RE DEFINITIONS

Modernity is a mental construct that alienates us from the body, the senses, and the natural intelligence of life—where the body’s needs are overridden by the mind. It replaces direct experience with abstract concepts, knowing with information, and participation with control. By treating knowledge as a product—external, fixed, and transferable—it disrupts the natural, embodied process of understanding. Modernity imposes a regime of abstraction, separating mind from body, thought from life, and self from world. As a result, the beingness of modern humans becomes linear, fragmented, and hierarchical—no longer rooted in wholeness, but shaped by disconnection and control.

Natural cognition is the embodied process through which living beings make sense of the world. The world is the source, the senses are the tools, experience form the process, and self-organization is how understanding naturally emerges. Abstraction here is non-linguistic and organic—grounded in concrete experience—where pattern recognition, generalization, and categorization arise naturally. While the senses understand the world, the mind understands the word—what the symbol represents. The mind doesn’t lead cognition, but follows and integrates it, translating experience into meaning through language without distorting the original sensory reality. Knowing arises through lived engagement—where experience itself is the ground of learning and meaning.

Learning is the natural process of life, requiring no deliberate action from the knower—only awareness, which is the default state of all living beings. Learning happens in experience, not in instruction. Knowing is innate, emerging as we explore and engage with the world. As biological beings governed by the laws of life, we carry within us bio-physics, bio-mathematics, bio-chemistry—which awaken through context, not language. These forms of intelligence exist outside the realm of words. In contrast, knowledge as a product is a modern invention of literacy. This shift—mistaking stored knowledge for lived knowing—has led to deep self-alienation, even distorting something as basic as parenting.

Abstraction is the capacity to recognize patterns and form generalizations beyond immediate perception. It manifests in two modes: Organic Abstraction and Artificial Abstraction. Organic Abstraction arises from direct sensory engagement and lived experience, where understanding emerges through repeated contact with the world. It remains fluid, contextual, and deeply connected to life, holding abstraction as an extension of the real. In contrast, Artificial Abstraction is built on disembodied reasoning—detached from experience, relying on concepts, symbols, and logic. It reduces and fragments reality into fixed categories, often losing the richness and continuity of life. When taken as truth, it fosters alienation, distorts perception, and disconnects us from the living world.

The modern understanding of embodiment arises from an intellectual pursuit, not from lived bodily experience. Cognition was first framed as a mental activity, and the body entered the conversation only when artificial intelligence required a physical form—thus, the body was “discovered” by the mind, not lived from within. While the body can be a subject of study, it must be approached not as an object, but as the living ground of knowing. Embodiment means being fully present in and through the body, where sensing, feeling, moving, and engaging with the world are the primary modes of understanding. It is through the body that life reveals its intelligence.

Indigeneity is not about geography or ethnicity—it is about rootedness in life, established through the sense. It is the original intelligence of beings who are attuned to their land, their bodies, and the rhythms of nature. An indigenous mind knows not through instruction but through intimate participation. Culture, in this view, is not constructed but lived—emerging from the reciprocal relationship between life and context. Indigeneity embodies wholeness, sufficiency, and trust in the order of life.

Artificial cognition is a constructed, disembodied process rooted in the literate, modern mind. Here, the book or data is the source, the mind is the tool, and reasoning, abstraction, and symbolic manipulation form the process. Understanding is not self-organized through experience, but assembled through external input, imposed concepts, and programmed logic. Abstraction is linguistic and artificial—detached from direct sensory engagement—where categories and meaning are derived from symbols, not lived reality. The mind dominates, while the body is bypassed. Instead of grounding cognition in life, artificial systems translate reality into representations, often replacing experience with models. Meaning is constructed, not discovered, leading to fragmentation, disconnection, and cognition that operates without presence, context, or being.

Creativity is the natural, embodied response to the unknown—the default condition in natural cognition. Rooted in the body and guided by context, creativity expresses life’s intelligence in action—revealing what is appropriate, beautiful, or necessary – not novelty unlike in modernity. The organism doesn’t “think up” something; it discovers and enacts what is necessary in the moment. Creativity here is biological, contextual, and emergent—a life process, not a mental achievement. In this sense, creativity is living intelligence in action. In contrast, modern notions of creativity reduce it to the mental manipulation of the known—a product of reasoning, imagination, and symbolic recombination. Here, creativity is abstract and performative, disconnected from lived experience.

Cognitive dissonance is the internal conflict that arises when the body and mind engage with different realities—not merely a clash between two thoughts. While the body choicelessly experiences the world through the senses, the mind—conditioned by schooling—focuses on abstract inputs from books and authority. This creates a split between lived experience and imposed knowledge, where the mind overrides the body’s natural intelligence, drawn by the certainty of external authority. The result is a fragmented self. Modern educated individuals live predominantly in the mind—physically present, but mentally absent—disconnected from their senses, surroundings, and the intelligence of life.

The usage – experiential learning – reveals the fact that modernity has neither understood experience nor learning. This is an oxymoron, as it implies the existence of non-experiential learning, which is absurd. The first truth is: we are always in experience, so learning can only happen in experience—there is no other way. Experience is the body’s direct, continuous encounter with the world—not passive, but an active engagement, a living dialogue between self and context. It precedes words and concepts, and is the ground from which all true understanding arises. Sensory, relational, and embodied, experience transforms us not by accumulation, but by integration. What we experience is what we truly know.

Culture is the living interface between humans and the world—a way of responding to life, not separating from it. It is not invented but emerges from deep, participatory relationships with nature. True culture arises when values are discovered through context, and life is lived with open senses and embodied presence. It expresses life’s intelligence through language, tools, and ritual. Indigenous cultures support this unfolding of natural intelligence. In contrast, modern systems condition rather than awaken. They engineer the mind instead of nourishing being. Within modernity, what we call culture is often better understood as mental engineering.

Artificial Intelligence is an extension of the computational cognitive system—a mechanical simulation of intelligence rooted in literate modernity. It depends on readymade data inputs and operates through artificial abstraction, representation, and algorithmic logic, entirely detached from lived experience. Unlike natural cognition, where understanding arises through direct engagement, self-organization, and the intelligence of life, AI processes information without presence, context, or being. It mimics intelligence by manipulating symbols and patterns, but lacks intuition, emotion, biological grounding, and the wholeness of embodied knowing. What it performs is not understanding, but simulation—constructed from the outside, rather than discovered from within.

Natural reasoning is the organic process by which the body organizes sensory input into coherent understanding. It is an unconscious, self-organizing function of life. Learning a mother tongue is a clear example—where scattered sensory and auditory inputs are internally integrated without instruction, enabling the child to speak fluently by age four or five. In contrast, modern reasoning is a conscious, language-based activity, shaped by literate schooling. It relies on abstract logic, symbols, and linear thought—disconnected from sensory experience. When language becomes the foundation of cognition, reasoning shifts from being a biological function to a mental construct imposed from outside.

The mind’s takeover of cognition fundamentally disrupted beauty—reducing it to an intellectual, conceptual pursuit called art, centered on self-expression. Cognition and beauty are two sides of the same coin: cognition enables the knowing of what, while beauty guides how to act—economizing action and ensuring harmony, appropriateness, and the absence of waste. Beauty is biologically embedded—an expression of the body’s natural intelligence, reflecting life’s logic: efficient, fitting, and alive. In indigenous cultures, cognition and beauty unfold naturally through the senses, shaping a holistic beingness. When this unity is broken—as in literate societies—knowing becomes mechanical, beauty becomes conceptual, the senses are dulled, and human beings become alienated from life.

Superstition is a belief or practice disconnected from direct experience and carried forward without understanding. It arises when symbolic meanings—once rooted in lived context—are repeated mechanically, severed from their original function and environment. In traditional cultures, what modernity dismisses as superstition often had biological, social, or ecological grounding, aligned with the logic of life. Ironically, modern education mass-produces superstitious minds by training students to accept linguistic information disguised as knowledge or science, without lived verification. Today, superstition reappears as blind trust in scientific authority, data, and abstraction. Textualized education has become the new colonizer, replacing religious superstition with scientific superstition, and belief with conditioning.