No Time For Words
By learning to step out of the way of observation we can experience a greater degree of reality.
‘Stow it, Guv’nor’
Turn On, Tune In, Shut Up.
In the beginning, we observe. We watch, wide-eyed, taking it all in. At first, we do not know what any of it means. There is nobody teaching us, and we have no words. Our only option when we are very young is to sense the world directly — with our fingers and toes, our breath, our noses and our ears, and our eyes. Soon though, so soon, we begin to have ideas. That person is a friend. This animal is soft. I like the taste of that. Those noises make me flinch. And soon those ideas come to replace observation. Soon we are interpreting as we observe, and it becomes difficult to tease the two things apart. What I am seeing becomes intertwined with what it means. In the study of animal behavior, one of the most difficult things to learn is to return to a state of observation without interpretation. If you are trying to figure out what an animal is doing, and also would like to understand why, you are not well served by jumbling it all together. All science, not just the science of animal …
