I think I get what Looking is now. This draws together most of the things I thought Looking might be, and explains how they’re the same skill applied to different things. The skill of drawing is transformative for some people. There’s a phenomenon I’ve heard repeated a few times (most prominantly in the book IMPRO) where a person “lives in their head” so much that they become distant from their sense-data, things literally losing color and taste, or noticing that you aren’t feeling touch very sensitively, and drawing can help you break out of that.
Learning to draw in itself might not help with Looking or might even hurt (if you get in the habit of thinking that all internal experiences reduce to atomic sensory observations), but it maybe if you learned to draw in conjunction with learning Gendlin’s Focusing, and meditation, and another introspective/phenomenological skill, you might get the general thing!
So, my model is that Looking is the ability to see your experiences for what they are. Whereas learning to draw, or learning to pay attention to what your body is feeling allow you to Look at sense-data only, the general skill has to do with perceiving what you experience (which is not just sense data—when you look at an apple there is a part of you which sees an apple and experiences it as an apple).
I don’t think I really have the general thing? At least not in a condensed skill. The idea of trying to Look at something seems like it would be too distracting from the experience of the thing, sort of like the learning-to-draw kind of Looking can distract from being able to Look at whole objects without splitting them into parts.
I think I get what Looking is now. This draws together most of the things I thought Looking might be, and explains how they’re the same skill applied to different things. The skill of drawing is transformative for some people. There’s a phenomenon I’ve heard repeated a few times (most prominantly in the book IMPRO) where a person “lives in their head” so much that they become distant from their sense-data, things literally losing color and taste, or noticing that you aren’t feeling touch very sensitively, and drawing can help you break out of that.
Learning to draw in itself might not help with Looking or might even hurt (if you get in the habit of thinking that all internal experiences reduce to atomic sensory observations), but it maybe if you learned to draw in conjunction with learning Gendlin’s Focusing, and meditation, and another introspective/phenomenological skill, you might get the general thing!
So, my model is that Looking is the ability to see your experiences for what they are. Whereas learning to draw, or learning to pay attention to what your body is feeling allow you to Look at sense-data only, the general skill has to do with perceiving what you experience (which is not just sense data—when you look at an apple there is a part of you which sees an apple and experiences it as an apple).
I don’t think I really have the general thing? At least not in a condensed skill. The idea of trying to Look at something seems like it would be too distracting from the experience of the thing, sort of like the learning-to-draw kind of Looking can distract from being able to Look at whole objects without splitting them into parts.