“Once dominated by the facile conveniences of language and the categories (and thus the species of gaps they both demand and impose upon consciousness) they impress upon our inner vision, we are deprived of some of the most pivotal aspects of our potential intelligences. It is in the nature of our rationality to presume, and then become convinced, that both the denotations of language and the categories thus delimited within our consciousness are givens, when, in fact, they are toys.

Once thus enslaved, and having concretized this slavery in our thought and habits of discrimination, we can no longer experience them as conveniences; instead taking their impovished (and, indeed, lethal) projections as givens in both reality and our orientations within the fields of identity and judgement (or evaluation).

The categories are not, in fact, givens, and have nothing to do with reality. They are, instead, utilitarian actions of discriminating consciousness, whose resulting species are determined not by rationality or phenomenon… but instead by the (usually hidden from us) purposes for which we depart relation and imagination. These purposes, learned in childhood, comprise not gifts or knowledge but a peculiar forms of circumcision — which is to say more clearly, amputation.

Categories then, are the progeny of the purposes of utilitarian departure from relation; and since nearly all of this is hidden for us, we take them not as conveniences but facts. And in so doing, lose at once our humanity, imagination… and the diverse possibilities of the myriad intelligences which we bring to human birth as seeds.

These seeds will wither and die in nearly all common contexts, and thought they may be resurrected by some few of us who are lucky or determined enough to discover and retrieve them, the vast morass of modern humanity are without this capacity, and will, instead, enthusiastically participate in the amputation and dismissal of the greater share of our true natures, humanity, and possible intelligences. Among the most lethal of our errors are the most common, and nearly all of these relate with the misapprehension of the powers… and purposes… of categorization.

This is especially true of abstract generalizations that are universalized. For example, the idea that the world ‘is a certain way’ or thing, or that some ‘class’ of people exhibit some particular behavior or quality. The error is obvious to those capable of discerning it: these forms of generalizations are rational ghosts, phantoms that take on reality to our awareness ‘because we believe’ that abstract generalizations are about persons or the world… when they are, instead, actions of a mind that has departed relation in order to tryst, instead, with the shadows projected by the damaged foundations of our linguistic training and habits. What was once a convenience, or instrument, has not become a prison. In truth, a chamber of torture that violates its origins with an authority befitting a god.”

— an intelligence agent