It's an amazingly beautiful day out, and I decided to take the bus up to Subway to get dinner. Walking across the parking lot on the way back, at first I was just thinking to myself in words and ignoring my surroundings, but I happened to glance down. In one sense, it's just a standard parking lot, but if you shut off the wordstream (essentially go into meditation) and allow yourself to experience the moment more purely, it's a vast expanse of incredible textures and colors (the picture above fails utterly to do it justice). Old blacktop patches, cracks, gravel, weeds growing through here and there, little oval islands of concrete with utility poles sprouting from them. There's also trash, which you could dismiss contemptuously as trash, or notice the plethora of incredible colors and surfaces.
I do this a lot, drop into what's known as a walking meditation. Stop the mostly pointless flow of words and become like a wide-eyed child, awash in all the sensory details. They're there all the time, all around us, but most of the time we just pay them no mind, ignore them and think think think. The mind can do one or the other, it can't do both at the same time, unless you train it to be aware of sensory detail all the time, and then you actually do a lot less thinking in words. It's like the difference between a movie that's all talk, where everything is done through dialogue, and one with lengthy wordless passages of great cinematic beauty.
I think this is one of the main differences, what separates a 'visual' person from a non-visual, or a verbal person. They're two different ways of seeing the world, or conceiving of it. You either shut up and pay attention, or you re-create the world in words from memory. When you do that there's none of the intense, sometimes shocking detail, visual and otherwise. A parking lot is a parking lot. Though if you walk across a few of them on a summer afternoon as the heat waves shimmer and dance, especially if you're a child at the time, you know they're not the same. They're all unique, and each one has various parts. That upper corner where it's overgrown with weeds and nobody has parked since the store there was abandoned ten years ago is not at all the same as down here. But if you're in the verbal mind they're all just parking lots, no more description needed.
I guess what I'm saying is, I'm not sure the difference is inherent or genetic. To some extent anyway, it's a choice we make every day. You can talk a pale ghost of the world into being without noticing anything about it, or you can live in the real world, experience it, and realize how filled it is with wonder and beauty. Before I decided to go into meditation mode I was just crossing a parking lot, but suddenly everything dropped into glorious 4k resolution and Technicolor.
I suppose some of us have this capability built in to a greater extent than others. Some people could stop talking, look down at the ground, and not notice anything special. But I suspect most of them are still resisting seeing it, hearing it, feeling it etc. I think even when they shut off verbal thinking they remain trapped in it, just with no words. Or they don't allow themselves to see the magic.
And I can't help but notice how often I used words like see, as if it's strictly a visual thing. It isn't, it's all the senses. It's called being a visual person though, and there's no changing the name of it, but I know it's all the senses, and I think of it as vivid rather than visual.
The world is achingly beautiful—everywhere, all the time. Whenever I let myself fall into that nonverbal mode I'm utterly entranced by it all. This is why when I write I feel the need to show so much detail, because it's how I experience the world. It's how the world IS. Everything is. Everything is beautiful. Knowing this, it would be a crime to reduce it all to cold gray facts.
A murder.
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