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

46 / You Are Not
tag actually represents an abstraction of an abstraction.
I find it amazing that when I label something I see as
apple, something as simple and obvious as that, I am
already at the second level of abstraction. (Korzybski,
Science and Sanity, p.389) (Sawin)
This becomes one of the most extraordinary things. WHAT
“YOU” SEE HAS ALREADY OCCURRED, and, the idea of
“I” chose this or that or “I” created this or that appears after
the experience has already taken place. In other words, the
condensation or water droplet (“I”) that is part of the wave
in the ocean has already hit the beach, when an “I” is formed,
which says “I chose to go to the beach.” In this way, not only
is the past, or what has occurred, the only thing seen by a
nervous system, but also the idea of “I chose this,” “There are
lessons to learn,” “I must have needed this,” etc., etc., appears
with the “I” after the experience has already passed. The illusion
is that the nervous system makes it seem that “you” have
choice and what “you” see is now, when by the time this “you”
is produced and sees—the new is gone and the representation
called “I” sees only what has already happened. In other words,
the produced “I” sees only the past.
Concerning the dots in the label level tag, Korzybski
wrote: We ascribe . . . characteristics to the labels, and
we indicate these characteristics by the little . . . [dots].
The number of characteristics which we ascribe by
definition to the label, is still smaller than the number
of characteristics the object has. (Korzybski, Science and
Sanity, p. 387)
As a practical example, imagine that the first tag represents
the label, “depressed,” then the second tag can represent
a statement like, “depression is bad.”
This is critical to dissecting the lack of “progress” made
in both developing spiritual as well as psychological insight