Discerning the Real: A Path of Living Cognition X
Naming is not knowing. Real knowing lives at the threshold of concept—where perception meets becoming, and meaning is allowed to emerge without being fixed.
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Module 10: The Threshold of Concept – From Naming to Knowing
Modern life is saturated with names. Every object, action, and phenomenon is tagged, classified, and indexed. We call this knowledge. But naming is not the same as knowing. A name closes a process; it arrests becoming. Knowing, in its living sense, is a movement—a dynamic engagement with what is coming into being.
To live on the threshold of concept is to dwell in the moment before the label settles. It is a space of openness, of questioning, of perceiving the formative forces that shape a thing rather than its fixed identity. This is not abstraction. It is intimacy with the becoming of the world.
Concepts, in their deadened form, are tools of power and control. They enable action and utility, but at the cost of life. A living concept, by contrast, is a vessel that holds process. It is like a musical motif that develops over time—not a snapshot, but a gesture unfolding in the soul. The moment we grasp something in this way, without fixing it, we are no longer users of knowledge but participants in meaning.
Children often dwell in this space naturally. To them, the table is not a noun—it is tabling. The stream is streaming. Things are alive, not because of sentimentality, but because their essence is not yet abstracted into function. In the early stages of life, naming is still saturated with reverence. But in the adult intellect, names often become reduction.
Spiritual cognition begins when we reclaim this reverence—when we learn to hover at the edge of conceptual closure and choose instead to accompany what is becoming. This is an act of patience, of restraint, and of love. It is also an act of trust: that the world is not hiding its truth, but offering it slowly to those who are able to wait.
The threshold of concept is not a void. It is a generative space. And those who learn to live there are not left empty—they are met by meaning. Here, we begin to sense that every being, every process, longs to be met in this way—not grasped, but known.
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