not labelling

In practicing silent illumination, it seems easy to get caught up in a tendency to label the situations and emotions around us, since emotions are tied into cultural and historical narratives. If I am educated in a Freudian psychoanalysis, I will label my emotional complexes differently from, say, a behaviorist psychology. Are the labels and explanations we assign to our experiences actually “real”? They are meant to create insights, but they don’t necessarily mean that states of mind or emotion are permanent. Sometimes the tendency to overthink or over-label can create situations where we think something is real and has to be “dealt with” in some way.

What if we are able to behold our pain without labeling such a pain? This is an important question. After all, the tendency to label things often comes from an idea of control. As a person educated in a certain language and set of cultural theories about how things are, I suffer the anxiety and fear of losing meaning and losing self if I simply see things without labeling them. In addition to the anxiety of losing cherished objects and having to face undesirable ones, I suffer from the fear of having no narrative or sense of meaning to fall back on if my mind is open and not labeling anything. I have to admit that this “life without labels” seems like a very advanced stage in Silent Illumination practice, particularly in daily life. At best, what I seem capable of is being able to see the totality of my emotions rather than just getting stuck on one emotion. Rather than obsessing over narratives about why and how suffering arises, it might be important to see that suffering in a shifting context of totality.