My article was about the huge milestones in life marked by a radically different point of view center-of-gravity due to learning, experience, boredom, and finally awareness of a higher order. There will be many exceptions and fractally occuring smaller patterns of this great pattern.

I agree with everyone here that Relational Theory is different from OOP Theory. My point in the article was to show that I no longer "see" a table as a table but as part of a subsystem or design pattern of tables. I see stored procedures as methods bound to data (table). I see indexes as attributes of a table. These ways of seeing are radically different from a "things" procedural mindset.

Earlier levels are never lost. One may always "regress" to seeing simpler levels such as seeing individual characters in words in a sentence. The article is mostly about the brain rising to complexity, mastering and simplifying it, and then moving to higher levels of mastery. But someone without mastery can only conceptually "see" higher levels without actually experiencing it and living it.

The real proof is when you are experiencing all areas of your life in a relationships fashion or a systems fashion. When there is a car accident in front of you, do you focus on the car in front of you or do you focus on flowing lanes and alternate routes? When you purchase a book, are you thinking of who is getting the money, the environment impact, the storage space, the time involved in reading it, the resale value? When purchasing food, do you consider if the seller is behaving responsibly or if the food is toxic or unhealthy long term for your body? Is the spent money staying in your community or being centralized to a few corporate heads? These aren't just topics for protesters but events affecting the stability of systems everywhere.