The Unlabeled Mind
Over the course of six days, we made our way from the foothills of the Himalayas to the Malabar coast in the north of Kerala. We traveled by bus, train, and hired car. We visited Delhi, Bangalore, and Nagarhole National Park. Along the way, we marveled at clay figurines sculpted by human hands nearly 5,000 years ago, ate in the world-famous Mavalli Tiffin Room, and saw majestic creatures in the wild.
The one thing everyone had told us about Delhi was that we should expect horrible pollution. We had also been told to expect bitter cold. Based on our experience in other Indian cities, we expected it to be noisy, congested, and dirty. We were pleasantly surprised when we none of these expectations turned out to be true.
To be fair, we only spent twelve hours in the city, and we never strayed too far from the Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station, where we would catch our train to Bangalore. But during our visit, the climate was pleasant, the air was relatively clear, and the streets were tranquil and easy to navigate. Rather than avoiding all contact with outside air as we had planned, we went for long, leisurely strolls along the leafy boulevards.
After the overnight bus ride from Raison, we decided to pamper ourselves. Our first stop in Delhi was breakfast at the elegant Imperial hotel, an immaculately-maintained relic of the pomp and grandiosity of the British Raj at its height.
It felt strange to be in the capital of the world’s largest democracy, where hundreds of thousands were taking to the streets in protest, and to be sitting in a dining room surrounded by portraits of Indian maharajahs, nawabs, and princes dressed in their finery and paying their respects to the British crown at some Delhi Durbar of days gone by. Nonetheless, we enjoyed the food, the beautiful Christmas decorations, and the ample and spotlessly clean washrooms.
After breakfast we visited the National Museum of India. While we only scratched the surface of what was on display, we viewed an impressive collection of sculptures dating from antiquity to the middle ages, and collections of exquisitely-detailed miniature paintings and decorative objects.
Most impressive to me was the collection from the Harappan civilization, which flourished from about 2700 to 2000 BCE. The collection includes tools, pottery, seals, jewelry, and terracotta figurines. I was fascinated by these objects, imagining the hands, minds and lives of the people that made them.
The figurines were mainly of either animals or humans. The bodies and features of the animals were for the most part represented realistically. The bodies of the humans were also relatively representational, but their faces were distorted. Their heads were narrow, angular, and fish-like, with huge eyes set toward the sides of the head.
Were these representations of Gods, partly human and partly animal? Were the Harappan artisans simply unable to represent the human face accurately? Or did these figurines reflect the way they saw themselves?
I thought of Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay on Paleolithic cave paintings, which predate the Harappan figurines by more than 10,000 years. She contrasts the portrayal of humans in these paintings as faceless stick figures, minor players in a drama taking place among vibrant, realistically-rendered animals, with the ubiquitous selfies of our narcissistic, photograph-saturated age.
I think the ease and ubiquity of the photographic image is impoverishing our internal representation of ourselves. We are dynamic, complex, contradictory creatures, not cardboard cutouts mindlessly mugging in front of the latest Instagram-worthy backdrop. The problem with narcissism is not just that we are self-obsessed, but that we are obsessed with such a flat, uninteresting version of our selves.
We spent a large part of the remainder of the day in a truly remarkable bookstore. Bahrisons Booksellers is a Delhi cultural institution, founded in the aftermath of the bloody partition that took place after independence and left two million dead and fifteen million displaced. Because of its location, it has always been frequented by politicians, bureaucrats, diplomats, and people who write about them. In this way it has been a witness and a party to the formation of the idea of India.
It is not a large shop, but it is chock full of books. The selection is carefully curated, and it is clear that the shop’s clientele is both intellectual and voracious. While there is a leaning toward political and cultural titles, a wide array of subjects and genres, both non-fiction and fiction, are represented.
The most notable thing about Bahrisons is that, by design, there are no labels on any of the shelves. There is very clearly an organization to how the books are arranged on the shelves, but that organization is a little more loose, a little more free-flowing. I found it to be more reflective of the nature of ideas, that they do not all fit into neat little categories, and of the the nature of the mind, that it does not cordon ideas off and keep them separated from one another.
Occasionally there were books that did not seem to belong on their shelves. In the midst of the yoga books, I found a book on bodybuilding by Arnold Schwarzenegger and a book on consciousness by psychiatrist and psychedelic researcher Stanislav Grof. Our minds are full of these kinds of connections, that may be obscure, tenuous, or even inexplicable. Our creativity depends on our ability to draw upon these connections and generate novel patterns.
When we label our shelves, our thinking becomes more rigid. We see every new piece of information as confirming our preconceived notions. We miss or ignore pieces of information that don’t fit into our scheme of how the world works.
Rationalism, which assumes that every thing that exists can be apprehended by our five senses (or the instruments that we build), that the “how” and “why” of every thing that happens can be comprehended by our minds, is one way that we label our shelves. When something comes along that pokes a hole in our assumptions about the fabric of reality — a dream that proves prophetic, a psychedelic or mystical experience, something that we sense or know without knowing how — we are left without a shelf to put it on.
We also like to create labeled shelves for spiritual traditions and beliefs. We have labels for Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics and the spiritual but not religious. We have labels within these labels for various movements, denominations, and sects. These labels emphasize the differences, rather than the commonalities, between traditions and beliefs.
The feeling of browsing a bookstore with unlabeled shelves was one of elation. There was a sense of freedom, discovery, and wonder. Unlabeling our shelves offers us the opportunity to become less rigid in our thinking, to incorporate new ideas, make new connections, and to see underlying, common truths.
This does not imply that all books are saying the same thing, or that specific details and differences don’t matter. It doesn’t mean that we should stop trying to organize the available information and make sense of the world. But it does mean that we should recognize that this is a messy process, that the universe doesn’t concede to be fit into any of our neat little schemes, and that commonalities and connections are as important as definitions and divisions.
Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station is named after Nizamuddin Auliya, a thirteenth-century Sufi saint whose shrine is located nearby. Sufis are members of a mystical order within Islam. They are known for their tolerance and pluralism, for their ability to see how the paths of other traditions can lead to the same One Truth, while still being solemnly faithful to their own beliefs.
There are striking similarities between Sufi descriptions of the One Truth and those from other mystical traditions such as Vedanta and medieval Christianity. The spiritual practices of the mystics seem to dissolve away the labels on shelves. The great Sufi master Ibn ‘Arabi describes the freedom that comes with being unfettered by these labels in one of his most well-known poems. The “garden among the flames” in the poem is the heart, but refers to what we would call the soul:
O Marvel,
a garden among the flames!My heart can take on
any form:
a meadow for gazelles,
a cloister for monks,For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka’ba for the circling pilgrim,
the tables of the Torah,
the scrolls of the Qur’án.I profess the religion of love;
wherever its caravan turns along the way,
that is the belief,
the faith I keep.
This is one of a series of posts written during our travels. You can find the first post here, and you can find the next post here. You can sign up for email alerts about future posts here.
