The kind of lying that is most deadly is withholding, or keeping back information from someone we think would be affected by it. Psychological illness of the severest kind is the result of this kind of lying. Psychological healing is possible only with the freedom that comes from not hiding anymore. Keeping secrets and hiding from other people is a trap. Adolescents spend most of their time playing this hide-and-seek game. The better you are at getting by with playing hide-and-seek during adolescence, the harder it is to grow up. “Important” secrets and all the plotting and cogitation that go with them are all bullshit.
The mind is a jail built out of bullshit. This book tells how the bullshit jail of the mind gets built and how to escape. This is a “how to” book on freedom. Withholding from other people, not telling them about what we feel or think, keeps us locked in the jail. The longer we remain in that jail, the quicker we decline. We either escape, or we go dead. The way out is to get good at telling the truth.
I work to relieve their suffering, primarily the suffering of deadness. Deadness is a low-intensity form of suffering. It is the result of staying on guard against imagined greater dangers. The greater dangers we imagine are based on memories of how we have been hurt before. Many of us learned as children that being fully alive was bad and you got hurt for it, so we deadened ourselves: partly as a defense against the big people, and partly to spite them. Deadening ourselves was our way of hiding that we were alive in improper ways, and the only thing to do was to keep it a secret.
I work on individual, self-created suffering with people who are responsible for continuing to create their own suffering. Like the body-shop man and the owner of the car, we concentrate on the condition of the machine and the results we want; we don’t have to figure out how the accident happened, and we judge the success or failure of our efforts by how close we’ve come to the results we want.
Often these general states of being — anxiety or depression — are accompanied by somatic discomforts and diseases such as skin rashes, ulcers, lower back pain, spastic colitis, allergies, high blood pressure, and insomnia; or by recurring problems in relationships, on the job, or in the family. When therapy works, the somatic ills disappear or decrease in intensity; anxiety and depression as steady states go away; and people take responsibility for making their relationships, professional lives, and creative powers work. Taking responsibility means a person no longer blames outside circumstances, or other people, or past events for the conditions of his own life.
Stress is not a characteristic of life or times, but of people. Stress does not come from the environment, it comes from the mind of the individual under stress. We make certain assumptions about the world, and we become attached to those assumptions. We suffer from thinking. We worked too hard to learn our ideas about the world to give them up. Like poker players who have already lost too much, we desperately double the bet in hopes of forcing fate to give us a good card.
We think about things too much and too seriously and we suffer a great deal from trying to make the world match our thinking. We complain about how the world fails to live up to our expectations. We think about how life doesn’t live up to its billing, and how it should, and how it is rotten that it doesn’t, and how we should somehow fix it. Many people think themselves to death.
Because of being lost in our own minds, we fail to recognize that the truth changes. When the truth changes and we fail to recognize what has now become true, while holding on to the idea of what used to be true, we become liars committing suicide.
Life goes on, and the truth changes; this just happens to be the way life is. What was once true is often no longer true just a little while later. Yesterday’s truth is today’s bullshit. Even yesterday’s liberating insight is today’s jail of stale explanation.
Roles and rules are also thoughts, which, when grasped onto as principles, are hard for people to get over, or get beyond or let change. People choke the life out of themselves by tying themselves to a chosen “self image” — any “self image” whatsoever. Many adults remain in a perpetual adolescence, locked in the protective confinement of a limited set of roles and rules. This protection kills.
They know a renewed love of life has something to do with escaping their own minds and the conditions of life their minds have set up, but they just can’t seem to do so. Moralism, a disease of living in the mind without relief, kills them.
Freedom from such a “life” is a psychological achievement. The freedom achieved by people who grow beyond the limitations of their childhood conditioning is freedom from their own minds. Freedom from one’s own mind is freedom to create. But in order to have some say in creating life, you must be willing to tell the truth. Telling the truth frees us from entrapment in the mind.
Creativity, using the mind rather than being used by the mind, is the cure for all stress disorders. Willingness to tell the truth in order to be free from your secretly assessing, secretkeeping mind creates the possibility of using your mind to make a future as an artist rather than as a victim.
Abstraction from past experiences being mistaken for current experience itself is the major disorienting error of the normal garden-variety neurotic. “I’ve been with you for 20 years-it should be obvious that I love you.” Evidence from the past doesn’t prove anything about current experience. We neurotics are people who make big generalizations to cover long periods of time.
Bullshit is any abstraction from experience your mind makes and assigns value to. “You don’t love me,” or “Those people are angry,” or “This is ugly (beautiful, good, bad, important, etc.)” all are interpretations of reality. Bullshit is a sales pitch for an interpretation of reality that comes with any interpretation of reality. All interpretations of reality are bullshit. Freedom is not being dominated by your own bullshit.
We believe our interpretations of reality intensely, and we want other people to join us in our interpretations to make us feel secure. We believe our interpretations are reality and if we can get enough votes we will prove it.
Cleaning up lies and “coming out of the closet” is getting more attention these days. Some day we will look back on these years of suffocation in bullshit in the same way we look back on all the years people lived in, and died from, their garbage.
What kills us is intense attachment to our interpretations and failure to distinguish these interpretations from sensate reality. This process of learning to categorize experiences, and then forgetting the distinction between categories and experience itself, is what I call learning how to lie.
In our culture, adolescence lasts from age 11 to about 30 or 35.
This extension of the time to choose vocational, sexual, and social identities in highly technological cultures is a mixed bag. Right now the fastest growing death rate in our society is for people between the ages of 15 and 24. Suicides, drug overdoses, accidents, and murder head the list of causes. We get a longer time to invent who we are, but the job takes a greater toll.
Even when people survive the years of adolescence, the great majority never get over the pretense of adolescence. Enormous suffering is caused by being lost in such pretense. Frequently, “helping professionals” recommend more pretending or more conventional pretending, because they don’t understand that the job of psychotherapy is to re-ground people in the world of experience.
The stress that kills or cripples most of the population comes from people being too hard on themselves when they don’t live up to their own imaginings about how other people think they should behave. We don’t know who we are, and we try to guess who we ought to be in order to do the right thing and be happy. We get lost in the process and beat the hell out of ourselves before we even know we’re hurt.
Adolescents miss the security of childhood and can’t stand the uncertainty of being between childhood and adulthood. Out of anxiety and intolerance for ambiguity they grasp onto roles or rigid standards to claim an identity so they can escape the interminable struggle over how to fit in. They become Christians or Hari Krishnas or gang members or hippies, or marry a childhood sweetheart, just to have a place to stand. They adopt the standards and principles of these groups to live by. Standards or principles to live by are all equal in this way: they are abstractions of the mind, summations based on past experience, not experience itself.
To grow beyond adolescence, people have to let go of, rather than tighten their grip on, the principles and standards with which they define themselves. This is usually very scary, like falling backward into the unknown. What results is experience in the here and now. The re-emergence of this struggle, the struggle for identity that was put away by grasping onto an identity out of an intolerance of ambiguity, is the most valuable function of psychotherapy for people who are frozen in role definitions. These people are reborn from their mental jail into the here and now.
Field dependent, socially dependent people take their cues from external frames of reference. Field independence is correlated with social independence and with creativity. Artists tend to be field independent. Those who learn to depend on rules rather than the seats of their pants, like lawyers, tend to be field dependent.
Depending on an external frame of reference for social orientation leads you to try to manipulate other people to get what you want rather than getting it on your own. What the well-trained field-dependent client usually does is try to con the therapist into telling him to do what he already wants to do — but is afraid of failing and getting blamed for — so if he fails, he can blame the authority who told him to do it.
