Categorization vs Lived Experience, Abstraction vs Flesh
From time to time i have something akin to the “madeleine moment”, highly significant feelings that never get past a few seconds in duration, but mostly just a flash. One particular aspect of these moments is that they present themselves as brief insights into the way i used to feel as a child or teenager. And compared to them my life now is like a sketch who outlived and replaced its full and vibrant subject.
My intuition is that — even without depression or other afflictions — as we get old our brain’s complex dynamics are constantly defining attractors and widening basins of attraction. The child’s exotic landscape of mental exploration gets crisscrossed by beaten paths, paved roads and traffic restrictions. We’re usually focused on the outer expression of kids vs adults but everything is downstream from this inner shift — it’s our most intimate dynamics that goes from “play” to “work”. As a kid, listening to the radio resulted in a chain of wildly different universes as songs followed one another. Now in my late 30’s i have a more generic and well established experience of “listening to pop music” that suffers slight tweaks as the songs change.
I think this is set in the brain’s biology governing the developmental stages. The young mind must have a wealth of possible “representations” & reactions towards the environment, testing and selecting them. The mature individual must be constant, having trialed responses that guarantee results. Evolution didn’t specifically honed us to enjoy life, it honed us to be efficient.
Another intuition that i picked up, this time from eastern thought, is that this pruning of experience happens around the linguistic scaffolding. Using language we parse a wildly rich & subtle reality into stable concrete categories — “listening to music”, “vacation”, “dog” — and then the mind becomes a master at reducing richness & subtlety to these limited number of types. Concomitantly it assigns invariant feelings and emotions to each category, which is a necessary part in order for the adult to manifest steady well tested behaviors in a quick & energy efficient way. What we get is an individual whose experience tends towards a generic “vacation” whether he goes one place or another. As a little kid i changed universes merely going into another room or changing the TV channel. But now in my late 30’s my well defined psyche wins and imposes itself over many scenes and situations.
This aspect could play a role in the unique life & subjective experience of Zen monks who spend decades doing the same stuff in the same places, day after day. Through their practices they likely change their brain dynamics in fundamental ways. Possibly the most distinct aspect of their minds could be that they don’t resort to categorization to the same degree that we do. The monk sits in his chamber without holding onto the mental index “i’m in my room” that brings about & maintains a stagnant rigid experience. They just sit with their awareness wide open to the present moment, as little informed as possible by semantic & episodic memory. They don’t even hold to the “i” that’s in “i’m in my room”. On the other hand, when i’m sitting in my room i’m not as much present in my “present moment room”, open to the bottom-up patterns of stimuli, as i’m present in my top-down generated category “my room” with all its implied constraints. Sometimes i become aware of slight changes — like a chip in the furniture — and i become present to that. But i quickly add it to update my mental representation of “my room” and it becomes part of the fossilized holodeck in which i live.
These things are made somewhat harder to grasp by the notion of “brain spontaneous activity” which breaks our common sense about how the brain works. Everyone has a very particular signature of endogenously generated activity & outside stimuli are only “carving it out”, they aren’t actually carrying anything “from the outside in” like it was previously believed. So the key is in both our unique signature of spontaneous activity & in the openness to be shaped by outside stimuli. Meditation is something that likely impacts both aspects.
Instead of a spontaneous activity that’s grasping (i’m not talking about a metaphysical free-will here, just work performed by an architecture of physical constraints that channels energy into maintaining functions) to hold on to certain identities including self identity, the monk enjoys a more unconstrained flow. Instead of experiencing the ossified remnants of “what was”, the monk experiences the everlasting “What Is”, which is something wholly unpinnable & undefinable for them because in Zen they don’t hold preconceived abstract ideas about reality in between them and reality. This is why the monk doesn’t need ever newer stuff to feel alive and evade boredom. They get everything out of the fundamental undefinability of “What Is”. Sitting in front of a drywall is as effervescent as anything could be. When you look at a drywall without having any notion of “wall”, “paint”, “matter” standing between you and it, you see that drywall as it really is: an unpinnable & undefinable bit of Existence. For the monks their monastery courtyard is an atemporal land of magic, as my yard was for me when i was little. Though monks are unlikely to be nearly as creative as children in their experience of reality (i’m not referring to narratives here, just naked visions, moods & emotions).
Sadly, i suspect that there are also many monks who don’t “get it”, just simulating the outside manners of their peers without tasting the inner condition, mostly wasting their lives in an environment that’s not right for them.
I imagine lay people themselves being quite spread with regards to being present to places, things & other people around them, with some being deeply intuitively non-linearly relating with the living breathing stuff of the world while others living in the abstract diagrammatic overlay. But we don’t see each-other’s inner dynamics, we only see our outer appearances, so we delude ourselves that we must be seeing & living the same reality. This is also helped by the fact that irrespective of how differently we experience the world, there’s a pressure on us to attune/cohere our outward attitude & behavior with the outward behavior of those around us.
Naming things is a source of disenchantment because in this way we pin things down, set borders on the ambiguous, we make mystery, diversity & fluctuation into something clear, belonging to basic categories & uneventful. And i think there is another related but subtly distinct way in which language can dispel the magic of life: explanation. Usually when the mind doesn’t have an abstract model for some aspect of nature — as is the case for kids, monks, but also adults — it fills that unknown with fascination and scintillating emotions & imaginings. The unknown gives freedom to the mind to manifest its spontaneity & creativity, to dance unconstrained, filling the void with its wild exotic movements. On the other hand a highly educated individual that’s thought-ridden has built a cage out of his mind that constrains his mind. Explanation is functionality but it’s also built on constraints —on the surface it gives us so much, yet underneath it also takes. As nebulous & unproductive my childish feelings were towards the world, their intensity and indescribable esthetic quality cannot ever be matched by holding abstract theory. Nonetheless my ambiguity got gradually replaced by salient features, generalizations & schematics. Due to these generalizations my functionality has greatly increased of course, i’m better suited to survive the child, but it’s the child now that has the reasons to survive. This is a natural sub-personal dynamic, it’s not something thought-ridden individuals like me decide to do.
“The poetic outline of the hills has been replaced by theories of hill formation”, Oliver Sacks quoting some other person.
Words can be used as veritable incantations that banish the magic of existence. I see it all the time how people build cages for their minds: “Love is chemicals in the brain”, “I am predictive algorithms”, “Emotions are evolutionary tools” (i’m not saying these aren’t true here). But you mustn’t oppose and vilify symbolic thinking — that’s more likely to only stir deprecating thoughts about thinking, trapping yourself into a catch-22. More importantly you must realize that words can also be used to open up magic. White witches and wizards exist, they’re called mystics and poets. They are the people who use language to see through it, beyond it. They use maps, signs & recipes as they shoud be used. Instead of concretizing and deadening experience they use language to open it up, expanding it into its wild possibilities. Words are used as magic spells to refine, stir up & transmute experiences.
Someone said that as birds are weaving nests humans weave propositions. I sometimes try envisioning these recurring evanescent structures as they take shape and wane. Sometimes they show themselves as a cage, but other times they take the form of abstract steps that take us out of concrete problems, or present us with incredible possibilities seemingly out of nowhere. And sometimes they act as a scaffolding guiding our soul to get in touch with itself and with everything else in ways it couldn’t have otherwise.
