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This concept also occurs in the discussion of exoteric and esoteric religions. Exoteric concepts are concepts which can be fully conveyed using descriptors and language constructs, such as mathematics. Esoteric concepts are concepts which cannot be fully conveyed except by direct experience. For example, a person who has never tasted an apple will never fully understand through language what the taste of an apple is. Only through direct experience - eating an apple - can that experience be fully understood.
The surrealist artist René Magritte illustrated this concept in a famous painting entitled The Betrayal of Images, which consists of a drawing of a pipe with the caption, Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("This is not a pipe").
Lewis Carroll, in Sylvie and Bruno ( 1889), made a somewhat related point humorously with his description of a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile." A character notes some practical difficulties with such a map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."See also: philosophy of perception, Zen, Discordianism