Image: ©️Stephen Tanham

The spiritual teacher and philosopher Krishnamurti once wrote:

‘Recognition dulls the mind’.

When I first read it, years ago, I disagreed with his proposition. Surely, I reasoned, the act of recognition is a result of intelligence? We learn to recognise something as an act of shortening the ‘path-length’ of the brain’s logic, as it wrestles to categorise the seen thing.

Take a lighted candle, for example. We might enter a darkened room and have our attention drawn by one. At that stage we might only perceive a diffuse and gentle light coming from a height which is not the floor – but we recognise that ‘container’ of something of interest, even if we don’t have a name for it…

If we have further interest in the object, we might stay with our container and notice that the source of the light is a tall, white stick. The light source appears to be dancing upon it, as though it were alive. The light is not uniform in shape; what initially looked like a sphere of light is revealed as an oval with radiant ‘rays’ of light streaking from it and into our eyes. A voice may caution us that this streaking effect is a subjective illusion; but, in reality, everything in that narrowing-down sequence is an illusion.

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