The mind wants to sort things before it sees them. I’m sure you have been on a walk with friends when suddenly they are pointing out faces and animals in the bark of trees as you pass through a woodland.
So often we do not see the wood or the bark. We project our interior associations onto the thing being observed.
Our minds have been trained to do this constantly. You catch a glimpse of something and your naming reflex fires before your eye has finished looking. That is stinging nettle, that is oak, that is a wren.
We file away what we see, and the meeting ends before it truly starts.
To paraphrase the Victorian artist John Ruskin: we always suppose that we see what we only know. We do not see the plant; we see our idea of the plant. The label is not a window; it is a wall.
This reflex happens fast, and it happens below conscious choice. By the time you have named something, you have stopped attending to it. You filed it, moved on, kept the world manageable, knowable in a way that makes you feel secure. There is nothing wrong with that for navigating through life. But navigation is not a relationship.
Domei asks something else from you. It doesn’t ask you to abandon knowledge. As mentioned in a previous post, Thoreau’s line is useful here: ‘forget your botany.’ That doesn’t mean discard what you know. It means set aside, long enough, your associations, your projections onto the living world. Come to the thing you are observing as if it has never been named. Let it arrive on its own terms.
In doing so, we shift from imposing on the world to receiving it.
When you stop sorting and cataloguing, what I refer to as bagging and tagging, something completely different opens up. The thing in front of you stops being a museum specimen with a label on it and becomes a presence.
Try approaching the living world with a beginner’s mind. Enter it as if you have no knowledge of it, no labels for it, no belief system around it. Meet it exactly where it is.