I find myself compelled to derive the categories of things or beings in my awareness. So that, when someone sent me a strange thing, I wanted to know “what” it was; i.e. to what category (set-family) does this object belong?

But then something strange happened, and I became aware of this urge and its dangers. I realized that the compulsion to ‘derive the category” was severely delimiting my awareness, imagination and relationship with the [ no category here ].

This is the sort (category) of thinking I am commonly engaged in; how our relationships with language, knowledge and the categories particularly, impact our potentials for learning, intelligence and awareness. In this case, my rush to ‘derive the category’ became conscious, and once it was, I was able to see with great clarity how it would delimit not merely my relations with the ‘object’ (object | organism is one of the root categorical derivations that precede further specification), but also my capacities for learning, discovery and actual sensing/relation.

I then realized that categorization is a precursor to rendering something into a commodity… to know ‘what it is worth’ or ‘what it is for’, as if things or beings had specific values and uses… yet it is our purposive awareness of the »relationship that is the source for such derivations: change the purpose and the value or function changes with it…

So now, because I am aware, I have an [ x ] that doesn’t collapse into a specific category, even though I am aware that my natural inclination is to derive one. In fact, perhaps more strangely, I have an object that acted within my awareness to draw my attention to the fact that in deriving a category I would be depriving myself of novelty, awareness, and learning-relation.

So, now, I have an object that exists in a superposition of category; I do not know what it is, even though I could frame language as if I did, for the purposes of description or convenience.