The Most Fundamental Psychological Model

I have been working to sort out and explore the most fundamental psychological model. It is difficult, so for now I will keep iterating as my understanding develops.
I. The Feeling Complex
Body and mind–feelings–emotions. Typical examples: feelings of unease/security, breakdown, loss of control, toxic shame.
Life has only one challenge: the present moment feels unbearable. This is why “living in the present” is the most central and ultimate issue. See my separate essay, “On Living in the Present.”
The karmic fire of ignorance: psychology says that seeing something brings relief. People often feel a “nameless karmic fire”: distress that is difficult to notice or describe, a familiar gloom, a sense of breakdown—“here it comes again”—a return from tranquility to suffering.
II. The Containment–Awareness Complex
(1) Emotional Containment–Awareness
i. The capacity to contain oneself: care, soothing, and stabilization.
ii. A capacity for containment strengthened through connection with the outside world (selfobjects, transitional objects, healthy relationships, nature).
Many people think that becoming a master means no longer experiencing any suffering. Yet even extraordinary figures such as Marx, Engels, Commander Peng Dehuai, Zhuangzi, and Su Shi still experienced considerable suffering and confusion, battered by fate—let alone ordinary people like us. It is simply a matter of not being consumed by suffering, of the subject not collapsing and being annihilated. Zhuangzi: be at peace with the times and dwell in accord with what unfolds.
Losing control means that the capacity for containment is insufficient; insisting on control is itself only a deluded thought. Awareness of, and permission for, losing control are also forms of containment.
Awareness Is the Most Important Thing
The most important things people do each day—resting, eating, exercising and moving, managing blood sugar, thinking deeply, stopping entanglement with karmic obstructions, and restoring connection with one’s intrinsic nature—all require a high degree of awareness, rather than effort. The Platform Sutra: “With delusion in the preceding thought, one is an ordinary person; with awakening in the following thought, one is a Buddha.”
The things we strain and exert ourselves over each day are often reactive, or troubles of our own making. Greater awareness can reduce the state of karmic obstruction within them.
But awareness is not something people can control, which is why keeping a diary is so important: it connects states of high awareness with states of low awareness.
(2) The System of Karmic Obstructions
The Defense Complex
The operation of defense mechanisms consists of emergency measures taken when the self lacks sufficient capacity to contain emotions. An infant cannot adequately handle bed-wetting (the karmic fire of ignorance): a mismatch in the timing of mammalian development means that innate wholeness has not yet had time to help the self become strong enough.
Defense mechanisms (repression, denial, projection, and so on) are good things. But in many situations they bring negative effects. Like minefields left over from wartime, they become obstacles (karmic obstructions). The greater the capacity for containment, the less need there is for a defense system.
The System of Karmic Obstructions
i. Internal karmic obstructions: various defenses, toxic repetitive patterns, the ego system, mistaken cognitions, and so on;
ii. Entanglement with karmic obstructions in the outside world (other people, the internet, alienation under capital).
The most fundamental karmic obstructions are clearly objective ones at the level of historical materialism: the alienation and instrumentalization of human beings by feudalism, bureaucracy, and capital. Next come existential crises at the level of alienation and the various accompanying defense systems, such as a toxic sense of existence and escape from freedom. As Marx said, the essence of the human being is the ensemble of social relations.
Container VS Trash Can: reversal of the mother–child relationship; people-pleasing personalities and rescuer personalities; becoming a willing trash can, turning one’s own capacity to serve as a container into a selfobject function and an instrument—this is a severe form of self-alienation.
(3) Entanglement with Karmic Obstructions VS Connection with Light
When faced with feelings that are difficult to contain, there is a sense of the self collapsing, consumed and engulfed by emotions. Various defense mechanisms automatically come into play as emergency measures, even to the point of developing a “habit” of seeking poor-quality soothing through poor-quality entanglements/relationships. This is the original positive source of karmic obstructions. One’s karmic obstructions become entangled with those in the outside world, creating a vicious cycle. One sinks into ignorance and ultimately turns bad and becomes demonic.
When the light of one’s intrinsic nature is sufficient for awareness, however, one can contain one’s own feelings and emotions, allowing and accepting them as they are. When this light connects with light in the outside world, a virtuous cycle forms. Karmic obstructions and the ego dissolve, healing gradually takes place, and the self grows stronger.
See my earlier essay, “Connection VS Entanglement.”
Hold Karmic Obstructions in Awe
Karmic obstructions can conceal one’s own innate wholeness, and they can conceal the innate wholeness of others. They must be taken seriously and held in awe.
(4) Innate Wholeness
Functionally, this is humanism: the human modes/mechanisms of foundational stability, foundational awareness, foundational development, and foundational healing. It manifests in the integrity, self-healing capacity, developmental capacity, and positive orientation of the human psychological system.
Philosophically, it is the human foundation, human essence and nature. It is the principle of being human, one part of the Way (the laws of the universe: time, space, atoms, physics, chemistry, and so on), the unity of heaven and humanity. In Buddhist terms, suchness is everywhere; in human beings, it is the Buddha-nature.
Higher-order feelings, foundational feelings
The capacity for self-awareness, the capacity for high-frequency awareness (tranquility, happiness, joy, connection)
Awareness is certainly not something that can be achieved through exertion. It is an outcome, not a means. Clarity and meditative absorption are outcomes of spiritual growth. Thus, “Spiritual Practice Is a False Concept” and “Effort Is a False Concept”: the underlying workings of human beings remain dialectical and materialist.
III. The Cognitive System
Cognition concerning one’s worldview, outlook on life, and values; an explanatory system. It is a system with a certain degree of conscious understanding, formed as the unconscious and consciousness interact together with the outside world, become entangled with karmic obstructions, and connect with light.
The gaps and contradictions among cognition, libido, and intrinsic nature are a basic driving force in the evolution of human cognition. A person’s inner intrinsic nature is always quietly carrying out cognitive behavioral therapy on them, while karmic obstructions continually distort cognition. The contradictions and tensions in the cognitive system—for example, truth, goodness, and beauty VS falsehood, ugliness, and evil among people at the bottom of society—are why middle-aged people need Marx and Zhuangzi to reconstruct their cognitive systems and rebuild the mountain of shitty code that constitutes their worldview, outlook on life, and values.
IV. The Energy Complex
Energy is something material that requires integrated management. Physical health and vitality; psychological health and vitality. Investment in work, life, social interaction, and emotions; frustration/reward; expectations; and so on.
Internal depletion is the internal expenditure of mental energy caused by inner contradictions and tensions.
Someone who is dejected and collapsing in body and mind after a breakup receives a text from their partner asking to get back together, and immediately feels charged up, bursting with energy. Energy is an integrated affair.
V. The Libido Complex:
The overall complex—the feeling complex–energy complex–system of karmic obstructions–ego system–awareness and containment complex—manifests as a (complex) current of psychic force, mental energy (waves), flowing outward in investment at high tide and receding when frustrated.
It is also the “unstable” “self structure” studied in self psychology.
What this overall complex interacts with is fate. Fate is innate endowment; innate endowment is fate. “On Living in the Present.”
The Ego System:
The ego resembles the false self: it is a composite role identity generated through mechanisms such as emotions, identifications, repetitive patterns, and fixations. But there are many egos; they conflict with one another and suddenly disappear/appear.
Buddhism’s seventh consciousness, the deliberating consciousness, which continually examines and deliberates and is called the faculty of thought, with its attachment to self and attachment to phenomena; Jung’s archetypes, complexes, “personality fragments,” and so on—all are observations of the ego system and the self system.
VI. Karmic Obstructions -> Awakening -> Becoming Tranquil First
As karmic obstructions decrease, the capacity for self-care continually grows, and intrinsic nature becomes able to digest karmic obstructions. Awakening is the point at which one experiences innate wholeness. Beyond that, one reaches “tranquility.” Those who have awakened and those who are tranquil do indeed benefit others: “Zhuangzi: Benefiting Others Through Tranquility.”
This progress is not something people can control. Many people become fixated on spiritual practice because they believe they can accelerate it. “Spiritual Practice Is a False Concept”; “On Living in the Present.”
“Those who become tranquil first” help bring about “those who become tranquil later.” But how much they can bring about depends on circumstances and unfolds naturally.
For discussions of awakening, see “How Ordinary People Can Experience Innate Wholeness,” “A New Hierarchy of Psychological Needs,” “My Second Year After Awakening,” and other essays.
The endpoint of the philosophy of mind is to accord with the Way without a contriving mind: being as things are, being natural, and seeking truth from facts. “On Living in the Present.”