In our last blog we wrote about the many ways in which we avoid reality. We have an endless number of distractions available to us through modern technology, and even when we try to meditate, we find ways to distract ourselves by getting lost in the endless creations of the mind, such as planning, fantasizing, analyzing etc.
In this blog we will explore an even more fundamental way that we avoid reality. It’s more fundamental because it may appear to us that we are paying attention and are present to our experiences in the moment, all the while, this is not quite true.
I am talking about the way that, in virtually no time at all, we label, conceptualize, and interpret every experience we have. A sound may arise and as soon as you recognize “hearing” the mind immediately interprets the sound and presents you with an image or a thought about that sound you hear.
For example, while you’re trying to meditate you may hear a sound and immediately interprets it as the sound of a lawnmower and you imagine that your neighbor is cutting his lawn. You may find anger arising and immediately determine that you can no longer meditate-- and that it’s all your neighbor’s fault! “If it weren’t for him, I could’ve had a great meditation!” All of this happens in a tiny fraction of a second.
Then you get up from your cushion feeling very grumpy, stomp into the living room only to discover that the sound you hear is coming from a television set that you left on. Then you may feel very foolish and wonder if you should apologize to your neighbor for all the bad things you were thinking about him!
The American philosopher William James wrote about this phenomenon one hundred years, ago.
If my reader can succeed in…avoiding all conceptual interpretation and lapse back into his immediate sensible life at this very moment, he will find it to be what someone has called a “big blooming buzzing confusion.”
Out of this aboriginal sensible attention [he] carves out objects with concepts that names and identifies forever—in the sky ‘constellations,’ on the earth ‘beach,’ ‘sea,’ ‘bushes,’ ‘grass.’… Out of time we cut ‘days’ and ‘nights,’ ‘summers’ and ‘winters.’
We [name] each part of the sensible continuum and all these abstractions are but concepts. The mental life of man consists almost wholly in [substituting] a conceptual order for the perceptual order from which his experience originally comes. *
We have a primal sensory experience, then we “wrap it up” in a mental concept, and then relate only to the concept for the rest of our life!
Concepts are connected to language--they arise together. These are then strung together to create a story that shapes our experience of reality--as well as our sense of self.
James describes exactly what we were talking about earlier: we have a primal sensory experience and then “wrap it up” in a mental concept and forever relate to the concept only. This begins as soon as we language our experience. Conceptualizing via language gives us the ability to communicate our experiences. This is very helpful but if we go no further than the concept then we divorce ourselves from the primal experience. This puts a barrier between ourself and reality, and then we pay the price in reduced aliveness and spontaneity.
As a child I did not like vegetables. I ate them very grudgingly. But in the summertime, we would often have fresh vegetables from the woods the garden---and I loved them! I once asked my father, “Why do they put vegetables in a can when they tasted so much better fresh.
He explained to me that vegetables in a can would last much longer than fresh vegetables. Canned vegetables could be shipped and stored for long periods of time--this made it available to more people and reduced the cost of the vegetables.
As I grew older, I began to see that we did this with many types of food. For economic reasons we sacrifice the quality of food to market it more widely, and at a reduced cost
In a way, we do the same with virtually every one of our experiences: We have a direct experience and then it is immediately labeled, “canned” and stored away into memory. This is helpful in communicating the experience to other people.
We “can” our experiences by conceptualizing them and then relate to the concept rather than to the experience itself. Some of this is necessary. However, if we “can” our experiences immediately, we are never tasting the freshness of being alive; we live in an artificial world rather than the real world of direct experience.
The practice of bare attention (mindfulness) allows us to taste the freshness of each experience. This is what makes us feel alive. If we need to communicate, we can use concepts to describe our experience. When we communicate directly from the experience, rather than from a canned speech, we come across much more authentically and compellingly.
To be truly happy, to experience real life, real love, and real joy, we need to practice tasting life as it is before we “put it in a can” and store it on the shelf of memory.” This will increase our creativity and our spontaneity. It will not reduce our pain, who but it will greatly reduce our suffering.
[*] Some Problems of Philosophy (1911) p 50 -51.