Hi Lesley,
The TSK quote, as I read it, is more about taking our experience as a symbol of a higher-level experience: a pretty remarkable idea. But it’s true that at some level our main experience with symbols is with words, so it’s good to look at this. The difficulty is that we tend to forget that words are symbols. Maybe one of the strengths of the TSK vision is that it forces us to notice that words are symbols, because it uses words to make occasionally outrageous claims.
Of course, to say that a word is a symbol is not enough. For the symbolic element to emerge, there has to be a kind of “bridging” function, in which the relationship between the word and the (experience? reality?) it symbolizes manifests. That is where the experiential element comes in. I usually think of words as pointers, or as invitations, but this symbolic aspect may take us deeper.
Jack