An Incomplete Thought On The Secularization Of Enlightenment Written At 8AM Between Customer Interactions At Work
One of the main problems with psychoanalysis as it’s done in in the colloquial form is people treat words as the stuff of thought, and words are only an accessory to thought, and help describe the content of an impulse and model things, but never accurately describe the whole of the impulse that pushed them into being/coherence, nor the entirety of the sensation they seek to describe. So we get into metaanalysis, exegesis of the spoken words themselves mixed with the strategy of the spoken words (for what reasons were they spoken more than logical coherence & the communication of the ideas directly expressed), the behaviors which are displayed during communication, sought outcomes versus expressed outcomes. These strategies too, though, carry the aim of understanding within a specific frame: how are they manipulating conversation/ideas/themselves, and how can I make them understand it and alter it. So the individual becomes, to some extent, self-aware, of both the limitations of the thoughts they’re expressing and their own behaviors, and can to some extent gain further self-control. Often, however, this gain of self-control is illusory, or only gained in one or limited domain(s), as the individual cannot access the behavior directly but creates new strategies to cope with it, alleviate the stressors/emotional charges that discharge as that behavior, or develops new complexes to avoid the old, or else simply has gained the power to name the complexes they already have without doing anything about them. I’ve, prior to this, expressed thoughts on “the naming of a thing being quite distinct from knowledge of that thing or the capacity to act on/alleviate the thing itself”. This falls under that header.
In this manner we thread carefully between trusting words, which we rely on necessarily to model ourselves and our behaviors, and experience. We aim for a kind of enlightenment. An issue I take with the notion of enlightenment altogether, however, is often it looks like we’re aiming toward this notion of “total self-control”, which is impossible (but something approachable, and something we expend vast sums of the economy approaching both through extrinsic technology and internal development), and exists in the way we use it, as a word and notion, as a kind of self-understanding achieved through a variety of means toward a variety of goals. There are different Buddhisms, different Hinduisms, & different Mysticisms. Therapy often is a form of the secular hijack of the idea of enlightenment or the cultivation of self-awareness, but it is shaped toward ends that are necessarily defined as largely social ends, informed by a DSM, a language designed to pathologize, and necessarily accessory to an institution. Not that religious institutions don’t pathologize: on the contrary, they pathologize often less-precisely, in ways that condemn, often without recourse to self-improvement as an out, but most often making available some kind of path toward at least salvation (necessary for a mechanism of control). These notions of systemic integration and salvation seem important to people, who need a path toward feeling like they’re part of things and doing “good”, whatever that may mean for their personal wellbeing.
But there’s this notion that enlightenment is something that transcends culture when it, as a state and as something we perceive, is necessarily embedded within any culture that has the idea, or approximates it, or strives for it. That being said, there are often similarities between the models between cultures. And between religious models and secular psychoanalysis. But even our notions of transcendence are simply notions, they cannot adequately describe it.
If so, we’d have a word that acted as a password to enlightenment. A simple utterance, and the eyes flood, a flow state is achieved. This is not so. Any mental state requires a labyrinth of actions and inputs to fall into or get out of. And I suppose any password can be completely unique, so long as it works exactly within the context it is supposed to. Baudrillard spoke of the mysticism of words, of words as living things, as intrinsically deceptive and also as a fundamental block of reality. I have to reread that fucking book.
— 10.28.2021
