What’s the Label?

We put a name on something, and we imagine that we know what we’re talking about. “What’s the Label?” was Bernie’s Ox Curriculum probe as Jishu led us into the fourth skandha. The skandhas, you’ll recall, are the stuff – sometimes translated as “aggregates” or “conditions” – from which, according to Buddhist psychology, we construct our experience. In the Heart Sutra, the fourth skandha is “reaction.” What’s the label that we put on the moment? What do I call this? “Writing a blog.”

In our skandha practice, we don’t get to the labels until we’ve worked with the more basic elements of our experience, until we’ve learned to see our hand in shaping our experience. What was that sound you just heard? “A car horn honking.” Well, no, you didn’t hear a car horn, you heard difficult-to-describe sounds. You added the identification, “car horn,” to your experience.

When we get to the reaction skandha, we’re getting deep into the shorthand of our experience.  We’re ready to see that the label is something which we’re adding to the moment. I was ready for this teaching.

I came to Zen practice when my sociology doctorate was fresh. For a time, I thought I’d do my dissertation on “labeling theory.” Even while still in social work school, Tom Szasz’ The Myth of Mental Illness was important to me. Just because, we call something a mental illness doesn’t mean that there’s a thing out there – maybe we’re picturing a germ or a cancer – which is causing the psychiatric symptoms we’ve just described, for instance, a patient hearing voices which no one else hears. We call it paranoia and imagine we’ve explained it.

We do this all the time. We get a couple of quick impressions, and we put a label on it. Our brain uses the label to fill in the blanks, to imagine all the details we didn’t see. It’s easier to be aware of other people doing it. We call it stereotyping or profiling. We call the people who doing the labeling, “bigots.”

It’s much harder to see in ourselves. We imagine that we’re seeing, but it’s as if our eyes are not open. We are “seeing” what we think not what’s in front of our noses. It was my great take away from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I hadn’t drawn the chair in front of me, hadn’t seen it. I’d drawn my idea of a chair.

And even when we’ve learned this Zen lesson, it’s hard to stop. We keep putting people and situations into boxes. Our labels are often useful. Even after Szasz alerted me to illusoriness of mental illness talk, the labels were still useful. If a patient tells me that he’s hearing voices of people who aren’t there, if I’m interested in suggestions on how to help, I look up articles on work with paranoid patients. I try to remember that paranoia is not something which causes people to hear voices. It’s my shorthand for the cluster of symptoms observed. It’s a label. It reminds me of Gertrude Stein’s, “There is no there there.” And sometimes, I forget.

The skandha practice is powerful training. Remember, Ken, you’re the one who’s doing the labeling. The label that you put on a person or a situation is not coming to you from the outside. It’s one of your contributions to the moment. And sometimes I forget.