Don’t mistake words for reality.

The mind alone is the reason for your bondage or liberation.

The professor walked with war veteran’s limp. His name was Alfred Korzybski. Fluent in many languages, he was a Polish polymath who hailed from a family of aristocrats that had produced many scientists, mathematicians and engineers.

He was selling Liberty bonds for Uncle Sam during the World War and lectured Polish-American audiences about the conflict.

One day, he suddenly interrupted his lecture to fish out a packet of biscuits wrapped in white paper from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something and he asked the students seated in the front row if they would also like a biscuit.

A few of them took a biscuit each. “Nice biscuit, don’t you think”, said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students nodded in agreement and began to chew vigorously.

Once he had them eating heartily, Korzybski tore off the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. It had a big picture of a dog’s head above the words “Dog Cookies”. The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to throw up. They covered mouths with their hands and rushed out of the hall towards the toilets.

This extraordinary exercise, Korzybski remarked, was “just a demonstration that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.” He had aimed his prank to illustrate how human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality and reality itself.

Korzybski’s path-breaking ideas went on to influence later projects such as neuro-linguistic programming and Gestalt therapy.

The moral of the story according to Korzybski was: “God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won’t.” Indian sages paraphrased the same sound bytes in a positive light when they said, “Manah eva mannushana karana bandha mokshayo.”