All about Frogs

Here's a different take on frogs and enlightenment by Stephen Nachmanovich, author of Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

"The world becomes very simple if all you're looking for, all your epistemology encompasses, is flies or not-flies. Even your need to eat flies may suffer, because the frog can be easily tricked into swallowing other moving black objects which are not flies. Human beings may be just as easily deceived, and are on a regular basis. We greedily swallow so many things that are not nourishment. One antidote is meditation in its many forms - we can get some practice at going behind that programmed fly-concept to experience the nature of our own minds, then it is easier to actually walk in the redwood forest and try to learn about what's in front of us without a priori placing labels on it. Then later, indeed we do at some point want to communicate our experience with people and to communicate we use words, labels and concepts; and we can enjoy the delicious, variegated play of concepts that are given to us by our languages and all our wonderful academic traditions - but we can learn to use those in a provisional way, understanding that we're looking at a map of reality and not at reality itself."