To Share and Err

The Question is: “Why do we feel the need to label things? We say we need to stop doing this, but it can never stop. Why IS there such a need to stamp a label on everything we experience?“

My Answer:

I label because I have a deep desire to share. I am deeply in conflict with my own solitude. Aren’t you?

On one level it’s because we believe that if we call it something, we have power over it, or that we can control it. Use it. To an extent, this is very true. To an extent, if you can grasp something conceptually, you can bring it into your life where otherwise it would be lacking. But we are always adding ‘more’ and we have a tendency to think that ‘more’ will get us what we want, eventually. Or power ‘over’ external things.

On another level we often believe if we’ve slapped a label on something, there, we see it, we know it, we understand it. We’ve defined it, it’s ours. However, I’ve found that often when I do this, I often prevent myself from understanding it further. The truth is living, the labels are dead.

So as an exercise in perception, I might sometimes try and ‘look’ or ‘listen’ and explore the texture (what I’ve called psychotopography, after Hakim Bey’s talks on poetic terrorism) of an experience without the compulsive labeling. With practice this can be refined and work ‘enough’ to get by. I don’t see it as being perfect, because the mind labels and divides. That’s what it does. It’s not ME doing it, it’s a reflex.

But it can be trained, sure, then we can get to these extended moments of clarity and understanding, even insight. But these moments never last, and if you believe in them too much you’ll just feel shitty when you label at all, and you shouldn’t. It’s not YOU labeling. It’s just labeling, and it goes on and on.

Going deeper…

On the deepest level I yet have observed within myself, the need to label is very profound, and has to do with this conflict with solitude. Loneliness is another way that our absolute solitude manifests, and it is suffering. Even when you are in a prison with the worst criminals that can be, to punish you, the guards would put you in solitary confinement. Psychologically, we would rather be around the most wicked and dangerous of people than have to sit alone by ourselves for any extended period of time!

So I think our need to label may have to do with the delusion that we can SHARE our experience of solitude. In a certain sense, yes we can, and language, up to a point, assists. It alleviates this pain, temporarily. Communication is communion and can have a very cathartic effect, (perhaps we can label that a spiritual feeling, but it’s a pain-killer… you might just as soon take an aspirin.)

The deep compulsion to SHARE, to struggle against loneliness, to ‘be not alone’, doesn’t cease, and so it can be very difficult to stop labeling, as I see it, until we abandon a certain hope.

Abandoning this hope, in the various ways it manifests, may be the only way to live life fully. I suppose it could be explained like that. Hope, in this sense, is the delusion that all things can be shared, or in fact, SHOULD be shared.

And trust me, you are delusional. Especially if you think you aren’t.

Do not stop talking.
Don’t let me make you think that I mean ’shut up’. I see others do this plenty. It’s totally misdirected. (Especially when you’re telling someone to shut-up who communicates/writes/designs for a living, as if you know how to live his life better than he does.)

I’m not going to advise anyone to stop speaking, or talking, discussing, sharing, labelling. I tried it, because I needed to practicing listening, but I discovered some things about listening that brought me back toward balance. Maybe I’ll talk more about listening later. At any rate…

You need to sharpen your mind. Conceptualize more clearly. Perfect your intelligence. Strengthen your memory. In all ways, purify and master your mind.

But realize of course that the mind IS NOT YOU. Anything you can see, or experience, or observe, or think about, or feel IS NOT YOU. In that sense there is no ‘internal’ world. It’s all external (or all internal). You do not begin or end at your fingertips, at your skin. Notice most the divisions we create about ourselves, and how we exist, how we relate!

No. I don’t believe that I should shut up. I think we need to talk more, think more, talk better, think better. The breakdown of effective communication is the path to violence.

Are we doing violence to certain experiences, doing violence to ourselves, when we attempt to share these things which should be taken into our solitude utterly and transformed into the incommunicable secret wisdom of life, the universe and everything?

Yes. There are things that one should not attempt to share, because to share them compulsively, or in certain cases at all, causes conflict, struggle, pain and violence. They cannot be understood, and kept, and integrated, and studied, at the same time as they can be shared.

I’m saying that if you attempt to share them, what you are trying to share no longer exists. For example: you’re reading this now, and maybe you feel a sense of wonder and clarity. ‘I should show this to so-and-so, they really need to read this!’ WRONG. You really need to read this. No one else does. You won’t understand a single word of what I’m saying if you try to share it with someone else, or try to share it back to me, as if I don’t quite understand what I’m talking about and you can correct me…

Give that idea up.

This is happening inside your mind. This is not a ‘person out there’ writing something, it is being written into your mind and memory by you, right now, and your labelling process and your loneliness are producing a situation in which you believe there is a student and a teacher, or an idiot on the other side of these sentences or a wise person. None of that is ultimately true, because as you read this, you are not actually in a discussion or in communication with anyone but yourself!

If you fail to notice this, you have failed to understand solitude.

You could now imagine that I might actually write for myself. Talk to myself. Take notes on myself for myself to process again at a later time. That it has nothing to do with you at all. If my writing it has nothing to do with you, then certainly your reading it has nothing to do with me!

To end things…

We need to communicate, and speak, and think and share. But not for the reasons we do it, when it is done so compulsively. Not to try to fend off the aloneness, the loneliness, the fear, the insecurity. It’s the motivation that is in error, not the process, because the process will happen. It’s what the mind DOES and will DO.

What is the ‘right’ motivation to communicate?

That’s not something I can share. You’ll have to figure it out for yourself!