An event, or the woven streams of event-ness that we refer to as “reality” can be associated with endless characteristics or features of ‘identity’, meaning, etc. Though there are no ‘divisions’ in time, a ‘moment’ in time is also thus.

We can imagine that only a certain subset of these features are generally available to human perception, a smaller set than this must represent each individual person’s (or moment of such a person’s) ‘reach’ into contact with the features of reality.

In other words, what we call experience abstracts a tiny portion of these accessible features of character and/or meaning from the infinite pool of the event, and we have ‘experience’.

This ‘experience’ abstracts an infinitesimal portion of the event’s actual features, and a smaller portion than is accessible to humans in general, and even a smaller portion than is accessible to me — because there are many accessible features which are either ignored, discarded, or left out. They do not make it ‘across the gap’ between ‘reality’ and ‘experience’. They are accessible, but we are not aware of them.

What we actually abstract from reality into ‘experience’ is usually -a few- features a selection of streams and events. At most. More than 99% is inaccessible. Of the remaining percent, we will usually abstract somewhere between a single feature and fifty features into experience. Usually less than 10.

But this is just the beginning. Because then, we assemble a description or label (a linguistic or semantic abstraction of experience) in which this process of ‘throwing away most of what’s there (when we barely had any to begin with)’ is repeated. The result is a description or term. Language. Stories.

All of this is well and good -if we are aware of this- and the incredible dangers it represents when it becomes unconscious. In proper contexts, this kind of cognitive activity provides peculiar modes of focus, and is profoundly valuable… until it becomes unconscious. What happens then?

The first thing that happens is that the distinction between the description and the experience disappears. They are now held to be equivalent. ‘What happened is what I described’.

There is no longer the awareness that the description is one of endless possible descriptions, each of which is uniquely endowed to communicate specific frameworks of evaluation or perspective. Nor is there any awareness that a description and experience are, in fact, different orders of the real. They cannot be commensurate. Ever.

The difference is analogous to the difference between a sketch and my experience of my hand. You cannot sketch my experience. In fact, it cannot be represented. Representations are, thus, a -convenience of communication- and should not be concretized or confused with experience.

And, of course, the next thing that happens is that the remaining confused conflation of the description and experience is -suddenly substituted for reality itself-. The abstraction — the description — leaps up the ladder of cognition, swallowing first experience — and then -reality-! The tragic victim of this cruel side effect of representational cognition – nearly every representational human who has ever lived here qualifies – is now trapped in a position from whence intelligence and insight are practically impossible.

Many great minds have understood this danger. Alfred Korzybski built a toy called the structural differential to demonstrate it. But consciousness of abstracting, while always practiced in some esoteric branches of spirituality or philosophy (or mathematics) is almost unknown amongst the common people. It is the only antidote to being driven around like cars by verbal descriptions gone tyrannical. And that, in case you are not paying attention, is most of what our species is up to, especially at the order of our collectives and our political consciousness.

Learn this danger, and learn to remain conscious of abstracting. It is, for most of us, an arduous task. It is also one of the rudiments of developing something more like intelligence than 90% of the examples we are being exposed to. Learning this, unlocks your mind’s power to think. Practicing this error is like putting chains on our wings, and paying every price for the privilege.