The way our upbringing teaches us to pay attention keeps us safely outside what we are looking at.
We observe, we record, we analyse, and the thing we are looking at remains over there, and you remain over here.
The status quo refers to it as subject and object. This is how we’ve been taught to understand the world: standing back on the touchline of life, we observe what we’re looking at as if it is separate from us.
Sustained attention changes the gap.
If we sit with a plant long enough, truly focusing on it without worrying about the past or dreaming of the future, we don’t automatically begin to name, categorise or file what we observe.
When we do this, the boundary begins to behave very differently. You might notice that your shoulders drop and your breathing slows.
The sense that you are a separate observer watching from behind your eyes softens. You may, if you’re lucky, stop seeing the plant as an object and instead something else happens.
It’s not so much what you’re looking at but rather who you are looking at. That distance closes. No longer is there an observer here and the observed thing over there. Instead, only subject and subject, a meeting of kin.
This is what happens when the mechanics of ordinary attention shift. We are not sealed off from the world.
Our bodies constantly communicate and interact with their surroundings. They adapt in real time.
The boundary between inside and outside is real, but it’s a lot more permeable than the culture wants you to believe.
The separation you feel and think of as normal is just a construct of the analytical mind. It keeps this separation because, in some situations, it’s very useful.
Yet to live with it continuously creates a loneliness and an isolation from the living world. As the American biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson called it, the Eremocene (the Age of Loneliness).
When we relax, even briefly, other things become possible. Goethe, the poet, playwright, and scientist, called it ‘living seeing’.
It’s a perception that participates in what is being observed rather than standing apart from it. Any insights we might glean (and it’s definitely not a given) come from within this relationship rather than from outside it.
It’s a participatory way of knowing that feels very different from ordinary understanding. This type of knowing carries information that our detached subject-object perspective cannot access.
That plant in front of you is continuously in relationship with its environment. Yes, it’s distinct on the one hand, but it’s not separate.
What Goethe and other philosophers discovered is that it turns out, so are you.