I hate labels. Once someone’s initial impression attaches a yellow piece of paper with the chicken-scratching- psuedo-scientific babbeltalk derived from a self-help book, it’s impossible to change that person’s projection… er, perspective. No matter what you do thereafter, you can’t change the views of the push-pin pusher.

Yet, it is very difficult to describe something without using labels … no matter what associations others may think when the label is given. While I think it is better to describe yourself by showing the world what you surround yourself with, e.g. your art and music collection, your half-finished projects, and especially, your circle of friends; it’s difficult to incorporate those things in a public statement such as this.

Self-labels are the worse yet. To call myself a poet would be a lie to most people and laughable to the rest. I mean, does the label, poet, mean a person writes poetry or writes good poetry? I dabble in poetry for my own amusement, and for no other reason. However, feel free to give me your own projective label once you’ve seen my feeble attempt.

While my family moved around quite a bit as a child, I was mostly raised in Utah. There, the label of intellectual is akin to the label of infidel in that culture’s view of heretics (as anyone who has lived there knows), and I was hardpressed in my attempts at avoiding that pin.

Along with the supposed smugness and superiority it suggests, the problem with that label is that it assumes a lack of any internal dimension… a soul-less mind, as it were. My spiritual struggle has been deep, difficult, and personal and any attempt to describe my inner world with the inevitable, ineffable words, would throw my precious pearls before label-infected swine.

I feel like Thomas Huxley when he described a similar problem of relating his internal world with an external label:

When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure that they had attained a certain “gnosis” — had more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion…

So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of “agnostic”. It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the “gnostic” of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes. (Quoted in “Encylopaedia of Religion and Ethics”, 1908)

While the label, agnostic, has taken a cynical tone these days, I like Huxley’s original definition. While I “don’t know” much about anything, I’m not apathetic about it. I find this attitude (as opposed to a position), to be both contemplative as well as liberating.

Huxley’s idea of adherring to that which is reasonable and demonstratable also resonates with me. However, accepting experiences from just the sensations of the five obvious senses, seem a wee bit limiting. But experiences from the ineffable senses isn’t something that can be shared with others.

The benefit of religion is in its stress release from the fear of pain, suffering and the future. But the promise of a future reward and a better after-world, doesn’t relieve my anxiety— it enhances it. “Am I good enought?” is a stress inducer. Now, perhaps I’ve studied Buddhism for too long, but their mantra of “relax into the pain” and whatnot works much better for me.

In fact, since Buddhism teachings have been crossing the Pacific, its arrival and seeding in the Western mind, hasn’t planted the “religionistic” trappings that I personally find distracting. I really don’t want to trade my superstitions for another’s superstitions.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m willing to just let the mystery be, and meditate on what I don’t know. But if I need to have a tail, like the other foxes, I guess I’m a deep agnostic Buddhist with a twist of ineffable experiences.