Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 45

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents

Day 45 Ways to See a Frog  

It sat in meditation (yeah, right) in water immersed, patient and still. What was I to it? A harmless shadow, perhaps? Were I to move closer, and suddenly, then the frog would leap and plop.

I can comment on it. Indeed, a series of comments came in an enlarging degree of abstraction. First, “a frog!” Then, “I see a frog.” Finally, “I experience seeing a frog.” In more formal language: “There is a frog in the water.” “There is the seeing of a frog in the water.” “There is the experience of the seeing of a frog in the water.” These levels, each building upon the previous, are like the levels of thinking about thinking, or attending to attention. 

Humans are mapmakers at various levels of abstraction. Even the frog in my vision is, in a way, a map. It’s not the actual frog. He or she is as unobtainable the way down to the river was, far below the cliffs (Day 41). My frog is a product of my eyes and brain. Sure, there is a frog out there, that I not only can know by the map that I call seeing but by the map called touch (if it lets me, which is sometimes possible if one like molasses moves a finger toward its slimy skin). The visual frog is a map created automatically by eyes and brain from a biological bit of outer reality. This process, especially when we give it a name, is the visual stream of thinking. 

In addition, I see that I am seeing. (Note how the word “see” is easily taken as a metaphor for thinking or knowing, as in “I understand, I see!”) In this next level, I construct a map of the act of seeing. I “see” not just the frog but the activity of seeing. I become aware of sensations in my eyes, their muscles and blinks. (Silently say to yourself, “I see a cloud.” You will probably note some twitching in the eyes, as if the word “seeing” sets off some evanescent sensations in the organs of sight.) And I become aware that I can say “frog.” In this second-level map, with the concept of the visual relationship of frog and me, I can comment upon the event of seeing. The comment reveals that an act of mapping has taken place. Cognitive psychologists call this making a representation. 

Finally, I step the representation up to an additional level. I can think to myself, “I experience the seeing of a frog.” (Which I was doing in describing level two in the previous paragraph.) This new level of map-making certainly began the moment I consider the relationship between the real frog I can never know and the frog as my visual image. In particular, this third level was assumed when discussing level two in the previous paragraph. But this level also leapt out right then, in my initial experience, when I first saw the frog, which was in my stream of consciousness and, at the same time, there was the stream of the stream that was knowing the stream. At first, this third level was not verbally noted but felt and experienced.

Levels are key to who we are. The fact of the levels of the braided stream of mind are as crucial to who we are as James’ primal fact of the stream itself. Augustine recognized the levels, in saying we can know the knowing, and will the willing. Each level seems to automatically give birth to the next, in the way a shoot on a plant gives rise to a new shoot, which in turn gives rise to the next. The visual frog exists because of the act of seeing. And to be aware of the act of seeing means that the act is being classified as a type of experience. We expand outwards in generality, from frog to seeing to experience. And I, somehow, somewhere, am all these streams of braided levels of recursion in the overall stream of being. Thanks, frog!

© 2025 by Tyler Volk

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