“I have given everything I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] all the meaning that it has for me.”
Have you ever noticed that when your friend John shows you his new car you suddenly begin to see those cars everywhere? Where were they before? They were there, weren’t they? They were but you didn’t see them. I know what you are thinking. “I had to have seen them otherwise I would have hit them.” If you really delve into this phenomenon you will realize that what we call seeing is merely our interpretation of a stimulus. The cars had no meaning until we gave them one. Now they resembled John’s car. Once given meaning they suddenly appeared.
Have you ever noticed that when we “see” an event for the first time we pause? It takes time to assign a meaning to something. We may even ask a friend for help. “What did you make of that?” We have to add it to the data base. The next time it happens we won’t pause. We don’t think of it as what is happening now we equate it with what happened then.
It’s the same thing with a new smell. “Do you notice how you keep sniffing?” Like you’ve got to figure it out? Then when we smell it again we know. “Wow, that smells just like John’s new car!”
I could go on forever with this. We associate all stimuli with an experience that has happened. We even recreate the emotions that we were feeling at the time.
EVERTHING! So what does that mean?
