in
place. This is only 'fashion'. If beauty is pointless - irrelevant to the criteria of our purposeful mind - then
a mind that is operating in the assigned meaning mode must be deficient in the experience of the type of
beauty that is independent of the beholder. In the absence of an independent reality one is trapped in a form
of closed-circuit solipsism.
Not only art, but 'life, the universe, and everything' is a complete irrelevance. As David Bowie
says "It has nothing to do with you, if you can grasp it...". Of course, as adapted organisms we are bound
to see certain aspects of our environment as being relevant to our purposes, but if we are exclusively
utilitarian in our relationship with the inscrutable accident that is the universe, if we make everything
relevant to our categories, so that our theories explain everything, then we fall victim to our own apparent
success. Life becomes a closed book to us, the living of it a mere technicality. What saves us from the
suffocating nightmare of 100% 'known-ness' is the universe's ultimate and glorious irrelevance to our
minds. Life is always beyond our banal (or 'shoddy,' as Krishnamurti would say) conceptions of it.
4/ 'Spontaneity' -
It is undeniable that we exhibit spontaneous behaviours such as laughing and smiling when we are
happy. If we have to think before we laugh, or will ourselves to smile, then we are feigning happiness.
Playfulness is another indicator of mental well-being, and as Carse says, to be playful is to be without an
agenda, to be open to surprise. A serious (or 'finite') game-player, on the other hand, is someone who is
not interested in being surprised. An exclusively finite game-player, we may suggest, is not likely to be a
lot of fun either to themselves or anybody else. The most telling indicator of all is undoubtledly the
capability to love. Love - as opposed to attachment (attachment being what Maslow calls 'Deficit driven'
or 'D-type' love) - is quintessentially spontaneous. It comes of itself: one cannot plan to love, or love
according to a method. The argument that a person who cannot love is lacking an essential 'connectedness'
with the rest of life would seem to be a strong one.
5/ 'Esoteric parallels' -
There exist very clear-cut parallels with esoteric 'techniques' for deconditioning people (i.e.
separating people from their conventional or fixed view of reality). Watts (1961) has already made the
point that Eastern systems and many Western psychotherapies actually have the same end in mind, namely
helping people to discard views of the world that are constraining them and making them unhappy. What
is telling is the way these systems go about it. In the 24 th stanza of Sri Sankaracharya's Bhaja Govindam
we read:
In you, in me, and in other places, there is but one Vishnu (the all pervading reality). Be patient, in vain
you get angry with me. If you want to attain the status of Vishnu soon, be equal-minded to all forms of existence.
More recently, Chogyam Trungpa (1976, p 46) writes:
In the beginning the practice of meditation is just dealing with the basic neurosis of mind, the confused
relationship between yourself and your projections, your relationship to thoughts. When a person is able to see the
simplicity of the technique without any special attitude toward it, then he is able to relate himself with his thought
pattern as well. He begins to see thoughts as simple phenomena, no matter whether they are pious thoughts or evil
thoughts, domestic thoughts, whatever they may be. One does not relate to them as belonging to a particular
category, as being good or bad; just see them as simple thoughts. When you relate to thoughts obsessively, then
you are actually feeding them because thoughts need your attention to survive. Once you begin to pay attention to
them and categorize them, then they become very powerful. You are feeding them energy because you have not
seen them as simple phenomena. If one tries to quiet them down, that is another way of feeding them.
A different approach is sometimes found in Zen Buddhism. The following example is given by Watts (1957, p 127):
A monk asked Chao-chou, "For what reason did the First Patriarch come from the West?" (This is a formal question, asking for the central point of Bodhidharma's teaching, i.e. of Zen itself.)
Chao-chu answered: "The cypress tree in the yard."
The answer that is given is characterized by its complete irrelevance to the question. The master is not
encouraging his student's categories of meaning, he is refusing to feed his conceptual mind. Turning now
to a more Western tradition, Fabricius (1976, p 16) explains that the abandonment of evaluative criteria
is an essential first step before an alchemist can embark upon the Opus Alchymicum. This is indicated by
various cryptic sayings, such as:
'Our material is stuff of no price or value; whoever comes across it hardly troubles to pick it up.'
'Much money does not buy it; it is thrown in the ways of both rich and poor.'
Although we do not have the space to go into it, it can be shown that all esoteric schools have as
their 'aim' the removal of conditioning, the relativization of rules, which is to say, rendering the uneven
even. This can also be seen positively, as the attainment of the rounded perfection of 'non-specialness' -
which strictly speaking is a 'non-goal' since all goals are by definition special, and, anyway, all things are
roundedly perfect and non-special (i.e. irrelevant) already.
GOOD AT ONE TIME, BAD AT ANOTHER.
Why is there so much difficulty in changing our thinking, and extricating ourselves from cognitive
cul-de-sacs? The reason, according to Jung (vol 14, par. 503) is that:
The conscious mind often knows little or nothing about its own transformation, and it does not want to
know anything. The more autocratic it is and the more convinced of the eternal validity of its truths, the more it
identifies with them.
The notion of 'autocracy' (i.e. one set of evaluative criteria ruling over all others) that Jung is using can
be linked with organizational closure. Knowing is a form of doing, which is to say it is managed or
criterion-based change. Since it is based on method (i.e. it is rule-based), it is deterministic and as a
consequence cannot ever escape its own premises. Escape, that is, spontaneous change, occurs when
randomness comes into the picture, and randomness - as we have said - is not at the beck and call of the
rational (purposeful) mind. Jung notes that this principle lay behind the frequently encountered motif of
the 'Old King' in the alchemical texts. The Old King, who used to be good and just ('right') has become
increasingly inflexible and tyrannical, even evil at times, in his reign. The cure, said the alchemical lore,
lay in the King's ritual murder and dismemberment. This violence was paradoxically merciful, because its
result was the rebirth of the King. To save the King it is necessary to kill the King. In Jung's terms (Vol
14, par. 498), "a new dominant of consciousness has been produced..." Fabricius (1976, p 101) comments
on the similarity between the subjective physical symptoms of depression and the torments suffered by the
Old King:
....The complaints of the dying king of alchemy read like a catalogue of the somatic sensations of depression: his
body is filled with rank poison, there is mortal inflation of his veins, he is tortured by the stings of the 'boar's
tusk,' by heaviness, headaches and sensations of falling bodily apart; he is even racked by the pains of abortive
birth.
Depression, referred to as the nigredo in alchemy, was welcomed as a necessary phase of the work, as
Fabricius (p 101) puts it "...the black transformation process: a building up by building down..."
The situation where one dynamic regime persists beyond the point where it represents a viable
solution is known as metastability, and Jantsch (1980) stresses, the transition from one dynamic regime
to another is catastrophic, necessarily involving the system's temporary dissolution in the structure-eating
chaos of the instability phase. In alchemy the experience of chaos (known as the prima materia) was also
seen as an essential part of the practitioner's progress. According to Fabricius (p 22-23):
.... With its extreme fluidity and incessant fluctuations, the prima materia appears as a clash between the
progressive and regressive forces struggling in the massa confusa to build a new cosmos out of an old one.
THE UPS AND THE DOWNS OF MODERN LIVING
One final point that we can note, before passing on to the conclusion of this paper, is the inversion
of euphoria to produce despair. We will make a hypothesis here and suggest that euphoria is the pleasure
that is involved when one is investing in structure - i.e. when one is 'making up one's mind' and becoming
as a consequence more definite (or determinate). [In quantum mechanics terms, when one's state vector
collapses] before there were many possible solutions to the existential equation (infinitely many in the
instability phase), now there is only the one. Once identified with structure one cannot escape without
paying a price in 'negative euphoria'. This statement can be illustrated by saying that all 'special' states
(desirable or goal-states) become prisons - they are equilibria, mathematical attractors. Thinking in goals
is a bit like falling into a hole: cognitive goal-based activity involves a loss of perspective since a goal is
'an end in itself,' an absolute value. In terms of control, we can say that the controller is always just as
much controlled (or determined) as that which is being controlled, since there has to be the
commitment to seeing things in that specific way. Both controller and controlled form an organizationally
closed system.
The sudden switch from euphoria to the depths of depression is linked by Fabricius (p 52) with the
identification of the manic-depressive with the world:
......To a normal person the world may appear good even if he feels bad himself, or the world may appear bad even
if he feels good himself. Not so with the manic-depressive: he is himself like the world, and so the world rises with
him and sets with him in the magical mirror of the revolving, symbiotic anima mundi. On the bright side of the
moon the whole world is 'eaten up' and introjected by a manic ego inflated by a universal soul and self. On the
dark half of the moon the manic's engulfed world is 'thrown up' and projected onto reality, which is now painted
in the same colours as the ego's blackened soul and self. As the sense of universal elation is changed into one of
universal depression, the circular flight of manic denial comes full circle in the depressive return of the denied.
For this reason the elation of mania is an uneasy one since it may be defined as a denial of the horror of the
depressed state.
It is of course a basic principle in Buddhism that suffering follows the pleasure of attachment like 'a cart
follows a horse'. The predicament of beings who continually crave material satisfaction is likened to the
torment (or frustration) of 'licking honey from razer blades'. In more contemporary terms: if you want the
rush, you have to face the blues that follow. As Ram Dass points out, chasing rushes isn't something that
just drug-addicts do, we all do it. That is what the consumer culture is all about! The anxio- and depresso-genic nature of modern society is referred to here by Sogyal Rinpoche (1992, p 20-21):
Sometimes I think that the greatest achievement of modern culture is its brilliant selling of samsara and
its barren distractions. Modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from the truth,
make truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists. And to think that all this
springs from a civilization that claims to adore life, but actually starves it of any real meaning; that endlessly speaks
of making people "happy," but in fact blocks their way to the source of real joy.
This modern samsara feeds of an anxiety and depression that it fosters and trains us all in, and carefully
nurtures with a consumer machine that needs to keep us greedy to keep going. Samsara is highly organized,
versatile, and sophisticated, it assaults us from every angle with its propaganda, and creates an almost impregnable
environment of addiction around us. As the eighteenth-century Tibetan master Jikme Lingpa said: "Mesmerized
by the sheer variety of perceptions, beings wander endlessly astray in samsara's vicious circle.
Obsessed, then, with false hopes, dreams, and ambitions, which promise happiness but lead only to
misery, we are like people crawling through an endless desert, dying of thirst. And all that this samsara holds out
to us to drink is a cup of salt water, designed to make us even thirstier.
It will be remembered that Watts defines samsara as what happens when one takes the world called forth
by one's cognitive agenda (or model) to be an absolute or exclusive reality. Another way of putting it
would be to say that samsara is when we think we 'know' what reality is, when we identify completely with
our rational interpretation of the world. In this state of organizational closure, as Fabricius says, we are
the world and the world is us. A logical relevance (a relationship) is established, in other words. The
mystical state of 'Oneness,' in utter contrast, involves no such logical correspondence, no such referential
duality. In the unio mystica - the state of organizational openness - all there is is just the 'one thing' of the
alchemical philosophers, and that 'one thing' is completely other; it is completely irrelevant to any rational
thought that anyone has ever thought. It is 'uncontained' by any linearity, and, therefore, completely 'out
of control'!
This generalized model of depression has been about for a long time but it would seem that we are
far too busy with our biomedical agenda to take any notice. As Watts says, the answer we are looking for
has to be 'state of the art' scientific/technological; it has to come out of our cleverness, anything else would
be a crushing insult to our whole value system. Ram Dass, an ex-Harvard professor of psychology who
became disillusioned with what he saw as the phony pretensions to knowledge of his former profession,
offers the following advice (1970, 90-91):
....Despair is the necessary prerequisite for the next degree of consciousness. Okay? That's absolutely a
prerequisite. So a lot of what we see in our society as a malaise we call deep despair and depression is in fact this
consciousness transformation that's occurring, this absolutely necessary prerequisite before we can start to hear
the next level, which is a very deep despair and a depression about everything we have going. Rather than teaching
each other to adapt to what we have, it would be better to honor the despair and allow a person to be in that despair
until he comes through it, hopefully coming through it in a more evolved fashion, if he's got support for it.
It is of course possible to dismiss Dass because he sounds too 'sixties'! Yet the hermetic scientists of old
said the same thing; Fabricius (p 109) speaks of the alchemists' attitude of "...conscious acceptance of the
state of depression as something positive to be endured." Alan Watts (1940 p108-9) is even more explicit
than Dass in his elucidation of the principle of acceptance:
.....The process is best shown by a concrete illustration. Let us take, for example, a mood of acute
depression. Three things may be said of it: firstly, that it is unpleasant in itself, secondly, that it comes without our
consent and does not leave at our command, and thirdly, that we have some reaction to it - which is a factor distinct
from and in addition to the feeling of depression itself.
We may call this mood a demon out of the unconscious which has "possessed" us. The way of acceptance
begins by giving it our attention. Instead of trying to forget about it and repress it we make our minds up to deal
with it consciously, almost as man to man. Instead of allowing our servant at the door (the Fruedian "censor") to
send it away, we invite it to come in and have a cup of tea. Yes, it would perhaps be better to offer it a scotch-and-soda - and I mean this in all seriousness, because the idea is to encourage it, to invite it to be itself with a
vengeance, really to be a depression. For this is accepting its independence of the ego, that is, allowing it to behave
as it wills, or, as the Chinese say, to follow its own tao, because if we do not allow all other things their tao we
cannot expect to have our own tao. In our own language we might say that to be in accord with nature is to allow
everything to follow its own nature. As Lieh Tzu remarked, in explaining the secret of his mysterious capacity to
ride on the wind, "I allowed my mind without restraint to think of whatever it pleased and my mouth to talk of
whatever it pleased." So here, we allow the depression to take whatever course it pleases; instead of denying it
we affirm it. This requires that we feel our way into its very heart and experience it to the full - one might almost
call this a "higher masochism" - and though, to all common sense, it seems the most absurd thing to do, it results
in the discovery that even the blackest mood has a profound meaning for us and is a blessing in disguise. It was
not without reason that the Egyptians called the demons the mediators between gods and men.
If, however, the conflict between the depression and the ego is particularly strong, we have first to deal
with another mediatory demon in the shape of the conflict itself, the feeling of impatience, disgust, and wishing
to be rid of it. Sometimes the actual depression is too tough a proposition to tackle directly, and so we have to allow
the reactionary feeling of disgust to be itself and behave as it pleases. To this we give full rein in the same way,
telling it to be as disgusted, impatient, and angry as it likes. This, of course, affords an immense psychological
relief. For it means that the conscious ego has divested itself of the unnecessary and impertinent responsibility of
thinking it essential to direct and interfere with all that goes on around it. It is this very sense of false responsibility
which disturbs its peace of mind. This is particularly noticeable in cases of insomnia in which people are kept
awake by such minor irritations as night noises, doors slamming, trains crossing bridges, cars changing gear, and
people moving about the house. The sleepless one immediately assumes a responsibility for these noises in his very
wish to interfere with them, and the tension of this responsibility keeps him awake. But if he can allow them to
go ahead and clamour as much as they like, he will at once feel relieved, relaxed, and ready for sleep. .........
LEAVING THE EQUILIBRIUM STATE OF SOCIAL ADAPTATION
It is possible to present Sogyal Rinpoche's argument in terms of adaptation versus individuation.
The former is the movement into equilibrium, where there is eventually only one solution to the equations
defining the state of the system; this is the direction of increasing stability. The latter is the movement out
of equilibrium, where there is an ever-increasing number of solutions, eventually an infinite number; this
is the direction of increasing instability. Our society, one might say, places inordinate - if not exclusive -
value on adaptation. This means relating more effectively to a given structural reality. This argument only
holds good for an intrinsic paradigm of consciousness. In the case of an extrinsic paradigm, then there is
a determinate basis to consciousness and therefore it can be approximated to by a single mode of
organization, a single level of description. Effective adaptation is therefore, in this case, the answer to all
psychological problems - a therapy of adjustment is what is needed. If a paradigm of intrinsic meaning is
accepted, then adaptation cannot, in the long run, be the answer. A therapy of de-adjustment (of induced
disequilibrium) would then be appropriate.
If we take the relativizing perspective that is provided by the intrinsic consciousness paradigm, we
are then in the position to make the following statements. Society (which is us in collusion with ourselves)
teaches us to play ever more sophisticated games. The more proficient we become at these games, the more
we are rewarded. These game-playing skills are, however, only useful within the context of the arbitrary
set of rules that defines the game in question. The benefits that come from adapting successfully to the
game are also only benefits for as long as one carries on playing. When the structure provided by the
assigned value system is taken away - as it eventually must be - we realize that the skills we have so
diligently learned are quite useless. We might surmise that this realization can actually take place at
anytime, not just at the moment of death. What happens then, perhaps, is that everyone colludes in saying
that "Such-and-such a person has clinical depression...." Depression is recognized as disease, which means
that the formidable message it packs in terms of falsifying assigned value is ignored - our rational mind
hastily consigns it to the mental category marked 'THIS INFORMATION IS OF NO VALUE - TAKE
NO NOTICE'. Of course, 'of no value' is actually a category of much value to the rational mind, but we -
in our unconsciousness - do not see this!
In short, adaptation, even to the most pressing extrinsic reality ultimately lets us down. This is not
only true for modern society, as the following excerpt from the introduction to the Bhaja Govindam of Sri
Sankaracharya (a popular Hindu devotional hymn) makes clear:
There is a story which describes the circumstances in which the present hymn was composed. It is said
that one day in Benares when Sankara along with his disciples was walking down the street, he overheard an old
Brahman pundit reciting the rules of grammar. Though on the threshold of death the old pundit did not reflect on
the ultimate questions of life and was busy reciting grammar rules. Sankara, realizing the ignorance of the old
pundit was compassionate towards him and desired to advise him on life's true purpose. And so he sang these
hymns called Mohomudgara or the destroyer of delusions, popularly known as Bhaja Govindam.
In the opening stanza Sankara addresses the old pundit as mudha or fool and says: "Of what good are
grammar rules? Abandon them and seek thy true good, while living worship the Supreme and realize thy true self,
for rules of grammar will not save you from the clutches of death." What is meant here of grammar rules applies
for all secular knowledge and pursuits which do not ultimately culminate in spiritual liberation. The true end or
success of life is not the pursuit of secular knowledge or the the accumulation of material wealth; if through
ignorance we set these as our ends we are bound to be disappointed and deprived when the hour of death draws
near. In the Chandogya Upanishad, there is a story where the learned Narada approaches Sanatkumara for
knowledge of the self. But Sanatkumara asks Narada to first tell him what he already knows. Narada thereupon
gives a long list of the sciences and arts that he had mastered, but all the knowledge of which Narada is a master
is characterized by the teacher as being mere names. The story is introduced to show that though one may be a
master of all the different branches of knowledge yet without self-knowledge, all one's endeavours are in vain, for
they do not help one solve the ultimate mysteries of life. In the Bible, Jesus is represented as saying: "What shall
it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" But knowledge of the other departments
are not to be discarded as being without any value, for they are of great help to the soul aspiring for perfection.
Only they are not to be pursued for their own sake and as an end in themselves.
We ought not to imagine that our present sciences are any more absolute in their power to describe reality
than were its antecedents. Richard Feynman (see Gleick 1987) invested a fair amount of energy in his later
years in an attempt to change the way science was taught in schools. It infuriated him that primary school
science teachers would say something like "apples fall to the ground because of gravity" and think that they
had actually explained something! In psychiatry, it sometimes seems as if we have the sacred task of
maintaining socially-prescribed sanity. The fundamentalism that comes with a 'belief in names' is
particularly present here, and the ability to question the bedrock of our psychic reality tends to be
noticeably absent. What this means is that our allegiance to helping people is compromised by our
(unconscious) allegiance to perpetuating the perspective we use to construe their problems with. We want
to cure depression but only if we can do so through our 'knowing,' through maintaining our position of
control. But too much reliance on knowing creates depression, and too much reliance on control brings
anxiety. The argument is not so much that orthodox perspectives have to be dropped, but more that we
should beware of getting stuck in any one perspective, for, as Jung understood, that spells nothing but
unconsciousness. Jung identifies unconsciousness as 'a state of original psychic distress' (Vol. 9 (1), par.
288); further on, (par. 455), he says the following:
It seems to me, frankly, that former ages did not exaggerate, that the spirit has not sloughed off its
demonisms, and that mankind, because of its scientific and technological development, has in increasing measure
delivered itself over to the danger of possession. True, the archetype of spirit is capable of working for good as well
as for evil, but it depends upon man's free - i.e. conscious - decision whether the good also will be perverted into
something satanic. Man's worst sin is unconsciousness, but it is indulged in with the greatest piety even by those
who should serve mankind as teachers and examples. ....
If we were to risk being possibly 'over-succinct' in our summarization of the approach to
depression that has been presented here, we could say the following. Our situation is much the same as that
of a crab. Most of the time we are armoured and therefore relatively invulnerable - our armour (or shell)
is our adaptedness, our expertize in living in a particular world that is familiar to us. This is fine for a while
but there is a snag - we, like crabs, have to grow! Crabs solve this problem by periodically shedding their
rigid exoskeleton: for a day or two they are soft and defenceless, their pincers incapable of gripping
anything, and then a new shell forms which is just as hard as the old one, only it is bigger and more
expansive. The possibility does not arise that a crab may fear being vulnerable and unadapted, and
therefore hold on to its old one, but if a crab did hold on the resultant conflict would be disasterous. We
humans don't have to deal with the logistic problems posed by having an exoskeleton, but the same
principle nevertheless applies. We become experts at being who we are, and we feel safe as a result, but
we still have to obey the law of growth. It is not enough just to get very good at living life in one narrow
way, we inevitably have to move on - we have to learn to see ourselves and the world we live in a totally
new way, and interact accordingly. The essential point is that the pattern of our life must dissolve into
chaos before it can reappear in a completely new (and more spacious) format, and the 'letting go' that is
involved is one of the most difficult things there is. After all, most of us would strongly suspect that there
is nothing on the other side, nothing beyond the reality we know. We all automatically assume that what
we know is all there is, and this idea has the corollary that to let go of what we know means death, i.e
personal extinction. Even if we were intellectually happy with the idea that the world is a bigger place than
we know it to be (as Shakespear has said!), when it comes to the crunch there is something in us that really
doesn't want to let go. Even though depression may have made us realize, on a very deep level, that we are
heartily sick of our existence as it stands, we are still very likely to find it difficult to take the plunge into
the unknown, and let life 'do with us what it will'. Yet this is exactly what depression requires of us, that
we abandon our selves, without any hope, to a greater reality, even if that reality appears appalling to our
habitual, run of the mill, common sense minds.
The bottom of the line is that life is deeper than we think it is. There are depths within us that insist
on finding expression, no matter how determined we are to stick to the shallows. The power of this
insistence seems terrifying to us for a very good reason - it is the practical manifestation of a law that is
completely and utterly implacable. You cannot possibly win against this law, because in order to win you
would have to be what you are not. You would have to make that which is false, be true, and the fact of
the matter is that an illusion can never be real, no matter how much you or I may want it to be. This law
can be a source of dread, but it is also the source of a very great joy and peace of mind. There is a song
that says "You can't hide from the truth, because the truth is all there is..." and this just about sums it up.
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