“To know something, we must be able to recognize it. So, too, to understand it. In this sense, prior to understanding or recognition, me must have some schema by which we distinguish, encharacter, and categorize something. This is a stranger and more complex situation than we ordinarily imagine. These processes have to do with what I call metaphication; the inner establishment of a constellation of likenesses, unlikenesses, reflections, connotations, qualities, potentials, features, functions, forms, and frameworks. They also involve how something comes to belong to a category of being or experience.

I noticed long ago that it seemed difficult or impossible to remember some experiences which were so apparently novel or unlike common expectation as to establish a new class or form of member. This might include such experiences as an automobile accident or other injury, skydiving, breathing underwater, driving a motor vehicle, one’s first orgasm, some forms of dream, reverie, or psychedelic experience, some forms of intoxication, and so on. It seemed to me that, the initial experience, usually unavailable to consciousness or only partly available, imprinted the highly structured ‘seed’ of a kind of template like primitive upon consciousness, which would later expand or grow into both the way of recognizing and participating consciously in the phenomenon and a vehicle for its storage manipulation and elaboration in memory.

I still think something like this, what has changed was that my initial model was primarily about memory. I now realize it must also include experience. For many things, we need something like a translation matrix which first allows us to represent the experience or situation in consciousness meaningfully, and then opens memory to use for these new or peculiar experiences whose novelty demands they not be treated as ordinary, and yet which must be brought under the aegis of conscious awareness and manipulation in order to give answer to their otherwise anomalous psychc status.”

— an anonymous observer of the evolution of consciousness