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File Drawers and Direct Experience

Usually we try to understand the world by organizing our knowledge and experience of it into a complex mental reference system. This reference system can be referred to as our “View of the World.” This categorization process begins when we have an experience. While we are engrossed in the experience, we subconsciously begin to categorize the details of it into our reference system. Whether the experience is of a culture, a type of person, or a place, categorization involves an inevitable comparison to similar past events. We then try to evaluate the experience based on these comparisons in order to file the present experience into our reference system. Categorizing our experiences and packing them safely into ...

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