Indeed we know that it is impossible to perceive "clearly" something, even to perceive it at all, without any name or concept about it...For example the fist Aztecs "perceiving" Cortès boats dont perrceive boats at
Beauty. Got another one. Check this out.
Carl Sagan recounts in his book The Dragon's of Eden how he asked his son at a very early age what is the first thing you can remember? And he said, "It was red, and I was very cold." His son had been born by c-section. So that was Carl. Then there's me.
As a little kid growing up, and I mean like couple years old, I had this recurring dream or vision, or memory, don't even know what to call it. The most fascinating sparkly gleaming lights shining, sometimes waving, with the marvelous sense of floating weightless and even better, a deep sense of Oneness. Don't know what else to call it. This memory/feeling would come and go and every time made me so happy, joyous, just the best feeling ever. Whatever it was. Back then, for some reason or other, I wondered about this more than anything else. What was it???
Then one day my parents have friends over and I hear my dad, he loved to brag about me all the time, his first born son and all that. He is telling his friend how he didn't want me to be afraid of the water. So he took me to the pool when I was still a little baby. Had me floating in the water. How I was loving it, happy as a little clam, kept my eyes open even when he let me go under the water.
Eureka! That was it! The lights, the floating, that was it!
Best I can figure, this early memory was formed at a time when I was so young and unformed there was no way of making any kind of sense out of it. But it made such an impression it endured nonetheless. Until I knew enough to understand, and then wow, all at once it did make sense.
Just as with the Aztec's the experience itself is not enough. We need information to understand, or else it is all meaningless shifting patterns of light. Or sound.