What To Do When Life Seems Confusing & Depressing?
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What To Do When Life Seems Confusing & Depressing?

If we try to reflect a little, we shall see that the main cause of almost all human traumas is “psychological games of mental abstractions”. It is not pure life that needs “fixing”. Life is “life” with no tags as such

Post by on Sunday, May 1, 2022

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How does Traditional Wisdom look at human experience of life particularly when life gives tough time to people? Life can be quite unsettling at its core and people may not find any “solution” for life. They start questioning the very need/reason for existing. Predominant attitude in Traditional wisdom as a response to this conundrum is to develop an aesthetic approach towards life rather than a rationalistic categorial one. This is because when we ponder over life, it escapes all rational categorizations. In its depths, it is a hard mystery, which rational blade fails to cut. Life is not a rational puzzle that someone might come up with some formula that “solves” life to its core. Reality is not merely the manifest (az-zaahir) but also contains the elusive element which escapes all theoretical frameworks referred to as the “hidden” mystery of our Reality (al-baatin) that needs to be respected.

Human rational theoretical frameworks are “impositions” on life and reality and reality is in no obligation to follow our patterns of thought all the time. Every now and then reality upsets our commonsense logic and rational expectations as seen in recent physics and championed in its own way by post modern thought. This is the reason as to why Absurdism comes out as a natural by-product of rationalism. This is because when man starts out with the assumption/premise that the universe has to make “rational sense” to me as an “individual”, absurdity is but natural and inevitable simply because the multi-variate complexity of life/reality does not succumb to reason. Reality is about the “whole” and an individualized cut-off “reason” cannot capture Reality in totalizing rational formulae. It is this stubborn wish to comprehend reality in a sort of an anthropocentric rational way which is the source of all confusion.

Life/reality escapes all rational/linguistic frameworks. It is constituted of “wonder” and human bewilderment towards it is man’s enlightenment rather than arrogant stubborn attempt to make sense (that too in dualistic anthropocentric terms). The essence of reality or the source of reality (God) is “gaib” that cannot be captured in thought/language. God who can be “spoken” of is no God. Quranic emphasis on “gaib” and Buddha’s silence to metaphysical questions refer to this point only. We can only submit to God/mystery & not force God to submit to our reason.

If we try to reflect a little, we shall see that the main cause of almost all human traumas is “psychological games of mental abstractions”. It is not pure life that needs “fixing”. Life is “life” with no tags as such. It is a human being who puts notions upon it or fears it, abhors it, is obsessive of it, jealous of it, hateful and despiteful about it, makes assumptions about it and what not. A human being fails to live as a simple piece of life only due to his mental abstractions. Traumatic questions over “meaning” of life emerge only when we sit outside of life so to say and make abstractions about it. Life has its own purpose when “lived”. Wholehearted participation and engagement in life never causes psychological traumas and confusions. Life deep down is constituted of bliss/Aananda which needs to be tapped into by “living”. It is not any triumphant claim of solving mystery of existence but rather a celebration of mystery which generates joy.

When one is playing an intense game or even watching one or viewing a thrilling drama/movie or engaged with homework/office work or preparing food for iftaar; does a human being (whilst being engrossed in these activities) really think about the purpose of life or various other trauma causing problems and “calculations”? Being attentive in the present moment is what developing “khushoo and khuzoo” aims at rather than daydreaming in past and future which cause all trauma. This engaged being (in present) is an ideal mode of being like an innocent mother at home cooking or innocent elderly in streets or a “simple” farmer at field tilling land who might get tired or thirsty or sad or happy but never faces existential horror, the kind our “well read” students go through. The more people read today in abstraction, the more they are removed from rich experience of life and thus consequently the more they suffer. No surprise that in tradition, a mystic is referred to an “extraordinarily ordinary person”. “Neither knowledge nor ignorance but complete innocence is road to salvation” as one master has noted. This ideal mode of being i.e. engaged participation in life/being leading to bliss is now attested to even by recent cognitive research as presented by John Vervaeke, where it is referred to as the “flow state”.

A human being most of the times is only few percentage of life, rest all of it is mere psychological pile of thoughts and abstractions. As we see in some ecocentric representations of tassawuf, wool (suf) (signifier of animal) refers to the pursuit of a sort of an animal “harmony” with the nature. An animal mostly “lives” with no psychological compilations of abstractions/constructions. A mere calculative brain does not categorically distinguish man from the rest of the animals because calculative cognitive faculty is anyway present in all members of animal kingdom in varying degrees like chimps, whales, etc. It is Human “intellect” which distinguishes us from the rest and this “intellect” (not to be confused with reason/ratiocination)  is not mere rational calculative faculty but rather a direct “intuition” of being itself where dualistic abstraction dissolves and one becomes “meditative” rather than “calculative”. In this mode of being one is a “living being” rather than a collection of abstract thoughts.

This point is elaborately developed by Heidegger. This also outlines the major problems with modern thinkers who stress a lot on “epistemology”. All they are concerned about is the “sources of knowledge” and how they have arrived at certain beliefs not realizing that “thoughts”/beliefs have no “life value” at all. Life/reality does not care about what is going on in our mental abstractions/constructions. Life is “life blooming” as always. Thoughts are outside of life not life itself. This pretty much displays the irrelevance of epistemology.

 

 

When a common innocent human being looks at a beautiful scenery- the “Aaah!” that he resonantly utters is the most natural response and a sign of participation in reality rather than a “subject” analyzing the geometry (of the object) and applying formulae which will only cause the viewer to get lost in endless detail. This is what we see in modern science, whether it be an atom or a cell, the scientist (as an observer/subject) is sucked into dispersing scattering endless detail.

As long as subject sits (ontologically) separate and disjoint from the object, it will never be able to truly know it. As we know, Cartesian dualism has only two logical end conclusions; either a) “Hume’s Skepticism”- where man (as a subject) only receives ideas and impressions and thus all we have is pile of impressions with no certain knowledge of material substance/matter, causality or mental substance/mind. For Hume, we know nothing except stream of sensations/ideas/impressions- nothing more, nothing less. And secondly b) “Kant’s agnosticism”- where “subject” knows the “object” only through the “lens” of his mind (mental categories of thought) and therefore the “subject” never actually knows/uncovers what the “object” really is in itself simply because the object is always modified by the “filter” of mind through which it comes to us.

Therefore, as long as subject is eternally divorced from object, no true knowledge is possible. All knowledge enterprise will amount to mere abstractions, adaptations and appropriations. Knowledge becomes possible only when subject sort of “enters” into object or “becomes” the object or “flows” with it i.e. “knowledge” intersects with “being”, doing away with dualism. The whole Cartesian representational theory of knowledge, therefore, doesn’t hold up. One can see for example, Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of Artificial Intelligence which rests on the same assumption of Cartesian/lockean represenatationalism and the problems that it faces in modeling the mind on Cartesian framework. They realize that man is actually a “being” Being rather than a “calculating” Being. For all these centuries after Descartes, philosophy is struggling with “proving” of the “Being” instead of with the “Being” itself as noted by Ben Rogers.

Metaphysics in Traditional understanding precedes epistemology quite unlike post-Aristotelian western philosophical tradition where epistemology overrides metaphysics. We need to remind ourselves, as Heidegger did, that we start with Being/wajood. Let us engage with “Being” itself rather than losing ourselves in the details of “models” of reality/being. We are in “Being” flowing with it and within it; therefore, no separation/dualism is possible. Before the Cartesian thinking “cogito”, there has to be “wajood”/existence which makes such a cogito possible at the first place. Modern thinkers unnecessarily take Cartesian dualism as some truth set in stone due to which they do not live as living beings in the world but “calculative subjects” analyzing “objects”.

 

 

 

Human being starts with “Being”, he is himself grounded within Being/wajood and therefore rather than “getting things right about objects”, knowledge should involve gradual disclosure or uncovering of Being/wajood which can only happen in meditative “participation” with “Being” rather than sitting outside and constructing abstractions/representations about reality. Moreover, these Cartesian dualistic representations can never escape the threats of solipsism and skepticism. How is one to prove the fact that within this paradigm of a divorced “subject” or “mind” trying to locate an “object out there” that one is not arrested in his own mind watching a video game? Egocentric predicament and solipsism is philosophically immune within Cartesian framework.

 

(The Author is pursuing Masters in Philosophy at JNU, Delhi. Email: mugees.kaisar@gmail.com) 

 

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