There is a visceral joy in the present moment during walking meditation. The colors, the contrast, the humidity on my skin, the blood flowing in my body.
The human mind classifies, categorizes, and names what it observes. So something is perceived, and perception occurs, possibly at first instance without categorization. But information is stored as you’re perceiving. The mind looks for patterns in the information. Eventually a light bulb goes on. The mind figures out what you’re looking at, or what that information that you are perceiving means.
And that invokes a categorization program that you have. And so you are walking and looking around. You see this ultimate natural beauty, say of a park, and you see the colors and the light. And you take it in for one tenth of a second. Half a second, or however long it is. And then boom there is tree, boom, there is a bird.
And that pattern matching is matched with your memory. And along with each of those labels, comes the definition of bird, what you know about birds. And then whatever your story is about birds. When I was a boy or whatever, I went hunting, or I had a parakeet pet bird in my room. And with that story comes feeling.
Whether you felt good about that parakeet or whether you felt bad about that bird you shot when you went hunting for the first time and you wanted your uncle’s approval. And yet your heart hurt possibly when you watched that bird die.
Visceral Joy of Walking Meditation: So ultimately, possibly, what humans have different from other animals, is this ability to gather information and not just pattern matched with memory, but recall the feelings of that memory.