Alter your habitual reaction to meaning-making.

The somatic analog of CBT is vipassana. In vipassana you alter your habitual reaction to feeling.

Actually, CBT is a species of vipassana. What propels the statement-makings is not logical inference. You are not just flowing effortless down the water tubes of logical inference. Narrative is not analysis, but novel synthesis.

What propels your assertions and conclusions are not axioms, but your very heartfelt desires aimed at painful sensation. Feeling is what pricks you into talking.

Before you can apply CBT, “This statement is bullshit! I will speak something happy into existence. After all, they are both consistent with the actual facts.”

Yes—this is key. One What Happened is compatible with many and conflicting The Stories. Logical possibility cannot be what pushes you because there are multiple things share this useless property of being compatible with the physical facts.

What pushes you is feeling, the vibration of the bowstring made out of clinging.

Hair trigger. That is the structure of consciousness.

Primates are rewarded by social interaction. Sex, loving conversation, and being deeply “gotten” by others’ listening are strong medicine. Our biologic wants tribal belonging. A situation of substantial loving interdependence inside an “us” of between 7–20 people provides the maximum happiness.

The spread of capital began eroding at tribal relations that were still intact in the 17th century. The tribal bond trickled down through history, morphing among different kinds, but remaining throughout bond-like and, so, nurturing. The organism rewards social security.

The feudal system retained the original tribal unity and even beautified it with metaphors of religious kingdom virtues. I love the king! I am properly aligned by loving the king! Loyalty and value in honor, which is virtue in the guise of social endorsement.

And you felt this. And if there is any truth in fascism, which we secretly love and envy, it is this—the joy of loyalty to the Good of the Group.

Our cells surely feel this way. This is the innate ananda of biology. Biology is basically bliss (so the Hindus are right). And it is also conditional on needs being met, all the way up Maslow’s hierarchy. And in this way the conditions of bliss compel us to acquire more and more survival security and pleasure in increasingly bizarre domains of possible care, concern, and failure. We spread out our clinging into increasingly spiritual, ethical, abstract, and Ultimate domains of concern. We cling to outcomes, and so enter into the deepest suffering—like the kinds that cause suicide (so the Buddhists are right).

Everyone is a beta, so everyone is chemically rewarded for being a team player. The self-purpose that is happiest is team-purpose. Fulfillment dawns not only by working under the alpha and for the tribe, but becomes deepest spiritual fulfillment when this tendency is internalized by making it an explicit, self-consciously intended (or “principled”) way of being.

The resurgent love-of-country bullshit is a sad joke version of the 7–20 tribal love because you don’t actually know more than 20 people. When you claim national spirit, who exactly are you happy to die for? “Everyone” really? Images of generic women with babies, a la those WWII posters? What a joke.

Anyway, that was mostly a tangent. The point is this: The tribe is gone, so we have to pay therapists. Capitalist atomization of society is a good thing for M–C–M´ because it created the therapy market. Everyone is lonely. For 115$ and hour, you make pro-social agreement with another cell. Happy cells really do work for the organ. Every holon really is happier when its will aligns with the will of the higher-order holon that transcends-and-includes it. Actually, there is a big movement going on right now to reorient mechanical primacy towards biology.

There are three elements to successful placeboic effect:

1. A metaphysical system or theory that “explains” how the therapy works.
2. Agreement, which gives the system its reality, or makes it stronger. We all know you are feeling better.
3. Physical props to embody or channel the placebo substance. Having physical props makes belief in presence stronger.

The problem and beauty of placebo therapy is that the curative stuff is never physically present. So we invent it inside of language. We concoct a metaphysics that uses known physical properties as metaphors. And then we involve these metaphors in reality by touching a proxy—some physical metaphor for the curative stuff. A magnet to alter the flow of a spiritual juice is a perfect example.