People can get all hung up on the fact that we can only 'see' things after light from them hits our retina and our nerves and brain convert the light into an image in our brain. So, we can never actually see or sense in any other way the outside reality. We are trapped behind our senses of hearing, smell, taste and touch as well as sight. Personally, I am willing to take the impressions of my senses as pretty good trips out into reality.
Several of the great religions caution against confusing the finger pointing to the moon with the moon. I am not sure anyone has but in a similar way, semanticists caution against confusing a word with its referent. The word b u n n y is not a rabbit but a configuration of English letters often used to refer to a rabbit. You might think that such word confusion doesn't occur but it does. Sometimes on the edge of a concept, the name of the concept and the idea itself get mixed up.
One of the daily exercises that helps us, especially in this day, of living in language, concepts, symbols and meanings, is to get in touch with our senses, just as Kabat-Zinn advises. The physical act of breathing can quickly put you in touch with something not conceptual but real. If your beloved sends you a text message saying things have changed and the two of you should no longer be close, the symbols on the screen of your phone make cause your blood pressure to increase and your mood to sink. After you discover that some unknown person hit your phone number by mistake instead of their beloved's, your blood pressure may drop and your mood rise.
Concepts and symbols almost always have some connection to the past or to the future. We both know that your beloved is not actually in your phone. We know that the phone picture of that important person is much smaller than they really are. We know that when you hear them on a call, you are hearing an electronic transfer of their voice sent through several steps. We humans live in a boiling sea of concepts and ideas and step out into the physical world only a few times a day.
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