Dear friend,

I hope that following few lines will be understandable. I was preparing this post for few days, it is one of the most important to me and as I still do not have any proof reader or assistant, you have to cope with my version of English language.

It has been while when I first time read about Taoism and frankly I had not really understood it all. It took me years and still I am in doubt when I have to explain it to somebody. It is rather often for me,  when using words is just not enough to explain. You may know it yourself. You try to transfer certain idea or feeling to other person, and even you try as much as you can, it just doesn’t go. This is especially case when you do not have much in common with the other person, no common memories, no common backgrounds…

I have read somewhere, long time ago, so I may be mistaken, that in languages like Chinese there are not names for things but rather descriptions of them. So when something new happen you do not give it new name, you just describe it using more or less limited set of  words. It may not be true, but I feel strongly that this is far better than what we, European – western culture people, do. We invent new words.

You may be wondering where I am heading, well it is in direction to my photographs. I feel very strongly that, when we use symbols, which we know naturally, to describe and transfer our experiences to other person we will succeed better, than when we inventing new words and even describing it with some less common way.

I am listener of the Philosophy Bites podcast. Few days ago I was listening older episode entitled Pat Churchland on Eliminative Materialism, where she spoke about very same thing. According to her the visual signals are processed at the beginning in visual cortex. Already there, at the beginning of the journey, decision about value of the signal is made and reaction is created. Far before we can name or even understand functionality of the visual information. Something babies do. They do understand visual signal and can react appropriately before they can even name things they see. We need to learn in years that. It is not given to us from the start. We artificially, based on customs of our culture and society, give names and describe our experiences by bunch of words.

Maybe all this is constructed theory, but from my experience I truly believe, there is no need for new terms, names and descriptions. We just need to feel and understand without need to name it.