The Mother of all Mistakes
If not only mental illness is intractable but also basic functions of governance, like maintaining order and managing the environment, might one wonder what’s causing misjudgment? Where the misperceptions are coming from that stand in the way of Understanding who we are and what we’re about? Where we are and how we got here? If one archetypal misperception, one seminal misunderstanding, occurred somewhere in the evolution of Mind, wouldn’t we want to track it down? Wouldn’t we want to know the story of Mind? Get straight what happened. Understand what went wrong?
Isn’t it logical to assume that one mistake in the functioning of the Mind that we share could be responsible for every mistake that followed? Could be the Mother of all Mistakes. To assume that a miscalculation of some sort sent thinking and perceptions that followed off on the wrong track. If an unintentional navigation error could get an intercontinental passenger jet so far off course that it got shot down over Russia, couldn’t an unintentional error in recognition get Mind and its replications off course, too? So far off course that their efforts to navigate bring them repeatedly to the wrong destination. To disorder and mismanagement. To repeatedly getting their hopes shot down.
Inert dummies strapped to their seats after a crash
Isn’t it logical, then, to wonder if such a consequential error occurred and what it might be? Have we surrendered our Free Will, our mobility? Or are we paralyzed by inertia and fear? Like passengers strapped to their seats after their plane has crash landed, dummies in a state of shock.
Do we really have the right answers? Or are we condemned to endlessly repeat our mistakes and expect different results? Without acknowledging our failures, taking responsibility, and fixing what’s broken? What happened to accountability? Where in all this fevered activity is there a hint of real sapience? Of our species’ vaunted self-awareness? Of openness and honesty? Of leadership and conscience? Or is it all submerged in the self-justification of groups, our Machiavellian overlords who have no use for moral codes. Their only “code” their survival, their authority.
Can we be so sure of basic assumptions that keep producing frustration that they don’t need to be questioned? Is faith in the sideshow pyrotechnics of matter -- astronomy and molecular biology, genetics and telecommunications gadgetry -- well placed if they reveal nothing new about Mind? Nothing that would prevent humanity’s animal instinct, its mindless reptilian brain, from continuing to misuse and abuse them? Did I fail to mention weaponry? Let us take pride in ingenuity that mows down defenseless innocents in schools, churches, theaters, and grocery stores.
The Big Bang was a Big Nothing
Could the intractability of mental illness, the virtual dead-end of psychiatry’s ability to cure it, be telling us something about Mind in general? After assuming that the cause is brain matter, that maybe the problem goes deeper than that? A lot deeper.
That the cause is Mind, not brain. And where Mind comes from. Where it remains, traces its pathology, its origins, well beyond bodies’ experience of infancy in a world of matter. Well beyond the event so enshrined in the human imagination as the beginning of everything, the “Big Bang.” When the Big Bang may be only one of a multitude of Big Bangs. May be in the Reality, the universe of Mind, effect, not cause. An imaginary event – a Big Nothing that has no real consequences and physics can never explain.
A Big Nothing in the dynamics of archetypal thought and feeling that can be explained. In the life and evolution of the Logic of Mind that preceded and caused it. Because conscious Mind has Logic, the only source of explanation and Understanding, and matter, the projection of Mind unconscious and dreaming, does not.
Why should this be of no interest to fields of inquiry – science, philosophy, psychology, theology – whose minds profess to want answers? Whose minds profess to have answers when they haven’t allowed themselves to ask the right questions. For this is what’s wrong.
They persist in their misjudgments, trapped by their misperceptions. Expecting different results either because they’re sure they Understand the situation humanity is in that yields our Understanding of purpose and meaning – our context. Or because they’re terrified that they don’t. That there may be another context, and it will be a discomfort, a major inconvenience, to figure it out. Or an embarrassment to hand it off to those who can. To theorists like Democritus, Parmenides, Plato, and Michael Faraday, who intuited with Logic what materialist body-centric science couldn't.
Caught forever in Erich von Stroheim’s Grand Illusion
Sticking with answers to the wrong questions is illogical. Illogic can’t yield Understanding or good results. The Logic of our context, our situation, is virgin territory, unexamined and unexplained by the paradigms that dominate our thinking. Because the reality of our context, handed to us by our bodies equipped with reptilian brains, that’s taken as a given, is, in fact, an appearance. A deception. The real Big Lie. That blocks examination and prevents explanation.
If the mentally ill must be abandoned en masse to the streets, if our children and grandchildren must be condemned to Anthropocene extinction, victims of mass insanity, doesn’t it make sense to remove the barrier to Logic? To change our focus from bodies and brains to Mind? From illusion that can’t yield answers to Reality that can. Because that’s where the problem is -- the emotion and the tears.