Seeing the world without concepts

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I was listening to a Dharma podcast which talked about the importance of seeing while seeing which I think was a quote from the Sattipathana Sutta. The teacher used this to explain how one should practise looking at objects and seeing them without conceptualising them. This is a simple but amazing concept and the possibilities when you apply it to objects of great beauty are mind blowing. I practise this with music. Rather than listening to an orchestra andhearing the individual instruments I try to simply hear pure timbres without labelling them. The idea is I thik to see things as they really are without concept colouring our perception..

The story of a fire alarm beeping in the basement was used. The owners of the house thought it was a family of birds and until discovering it was a fire alarm were delighted by thesound. The moment they realised it was in fact a fire alarm they immediately requested that it be fixed. The only thing that changed as the teacher said was the filter through which they heard the sound.

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Jiddu Krishnamurti amongst others, has talked at great length about this. When in a meditative or mindful state it is often possible to see the world clearer and without so many layers of concepts heaped on top. The vast amount of what we see, hear and touch isn't passed onto consciousness and what we do generally become aware of isn't the raw reality but what it means to us e.g. is it a threat, is it something desirable, is it relevant to my existence and so on. There is a great deal of beauty in the world and in nature in particular when we start to view it more directly and less with an eye of how we can exploit it, fear it or judge it.

Not only do we have our evolutionary heritage but as children we absorb the social conditioning of our peers, parents, teachers and society and we tend to see people through these filters. The difficult thing is to (a) be aware of this social conditioning and then (b) to see through it.

It's an easy concept but I was unable to do it in practice. I have tried this on many occasions. The only time I was able to come even remotely close was by painting a picture whatever I was trying to experience without conceptualizing. While painting, I focused on the color and shape of whatever it was rather than the meaning of whatever it was. (These paintings were for meditative purposes only and I discarded them after). But in reality, all I was doing was displacing some concepts with other concepts.

Swapping out one concept for another concept is an easy enough thing and people do it all the time when they get more information about whatever they are experiencing. That's what the family who thought then alarm was birds did. They heard a sound and put the concept of "bird" on it. (The low battery signal does sound d exactly like a bird chirp- its' regularity is what gives it away.) With more information, they swapped the concept of "bird" for then concept of "alarm". But listening to it without putting a concept on it (bird, alarm or something else) would require not actually wondering what it was. As you both say, this goes against evolutionary instincts. Experiencing something without wondering what it is can get you killed if that something is a threat.

I think this is likely more easily done for visual thinkers than verbal thinkers. And potentially impossible for folks who have non-verbal learning disorders as they often have great difficulty seeing past the details to the 'big picture', in visual thinking, in what seems as obvious reason to me.

I can easily do this with music and movement in TAI CHI and other related martial arts flowing movements with no instruction or guidelines, but sitting still as a person who was born hyperactive, it is impossible for me as I get bored and have to at least move in balanced movement to escape verbal language in my mind.

Unfortunately for many folks like me, with ADHD symptoms, the world is becoming one of more non-movement; robotic like in mechanical cognition living in a computer screen rather than the real world of three-dimensional movement, that can be one of moving in almost 360 degrees with TAI CHI and other martial arts.

I was an extremely uncoordinated person up until the time I started becoming proficient in martial arts. Now I have no problem with movement at all, and am always relaxed as long as I can move just a little bit, like TAI CHI, almost not perceptible to other folks around me.

It makes perfect sense. The cerebellum responsible for movement is also responsible for the adrenaline response and sensory integration.

The quiet hands objection in the so-called 'militant' autistic community against the rest of culture really does have roots in neuroscience.

Unfortunately most therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists are too busy to stay abreast of current research, and haven't caught up yet to the scientific reason why stimming can be so vital for people on the autism spectrum with ADHD symptoms, comprising over 50 percent of folks on the spectrum, according to research on the prevalent co-morbid condition of ADHD.