How do we experience reality? Your lived experience can seem like a muddled and confusing mess. This model presents three interpenetrating aspects of your experience. Paying attention to them will help you to explore how you construct both your Self and the World.

Thoughts (Abstract Intellectual)

As you move through the world, you generate models of what is happening and will happen. Thoughts are conscious or pre-conscious explanations of the Self, others, and the world that can be expressed in language. The level of thoughts operates according to propositions and analyses.

Symbols (Imaginal)

Emotions and images mediate between the conscious and unconscious aspects of your awareness. The level of felt sense is a visceral experience of "how things work" and "what things are like", a sense that in itself is neither words nor sensations. You can pull this up into thoughts, steer it toward pleasure and enjoyment, or deconstruct it into its component parts by watching sensations as they appear and change.

Sensation (Concrete Physical)

Your body gives you information about your current physical state. In its most basic form, the level of sensation is the sensory-motor experience of pleasure and pain. By carefully attending to sensations, you experience the ever-changing process underway in your nervous system.

Cultivating Personal Wisdom