In The One Straw Revolution, a book about regenerative farming, the Japanese farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka differentiates between discriminating and non-discriminating knowledge as two different ways to perceive the natural world. Discriminating knowledge refers to the analytical, scientific, and rational approach to understanding the world and relies on breaking things down in particular categories: a landscape is made up of a tree and a bird and grass and the sky, for example. As a biology major, I think in this way about half the time. For the other half, the Art half, I try to see in the way the Fukuoka does: he describes non-discriminating knowledge as that that is gained through a fundamentally intuitive and experiential process with our surroundings.  If we can deconstruct our knowledge and re-learn to see in this way, we are no longer able to draw so many boundaries: all I can say is, That Is (or, as Nisargadatta Maharaj says, I Am That). For my senior thesis in Art, I am exploring this idea through the abstract versus representational, the piece and the whole.