[34, 35] I've been thinking this morning about the conventions of color naming in our culture--probably because it is so gray & rainy outdoors at the moment. In 34 & 35 W points out the difficulty of knowing just what is being pointed to--a shape or a color--when one, say, is directed toward a red circle. Somehow this got me thinking about those little strips of color samples one gets at the paint store in order to decide what will be an appropriate / attractive color for the living room. This is statistical & culturally local, but I bet if you showed people colored rectangles & asked them for a definition, they would name the color; but if you showed them colored circles, they would name the shape. But that is only because we have an (unspoken & probably not universal) convention about such things in our particular time & place. What W is doing here is trying to get us to see the conventions as a convention, a practice, a way of life.

All of which is therapeutic, of course, but we cannot live daily being conscious of all the conventions in which we are enmeshed, can we? Would that be satori, or its opposite? At the same time, it is very useful to be able to phase in & out of therapeutic mode & this is something that many, but by no means all, people do more or less routinely.