It is popular these days to talk about the ways language construct reality, slicing it up in a particular way and creating objects, relationships, characteristics of both, and more.
When I explore the sense fields, I see that language is doing this, but I also find another layer which is equally important: the wordless activities of the mental field. And these do the same.
I find images, and these are an overlay of boundaries on each of the sense fields, they serve as a source and fuel for language and discursive thought, they combine with activities in each sense field to create the appearances of gestalts, and much more.
It seems that language informs these images, including where boundaries go. But these images certainly inform language as well. There is an activity in the sense fields, an image of a singing bird overlaid on the sound field, and this can inform discursive thought about a bird singing, and also other activities of our human self such as walking over to the window to take a look.
Seeing this overlay, it is pretty clear that it is arbitrary. Boundaries can go anywhere. What happens in the sense fields can be sliced in innumerable ways. Yet since its only function is to help our human self live in the world, we tend to do it in the ways that are most functional, and this is determined in part by our particular culture and individual circumstances.
Of course, we can also go into stories about all of this. We can tell ourselves that language early on in our life helped informed where the boundaries go, including the wordless image ones. And that these images then helps support language, and serve as a guide and material for discursive thoughts. And that where the boundaries tend to habitually go, the relationships of the objects that emerge, and the characteristics of both, have infinite causes, stretching out to the extent of the universe and back to the beginning of the universe – going through the habits of this universe, the characteristics of this solar system and this living planet, the evolutionary history of this species, culture, individual experiences, and more.
All of that may be quite helpful and functional, but it is also good to see that those are just stories. Just other activities of the same mental field, constructing a partly imagined reality.