The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
To me, this quote is misguided.
Our stories obviously color our perception and life, and so also our stories about a bird.
The name of a bird is one story along with a range of other stories.
It’s possible that after knowing the name of a bird, we’ll be satisfied with the label and not bother so much with the bird anymore. But that can happen even if we don’t know the name of the bird. If someone responds that way, they probably would anyway.
And it’s also very possible to know the name of a bird, know that it’s just a human-made label to facilitate communication, and continue to be fascinated by the bird. We can be in awe of it, notice a range of small details, get to know its behavior, and so on.
To me, this is an example of what Ken Wilber calls the pre/trans fallacy.
Yes, a baby without language may be fascinated by the bird. It may take it in without the particular filter of stories about the bird. (Although we still operate from a huge amount of other filters from our senses, physiology, evolution, and so on.)
We can also learn the name and all sorts of other stories about the bird, recognize these as stories and know that reality is always more than and different from our stories, and operate from genuine curiosity, receptivity, and take in our sensory experiences of the bird.
This Krishnamurti quote may not only reflect the pre/trans fallacy but also a generally cynical view of humanity.
The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
You should read about the Default Mode Network. The empirical science behind how our brain is operating on a moment to moment basis is the evidence of what Krishnamurti understood. Krishnamurti wasn’t applying his observation onto all of humanity as a moral or reductionist stage of consciousness. He was literally stating an empirical fact that a part of our brain IN FACT does this as a way to save time and be more efficient – at the cost of being in the present moment. It looks like you have a reductionist view of Krishnamurti.
Hi and thanks for your comment. I am familiar with what you talk about since I studied cognitive psychology, along with other fields of psychology, for years at a graduate level. What I was writing about is that the mind tends to go to a label in order to preserve resources (time, attention, processing etc.) for more important tasks, and we may assume that we understand or perceive something even if we are mostly focused on our labels and stories about it. Inquiry can help us be aware of these mental representations and how they are an overlay on our other sense fields. When we recognize these mental representations, it easier to differentiate and pay attention to what’s here in the sense fields as it is. (As it appears to us, which is very different from reality since our senses are very limited and our brain cobbles it together to something that makes sense to us.) Noticing our mental representations – labels, assumptions, and so on – also helps us find more receptivity to explore and learn more about whatever it is. There is a lot more to say about this, and many other sides to it, which I have touched on in other articles. There are very likely reductionistic elements in this, and my understanding and experience is inevitably very limited. I am interested in understanding it in a less reductionistic way, if you can give some pointers.
To be honest, for me, all understanding – reflected and created by the mental field – is reductionistic. We take the immense complexity of reality, and the inherent oneness of reality and our experience, and simplify it. That’s the essential reductionism inherent in mental images and words. I know this is not what’s technically meant by reductionism, but it is a kind of reductionism inherent in all understanding.