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Here's a detailed, thoughtful elaboration for a Substack post on the topic:
Consciousness, God, and the Analog Nature of Perception vs. the Symbolism of Language
We live in symbols. But we perceive in sensations. This basic tension—between what we experience and how we communicate—lies at the heart of consciousness, spirituality, and even the perennial human search for God. In this post, I want to unpack how perception is analog, language is symbolic, and what this means for our relationship with truth, divinity, and ourselves.
1. The Analog Nature of Perception
Perception is not digital. It doesn’t happen in discrete, labeled packets. It’s fluid, continuous, and immersive.
When you gaze at a sunset, you don’t see “#FF5733” or “horizon line.” You perceive a flow of color, warmth, depth—a kind of living gradient. When you hear a symphony, it doesn’t break itself into “C-sharp” and “G-major.” The music washes over you. It happens to you, like weather.
This analog nature of perception is foundational to what it means to be conscious. Before we ever name a thing, we feel it. Infants live almost entirely in this pre-linguistic state—sensation without division. Arguably, so do animals. And maybe, so does God.
2. Language as Symbolic Abstraction
Language is a compression algorithm. It takes rich, continuous experience and flattens it into symbols—words, signs, syntax. It maps the territory but is never the territory itself.
To say “love” is to point at something massive, complex, and dynamic—and reduce it to a four-letter sound. Useful? Of course. Precise? Almost never.
Language is what allows us to build civilizations. But it's also what separates us from the raw immediacy of experience. The moment you name a thing, you start to cut it off from its full reality.
This is why mystics in almost every tradition—from Taoism to Christianity—speak of God as something beyond words. Lao Tzu opens the Tao Te Ching with:
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
Language filters reality. But perception lives reality.
3. Consciousness: The Theater of Meaning
Now here’s where it gets strange and beautiful. Consciousness is the arena in which these two worlds—analog perception and symbolic language—meet.
You feel something (analog), then try to think about it (symbolic).
You hear a piece of music that brings you to tears. Later, you try to explain it—and find yourself fumbling, flattening, failing. This is not a bug; it’s the human condition.
Consciousness, then, is not just awareness. It’s the ongoing attempt to reconcile the infinite flow of reality with the finite symbols we use to grasp it.
4. God as the Ultimate Unsymbolizable
In many mystical traditions, God is not a being, but Being itself—the unfiltered, undivided Whole. If that's the case, then God can only be perceived, not described. God is apprehended in silence, in awe, in presence—not in doctrine.
The analog nature of perception allows us to touch this infinite. Not with words, but with wonder.
Language is necessary for community and survival. But it often becomes a wall, rather than a window, when it comes to the divine.
This is why the mystic falls silent. Why the Zen master answers a question with a slap. Why poetry gets closer to truth than prose.
5. The Crisis of Modern Consciousness
Much of our current existential dislocation may stem from over-indexing on symbolic systems—algorithms, ideologies, digital abstractions—at the expense of the analog richness of direct experience.
We scroll, but we don’t feel.
We tweet, but we don’t touch.
We name, classify, categorize—and wonder why we feel distant from life.
To return to God, or to ourselves, we may not need more information—but deeper attention. More silence. More perception. Less symbol.
Closing Thought
Maybe God is not a word, but a frequency.
Not a noun, but a verb.
Not something we speak—but something we feel, in that vast analog silence before language begins.
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