If you notice you think in language, probably English in your case. We use works to talk to ourselves as well as others. Take the put downs that have been directed at you in this thread. They are zeros and ones that print out on a screen and are distinguished by your eye which has been trained to see those works. You hear in your head what the words are and next comes the emotional effect. You know right away they are insulting and for whatever reason others may tell themselves as to the justification for delivering them they carry an implied hurt. How do we know this. It is because language, words, carry emotional associations that evoke our past experience with them. Language then is memory of the past, and in the case of put downs memory of emotional pain. We have all been subjected to humiliation by words. A dog will read your body language and know you may be about to hurt him, but you can never make a dog hate itself. A dog can learn that some words may be followed by punishment and anticipate pain, but he will never feel that pain by thinking negative thoughts about himself in his head. He will always be present in the now reading only what is happening in the present.
This is what I believe the story of the Garden of Eden is all about. The information we acquire in building our tree of knowledge is our experience our memory of the past with all the emotional experiences that go into the learning. In this way we created the notion of good and evil, as if those were real things. They are concepts that have no reality without thought and thought has no reality without words and language. Only humans can tell other people they are bad or evil, by creating pain to go with the lesson, which creates the kind of thinking that can anticipate a future to fear. Without words there can be no thought and without thought there can be no comparison, no division of things into say good and evil, no separation of the self from all that is. It is thought that takes into the future or the past and out of the now. In the now, in presence, the state we were born in, we were one with the universe. Occasionally people awaken in the now and realize all of this. You can talk about it. You can practice techniques the wise have figured out will bring one to this, but you can't know the state of presence, something different than duality, without experiencing it. We always look for it by thinking how to get it or pretending it doesn't exist.