Concept And Experience
There is a contrast between concept and experience.
Concept is defined as ideas, or stories, that are fundamental building blocks of principles, thoughts, and beliefs. Whenever you are thinking, you are in the world of concept. Concepts are not of the moment, even though you are thinking in the moment. The stories we hold about our past are all concepts, as are the fears, hopes, and plans we have about the future. When you start to investigate your inner landscape, you will find that most of your attention is involved in concepts.
Experience is in the now. It is the direct perception of what is happening in this moment. But upon investigation, our experiences are quickly interpreted within the vast array of concepts that make up our description of who we are. For example, I look outside and see one of our cats perched on the cat condo. The direct physical experience of perception is immediately framed as “outside” and “cat,” which are concepts that give me definition in relationship to my ongoing reality.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this process, but it is important to notice that we experience in the moment and conceptualize outside the moment. If we aren’t paying attention, we can mistake the concept we create for the experience that initiated it, and believe they are the same thing. It is in the experience that we engage reality, but it is in concept that we create our understanding of reality.
This can work in reverse as well. I am a woodworker, and make things. I am strongly rooted in the conceptual, and carefully visualize what I want to make, and plan out the details and sequence of construction. However, when I have completed my project, I sit and observe what has been created, because the reality of the piece is different for the conceptual plan and vision that guided my work. In that moment, I experience the piece rather than the concept that guided it coming into existence.
Experience is the natural domain of most living beings. One of the transformative steps in the evolution of modern humans was the development of language, which was the beginning of concept. Language is abstract sounds, given conceptual meaning within the group that speaks that language. Writing of language came much later, and was just as transformative a step as speaking. The first writings were very limited, and were often just stylized pictorial representations. Alphabetic writing systems were another step into concept, as the individual letters no longer had any relationship to the words they convey, but the simplicity of the system allowed an explosion of literacy within the society. Writing allowed wisdom gained from experience in the moment to be shared across space and time, but it deepened the immersion of humanity into concept, and allowed a distancing from experience.
Humanity is now so steeped in concept that people can believe they know something about reality because they have embraced a detailed concept. However, the experience of breaking a bone is quite different from the concept of breaking a bone. There is a relationship, but they are not equivalent. The conceptual portion of the brain is good at discerning differences and sequences, which are essential for gathering meaning from the written words. But it is easy to mistakenly generalize such differences to the larger world, with possibly disastrous consequences. For example, President Reagan said “if you have seen one redwood tree, you have seen them all,” conflating his limited concept of a redwood tree to the reality of all redwood trees.
Another significant conceptual obsession was the creation of money, which allowed an expansion of trade by creating a concept of value that could be easily shared within the community that agreed with the concept, even though money has no inherent worth. These days, most money doesn’t even exist in physical form. But civilization is willing to sacrifice all real values for more of this concept, to the point of killing real people and the entire planet.
Concept is a shallow reflection of the reality of experience. It is a powerful tool, which has allowed humanity to out compete all other species, and expand across the planet to unprecedented scale. But we have lost touch with the natural world that we arise from, and still depend upon.