Language is powerful, but it is not literal reality.

A literalist relationship to language—treating words as if they directly describe what is—quietly distorts our experience of the world. Words break wholeness into pieces, replace immediacy with abstraction, and introduce ideas that don’t actually appear in direct experience.

Consider a few everyday examples:

We speak as if places exist “here” and “there.” Yet no matter where you go, you never experience “there.” You always and only experience here. “There” is a useful concept for navigation, but it is never lived.

We talk about time as “past” and “future.” But experience itself only happens now. Memories arise now. Anticipations arise now. The past and future exist as thoughts—not as lived realities.

We know scientifically that the Earth revolves once a day. Yet our direct experience is not of a rotating planet—it is of the sun rising and setting. The scientific explanation is accurate, but it replaces lived experience with abstraction. In this instance, the explanation is more accurate, but one it must be weighed against the myriad aspects of what language cannot express.