Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [43]
The public formulator supposes that experiences don’t count unless they make an impression beyond the confines of his own mind. Those of us who are free of this delusion may yet labor under the equally groundless assumption that experiences don’t count unless we formulate them inwardly. We remember Socrates’ advice: the unexamined life is not worth living. We think that if we don’t note to ourselves that we’re having a valuable experience, we might as well not have it at all. This causes us to engage in private formulation.
But Socrates was the principal architect of a disastrous confusion between thinking and consciousness that has ever since bedeviled Western culture. As we demonstrated in the first chapter, thinking and consciousness are entirely different mental processes. We often think unconsciously, and we may be fully conscious without entertaining a single idea. Now it’s true that we have to be conscious of our experience in order to enjoy it. We can’t marvel at a sunset that passes unnoticed. But it isn’t necessary to think about the experience, or to speak its name. On the contrary, the never-ending litany of formulas that usually accompany experiencing—“Good food! Yum-yum! This is terrific!”—serve only to diminish pleasure by dividing our attention.
Certain of life’s experiences are not merely diminished by formulation. Their very existence depends on our refraining from speaking their name, even in the privacy of our own mind. They are regions of the Universe that remain forever closed to the formulator. For example, the enjoyment of humor requires us to suspend our formulative tendencies. We can’t simultaneously experience funniness and describe what makes it funny. The explanation of a joke doesn’t get laughs. If we insist on saying what everything is, we will always be grim.
A textbook-perfect example of an experience killed by the slightest brush with formulation is the aesthetic appreciation of mystery. Connoisseurs of this experience are rare nowadays. We move so quickly to fit every situation into our conceptual scheme that we no longer know the pleasures of bafflement and speechless wonder. We see mystery only as a problem to be alleviated by “further research.” We await the day when science takes the mystery “out of” acupuncture, hypnosis, or flying saucers, supposing this to be an unalloyed good. But the tailoring of conceptual schemes to fit phenomena (or vice versa) is only one of the games in town. To be sure, it’s a game that has enjoyed a great deal of prestige in the last few hundred years. The pursuit of intellectual knowledge has the lofty status that was once reserved for the service of God. But knowledge, like every other commodity, has its costs, and it’s an unwise shopper who pays more than a thing is worth. We wouldn’t willingly lose our eyesight for the knowledge of what our neighbors ate for breakfast this morning. And laundering the Universe clean of mystery is very much like going blind. For mystery isn’t just an absence of knowledge—it’s an experience in its own right, palpable as an itch.
The key to the arcane realm is a mind free of useless opinions.
Our needless descriptions of the world have an uncanny knack of turning into arbitrary prescriptions, catapulting us from formulation into regulation. We pointlessly tell ourselves that we’re Cleaning the House, intending only to describe our present condition. But immediately we feel as though we’re under an obligation to ensure the continuing veracity of our words. We ruefully turn down invitations to other activities on the grounds that we are, after all, Cleaning the House. We can’t stop to chat with a friend because we’re Going Somewhere. We won’t take the smelly garbage out of the kitchen because