Robin Harford Notes.
Naming something creates a screen between you and direct experience. Once your brain labels something, it stops you from actually connecting with it. (McGilchrist’s neuroscience research confirms this.)
Indigenous “the plants told us” isn’t mystical. They tasted plants carefully whilst staying still and noticed bodily sensations (tingling scalp, throbbing back). That physical information revealed what the plant would do. Their rational mind didn’t constantly “get in the bloody way.”
Exact sensorial imagination works like this: observe something repeatedly with full sensory attention, then close your eyes and replay those encounters like DVDs in your mind. When you combine multiple “recordings,” patterns emerge that individual observations miss. This activates long-term memory differently: Emma remembers plant encounters instantly, but not what she read yesterday.
You can create a mental time-lapse. Observe a plant weekly for a month, then sequence those observations in imagination. The perception animates, revealing growth and change invisible in real time. No camera needed.
Good writing communicates feeling even with grammatically incorrect structure. The impression matters, not whether “grammatists” approve. Readers know exactly what’s being communicated despite structural “errors.”
The Ayurvedic onion layers: soul (core), then feelings, then emotions, then thinking. Modern culture stays stuck in the thinking layer. Projection happens in the emotions layer. True knowing happens when you reach the feelings layer, you’ve removed the buffers and get data almost directly.
Classification is ego-tickling, not knowing. Saying “that’s a nettle” pleases your ego but doesn’t mean you know the nettle. Knowing requires emptying yourself out and being filled by the phenomenon.
Mainstream science reveals only partial knowledge because humans use only parts of themselves to know things. It provides a mechanical understanding but misses the true nature, context, relationships, and dynamics; it can list a room’s furniture but can’t perceive the ambience.
Einstein’s principle applies: you can’t solve a problem on the same level it was created. If we used our whole selves instead of just analytical parts, solutions would become immediately apparent, not temporary fixes but opportunities to resolve issues at their root.
Dig deeper.
- Emma Kidd: First Steps to Seeing.
- Iain McGilchrist: The Master and His Emissary.