I’m inclined to think of double binds as being life and death situations, comparable to the movie Sophie’s Choice when she has to choose which one of her children she’s going to pass over to the Nazis in order to (hopefully) save her other children. In these moments you know that you are absolutely fucked — there is no way to win. It’s been years since I saw the movie but if I recall correctly her mind snapped and she was never the same again.

Essentially, this is what a koan also does — you turn it over so many times in your head until eventually the mind snaps because there is no way out. Therein lies the paradox because the “out” is actually found in the act of losing the mind. But it’s a risky bit of business to play with.

As for the discussion related to schizophrenia, I would still define it as ego collapse although perhaps that’s only true with some forms of schizophrenia/psychosis.

Not to be a dick, but it sounds like thinking about double-binds is putting you in a double, triple, perhaps quadruple bind.

Well, yeah thats my goal, is to put myself in it really hard, so I can experience it as fully as possible. But to do so in sort of a “safe” environment, built for exploration, keeping my wits about me. The double bind of double binds, rather than one that somebody else built which I get emotionally invested of and lose track of what’s going on.

“The best way to get an intellectual riled up is to to flatly contradict what they know to be true, without cause or proof.”

You’re right and that’s a totally awesome quote.

Not to be a dick, but it sounds like thinking about double-binds is putting you in a double, triple, perhaps quadruple bind.

I am guilty of this often. I think of something a friend told me once in re: his college years. “The best way to get an intellectual riled up is to to flatly contradict what they know to be true, without cause or proof.”

A double-bind is the equivalent of being blatantly contradicted, and the intellectual mind goes crazy trying to wrap its head around it. Simpletons tend to ignore these double-binds: in a sense, that’s the message of Forrest Gump, a movie that I have mixed feelings about.

Politically, the Democrats are being bound multiple times over by the current Administration. Day after day, I read leftie blogs and sites that are flabbergasted about Bush’s lies and chicanery, because it defies their personal logic. “How can he get away with this?” they ask themselves. “They impeached Clinton over less– why isn’t Bush in jail?”

The Bushies seem to me to be master double-binders. That’s because they’re evil mindfuckers (IMO) and get off on playing shell games with the media and the public.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but this calls back to mind that awesome David Lynch quote:

“I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.”

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/11/19/david-lynch-quotes/

The other day when we were speaking, I mentioned, “If a tree fell on us right now while we were doing this interview, what caused it?” Well, we would say in a scientific sense, “Well, the roots were rotten…” No, no, why right now when John and Wade sat down to do an interview? — we in the West would say, “Well it’s coincidence, chance.” But these are ultimately meaningless euphemisms that don’t really answer the question, but critically allow us in the scientific worldview to avoid having to answer that question, because ultimately there is no answer except a mystical or a magical answer. That gives us the “out,” but at the same time, as it frees us from the confines of absolute causality, it also leads us adrift in a world without total explanation.

In African societies, no event has a life of its own, and the falling of that tree would have been of course by some magical thing. Now that can be seen as a tyranny. It can also be seen as a comfort, a blanket of comfort that insulates the individual, gives meaning to the individual.

(Read or listen to the entire interview here, its 45 minutes and quite insightful)

I’m only a novice when it comes to PKD, but I want to say that him (and most of us) seem to have grown up outside such a tradition and probably feel compelled to search, search, search for the one answer/theory to explain everything. Maybe getting caught up in the idea that there exists a single absolute solution is what tightens the finger trap?

All of religion, mythology, philosophy etc has been an ongoing project to find that final solution to the double bind of life. And all of entertainment and the like has been an ongoing attempt to distract us from the double bind, or relieve us from the fatigue of it.

Myth kind of does both jobs, though. Now that I think about it. Myth gives us the momentary satisfaction of a somewhat reasonable explanation, while also engaging our minds for a little while so that we can take a break from the panic of existential uncertainty.