Do you live a forensic minded life? Do you observe things like a police blotter report, "male, Caucasian, 5 foot 8 inch tall, brown hair, blue eyes, age 35..."
In our haste to "get a quick grasp" of things we encounter, we categorize them with canned ideas and set parameters to stipulate what we think they are, skipping the peculiarities and the subtleties that constitute the whole.
Starting the days when "natural philosophy" became "natural science", when Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Bacon and John Locke encouraged people to treat nature as an object to be studied, experimented, then conquered, we have gotten better and better slicing nature thinner and thinner, reducing it to nothing but a working mechanism of chemical and physical actions and reactions.
That analytical, indiscriminating mind eventually turns its head on its own kind, treating humanity's "other people" as "the other", the object.
Does knowing the how's and what's lead us to understanding the why's? Do all the detail, technical deconstructs of things and events explain away the mystical sense we feel at heart when we experience wonder and awe?
To quote the conclusion of a short true story I once heard:
"When we fall in love, there are surges of hormones and chemicals and processes that produce the euphoria. So should we just shrug it off and say 'no, love is not worthy of poetry, because it's all just biochemistry', or should we embrace the joy and marvel at the experience?"
Say we try "bracketing" (withholding) such anti-nature attitude for a moment, leaving all our sensory faculty all open, receiving all natural data as they come, with no categorization, no precalculation... like when I swim, instead of forcefully exhale and inhale every time I bob my head above water lest (I thought) I should lack oxygen, I just let go my breath smooth and easy as I row my body through the water, feeling the thrust of my palms against the flow, body slivering through the stream, then inhale smooth and easy when I raise my head above the water; and when sitting in the cool-down well after a hot bubbling one at sauna, instead of counting "one alligator, two alligators, three alligators..." and missing out the ultimate pleasure of feeling my body heat and the surrounding cold meet their perfect equilibrium, I just loosen up my body and quiet my mind, enjoying all the sensations that come and go as they do...
That's Phenomenology 101.
Starting the days when "natural philosophy" became "natural science", when Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Bacon and John Locke encouraged people to treat nature as an object to be studied, experimented, then conquered, we have gotten better and better slicing nature thinner and thinner, reducing it to nothing but a working mechanism of chemical and physical actions and reactions.
That analytical, indiscriminating mind eventually turns its head on its own kind, treating humanity's "other people" as "the other", the object.
Does knowing the how's and what's lead us to understanding the why's? Do all the detail, technical deconstructs of things and events explain away the mystical sense we feel at heart when we experience wonder and awe?
To quote the conclusion of a short true story I once heard:
"When we fall in love, there are surges of hormones and chemicals and processes that produce the euphoria. So should we just shrug it off and say 'no, love is not worthy of poetry, because it's all just biochemistry', or should we embrace the joy and marvel at the experience?"
Say we try "bracketing" (withholding) such anti-nature attitude for a moment, leaving all our sensory faculty all open, receiving all natural data as they come, with no categorization, no precalculation... like when I swim, instead of forcefully exhale and inhale every time I bob my head above water lest (I thought) I should lack oxygen, I just let go my breath smooth and easy as I row my body through the water, feeling the thrust of my palms against the flow, body slivering through the stream, then inhale smooth and easy when I raise my head above the water; and when sitting in the cool-down well after a hot bubbling one at sauna, instead of counting "one alligator, two alligators, three alligators..." and missing out the ultimate pleasure of feeling my body heat and the surrounding cold meet their perfect equilibrium, I just loosen up my body and quiet my mind, enjoying all the sensations that come and go as they do...
That's Phenomenology 101.
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