Arc 1 · Liberated Perception · Lesson 03

Conceptual overlays

There's a layer of interpretation that runs underneath ordinary experience. It's useful. It's also a kind of map you sometimes mistake for the territory.

What if English is a sound first?

When we release conceptual fixation, there's more to notice. We often focus on vision; let's shift to sound. What happens if we experience English primarily as a sonic event?

Leaving experience uninterpreted can open us up to greater vividness and surprise. Concepts are pattern recognition — useful, but also able to forestall the discovery of different patterns, or of less patterned parts of the world. Letting go of habitual interpretations doesn't inhibit pattern recognition (you still understand this sentence). Instead, the underlying textures shine through. In speech, we call this timbre.

Listen to this next clip with an ear for timbre rather than meaning.

The heads-up display

One way to picture conceptual experiencing is a heads-up display, or HUD. The HUD overlays symbolic representations of your environment and your place in it. It's not the same as direct sensory experience, although it can inform action in useful ways.

Think of: car HUDs, video game UIs, AR navigation, the TikTok feed UI. Conceptual experiencing is like experiencing reality through your personal HUD. The symbols in the HUD are not the same as what they represent. One is not better than the other. But they are different at the level of experience, and that difference is what we're pointing at.

Five layers of attention

The exercise that follows is the most demanding of this lesson. It's worth doing in one continuous sitting. Click Begin below — the video will loop silently in the background while a guide speaks each step aloud. Five steps, about thirty seconds each. Bell between.

To start, pay attention only to the captions at the bottom of the screen. If your attention wanders to the visuals, gently redirect it back to the words. Now expand your vision to include both the captions and the main video image. Expand your vision further to include the physical device that is playing this video — the screen and its frame. Relax into this wider view: the screen, the video, and the captions all together. Now expand your vision to include the room around you, your body in the room, and your sensory experience as a whole. If you notice your focus narrowing, relax. Finally, expand even further. Include everything else that is going on for you — bodily feelings, sounds, smells, even your intention to do this exercise right now.

The take-home: finding awareness of the whole context counteracts fixating on particular aspects of experience to the exclusion of others. Vividness and wonder can arise in any moment.

Notice: focusing only on the captions — the conceptual representations — while ignoring the visual richness of the video is similar to how our conceptual overlays of experience can obscure the richness of direct experience.

Where this is going

Next: art and nature as invitations beyond concepts — and the perceptual flinch we hit when experience is unpleasant. Plus a return to the hands-and-wrists exercise from Lesson 01.

← 02 Vividness in the ordinary Next · 04 → Art & perceptual flinch