When I say, "Ball" something comes to mind for you, doesn't it? That could be a baseball, a soccer ball, or a basketball. Perhaps you even see it in your mind's eye. Perhaps you recall a specific ball you either currently have in your possession and use or used to play with at some time in your past.

Maybe the ball is currently right in front of you, or maybe it's absent physically, not present to your perception but only present to you because you can remember and call it back to your awareness.

When we experience things, generally speaking, we can do that in one of two ways. We can either have a direct interaction with something through our senses, and then we call that a function of perception, or something appears to us through our use of language and our ability to conceptualize.

Technically, the object that appears to us in either case is known philosophically as a noema. When noemata appear to us through our senses, we can call these perceptual noemata, but when something comes to us through language or reflection, that is a higher order of consciousness known as a categorial noema.

Thus, experience itself can either be of something currently present or of something conceived but physically absent and only present to us categorially. Further, categorial noemata can be concepts and situations just as easily as they can be concrete objects and people.

This latter experience, by the way, is what takes place when a person experiences what we might call "Biblical faith." In such faith one has the proof of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen.

That is, a person is presented with a concept, a potential, or a precept and the fullness of it, the reality of it, the PRESENCE of it is experienced in the absence of the physical perception or appropriation in question. As such, faith becomes the principle by which noemata are experienced phenomenologically.

These noemata are objects of our intentionality. Intentionality is another technical and philosophical term, and it indicates the "aboutness" of our focus in life, not merely the idea of purpose. Thus, when you have an emotion, it is about something.

I encounter this often with my clients who are depressed, and I say to them, "Your depression is about something." Thus, our feelings, our emotions are about the important things in our lives, and they actually help us to pay attention, to orient, and to organize around those things that matter the most.

Let me bring some of this together in a very natural and real way. Hopefully, you will follow.

This morning my wife and I went out to Warwick Long Bay. The sunlight hit the horizon out on the open sea in beams shooting down from the sky through breaks in the clouds. The clouds were billowy and thick but scattered, and they were various shades of grey. The beach was deserted, and we walked down to where the dry sand gave way to wet. The water was choppy and the surf was rolling onto the beach. As we stood there in the quiet of the early morning, two things happened which I regarded as remarkable.

First, a man rode up on his bike, parked it and walked down toward us. At first I did not recognize him. He had his bathing suit and a loose fit shirt on.

That was about it. His hair was all mussed up, and he had not shaved. He looked a bit crusty and slightly sun burnt. As he got closer I saw whom it was. What was at first present to me as a stranger and some early morning denizen became revealed to me as a man of prominence - a member of one of the more distinguished and eminent families in Bermuda.

I said, "Hello" and introduced him to my wife. That's when he recognized me as well, and he said, "At first I didn't know you with your long hair."

As we were standing there, this man looked over our shoulder to announce the presentation of the second remarkable noema. He asked, "Is that your ball?"

There, about fifty metres down the beach came rolling with the wind a yellow, green, blue, and transparent beach ball about one meter in diameter. It was rolling with some velocity, and my wife caught it.

We all stood there contemplating the mystery of the run-away ball; it seemed like a sign or a signal of something more significant, and we decided to let it go free. So, Linda dropped it onto the sand, and the wind caught it and rolled it all the way down to some rocks, where it careened into the surf and then was caught in a repeating surge back and forth from the sea back onto the land, and so forth and so forth.

Did you experience the man; did he come to you in some way? Was he present to you in some way as a real man? Did you see the ball? If these objects became real for you instead of a blur of words on the paper, then they became part of your intuitive experience. They were presented to you as noemata.

They were not fantasy; they were real, for you know of real prominent families in Bermuda and you know of rolling beach balls. This is the essence of what we have to offer one another in our various relationships, and when you think about it, it is all we have to offer, while at the same time the most priceless thing we have to offer - our own, unique way of experiencing people and things.