**\#️⃣ Tags:** #Wisdom #TheMind > **🌱 Planted:** Fri 14 February 2025 --- > [!quote] > "The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again." — Krishnamurti Let's say you are playing a video game. We'll go with Grand Theft Auto because it's what popped into my head first and is one many would know. On the screen you see your character moving through the world—driving, running, interacting. Over the top of the game itself, as an overlay, you have information about the game—your health levels, a map and your mission objectives. These elements help you to navigate the game by telling you where to go next and what you need to do, but they are not the game itself. They are abstractions of the game—representations of what happening in the game, but they don't represent the direct experience of the game itself. Our intellectual minds work in this same way as an overlay to reality. While the mind is a powerful tool for navigating our everyday lives and is the very thing that sets us apart from all other life on Earth, it deals in fixed concepts, ideas, and beliefs as representations of reality, which aren't reality itself. In our everyday lives, we mostly experience the world in subject-object polarisations—‘this is me’ and ‘that is the world'. This is the discriminating ability of the mind, which takes the dynamic and fluid nature of life and solidifies it by presenting it as fixed objects. This process is known as **reification**, where the mind takes the contents of our experience and turns it into fixed mental representations. Over time these mental representations filter our perception and shape our experience in accordance with our accumulated knowledge and past memories. As this takes place, it can make it difficult for us to be present in the now because we're instead experiencing a reified mental representation in its place. When we're experiencing reality through the faculties of the mind, we miss the essence of how reality truly is. The moment we name, categorise, or conceptualise something, we no longer experience it directly as it truly is, rather we experience an abstraction of it. --- **🈁 See Also:** - [[Never mistake the finger for the moon]]. - [[We can only know who and what we are through direct experience]]. - [[Object Relations]] describes how we know ourselves through our Self-Concept which is created through internalised mental representations from our past relationships. In this way, our self-concept (or simply the way we see ourselves) works in the same way as the mind overlaying reality with abstractions such as concepts, ideas and beliefs.