How to Be Free by Joe Blow (best large ereader TXT) 📖

armouring and this concentration is not available for acknowledging outside factors. And the armoured individual can only respond within the bounds of their stereotyped behaviour. To get an idea of the disadvantages of character and body armour, imagine a team of mediaeval knights in full body armour trying to play a game of football.

It is said that most of us only use 10% of our brain’s capacity. This is because our thinking is impeded by our character armour. Since thinking truthfully would destroy our armoured ego structure, we have to spend a huge amount of our intellectual ability on finding ways to function without thinking truthfully.

A good example of this is the theory in evolutionary biology which interprets human behaviour in terms of the genes need to reproduce. (See The Moral Animal : Why We Are the Way We Are : The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright (Vintage, 1995).) Unable to think truthfully and acknowledge that we are suffering psychologically and that self-directed awareness is the natural response of an organism to suffering, some of us had to find another way to explain (i.e. justify) this aspect of our behaviour. But if one tries to explain human behaviour by reference to animal behaviour in this way one ends up with a complex unwieldy theory which strives to explain everything from Shakespeare writing his plays to the Pope wearing a ridiculously large hat as outgrowths of the genes’ struggle to proliferate. It takes a huge amount of intellectual effort to build and maintain such a complex alternative to admitting that we have become sick. And, of course, the only individuals who pay any attention to such ridiculous theories are intellectuals.

So it is not unfair to speak of the armoured individual as being less alive than the un-armoured individual, if we judge aliveness in terms of sensory awareness, freedom of thought and capacity for spontaneous interaction with others and the environment.

I’m not a religious person, so I don’t believe in a life for the ego after physical death. But I look for associations and patterns where I can find them. And it has struck me that a lot of what Jesus is quoted as having said about life after death and not having to die, would make a lot of sense if what was being referred to was not physical death, but the living death of armoured existence, especially given the emphasis he placed on sin (i.e. selfishness) as being a problem to be solved and forgiveness (i.e. acceptance) as key to that solution. I wouldn’t claim that this is what he was talking about. It may simply be another example of the way in which the systematic nature of life and the universe is manifested in repeated patterns.

Depression

When we are depressed we are cut off from reality, trapped within the tiny world of our own withdrawn ego. This is a bit of a paradox. If reality were an unpleasant place and we withdrew into our own ideal dream world, that might make sense. But reality is a beautiful place and when we are depressed we retreat from it into a place which is truly horrible. Why?

Thoughts are the body of the ego, whether it is a free ego thinking spontaneously and laterally, or an obsessed ego running around in circles.

Though it has many variants, the central thought of the depressed mind is, “I’m a bad person.” This thought makes us think that we deserve to be cut off from the beauty of reality and, ironically, our attempts to fight our way back out again are what keep us where we are. We become like the man who is so anxious to escape the burning building through the revolving door that he runs too fast and ends up constantly revolving back in again.

What keeps us cut off from healing reality is that we keep thinking about ourselves. There is a simple trick we might try to short-circuit this process. If we fear that we may be a worthless individual, then we might ask ourselves : “How bad would it be if that were the case?” What would it mean if we had no worth? Nothing could be expected of us. The world would not cease to exist. We would still be capable of experiencing pleasure. To be worthless would simply be to be insignificant or unimportant. (Of course this isn’t the same as being bad, but it is still worth a try.)

If we can accept that, even if we were worthless, it would not be such a bad thing, then we can stop the self-justification merry-go-round that keeps us cut off from our capacity for unconditional love. Our inner child is capable of loving us unconditionally as much as anyone else.

There are two major kinds of depression - reactive and endogenous. Reactive depression is depression which is triggered by an outside event. This could include the break-up of a relationship, a death in the family or giving birth. Endogenous depression seems to originate spontaneously without an outside trigger.

Given that the central thought of depression is “I am a bad person” we can see that the most likely cause for endogenous depression is self-condemnation based on “sick” ideas formed from repressed emotions. Very often those most prone to depression are those whose behaviour is impeccable. So why should such individuals come to believe that they are bad? The well-behaved person is someone who represses any antisocial impulses. This means that the subconscious of the well-behaved individual is more likely to contain “evil” thoughts. Not realising that the existence of such thoughts is a sign of moral rectitude rather than the opposite, the endogenous depressive condemns himself when he comes in contact with such thoughts.

One of my early depressive episodes, as I’ve mentioned, was exacerbated by the thought of killing a baby. Such a thought is a fairly typical one for the individual who keeps a very tight reign on his anger. When we are feeling unhappy it makes us selfish. A new baby gets all the attention, so we feel jealous. Our mind throws up the idea, “If I killed that baby, then they would pay attention to me.” It is just a passing thought fired off by the brain. But the conscience comes into play. The conscience, as I’ve said, is another part of the ego which contains our ideas of right and wrong. The conscience condemns us for such a though. We try to think of some way of proving we are not really bad, but even the best defence is, in itself, a jail cell, because it is thinking obsessively about ourselves which keeps us cut off from the healing power of our deeper unconditionally loving self.

With reactive depression the process is exactly the same. It is not the event which triggers the depression which is really important to understanding it. What is important is understanding that the event leads the individual to feel that they are a bad person. In the case of a relationship break-up, “If I’m a good person, why did she dump me?” In the case of a death there is no doubt some regret involved for the person who becomes depressed, “If only I’d been a better son,” or whatever. In the case of postnatal depression, there are two possible kinds of negative thought, “What a bad, screwed up person I am when I compare myself to a healthy, unspoilt infant!” and/or “I’m not a good enough person to be responsible for the care of this precious child.”

Some claim that depression is all a matter of brain chemistry. While it may be true that the stress of depression brings about changes in the chemistry of the brain, from a close examination of the way that the obsessional thinking characteristic of depression keeps us trapped within ourselves and cut off from the healing potential of spontaneous and open communication with other people and the world around us, we can see that there are better approaches to releasing ourselves from depression than swallowing pills or having epileptic seizures induced by the application of electricity to our brains. These things have provided a limited amount of help to some individuals, including myself, but they are really the equivalent of providing air-conditioning in the prison cell instead of unlocking the door.

Self-Acceptance and a Troubled World

There are many problems in the world which often seem insoluble - ecological collapse, poverty, war, political oppression and disease, to name some of the obvious ones.

Many have made a great effort to fight these problems, but, at times, it seems futile. As with depression, sometimes it seems as if the more we try to do something about the problem the worse it gets.

Psychology is a huge factor in these problems.

The key factor in our ecological problems is consumption, whether of food, manufacturing materials, living space or energy. Population is also crucial. It’s a case of how many of us there are and how much we are using of which resources. Our basic physical needs are, for most of us, a very small subset of what we consume. Our psychological needs determine most of our consumption. And, similarly, how many offspring we have is a psychological decision, unless the condom broke.

Poverty is a symptom of a malfunctioning social system in which the basic physical needs of some are not met because the resources which could meet those needs are being directed towards satisfying the psychological needs of others.

So ecological problems and poverty are highly dependent on consumption, and this is something which varies according to our psychological needs. I’m not saying we should strive to consume less. But when we are armoured we can’t get as much enjoyment out of the things that we have and therefore we need more. And we are less flexible in what we chose to consume. Materialism is a poor substitute for other more social forms of enjoyment. When we are not locked up within ourselves we will find that we can have more fun interacting with others - partying, creating, having sex - than we can polishing our trophies. When we felt worthless, our possessions told us that we were not, but when we no longer feel that way, we will have little use for many of them.

While there may be many specific contributing factors to war the underlying driving force is neurosis. The desire to use violence to change the behaviour of others is a symptom of a divided self. To directly protect ourselves when attacked is a natural function of the healthy organism. And it is natural to feel anger when we are treated unjustly. But to believe that we can improve our lot in life by invading Poland, that killing people in a foreign land will make us safer at home or that we can free ourselves from an oppressively hierarchical global political structure by flying planes into the economic centre of the nation at its peak, are irrational conclusions driven by the divided individual’s need to find a target for his or her self-contempt. But, even if one does not accept this assessment, one has to admit that someone who is not in a healthy psychological state is not going to make good decisions in an activity as dangerous and prone to backfiring as waging war.

Political oppression is something which is only easy to maintain when the confidence of the majority of members of your society is compromised by internal psychological division. Tyrants may resort to murder and torture, but they are always outnumbered when the population doesn’t consist mainly of individual’s predisposed to submission. Wilhelm Reich, in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1933), put forward the theory that the phenomenon