From Experience to Belief -  When We Begin to Defend the Translation

When Words Begin to Trap Us

In the previous text, we followed the moment when a feeling finds a name.

Something happens in the Body-Territory. We try to perceive it. We search for a word. We say "fear," "love," "injustice," "abandonment," "God," "freedom."

But we rarely stop there.

After the name, we begin to tell a story.

Perhaps we can notice this in a simple situation.

Someone important to us does not reply to a message.

First, there is the event:

the reply did not arrive.

Then something happens within us.

The body changes. Our attention returns to the phone. Discomfort appears.

We find words:

"I am anxious."

Soon a sentence appears:

"They are avoiding me."

Then an explanation:

"They do this because they do not care about me."

And perhaps, sometime later, a broader belief:

"People always abandon me."

We can travel an enormous distance without noticing.

experience -> feeling -> word -> sentence -> explanation -> belief

What is curious is that each stage can seem like a natural continuation of the one before it.

But they are not exactly the same thing.

The phone really did remain unanswered.

The discomfort really did happen.

But "they are avoiding me" is already an interpretation.

"People always abandon me" is something larger still: one possible way of organizing different events across a lifetime.

The question we want to keep with us is simple:

Am I defending what I lived, or the words I found to explain what I lived?

Every translation adds something

When we translate an experience into words, we gain a great deal.

We can communicate it.

We can think about it.

We can compare it with other experiences.

We can ask for help.

We can remember it.

But translation is never merely transportation.

By choosing certain words, we highlight some relationships and leave others in the background.

Agustín Ibáñez and colleagues, in a 2023 consensus paper on embodied language, draw attention precisely to the variability in the relationship between words, sensorimotor experiences, individual differences, and context. Linguistic meaning does not appear as a rigid reproduction of previous experiences. It is flexible and sensitive to personal history and to the situation in which language is being used.

Perhaps this can help us think about our own explanations.

"They abandoned me."

"I failed."

"That was an injustice."

"God answered me."

"I am not made for this."

These formulations may be important.

They may even prove to be very appropriate.

But there is a difference between recognizing their usefulness and transforming them into the event itself.

Perhaps we could quietly add two words:

"My interpretation, for now, is..."

Something changes when we do that.

We do not need to deny our experience.

We simply return the explanation to its condition as an explanation.

Patañjali was already suspicious of what words can construct

Long before contemporary neuroscience or psychology, Patañjali's Yogasūtra distinguished different movements of consciousness.

In Lilian Cristina Gulmini's translation and analysis, sutra 1.9 describes vikalpa, translated as "composition," as something produced through verbal knowledge that may not correspond to an object existing in physical reality.

Gulmini emphasizes that the concept does not refer only to fantasy. It also includes constructions made possible by linguistic thought itself.

This deserves careful reading.

Patañjali was not saying that words are false.

Without language, we would struggle to construct concepts such as "infinity," "nothingness," "democracy," "justice," and countless others that greatly expand our world.

What matters to us is something else:

The mind can construct through words something that does not need to be directly present before it.

This ability is a human power.

But precisely because it is so powerful, a verbal construction can acquire enough consistency that we begin to treat it as though it were the very object it was meant to explain.

The description stops looking like a description.

It begins to look like reality.

"Be skeptical, but learn to listen"

This is where the Fifth Agreement, presented by Don Miguel Ruiz and Don José Ruiz, meets our discussion.

Its formulation is:

"Be skeptical, but learn to listen."

In Ruiz's presentation of the principle, skepticism does not mean rejecting everything we hear. It means not automatically granting words the status of truth, while remaining open to what another person is trying to communicate.

Perhaps we can first apply this agreement to ourselves.

Listen to our own sentence.

"They do not like me."

And then ask:

Did that happen?

Or is this my best translation at this moment?

We do not need to answer immediately.

Perhaps the exercise is precisely not to destroy the sentence, while also not completely obeying it.

Listen to it.

Try it.

And remain available to what still does not fit inside it.

Categories are necessary - and someone is always left at the border

Danilo Silva Guimarães offers an especially important image for this discussion.

When discussing identities and social classifications, he observes that categories are necessary for organizing feelings, thoughts, and actions. But he also shows that language divides reality and creates boundaries.

Whenever we create a category, regions appear where that category does not fit perfectly.

His discussion of the category "pardo" in Brazil is revealing. A classification created to organize population information can also conceal histories of belonging that disappear when someone is required to choose only one alternative.

Guimarães draws attention to people who remain precisely in these border regions and to the danger of rigid conceptions of truth eliminating ambiguities that continue to exist in experience.

Perhaps we do something similar to ourselves.

"I am shy."

"I am strong."

"I am anxious."

"I am conservative."

"I am progressive."

"I am religious."

"I am rational."

A word can help us say something important about ourselves.

But does everything we might still become continue to fit inside it?

Célia Xakriabá offers an interesting counterpoint in speeches published in 2023. Her political expression moves through territory, ancestry, body, language, poetry, and belonging, refusing a simple separation between these dimensions.

The publication even preserves particular features of Xakriabá Portuguese instead of correcting the speech entirely into formal standard Portuguese.

Perhaps some experiences need to remain larger than the category we use to present them.

When an explanation encounters authority

Today, neuroimaging also allows us to observe small fragments of this process.

A study published in 2026 used fNIRS to monitor prefrontal activity while participants judged true and false information accompanied by fact-checks attributed to sources with different levels of institutional authority.

The perceived authority of the source altered both behavioral judgments and prefrontal hemodynamic patterns.

Under some conditions, sources perceived as more authoritative facilitated acceptance. Under others, lower authority appeared to increase vigilance when participants encountered false information.

The relationship was not simple.

The study does not demonstrate that a belief is merely prefrontal activity.

Nor can we look at a brain and discover "the truth" a person believes.

But it offers a relevant clue:

We do not evaluate sentences only through their content. The context in which a sentence reaches us also participates in how we process it.

Who said it?

My father?

My teacher?

My group?

A physician?

A religious leader?

A scientific institution?

Someone I love?

A sentence can arrive already accompanied by trust, long before we have verified what it claims.

And then we begin to defend the translation

Perhaps this is the decisive point.

An explanation was useful.

It organized a confusing experience.

It reduced uncertainty.

It was confirmed by the group.

It began to participate in other experiences.

After some time, it no longer feels like a hypothesis.

It simply feels like:

"This is how it is."

And when someone questions the sentence, we may feel as though they are questioning what we lived.

But perhaps they are not.

Perhaps they are questioning only one of the possible translations we constructed for what we lived.

That difference preserves something precious.

We can say:

"What I lived was real for me."

And also:

"I can continue investigating what it means."

One does not destroy the other.

Perhaps maturity is not having definitive explanations for our experiences.

Perhaps it is being able to use explanations that are good enough for living and acting, without preventing new encounters from changing them.

We can return, then, to our opening question:

Am I defending what I lived, or the words I found to explain what I lived?

Perhaps we cannot answer immediately.

And perhaps that is a good thing.

Because while the answer remains slightly open, reality still preserves the possibility of surprising us.

And our words remain tools.

They have not yet become walls.

Main References

GUIMARÃES, Danilo Silva. Identidades fixas não descrevem as experiências de muitas pessoas e produzem apagamentos históricos. Jornal da USP, 2025.

IBÁÑEZ, Agustín et al. Ecological Meanings: A Consensus Paper on Individual Differences and Contextual Influences in Embodied Language. Journal of Cognition, 2023.

XAKRIABÁ, Célia; RODRIGUES, Ana Paula. A política e a poética de Célia Xakriabá: três discursos da primeira deputada indígena eleita por Minas Gerais (2022). Mana, 2023.

CHENG, Shuhua; YANG, Xinyue; DING, Yi. Authority Reliance vs. Deliberative Assessment in Processing Online Rumors: Evidence from fNIRS. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2026.

RUIZ, Don Miguel; RUIZ, Don José; MILLS, Janet. The Fifth Agreement: A Practical Guide to Self-Mastery. Amber-Allen Publishing, 2010. Although published before 2021, it is retained as the direct conceptual reference for the Fifth Agreement.

PATAÑJALI. Yogasūtra, sutra 1.9, in Lilian Cristina Gulmini's translation and analysis. Historical source retained for its specific contribution to the concept of vikalpa as a composition made possible through verbal cognition.