
Image: ©️Stephen Tanham
The spiritual teacher and philosopher Krishnamurti once wrote:
‘Recognition dulls the mind’.
When I first read it, years ago, I disagreed with his proposition. Surely, I reasoned, the act of recognition is a result of intelligence? We learn to recognise something as an act of shortening the ‘path-length’ of the brain’s logic, as it wrestles to categorise the seen thing.
Take a lighted candle, for example. We might enter a darkened room and have our attention drawn by one. At that stage we might only perceive a diffuse and gentle light coming from a height which is not the floor – but we recognise that ‘container’ of something of interest, even if we don’t have a name for it…
If we have further interest in the object, we might stay with our container and notice that the source of the light is a tall, white stick. The…
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