In Deep Philosophy, like in every philosophy, we philosophize with ideas in order to explore fundamental reality. Traditional philosophers usually do this by constructing theories about the way reality is. This approach is not appropriate for Deep Philosophy because theories separate us from reality. They not only engage a limited part of ourselves – our discursive thinking, but also are “about” reality, thus making us external and uninvolved observers.

The use of theories-about-reality is based on the visual metaphor of “looking” or “seeing”: We imagine reality as a kind of fixed landscape, and the theory as a map or picture that represents this landscape, mirrors it, corresponds to it. A theory is supposed to correspond to reality just as a photograph of a forest corresponds to the forest, just as a map of a city represents the buildings and streets, just as a visual experience of a mountain mirrors the mountain’s shapes and colors. As a result, when we follow this “seeing” metaphor, we relate to reality from an external, distant, uninvolved perspective. Using our intellect we “look outside” ourselves at some “elsewhere.”

But the visual metaphor is not our only way of relating to ideas. An alternative metaphor is that of “hearing” or “listening.” Hearing does not involve a picture-object relationship. If I hear a bird, for example, this does not mean that I have a mental picture of the bird. I may not know what is producing the sound. What I experience is not an object outside me, but the quality of the sound entering me and resonating in me. Indeed, if I want to listen carefully to music, I may close my eyes and listen INWARDLY. The external object producing the sound is hidden from my hearing.

“Listening” can serve as a metaphor for how we relate to ideas in Deep Philosophy, although like all metaphors it has its limitations. Just as we listen to a sound, we “listen” to ideas as if they come into us and resonate in us, instead of inspecting them like maps or pictures. We then feel them filling our mind and giving us the intense presence which we often experience during contemplation. “Listening to” ideas is a very different inner attitude from the attitude of “looking at” ideas.

If we follow this metaphor, then ideas in contemplation are analogous to sounds. Or, rather, since they have meaning and are not just meaningless noises, we may call them VOICES. Contemplating is, metaphorically, listening to “voices.”

What sort of phenomena are these “voices” or meanings? Here we must remain in the “auditory” language of “hearing” and avoid theoretical explanations, because theoretical language is a “visual” language of objects, which is what we want to overcome.

And so, although in the material world, sounds are normally produced by objects (a bark by a dog, a shout by a person), this is not how we should think of our metaphorical voices. Once we think of sounds as produced by objects, we are back in the world of things. We must remain with the language of voices and resist the temptation to translate it to the language of objects.

We may say that when we contemplate, we enter a world of voices, and we even transform ourselves from a thing (a self, a person, a psychological mechanism) into voices. I am a voice, and the text is a voice. In this world of voices, there are no things, no physical locations or distances.

The metaphor of voices allows us to relate to ideas in ways that are impossible in the visual language of things. It allows us to relate to reality (or a text) as if it speaks WITHIN us – as indeed we feel in contemplative sessions – which makes no sense in a world of “things.” It allows us to find no clear distinction between inside me and outside me, just as a sound is experienced both inside me and outside me. It also allows us to interact with companions by “resonating” with them, which is a relationship between two voices. Resonating goes beyond the dichotomies of thinking-about: agreeing or disagreeing, true or false, correct or incorrect. These dichotomies govern the world of objectification, of thinking-about, of subject-object. In contrast, resonating allows a rich, flexible, and creative range of responses to ideas, beyond a simple dichotomy.

Thus, we live in two different worlds: first, in the world of objectified reality, of thinking-about, of theories and objects of thought; and second, in the world of meanings before objectification and before subject-object, a primordial world of voices. In contemplation, when we communicate with our companions or with a text in the realm of voices, we are voices, our companions are voices, the text is voices, reality is voices, and we all resonate with each other. But this can happen only if our language is not the language of objects – of empirical people, places, events, facts. The world of voices is not accessible to objectifying thought, which is both our everyday thought and theoretical thought. It can be accessed only through a de-objectified language, a language of voices, of pure meanings. This is the language of philosophy – or, rather, of some philosophies that deal with the most basic ideas beyond empirical objects. Contemplating on philosophical ideas – or “listening” to ideas as voices – is our access to a different level of reality.

Here we are tempted to ask: And what is the relationship between the world of voices and the world of objects? But no theory can give us an answer. Any theory would be a form of object-thinking, and as such it would distort the realm of voices. We cannot stand outside both voices and objects, on a neutral ground, and explain them together. We have no neutral perspective from which to look at both objects and voices. We can only notice that we are living in two different worlds, and that we can emigrate from one to another.

But in fact, this is rarely a matter of either-or. More often we hover between the two worlds, partly here and partly there. We are like movie-goers who are absorbed in the movie-world, but at the same time, in the back of our mind, are aware of the physical cinema hall around us.