There’s an expression, ‘the moment he learned the word butterfly, he never saw it again’.
We have a tendency to forget to see fresh what we label with words.
Each butterfly is no longer seen as a unique, majestically colored, floating collection of miraculously synchronized particles.
Rather each time we see something moving around with the shape we call ‘butterfly’, we file the object into that mental filing cabinet without a moment of awe, wonder or appreciation.
We live in a prison of our conceptual mental landscape.
We classify all kinds of phenomena into labels and categories we already once defined.
We do this with people, too.
Once people are labeled “a good person or a bad person”, “selfish or selfless”, “intelligent or dumb”, “attractive or unattractive”, “successful or unsuccessful”, “sensitive or insensitive”, we rarely revise our labels.
Information that fits the label is quickly unconsciously tagged and stored. Information that does not is discarded.
Creating the illusion of a far more static, fixed reality, designed to make us feel safe by managing the complexity of this sometimes overwhelming world.
Learning through contemplative practice, to see through the unconscious automaticity of this mental construction process of our reality,
We have the opportunity to pierce the veil,
Experiencing the naked, fresh, continuous novelty of the undifferentiated phenomenological continuum, whose fundamental nature is raw, ultimate light and ultimate sound.
Here deeper truth can be found.
