Thinking runs us rather than vice versa. Adyashanti compares the state of being in which we are 'identified with our own thinking' with being in a make-believe car on a fairground ride - 

"This situation is like being on a fairground ride where we have a little make-believe car which comes equipped with a toy steering wheel to enable us to 'pretend' that we're steering the ride. Just as long as we steer the same way the ride wants us to go, we'll never know the difference!" 

Trying to 'fix our own thinking' is an infinite regress - there's no end to it and the spiral of control just keeps getting tighter and tighter...

The 'cybernetic disaster' is where our coping strategy exacerbates the problem that we were trying to cope with, which necessitates doubling down on the strategy (because we can't see that what we're doing is making everything worse not better), which then exacerbates the problem even more. We then get locked into a self-destructive spiral and are doomed thereby to see the process through to its bitter end, whilst all the while fighting as hard as we can against it. To say this this process is 'not a pleasant one' is of course something of an understatement...

The 'Negative Path' - simply put - comes down to 'the art of getting out of your own way'...

 In Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles (aka 'the Devil') famously says - 

"All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green." 

No strategy can ever help us become free from anxiety (or any other neurotic condition). We can't fight our way to freedom, we can never get so good at manipulation as to no longer NEED to manipulate (or control). The ego-concept is big on striving / controlling and what it is essentially trying to do here is to FREE itself from the need to keep on struggling and striving and scheming (because all of this is so terribly wearisome). What it doesn't (and CAN'T) understand is that it can't exist independently of its own striving (since struggling and scheming is how it creates itself, is how it gets to keep on 'existing').

The age-old 'war' between the Principle of Light and the Principle of Darkness (between Ahura Mazda on the one side and Ahriman on the other) may be seen as a metaphor for the war between consciousness and rational thought (which seeks to 'pull everything down to its level', so to speak). This way of understanding the essential dualistic myth is however not at all to our liking since we identify with thought, and not with consciousness. In our society we worship thought. and this - needless to say - doesn't do us any favours at all....

Instead of talking about 'pretending' [see Pretending Mode 1] we could talk in terms of bluffing - we bluff our way through life and we do so without facing the fact that this is what we're doing. If we 'faced the fact' then that would be the end of our bluff right there, so obviously that's no good! What we call 'neurosis' is where this bluff starts to disintegrate on us, and we try to fix it by 'identifying more strongly with the sufferer' , as psychotherapist Greg Tucker says. The mental health services exist to help us in this strategy...

An example of paradoxicality in mental health is found in 2 Corinthians 12:10 - "...for when i am weak, then I am strong."

If I can't drop my agenda then I am a slave to it - I have no autonomy in this situation at all. We see this backwards however - we see autonomy in terms of being able to push through our agendas, in terms of being able to attain all of the goals that we are being pressurized to attain. We don't actually know what the word 'autonomy' means, therefore. We're clueless....