OPEN, when it is closed, becomes ‘the definite picture’. The definite picture is what we deal in, it is what we know, it is what we do business with – anything that is not part of the definite picture we...| The Negative Psychologist
Just as ‘all art aspires to the condition of muzak’ (as Alvin Toffler says), so too can we say that all logic-based therapy – which is just about the only therapy we ever come across in the world of modern...| The Negative Psychologist
When we live in ‘the Box’ – the box of our thoughts, the box of what we have automatically assumed to be true – then we’ll never come across anything that is genuinely new. When we live in the box...| The Negative Psychologist
There are only two possibilities that are open to us – either we can become ‘machines’, or we can become ‘philosophers’. It’s as simple as that! It’s as simple as that – there is no middle ground, we’re either one...| The Negative Psychologist
The Equilibrium World is the world that comes into being when everything that happens has to happen in a way that agrees with the guidelines, agrees with the standards, agrees with the ideal values that have been specified by that system. In the Equilibrium World equals , which means…| The Negative Psychologist
The thing about living in a one-sided way is that we can have no awareness of the absurdity of the so-called ‘life’ that we are leading as a result. We have zero awareness regarding the absurd nature of our existence - on the contrary, we take our absurd existence very…| The Negative Psychologist
We are – in this high-tech, super-rational world of ours – as far away from understanding psychosis as we could ever be. We have lots to say about it for sure, we have all sorts of different types of medication...| The Negative Psychologist
A circle is a ‘self-referential’ kind of thing, we might say – a circle is a self-referential kind of thing because every point on its circumference has the very same relationship to the centre, which is also the circle, just...| The Negative Psychologist
We all have this sure and certain idea regarding ‘who we are’, and ‘what life is all about’, and this notion that we have - no matter how ridiculously unsupported it might be - is so sure and certain that we never give it another thought. We never ‘revisit the…| The Negative Psychologist
It’s impossible to be in Rational / Purposeful Mode and yet at the same time be ‘in reality’. That just can’t be done. When we think about things then we’re not in the real world, and when we deliberately act...| The Negative Psychologist
It's not so much a matter of 'being versus non-being' (although it is that as well) but ‘being versus pseudo-being’, which is infinitely more nuanced, infinitely more subtle. Pseudo-being is all we know! 'Margarine is all we know', Russian mystic and philosopher Pyotr Demyanovich Uspensky tells us. Because pseudo-being has…| The Negative Psychologist
The nature of all phenomena is inherently tranquil, so the Buddhist sutras tell us, and yet this is a tranquillity that we very rarely perceive in everyday life. Instead, the world as we know it is full of strife and commotion and - we say - in need of correction…| The Negative Psychologist
‘Freedom is taken, never given’, says Gurdjieff. If there is one who controls us, rules us, regulates us, then no matter how long we wait, no matter how well we behave, no matter how compliant we are, we are never going to be given back our freedom. Hell will freeze…| The Negative Psychologist
Linearity is simply a trick or gimmick, nothing more - it's a trivial affair, not a profound one. Having said this, we still have to acknowledge that it seems pretty nontrivial to us as we actually experience it - it's not like a wet paper bag that that we can…| The Negative Psychologist
