Reality is Nonconceptual
On liberation from the intellect
For some reason I just don’t want to write about my usual topics right now. Maybe they're all too abstract and right now I want to be more embodied. I want a break from the world of concepts and want to touch down again with non-conceptual reality.
I keep looking out my window, watching the wind and the rain and the birds flying past. Watching the dogs going for walks and getting soaked with their owners. Listening to the gentle (and then not so gentle) patter of rain on my roof. It all seems so real. It doesn't need my conceptualisation: It just is.
I can set concepts aside for a while and let what is just be. I can let myself just be. Set my mind aside for now...
A big belief of mine is that reality is non-conceptual. The world precedes all our language, our concepts, and even our logic. Many think of things like logic or the law of non-contradiction as written into the fabric of reality itself, but I disagree: logic governs “logoi”, words; the law of non-contradiction is concerned with “diction”, speech, not with reality prior to our speaking it. Reality is prior to our concepts, and so prior to logic too. What would a nonconceptual contradiction even be? What is it it’s meant to deny?
All our concepts are artificial impositions. The world is one and whole before the intellect comes along and begins to cut it up into pieces like a tailor. The world exists in flow, but the intellect breaks up the flow into a series of timeless frames for its own analysis. It insists on cutting and smushing the world into its rigid, static conceptualisations.
But there is another way of seeing and being in the world. We can experience the world in its flow and unity, by experiencing our own flow and unity with the world. We can stop conceptualising ourselves as separate static objects, and feel ourselves as interdependent living beings caught up in the universal flow. We can live. When we drop the intellect for a while, we find intuition was waiting beneath it all along. We find pre-conceptual reality was always there.
This is the point of “the flow state” and of various meditation techniques. To set aside the concepts that interject themselves between us and reality, so that we can engage more deeply and intimately with it. So that we can see it as it is. So that we can live as an extension of the world and the world live as an extension of ourselves.
If we never set our conceptions aside they can seem incredibly real. They form a kind of closed world of their own, with hardly a gap left through which to see the reality beyond. We are stuck in a simulation of our own construction.
But we can escape the simulation by setting ourselves aside for a minute and “touching grass”. Get in contact with the ineffable reality that pre-exists all our ideas. Understand how small and simplistic all our thoughts really are.
And once we see this, we are free to take a more free and playful approach to our concepts, using them freely without being bound to them. We can take ourselves less seriously. When we see that reality is forever before and beyond our conceptions we do not abandon conception entirely, but see the endless possibilities of reconceptualization. We find that liberation from the intellect is simultaneously liberation of the intellect.
Anyway. Enough thinking about nonconceptual reality. I must get back to living in it!
Reality is metaphysical. Our conceptualization of reality is epistemological.
This was an enjoyable read. However, I just want to share my doubts about "So that we can see it as it is". Our perceptions, whether visual or auditory or tactile, are inevitably shaped and limited by the specifics of our evolved sendory organs and nervous system. I agree that our logic cannot go beyond the limitations of our conceptualizations. But I want to go beyond this, our more "intimate" flow experience is also limited.