The Most Fundamental Psychological Model

I have been working to organize 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 awful. This is why “living in the present” is the most central, ultimate task. 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 falling apart. “Here it comes again”—a return from tranquility to suffering.
II. The Containment–Awareness Complex
(1) Emotional Containment and Awareness
i. The capacity to contain oneself: care, soothing, stabilization.
ii. Greater capacity for containment 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. But even such extraordinary figures as Marx, Engels, Commander Peng Dehuai, Zhuangzi, and Su Shi still had plenty of suffering and confusion, and were battered by fate—let alone ordinary people like us. They simply were not swallowed by suffering; their subjectivity did not collapse and disappear. Zhuangzi: be at peace with the times and dwell in accord with circumstances.
Losing control means that containment is insufficient; insisting on control is merely a delusive thought. Being aware of and allowing loss of control is itself a form of containment.
Awareness Is the Most Important Thing
The most important things in a person’s day—resting, eating, exercise and activity, blood glucose control, deep thinking, ending 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: “Deluded in the preceding thought, one is an ordinary person; awakened in the following thought, one is a Buddha.”
The things we strive and strain at every day are often things we do reactively, or things through which we create trouble for ourselves. Greater awareness can ease the state of karmic obstruction within them.
But awareness is not something people can control, which is why keeping a journal matters: a state of high awareness can connect with a state 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 cannot adequately contain emotions. An infant cannot adequately handle wetting the bed (the karmic fire of ignorance): a mismatch in the pace of mammalian development means that innate wholeness has not had time to foster a sufficiently strong self.
Defense mechanisms (repression, denial, projection, and so on) are good things. But in many circumstances they bring negative effects. Like minefields left over from wartime, they become obstacles (karmic obstructions). The stronger 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 patterns of repetition, the ego system, mistaken cognitions, and so on;
ii. Entanglement with karmic obstructions in the outside world (other people, the internet, alienation by 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, along with 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 Garbage Bin: reversal of the mother–child relationship; people-pleasing personalities and rescuer personalities; becoming a garbage bin of one’s own accord, objectifying and instrumentalizing one’s own capacity to serve as a container, is a severe form of self-alienation.
(3) Entanglement in Karmic Obstructions VS Connection in Light
When faced with feelings that are difficult to contain, there is a sense of the self collapsing, swallowed and submerged by emotion. Various defense mechanisms are automatically activated as emergency responses, and one may even become “accustomed” to seeking poor-quality soothing through poor-quality entanglements/relationships. This is the original positive function from which karmic obstructions arise. Karmic obstructions become entangled with those in the outside world, creating a vicious cycle. One sinks into ignorance and decline, ultimately turning bad and becoming consumed by inner demons.
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 that light connects with light in the outside world, a virtuous cycle follows. Karmic obstructions and the ego dissolve, healing unfolds gradually, and the self grows stronger.
See my earlier essay, “Connection VS Entanglement.”
Respect the Power of Karmic Obstructions
Karmic obstructions can obscure one’s own innate wholeness and that of others. They need to be taken seriously and treated with respect.
(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 wholeness, capacity for self-healing, developmental potential, and positive orientation of the human psychological system.
Philosophically, it is the human foundation, human essence and nature. The principles of being human are 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 tathāgata-garbha, or Buddha-nature.
Higher Feelings, Foundational Feelings
The capacity for self-awareness; the capacity for awareness at high frequencies (tranquility, happiness, joy, connection).
Awareness is absolutely not something that can be achieved by exertion. It is a result, rather than a means. Purity and meditative absorption are results of spiritual growth. Hence “Spiritual Practice Is a False Concept” and “Effort Is a False Concept”: the underlying workings of human beings remain dialectically materialist.
III. The Cognitive System
One’s understanding of the world, life, and values; one’s system of interpretation. This is a system with a certain degree of conscious understanding, formed as the unconscious and consciousness interact together with the outside world, become entangled in karmic obstructions, and form connections in light.
The gaps and contradictions among cognition, libido, and intrinsic nature are a fundamental 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 within 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 views of the world, life, and values.
IV. The Energy Complex
Energy is a material matter that requires comprehensive 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 left dispirited and shattered in body and mind after a breakup receives a text from their partner asking to get back together, and immediately feels recharged, bursting with energy. Energy is a matter of the whole.
V. The Libido Complex:
The overall complex—the feeling complex, energy complex, system of karmic obstructions, ego system, and awareness–containment complex—manifests as a current of (complex) psychic drive, a wave of mental energy: investing outward as the tide rises, ebbing when frustrated.
It is also the “unstable” “structure of the self” studied by self psychology.
What this overall complex interacts with is fate. Fate is natural endowment; natural endowment is fate. “On Living in the Present.”
The Ego System:
The ego is similar to the false self: a composite role identification arising from mechanisms such as emotion, identification, repetitive patterns, and fixation. But there are many egos; they conflict with one another and suddenly disappear or emerge.
Buddhism’s seventh consciousness, the manas consciousness, constantly examines and deliberates, is called the mental faculty, and involves attachment to self and attachment to phenomena; Jung’s archetypes, complexes, “personality fragments,” and so on are all observations of the ego system and the system of the self.
VI. Karmic Obstructions -> Awakening -> Becoming Still First
As karmic obstructions diminish, the capacity for self-care continually grows, and intrinsic nature becomes able to digest karmic obstructions. Awakening is the point at which one feels innate wholeness. Further along, one reaches “stillness.” Those who have awakened and those who are still do indeed benefit others. See “Zhuangzi: Benefiting Others Through Stillness.”
This progress is not within human 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 still first” help others “become still later.” But how much they can help depends on circumstances unfolding naturally.
For discussions of awakening, see “How Ordinary People Can Feel Innate Wholeness,” “A New Model of the Hierarchy of Psychological Needs,” “My Second Year After Awakening,” and so on.
The endpoint of the philosophy of mind is to unite with the Way without a contriving mind: to be as things are, natural, and to seek truth from facts. “On Living in the Present.”