You Are Not Book.indb - Stephen H. Wolinsky Ph. D.

The structural differential diagram / 35
Identification (confusing, one level with another), in this case,
is the confusion of “I AM peaceful” as a spiritual quality of
THE SUBSTANCE with THE SUBSTANCE, which is qualityless
and is not. This is a confusing of levels of abstraction.
To summarize: I AM→Label→Description→
Inference-1→ Inference-2→Inference-3→etc.
( “→” = abstracts).
“Everything a person senses about reality is the result
of some energies of the universe being selected by that
person’s nervous system through the sense organs. These
external energies of reality activate internal energy processes
in the sense organs, such ‘ . . . chains of electrical
[nerve] impulses . . . ’ (Gregory, The Intelligent Eye, p. 9)
and these processes are themselves converted to other
sorts of impulses when they are received by the brain.
(Mueller, Sensory Psychology, Ch. 2). The brain takes these
impulses and tries to make sense of them by comparing
them to its memories of similar impulses. (Gregory,
Eye and Brain, p. 13) When it finds a fit, that is when a
person can understand what he is perceiving—I see a
chair, I hear a train, etc. (Pula, General Semantics Seminar,
Tape 102-B) Hayakawa made a good point concerning
this process when he wrote, ‘[A new] experience does
not tell us what it is we are experiencing. Things simply
happen.’ (Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action,
p. 291) The main point I want to emphasize here is
this: Anything a person senses about reality in terms of
lights, colors, sounds, shapes, temperatures, etc., is not
a direct recording of absolute reality. It is the nervous
system’s interpretation of a very limited sample of the
energies of reality. For example, the eye does not simply
record reality. Professor of Bionics, R.L. Gregory, put it
this way: ‘The retina [in the eye] is not merely a layer