Last week, I wrote about what it feels like to wear freshly cleaned glasses. It's a two-minute read if you have the time, but you don't have to, because I hope to present a different version of the same idea here.
I'd like to share some thoughts about concepts.
Specifically, the concepts we all carry around.
First, a small detour.
The Rope and the Snake
A person walks at night along a path. They see a poisonous snake barring their way and turn and run in the opposite direction. As they return along the same path in the morning, they find a coiled rope on the ground. They realize that in the darkness, they mistook the coiled rope as a snake and it dawns on them, in the dark it is hard to see reality as it truly is.
Source: pranashanti.com
Detour over.
I told you it was small.
Two opposing and important things we should learn from this:
Firstly, our concepts help us to process our reality—if the rope had really been a snake, the person made the right choice.
Secondly, our concepts can also blind us from seeing reality—the rope wasn't a snake, it was a rope.
We all carry concepts.
Often, the words we use help us to create these concepts.
For instance, if I type the word tree and ask you to picture it in your mind, there's something there, right?
Sentences can do this too.
Imagine these:
Your boss sends you a message saying, "Hey can we chat for five minutes?"
Your child walks out of their room in the middle of the night and says, "Can somebody help me?"
But they say it more like this ... "Can sommmmeeeboodddyyyy hheeelpppp meeeee?"
We all carry concepts.
In order to see reality as it truly is, we may need to drop them.
