Colors and Counting

Josette was slow to learn colors. She knew all the farm animals and their sounds months before anything was any color besides blue. What color is the cow? Blue. The barn? Blue. The turtle? You guessed it.

Strangely, it made me a little proud.

I like to imagine that she wasn’t learning the colors because she refused to let her beautiful and infinitely nuanced kaleidoscopic world be compressed into a few primary colors.

She was a Zen Roshi who knew intuitively that language could only dumbly point in the general direction of reality like a finger pointing to the moon.

You’re telling me you’re going to call that [deep indigo ocean] “blue” and also THAT [light baby blue shirt] “blue”?!? Get the fuck outta here.

I was narrowing her world — the vast spectrum from indigo to periwinkle would forever be compressed into “blue”.

As someone who has personally benefited from the teachings and practice of Zen Buddhism and other similar contemplative traditions, I find an interesting paradox in raising children. Children seem to be close to perfect practitioners of several central aims of Zen — non-duality, selflessness, and consciousness prior to concepts.

Their world starts as a blooming buzzing confusion, with zero sense of a self separate from the rest of their perceptions. Then begins the inevitable march towards the overly self-aware state of adulthood — mired in its various regrets and rumination, complexes and conditions.

Obviously we want our children to develop into functioning members of society with the ability to survive and thrive in the world — so they need to progress past the acid trip of infancy. But there seems to be a sweet spot of self awareness where they are cognizant of their agency in the world but free of judgement and the striving that Buddhism submits is at the root of all suffering. The sweet spot feels to be somewhere along the continuum of concept building and language acquisition.

“Blue” might seem inconsequential concept to learn but, the more complex the concepts, the more of the bullshit of adulthood seems to come with it.

Recently, my 3 year old niece told me, “Uncle, I’m sad. I’m not popular.”

Talk about the damaging power of abstract concepts and an overly acute sense of a separate self.

Much of Buddhism, Zen in particular, is focused on the practice of noticing what consciousness is like prior to concepts. Many sutras, koans, and guided mediations point towards noticing a flow of raw sense data — What you see, feel, hear, smell — absent of the concepts we impulsively filter it all through — absent of putting names to everything.

One of the core goals of Buddhism is to recognize that our sense of self tends to be far more fixed, separate and central in our minds than it ought to, or needs to be. Our perceptions of the world both interior and exterior change moment to moment. Our identity is ever subject to the winds of experience and culture. Our memories are fickle and evolving. And there is no magic physical boundary at our skin that separates us from the world. This recognition, that comes intuitively to any 2 year old, is a major part of what the monks in mountain temples are after. It is the key to Nirvana and a lack of striving.

There are two important parts of my niece’s statement that cause pain. Both are complex concepts — one is the concept of her self as separate from the world and the other children, and the other is the social construct, “popular”. Had she not learned the word “popular”, would it have even been conceptually possible for her to construct the concept that was making her sad?

I mean that question very literally. Without the word, the thought/idea/feeling may not even be possible. Sure, she could have a negative feeling in the moment if she wasn’t included in an activity. She might have a memory of that momentary feeling. But it’s hard to imagine she’d have a conception of herself, that she’d be repeating in her head, reflecting on, and reciting without the language to form the concept of “unpopular”. The link between language and thought is deeper and more fundamental than it might seem at first.

Daniel Dennett wrote, “You can’t do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can’t do much thinking with your bare brain.”

We generally think of language as a tool for communication but its primary function is as a tool for thinking. Without language as a mental tool to form concepts like popular, or sad… or friend, home, home sick, nostalgia, joy, share, selfish, game, rules, basketball, town, trade, enemy, country, money, belief, poem, and on and on, we’d have much less to communicate. We’d still probably communicate — maybe we’d point to the berry patch or the lion’s den to help a family member find food or avoid danger, but we likely couldn’t conceive of almost anything that forms the basis of a modern life — communities, societies, monetary systems, technologies, governments, religion, philosophy, or art of any kind. It’s not because we couldn’t talk about it, but because we literally couldn’t conceive of any of it.

Research indicates that cultures with language that doesn’t include numerical words have a difficult time differentiating quantities larger than 3. Other studies show that cultures with fewer words to differentiate within color hues (eg. indigo vs. navy vs. baby blue) are actually less able to perceive these differences. People without words for left and right are orders of magnitude better at knowing their cardinal directions at all times.

Language, far from a simple tool for communication, seems to be integral to thought and even perception. On one hand, from the Buddhist standpoint, language and concepts might compress our world into an impoverished simulacrum of reality, from another angle it seems obvious that language opens up worlds that would otherwise be unknowable to us.

So, I guess I’ll keep adding a color descriptor to every god damn sentence. “Hey Josi, let’s get in our white car! Do you want to bring your brown bear? Look at the blue sky.” Maybe we’ll save the concept of non-duality until she can count past 3.