I think drawing may be a similar skill. I can’t actually draw well, but my model of how one does this is by not interpreting your visual field by the laws of perspective and instead making lines that correspond to your actual sensations. This is why sometimes one sees it recommended, as a learning technique, to put a photo upside down and then try drawing that. It forces you to pay attention to the lines instead of performing the visual parsing step one ordinarily does. (The other half of drawing is causing the lines to show up on the page in the place where you want them to; this is not part of the analogy.)
One could consider this Looking at one’s raw visual phenomena. The skill described in the OP would be Looking at one’s own mental phenomena, a layer or two further up the stack from the raw visual phenomena. It’s possibly important not to think one has the generalized skill of looking if one just knows how to draw (it may block you from actually learning how to Look). However, if this analogy holds as strongly as I think it does, then one ought to be able to learn both skills with similar techniques?
For drawing that implies perhaps spending time studying your visual field without parsing it may improve your skill, even without practice (clearly at some point you also have to learn the skill of putting lines where you want them). This sounds a lot like meditation, but applied to different sensory input. This seems like a testable prediciton of this hypothesis/theory.
Then again, I might be normie-splaining; I don’t draw well, and I either haven’t had the experience described in the OP or have but don’t consider it remarkable (honestly can’t quite tell). But this seems like a stronger analogy than any I have had heard.
I think I get what Looking is now. This draws together most of the things I thought Looking might be, and explains how they’re the same skill applied to different things. The skill of drawing is transformative for some people. There’s a phenomenon I’ve heard repeated a few times (most prominantly in the book IMPRO) where a person “lives in their head” so much that they become distant from their sense-data, things literally losing color and taste, or noticing that you aren’t feeling touch very sensitively, and drawing can help you break out of that.
Learning to draw in itself might not help with Looking or might even hurt (if you get in the habit of thinking that all internal experiences reduce to atomic sensory observations), but it maybe if you learned to draw in conjunction with learning Gendlin’s Focusing, and meditation, and another introspective/phenomenological skill, you might get the general thing!
So, my model is that Looking is the ability to see your experiences for what they are. Whereas learning to draw, or learning to pay attention to what your body is feeling allow you to Look at sense-data only, the general skill has to do with perceiving what you experience (which is not just sense data—when you look at an apple there is a part of you which sees an apple and experiences it as an apple).
I don’t think I really have the general thing? At least not in a condensed skill. The idea of trying to Look at something seems like it would be too distracting from the experience of the thing, sort of like the learning-to-draw kind of Looking can distract from being able to Look at whole objects without splitting them into parts.
Of course, it suggests ever more strongly that—if ‘Looking’ is a real thing (i.e., a skill or ability that it’s possible to have, and that perhaps some people do have, but which most people don’t have)—then it should allow one to produce unmistakeably impressive artifacts or feats.
After all, what can one do with this ‘visual Looking’ skill you describe? Why—draw pictures! (Specifically, one can draw pictures that look much more realistic than those drawn by people without the skill, such that the beholder says—“My god! That actually looks like the real thing!”.)
There can be absolutely no mistaking the impressiveness of pictures drawn by a person with the ‘visual Looking’ skill. Crucially, their impressiveness is perceivable…
… without the beholder himself having the skill; and even…
… without the beholder even knowing about any such skill, nor, indeed, having any knowledge of drawing techniques.
(That’s not the only clearly real and tangible skill or ability gained by someone who has this capacity to perceive their raw visual field; there are others. Drawing realistic pictures, however, is one of the most unmistakeably impressive ones, and one of the easiest to demonstrate.)
What is the analogous product of general ‘Looking’—one which is impressive to someone who does not themselves have the skill, nor even know that such a skill exists?
Not all domains have obvious outputs. It’s entirely plausible to me that there is no equivalent of “drawing” for the skill of Looking-at-mental-phenomena.
Another dimension to that analogy is that “visual Looking” can be systematically taught. Art schools do that for generation after generation of students. They provide (to borrow another analogy) the recipe, the cooking instructions, examples of well-made and ill-made cakes, and give critiques of the students’ work. There are books and videos showing you how to do these things. There is no mystery about how to learn “visual Looking”.
None of which seems to be available for Valentine’s “Looking”.
Actually, there absolutely can be mistaking the impressiveness of pictures drawn by a person with the ‘visual Looking’ skill. If you get certain stylistic aspects wrong, or come from the wrong class/race/etc., it gets called “degenerate” instead of impressive.
Telling whether someone draws a realistic picture is quite easy because you can compare the picture to a photo. You don’t have a similar comparision for subjective experience and ontology. In both cases getting better at those will allow you to make better predictions in specific cases but it’s hard to put that into a structure.
If Looking is something like bypassing one’s own mental machinery that interprets & somewhat distorts reality, then maybe someone who’s enlightened has few cognitive biases, or at least is capable of noticing & maybe bypassing them when they arise?
I would expect someone who’s really excellent at Looking would be better at tracking what actually matters.
Sidestepping cognitive biases requires something else. Like, you can be tracking what actually matters instead of what you think matters, but still get surprised by your systematically overoptimistic estimates about how long things will take. If you notice that affects what you care about in a way that matters, then you probably have to actually do something about your thinking.
Things like survivorship bias also require noticing when something true and important is hidden. Tracking that is a matter of rejiggering the mind to notice where this bias arises and adding corrective factors.
…but if a master Looker[1]does not care about these effects, they might in fact use examples that arise from (say) survivorship bias precisely because they make the point the Looker does care about. And they might dismiss and be disinterested in corrections to their thinking, basically for the same reason someone writing a text message might find it annoying for someone to correct their grammar & punctuation.
So I daresay that really grokking Looking runs the risk of making one enact biases more.
…because much of the time they just don’t matter for what you actually care about.
Bypassing one’s own mental machinery and instead using… what?
Anyway, I have never noticed anyone “enlightened” having fewer cognitive biases than anyone else, or being more capable of anything in particular. If you claim otherwise, I should like to see the evidence.
Bypassing one’s own mental machinery and instead using… what?
Direct embodied perception prior to thought.
But I want to acknowledge you’re probably using the concept of “mental machinery” differently than I am here. I’m guessing you mean something more like “internal human computation”. (Forgive me, I’m not sure how to be really precise there. Hopefully you can see where I’m pointing.)
Whereas I’m pointing at something in the structure of human experience. Like, seeing like an artist: When you look at a table and just see a table, you can totally miss nearly all the experience you are in fact having of the table. But if you set aside your idea of “table” and you look at it like you’ve never seen anything like this before, and you behold it with wonder… you start to notice the very subtle differences in color, and the grain of the wood, and the way the light glances off of it, and a bazillion other details.
The main difference here is that instead of projecting your internal concept (“table”) onto your experiences and staring at your concept, you’re just looking at the experiences prior to thought.
Michael Singer has a wonderful example of this kind of thing in “The Untethered Soul”. I don’t remember his example exactly but it goes something like this: Sometimes I go for a walk a bit after it rains and I see a rainbow over the valley near my house. And I think “Wow, that’s beautiful.” But in order to think those words, I had to already know it was beautiful. The words aren’t informing me of anything. What is the experience I have prior to thought? What if I just… stay with that level of experience?
Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with thinking. But lots of (most? nearly all?) people seem to miss this process, and their thoughts carry on after that initial point and drag them into bizarre fantasies and illusions. Things like “That rainbow is really beautiful. I remember sitting on a hill with my ex looking at a rainbow like this. She broke up with me saying I’m selfish and emotionally unavailable. What a bitch. But maybe she had a point?” Et cetera. Most of that isn’t grounded in reality, but that fact is hard to miss because the thinker isn’t distinguishing between thoughts and reality.
Looking is just the skill of looking at reality prior to thought. It’s really not complicated. It’s just very, very easy to misunderstand if you fixate on mentally understanding it instead of doing it. Which sadly seems to be the default response to the idea of Looking.
I don’t know anyone enlightened, so I’m not making a claim either way. Just that if this is roughly what enlightened is meant to mean (I surmise via the drawing analogy), then this might be an expected consequence, hence test, of it.
It may be the case that “enlightened” is historically correlated with “religious” or “esoteric”—so the downsides of “religious” or “esoteric” usually negate the upsides of “enlightened”?
By the way, this explanation of enlightenment looks totally understandable to me.
I think drawing may be a similar skill. I can’t actually draw well, but my model of how one does this is by not interpreting your visual field by the laws of perspective and instead making lines that correspond to your actual sensations. This is why sometimes one sees it recommended, as a learning technique, to put a photo upside down and then try drawing that. It forces you to pay attention to the lines instead of performing the visual parsing step one ordinarily does. (The other half of drawing is causing the lines to show up on the page in the place where you want them to; this is not part of the analogy.)
One could consider this Looking at one’s raw visual phenomena. The skill described in the OP would be Looking at one’s own mental phenomena, a layer or two further up the stack from the raw visual phenomena. It’s possibly important not to think one has the generalized skill of looking if one just knows how to draw (it may block you from actually learning how to Look). However, if this analogy holds as strongly as I think it does, then one ought to be able to learn both skills with similar techniques?
For drawing that implies perhaps spending time studying your visual field without parsing it may improve your skill, even without practice (clearly at some point you also have to learn the skill of putting lines where you want them). This sounds a lot like meditation, but applied to different sensory input. This seems like a testable prediciton of this hypothesis/theory.
Then again, I might be normie-splaining; I don’t draw well, and I either haven’t had the experience described in the OP or have but don’t consider it remarkable (honestly can’t quite tell). But this seems like a stronger analogy than any I have had heard.
I think I get what Looking is now. This draws together most of the things I thought Looking might be, and explains how they’re the same skill applied to different things. The skill of drawing is transformative for some people. There’s a phenomenon I’ve heard repeated a few times (most prominantly in the book IMPRO) where a person “lives in their head” so much that they become distant from their sense-data, things literally losing color and taste, or noticing that you aren’t feeling touch very sensitively, and drawing can help you break out of that.
Learning to draw in itself might not help with Looking or might even hurt (if you get in the habit of thinking that all internal experiences reduce to atomic sensory observations), but it maybe if you learned to draw in conjunction with learning Gendlin’s Focusing, and meditation, and another introspective/phenomenological skill, you might get the general thing!
So, my model is that Looking is the ability to see your experiences for what they are. Whereas learning to draw, or learning to pay attention to what your body is feeling allow you to Look at sense-data only, the general skill has to do with perceiving what you experience (which is not just sense data—when you look at an apple there is a part of you which sees an apple and experiences it as an apple).
I don’t think I really have the general thing? At least not in a condensed skill. The idea of trying to Look at something seems like it would be too distracting from the experience of the thing, sort of like the learning-to-draw kind of Looking can distract from being able to Look at whole objects without splitting them into parts.
I like this analogy!
Of course, it suggests ever more strongly that—if ‘Looking’ is a real thing (i.e., a skill or ability that it’s possible to have, and that perhaps some people do have, but which most people don’t have)—then it should allow one to produce unmistakeably impressive artifacts or feats.
After all, what can one do with this ‘visual Looking’ skill you describe? Why—draw pictures! (Specifically, one can draw pictures that look much more realistic than those drawn by people without the skill, such that the beholder says—“My god! That actually looks like the real thing!”.)
There can be absolutely no mistaking the impressiveness of pictures drawn by a person with the ‘visual Looking’ skill. Crucially, their impressiveness is perceivable…
… without the beholder himself having the skill; and even…
… without the beholder even knowing about any such skill, nor, indeed, having any knowledge of drawing techniques.
(That’s not the only clearly real and tangible skill or ability gained by someone who has this capacity to perceive their raw visual field; there are others. Drawing realistic pictures, however, is one of the most unmistakeably impressive ones, and one of the easiest to demonstrate.)
What is the analogous product of general ‘Looking’—one which is impressive to someone who does not themselves have the skill, nor even know that such a skill exists?
Not all domains have obvious outputs. It’s entirely plausible to me that there is no equivalent of “drawing” for the skill of Looking-at-mental-phenomena.
This is an interesting perspective. I could respond by asking “then what good is it?”—but let’s dig deeper:
What examples can we think of, of other domains which have no obvious output, but which, clearly, are real and valuable?
No doubt there are some. Comparing them to ‘Looking’ may yield useful insights, yes?
Another dimension to that analogy is that “visual Looking” can be systematically taught. Art schools do that for generation after generation of students. They provide (to borrow another analogy) the recipe, the cooking instructions, examples of well-made and ill-made cakes, and give critiques of the students’ work. There are books and videos showing you how to do these things. There is no mystery about how to learn “visual Looking”.
None of which seems to be available for Valentine’s “Looking”.
Actually, there absolutely can be mistaking the impressiveness of pictures drawn by a person with the ‘visual Looking’ skill. If you get certain stylistic aspects wrong, or come from the wrong class/race/etc., it gets called “degenerate” instead of impressive.
Examples?
Telling whether someone draws a realistic picture is quite easy because you can compare the picture to a photo. You don’t have a similar comparision for subjective experience and ontology. In both cases getting better at those will allow you to make better predictions in specific cases but it’s hard to put that into a structure.
If Looking is something like bypassing one’s own mental machinery that interprets & somewhat distorts reality, then maybe someone who’s enlightened has few cognitive biases, or at least is capable of noticing & maybe bypassing them when they arise?
I would expect someone who’s really excellent at Looking would be better at tracking what actually matters.
Sidestepping cognitive biases requires something else. Like, you can be tracking what actually matters instead of what you think matters, but still get surprised by your systematically overoptimistic estimates about how long things will take. If you notice that affects what you care about in a way that matters, then you probably have to actually do something about your thinking.
Things like survivorship bias also require noticing when something true and important is hidden. Tracking that is a matter of rejiggering the mind to notice where this bias arises and adding corrective factors.
…but if a master Looker[1] does not care about these effects, they might in fact use examples that arise from (say) survivorship bias precisely because they make the point the Looker does care about. And they might dismiss and be disinterested in corrections to their thinking, basically for the same reason someone writing a text message might find it annoying for someone to correct their grammar & punctuation.
So I daresay that really grokking Looking runs the risk of making one enact biases more.
…because much of the time they just don’t matter for what you actually care about.
I’m avoiding terms like “enlightenment” or “enlightened” because of serious overloading here. I’m just talking about skill with Looking here.
Bypassing one’s own mental machinery and instead using… what?
Anyway, I have never noticed anyone “enlightened” having fewer cognitive biases than anyone else, or being more capable of anything in particular. If you claim otherwise, I should like to see the evidence.
Direct embodied perception prior to thought.
But I want to acknowledge you’re probably using the concept of “mental machinery” differently than I am here. I’m guessing you mean something more like “internal human computation”. (Forgive me, I’m not sure how to be really precise there. Hopefully you can see where I’m pointing.)
Whereas I’m pointing at something in the structure of human experience. Like, seeing like an artist: When you look at a table and just see a table, you can totally miss nearly all the experience you are in fact having of the table. But if you set aside your idea of “table” and you look at it like you’ve never seen anything like this before, and you behold it with wonder… you start to notice the very subtle differences in color, and the grain of the wood, and the way the light glances off of it, and a bazillion other details.
The main difference here is that instead of projecting your internal concept (“table”) onto your experiences and staring at your concept, you’re just looking at the experiences prior to thought.
Michael Singer has a wonderful example of this kind of thing in “The Untethered Soul”. I don’t remember his example exactly but it goes something like this: Sometimes I go for a walk a bit after it rains and I see a rainbow over the valley near my house. And I think “Wow, that’s beautiful.” But in order to think those words, I had to already know it was beautiful. The words aren’t informing me of anything. What is the experience I have prior to thought? What if I just… stay with that level of experience?
Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with thinking. But lots of (most? nearly all?) people seem to miss this process, and their thoughts carry on after that initial point and drag them into bizarre fantasies and illusions. Things like “That rainbow is really beautiful. I remember sitting on a hill with my ex looking at a rainbow like this. She broke up with me saying I’m selfish and emotionally unavailable. What a bitch. But maybe she had a point?” Et cetera. Most of that isn’t grounded in reality, but that fact is hard to miss because the thinker isn’t distinguishing between thoughts and reality.
Looking is just the skill of looking at reality prior to thought. It’s really not complicated. It’s just very, very easy to misunderstand if you fixate on mentally understanding it instead of doing it. Which sadly seems to be the default response to the idea of Looking.
What is your sample size here? How many “enlightened” people have you examined for cognitive bias?
I’m not the one making the positive claim.
This response makes it sound as though you are trying to win a fight rather than interested in understanding something.
I don’t know anyone enlightened, so I’m not making a claim either way. Just that if this is roughly what enlightened is meant to mean (I surmise via the drawing analogy), then this might be an expected consequence, hence test, of it.
It may be the case that “enlightened” is historically correlated with “religious” or “esoteric”—so the downsides of “religious” or “esoteric” usually negate the upsides of “enlightened”?
By the way, this explanation of enlightenment looks totally understandable to me.