11-05-2022
Question: Could you comment on any relationship of thinking and thought to anxiety, to neurosis, to obsession?
Answer: An interesting question. For a clinical answer, you may want to ask a psychologist. The following is my observation as a philosopher who thinks about thinking:
To think and to have a thought are two different activities. Everyone has thoughts but few actually think. To think means to originate thoughts. When you are just having a thought, you are not being the origin of that thought.
Real thinking, or authentic thinking, is a spiritual activity inclusive of but beyond the intellectual activity. In and through thinking, the real “I” comes into being. In thinking, you become the individual. Through thinking, you mark the universe with your soul. With thinking, you ensoul your thought.
A truly creative work of art, philosophy, and science has the soul, the signature, the distinct mark, of the creator. When you listen to Beethoven, his soul awakens your soul. When you behold Michelangelo, his soul embraces your soul. When you read Aurobindo, his soul infuses your soul with inspiration. When you study Bruno, his soul enlivens your soul to the wonder of the infinitude. Their genius is their soul that awakens the genius within you.
In contradistinction, when you are having thoughts, you—your soul, your individuality—are absent. It is more accurate to say that the thoughts have you, not vice versa. You are unaware of whence the thoughts come when the thoughts have you. The thoughts come from the past in reaction to the present. Unlike the great work of genius, the overwhelming majority of what you read today online and in print is the public display of the writers reactively having thoughts.
When thoughts have you, you are “possessed” in various degrees. The conditions you mention—anxiety, neurosis, obsession—are all conditions in which you are being possessed by various unwanted thoughts disconnected from the present reality. Since neurosis, though it is no longer a clinical term, is the broader category (genus) to which anxiety and obsession belong as subcategories (species), let us use neurosis to represent all such conditions.
What is neurosis? What is happening to a person who is having a neurotic reaction such as anxiety, rage, obsession, compulsion, or depression?
My non-clinical definition or understanding of neurosis: Neurosis is the psychological condition in which the person is unable to be at ease with reality—that is, the person is in the state of chronic existential dis-ease with reality.
The neurotic person is in a chronic denial of what is (reality). He is unable to accept and be with what is. What part or kind of reality he denies and how he denies it determines his particular neurotic symptom or syndrome.
Growing up as a child is a traumatic process for most, if not all, of us. First of all, we are not encouraged or even allowed to pursue to be who we are according to the singular design and unique potential with which we each was born. We have been conditioned and programmed to become “somebody” inside the homogenized collectivist culture since we were born—or rather since we were in the womb (the original “Matrix”). This is the all-pervasive child abuse that we all suffer which humanity is not aware enough to recognize.
In addition, there are millions upon millions of children who suffer various individual abuses, intentional or unintentional, that negatively affect and deeply afflict them their entire life. Yet, as a child, we have not developed the sufficient competency to effectively process and deal with traumatic experiences stemming from abuse. And some experiences are simply too painful, too traumatic, to endure.
Hence, the denial of reality and the concomitant escape into fantasy, as the substitute for reality, become our survival strategy for dealing with the ‘undealable’. We develop our ego-logical personality (actually ‘society of personalities’), in large measure, as the avoidance strategy or scheme so as not to re-experience the unendurable traumas, ever.
Unfortunately this strategy does not really work. An unprocessed experience is an incomplete experience and an incomplete experience inexorably wants to and tends to complete itself. This inexorable impulse for experience-completion constitutes one essential component of what Freud named “the unconscious” or what Jung termed “the shadow.”
The neurotic person is constantly stressed and distressed by the pressure of this impulse coming from the unconscious, which becomes a perpetual part of his experience of reality, which he has learned to avoid or deny.
The avoidance of reality is the attempt at the voidance of reality that is ‘un-voidable’. The denial of reality is the same: it is the attempt at denying that which is ‘un-deniable’. Therefore, as the child escapes into his fantasies, so does the adult or the (so-called) grown-up escape into his “narratives” as the substitution to reality. That is, what isn’t becomes the substitute for what is.
Such narratives are the thoughts that possess us and occupy our minds. Thus, the “normal” persons and the neurotic persons comprise the same spectrum inside the ‘normalcy continuum’ wherein the persons (are able to) maintain the connection to reality to varying degrees. When the person loses the connection to reality completely and transports himself into his fantasies, delusions, or narratives, then he becomes psychotic.
(Some postmodernist philosophers have come up with an idea, the “metanarrative” that states “narrative = reality,” which collapses the distinction and the contradistinction between reality proper and narrative proper to further dissociate the human being from reality. An important philosophical subject for which I have no time here.)
Now the question people would naturally ask is: What is the remedy? How can a neurotic person gain a degree of normalcy and then go beyond just having thoughts to being able to really think and become an originator of thought?
The shortest answer is: Character development. Character signifies the ability to face reality and to meet the challenges of reality. Since neurosis consists of various kinds and degrees of existential disconnection with reality, character development constitutes the counter current that increases the person’s existential connection with reality.
Without a sufficient degree of character development, psychotherapy usually fails, and people end up going to see their therapists for years or even decades without any real change. They only replace their neurotic narratives with psychoanalytic metanarratives about themselves and their lives including their neurotic narratives. (This explains the reason why psychotherapists or psychoanalysts who are masters of psychoanalytic narratives are sometimes as neurotic as their patients.)
Character development begins with you orienting yourself toward reality and truth. To orient yourself toward reality and truth means to develop a loyalty to reality and truth. The loyalty to reality is honesty and the loyalty to truth is integrity. Therefore, character development starts with honesty and integrity.
The avoidance strategy is a form of self-deception. Self-honesty hence is the antidote for the avoidance strategy that perpetuate the neurotic condition. When you face reality in pursuit of truth, the narrative, neurotic or otherwise, gradually disappears. Your mind becomes quiet and you cease to have thoughts and the thoughts cease to have you. Then, the truth reveals itself, and the utterance of that truth is your original thought.
Meditation is the art of being with what is, within and without. And as you practice meditation, the art becomes the constant act of being with what is, within and without. As meditation thus becomes your very existence, there will be no avoidance of reality but a complete voidance of neurosis.