Perceive things directly without always needing to label and name them

• Our ego uses concepts as filters to screen us from a direct perception of what is. Chogyam Trungpa
• Relinquish, for a moment, your desire to explain and label. Eckhart Tolle
• You must not know too much, or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain free margin, and even vagueness – perhaps ignorance, credulity – helps your enjoyment of these things… Walt Whitman
• There is a language that is beyond words. If I can learn to decipher that language without words, I will be able to decipher the world. Paulo Coelho
• Words,  Perception,  Letting go,  Stillness,  Meditation,  Presence

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To see something through the filter of a label is not to truly see it

• As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw. Shunryu Suzuki-roshi
• We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we’re looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us.  Charles de Lint
• Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence. George Steiner
• We are so impressed by scientific clank that we feel we ought not to say that the sunflower turns because it knows where the sun is. It is almost second nature to us to prefer explanations with a large vocabulary. We are much more comfortable when we are assured that the sunflower turns because it is heliotropic. The trouble with that kind of talk is that it tempts us to think that we know what the sunflower is up to. But we don’t. The sunflower is a mystery, just as every single thing in the universe is. Robert Farrer Capon
• We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time, we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction. Aldous Huxley
• As things are interpreted or labeled by the mind they slowly cease to be what they are and start to become what is thought about them. John Greven
• Name the colors, blind the eye. Zen saying
• I confused things with their names: that is belief. Jean-Paul Sartre
• To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees. Paul Valéry

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Labels and mental concepts diminish and reduce

• Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can’t deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can’t be explained and understood. Chuck Palahniuk
• The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. Eckhart Tolle
• The more you perceive life through a mental screen of abstraction and conceptualization, the more lifeless and flat the world around you becomes. Eckhart Tolle
• In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better. Edward de Bono
• You don’t see anything as it is, but distorted and reduced by mental labels, concepts, judgments, opinions and reactive patterns.  Eckhart Tolle
• The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. Eric Berne
• Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, … Eckhart Tolle
• The less the mind understands and the more things it perceives, the greater its power of feigning is; and the more things it understands, the more that power is diminished. Baruch Spinoza
• We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile! Henry David Thoreau

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Perceiving something without imposing labels or words creates immense depth…

• Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it and let it be without imposing a word or mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you. Eckhart Tolle
• Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sound or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don’t know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. Eckhart Tolle
• But when we perceive without interpreting or mental labeling, which means without adding thought to our perceptions, we can actually still sense the deeper connectedness underneath our perception of seemingly separate things. Eckhart Tolle
• If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change. Buddha
• When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. Eckhart Tolle
• The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. Henry Miller
• I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it. Henry David Thoreau

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… and beauty and aliveness

• Go slow. Stop thinking. Look around. You’ll see something beautiful if you open yourself. Sermon of Vincent van Gogh
• One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world. William Hazlitt
• To experience anything fully and see it clearly there must be a moment of presence where conceptual thinking is not interfering with your experience of that moment. Eckhart Tolle
• When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life. Eckhart Tolle
• Break through the surface ideas, truths, laws, whatever it is that we are contemplating, to explore their deeper meaning and implications. John Kehoe
• Beauty,  Being fully alive

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Labels and concepts can imprison and confine

• You do not awaken spiritually until the compulsive and unconscious naming ceases, or at least you become aware of it and thus are able to observe it as it happens. It is through this constant naming that the ego remains in place as the unobserved mind. Eckhart Tolle
• For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly. Kahlil Gibran
• You can’t ‘figure your way out’ of the conceptual prison that your mind has created. The mind cannot ‘see’ outside the mind. Freedom can come only when you leave the entire conceptual framework behind. Ed Muzika
• Logic is the death to that part of you that is the miracle maker. Sturat Wilde
• A person does not have to be behind bars to be a prisoner. People can be prisoners of their own concepts and ideas. They can be slaves to their own selves. Maharaji
• Those who are highly evolved, maintain an undiscriminating perception. Seeing everything, labeling nothing, they maintain their awareness of the Great Oneness.  Thus they are supported by it.  Lao Tzu

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Words reduce reality

• Trying to use words to clarify reality is like trying to live in a dictionary. Ikkyu Jones
• Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much. Eckhart Tolle
• Words are like nets – we hope they’ll cover what we mean, but we know they can’t possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder. Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart
• Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Rudyard Kipling
• Words were given to man to conceal his true feelings. Voltaire
• Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth. Neale Donald Walsch
• The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. Stephen King
• Reality

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Truth is hidden by concepts and labels

• Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth. Friedrich Nietzsche
• As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind. Anthony de Mello
• Language can be very adept at hiding the truth. Dan Brown

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Penetrate the depths to get a deep understanding

• Do not hover always on the surface of things, nor take up suddenly with mere appearances; but penetrate into the depth of matters, as far as your time and circumstances allow, especially in those things which relate to your profession. Isaac Watts
• …with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things. William Wordsworth
• Understanding

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Regain a child’s fresh perspective

• As children we see life only in the present moment. Children feel a certain way and react intuitively in the here and now. They have not yet developed an analytical process which interfers with intuition. Adam McLeod
• Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome aim of the ego. Not until years later, does an instinct come, that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers. Peter Matthiessen
• When you teach a child that a bird is named ‘bird,’ the child will never see the bird again. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear- eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. Rachel Carson
• Perspective

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Practice non-labeling through mindfulness and meditation

• Meditation is not aimed at developing a fine philosophy of life or mind. It is not about thinking at all. It is about keeping things simple. Right now, in this moment, do you see? Do you hear? This seeing, this hearing, when unadorned, is the recovery of original mind, free from all concepts, including “original mind.” Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Mindfulness,  Meditation

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Final thoughts

• Freedom is not a goal, it is the supreme awareness of who you are. Freedom is found once all concepts are thrown away, and one stands alone in the present moment to find the depth of meaning inherent in their spirit.  Spiritual Warrior
• Thinking about something is the mind using definitions to figure out a definition, concepts to unravel a concept. The mind is chasing its own tail.  Michael Jeffreys
• Your true meaning cannot be grasped or captured by words. You can never be equated with any words, because you are prior to words. Nisargadatta Maharaj
• When your sense of self is no longer tied to thought, is no longer conceptual, there is a depth of feeling, of sensing, of compassion, of loving, that was not there when you were trapped in mental concepts. You are that depth. Eckhart Tolle

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