THE ATLAS OF THE REALITY TUNNEL

Alfred Korzybski

Korzybski

nature

Polish aristocrat, artillery officer, engineer, and — after the First World War convinced him that humanity kept killing itself with its own abstractions — the founder of General Semantics. He wrote two enormous books and built a wooden apparatus, and spent his life insisting on one distinction that everyone agrees with in principle and violates in every sentence.

Everything downstream in this corpus is a variation on his single axiom. Bateson carried it into therapy, Bandler and Grinder built a toolkit from it, Wilson turned it into cosmology.

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

rhymes with

sephirahhod

whyHod is the sephirah of language, form and splendour — the place where the world becomes sayable, and where the saying starts to be mistaken for the thing.