On Experience Merging into Meaning |
An impression often arrives with texture before it has words.
Much conscious experience begins beneath awareness, partly formed by memory, emotion, and bodily sensation.
The movement from felt sense to thought involves noticing, sensing, connecting, and meaning "clicking".
Attention is a tool; attention to attention itself gives a measure of sway.
The other week, visiting family, I was driving past a highway exit sign signaling towns from my archeological past. A swirling array of experiences ensued, not distracting but engaging. They were neither memories nor fully-formed ideas or words. They were more like a texture or shape, a somatosensory moment tied to a spiderweb-pinwheel of impressions: the feel of one town, layered with feelings from different stages of life, present in awareness as a splintered whole, before anything fully alighted.
Had I tried to write down what just arrived, I would have to spin it up out of something that was not yet verbal at all. Like forcing an interpretation on a fresh dream.
Most of what we know, we know first by feel. An impression about a place, a name, a person, or a problem often arrives with sensory and emotional texture before it has words. It may be layered, organized, and meaningful before it is explainable. This is not failed thinking. It is experience in one of its native forms: the mind before symbolization, if symbolization ever arrives at all.
Beneath conscious experience is a deeper layer of activity we do not perceive directly. Most of what becomes conscious begins........