The Record Album In Your Mind Has Grooves

In 1980, a physicist sat with a sentence most people wouldn’t think twice about: “It is raining.”

He asked a simple question about it. Where, exactly, is the “it”? What is the “it” that’s doing the raining? There’s no thing out there called “it”—just water falling. His own fix: it would be more accurate to say “rain is going on.” No phantom subject. Just the process, named directly, with nothing invented to satisfy English grammar’s demand for something to do the verb.

David Bohm wasn’t looking for a grammar lesson. He was trying to solve a problem in physics—why quantum mechanics kept producing paradoxes that seemed to defy logic. His answer, worked out over years of collaboration with students at Krishnamurti’s Brockwood Park School: maybe the paradoxes weren’t in the universe. Maybe they were built into the sentences physicists used to describe it. Maybe language itself was creating the paradox.

A very similar paradox shows up much closer to home. Let’s look at an example: would you say you believe in personal responsibility—that you’re in charge of your own choices and your own reactions? I’m guessing you’d say yes. But later I might overhear you say something like “he ruined my day.” Look at that sentence the way Bohm looked at the rain: you’re handing your entire day over to someone else’s control. So—at times, do other people determine the quality of your day? If you say yes to that question too, notice that this answer cancels the belief in personal responsibility you very likely claimed a moment earlier. Nobody planned this contradiction. It’s just sitting inside the grammar, the same way the phantom rainer was sitting inside “it is raining.”

A natural way out is to say: most of the time I’m responsible, but sometimes people really do ruin my day. That sounds like it settles things, but look closer. It doesn’t remove the contradiction—it just makes it occasional. There’s no way to tell in advance which days count as the exception. The only sign is that a day already feels ruined—and “he ruined it” is simply the sentence that shows up next, automatically, without anyone pausing to ask why.

Bohm tried building a whole language to fix this habit at the root—a language built around movement instead of things—and called it the rheomode, from the Greek rheo, “to flow.” It didn’t fully work. In practice, the people trying to speak it kept turning his new verbs back into nouns anyway—reaching for the illusion of solid ground, even in a language built to deny there was any. The lesson wasn’t that the insight was wrong. It was that asking people to learn a whole new vocabulary, and use it in ordinary conversation, was too big an ask.

There’s another way to work with the same insight—one that doesn’t require anyone to learn new words. That’s what SAGE does: a psychological framework built around this same pattern, in how people use language to make meaning and communicate. Underneath the grammar, Bohm and SAGE were circling the same question: whether one thing actually causes another, or whether language just makes it look that way.

Ordinary English assumes something happened out there, and it produced a feeling in here, the way one billiard ball hitting a second one explains why the second one moves. He did something, so I felt something—a straight line, cause to effect. But a feeling doesn’t get produced the way a billiard ball’s motion does. A billiard ball doesn’t interpret anything before it moves—force hits it, and it moves, nothing in between. A feeling isn’t that direct. What actually sits between the event and the feeling is interpretation—the meaning a person makes of what happened—and that interpretation gets built out of language, fast, automatically, usually before anyone notices they built anything at all. Two people can watch the exact same thing happen and walk away with two completely different feelings about it. The event didn’t determine the feeling. The meaning made of the event did. Grammar just makes it look like a straight causal line—he did X, so I felt Y—when what’s actually happening is closer to: X happened, then a meaning got made of it, in language, in an instant, and the feeling followed the meaning, not the event.

Bohm worked at the scale of physics, trying to rebuild the vocabulary of an entire discipline. SAGE works at a much smaller scale—one sentence at a time, about one moment, in one person’s mouth. Three ways to describe the exact same event:

“He made me furious.” “I got furious.” “I made myself furious.”

Nothing about the event changed across those three sentences. Only the groove changed—and with it, what seems possible to do next. Sometimes what’s possible is simply catching the old sentence mid-flight and reaching for another one instead.

People can catch themselves and lay down a different sentence all the time—I see it happen regularly, in ordinary conversation, once someone learns SAGE. It doesn’t matter how long the old sentence has been in use. Someone who uses expressions such as “he made me furious” for decades can still catch it mid-sentence and swap in something else. The old sentence is a groove worn in by repetition. Worn in doesn’t mean permanent.

The switch from “he made me furious” to “I got furious” is real progress, but it still describes fury as something that happened to the person, rather than something the person did. The fuller version—“I made myself furious”—treats the feeling as something the person is doing, even if automatically. It’s also usually the version people resist hardest. That resistance makes sense: “made” sounds like it’s assigning blame, like admitting fault. But using SAGE isn’t the same as assigning blame. Nobody chooses, in advance, to make themselves furious. The sentence isn’t a verdict about what a person should have done differently. It’s just a more accurate account of where the feeling actually came from—not from the other person, but from the meaning made, in the moment, of what the other person did.

That’s the same insight Bohm chased in physics grammar, brought down to where a person actually lives. And here's the part worth sitting with, not skimming past: SAGE’s move is more modest than Bohm’s, but that modesty doesn’t cap how profound a change it can bring about if it spread. Most of what shapes a person’s suffering doesn’t happen in a considered, reflective moment—it happens in the first automatic sentence, milliseconds before any reflection has a chance to weigh in. “He made me furious” isn’t a conclusion someone reasons their way to. It’s already there, doing its work, before the person notices. That’s exactly the level SAGE is aimed at — not persuading someone, after the fact, to reinterpret a feeling they’ve already locked into a story, but catching the sentence at the moment it’s forming the story in the first place. That kind of shift is easy to miss from the outside—nothing visible happens, even though something real just changed on the inside. It’s also, for the same reason, closer to where the actual trouble starts than most approaches ever reach.

Picture a record on a turntable. Do you remember those? Most records have one groove—a single spiral, start to finish. Set the needle down anywhere on it and you’ll hear the same song, just starting from a different point in that same song.

But there’s another way a record can be pressed: two separate grooves, cut side by side into the same disc, one just outside the other. Where the needle drops decides which recording plays—not two spots in one song, but two different songs, pressed onto the same piece of vinyl.

English works like that second kind of record. Nobody had to invent a new word for “I made myself furious.” That sentence was already sitting there in ordinary English, cut into the record the whole time—right next to “he made me furious,” close enough that a person could reach either one without ever noticing the other groove was there. The alternative isn’t hypothetical, waiting to be built. It’s already grooved into the language a person already speaks. It just takes a hand—lifting the needle off the groove worn smooth by habit and setting it down one groove over.

SAGE gives a name to the two grooves already cut into ordinary English: outside-in, when a sentence points the cause of a feeling away from the speaker, and inside-out, when it points back at the speaker. Naming them is what makes it possible to notice, in real time, which groove just produced a sentence—and to move the needle before the next one plays.

“It is raining,” English says, reaching for a rainer that was never there. Bohm’s answer: there’s no rainer. Just rain going on. “It is upsetting,” a person says, reaching the same way—for someone out there doing it to them. SAGE’s answer goes a half-step further than Bohm’s: there’s no one out there upsetting you. There’s an event, and there’s the meaning being made of it, in real time, largely without anyone noticing they’re the one making it—the needle finding the groove it always finds, unless a hand reaches in and moves it.

If you’d like to go deeper into the world of SAGE, we invite you to download our recent paper, The Overview Effect in Psychology:

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