PSYCHOLOGICAL CLARITY
A QuietJohn consideration
The soul of matter.
Desolation sound, British Columbia.
who are you, what are you and is anyone watching you?
PHILOSOPHICAL CLARITY AND THE CURIOUS QUESTION OF MENTAL HEALTH
We all need an answer to the question "What am I?", or "Who are you?", but the initial difficulty lies in grasping the nuances amd subtlties that envelope such inquiry.
An inquiry being an investigation into something, as contrasted with an enquiry, which is to simply ask a question.
Lets begin by asking a question.
Can we distinguish between the thinker and the thought?
Our familiarity with both the word and the process can easily lead to assumptions and presumptions that allow us to speak with unjustified confidence regarding our understanding of our thoughts.
We may instigate thoughts, and feel we are responsible for doing so, but we are also well aware that thoughts often arise unbidden and unwanted. We accept we determine many of our thoughts but are often clearly not in any obvious way the initiators of all thought. Control of what goes on in our head is not something we can easily assign to a specific source. To say that we have personal control over the activities of what we describe as "our own thought processes" is simply not true.
If we cannot give a meaningful response to the questions who am I? what am I? And by meaningful response I mean something that accounts for more than just the body but an explanation for the psychological entity we believe we are, then we cannot claim to have psychological clarity. An absence of psychological clarity I would describe as an indication of very poor psychological health.
The mistaken individual-
The body delineates a boundary layer and the vocalisation of thoughts behind the eyes traps the psychological entity we presume we are in a prison of self affirmation. Convinced of the limitations imposed by the boundary of body and head, of skin and eyes, we live an isolated existence that delights in the occasions when we transcend those boundaries but fears the loss of a presumed security that comes with maintaining those same boundaries. So transcendance is a temporary affair.
What is this "transcendence" that is referred to? Simply the relaxation of our mental conviction that we are an entity within a body. The belief that we are a person, that absolute certainty of being an individual the majority live with from waking in the morning to sleeping at night. It is possible to see beyond a personal existence to experience a world that is seen to be our fundamental being, transcendent of all notions of isolated personal individuality.
This is something that is easy to state but is not to be taken as an intellectual understanding... it requires direct intuitive experience that comes from seeing through the subtlties and nuances of the intellect and observing the fundamental awareness of being.
This mistaken individual creates a world of intense confusion, mistrust and self protective isolation.
The shambolic state of the world is a direct result of our incapacity to recognise that individuals are not isolated entities. We can see this rationally and intellectually but fail woefully to grasp it internally. That is to feel it with pychological clarity.