Animystic » language

The One Issue of True Religion

Adam — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 13:20:00 +0000

A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe”, a part limited in space and time. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself of this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

I love this quote, a letter addressed by Albert Einstein to a Dr Marcus of the World Jewish Congress in 1950. I am grateful to this post, Einstein Sleuthing for drawing it to my attention and even more grateful for the sleuthing work she did in order to track down the original source. Because I think that is important.

I recently posted a quote out on Twitter that seems to have recently become attributed to Paulo Coelho or is simply quoted and misquoted as “Unknown”

A life without a cause is a life without effect

Now a simple piece of research showed the original to come from the 1968 film Barbarella, yet this seems to be wrongly attributed in many places.

Take the following

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond imagination. It is our light more than our darkness which scares us. We ask ourselves – who are we to be brilliant, beautiful, talented, and fabulous. But honestly, who are you to not be so?

so often attributed to Nelson Mandela and misquoted in the process, yet originally from Marianne Williamson in her book Return to Love.

It seems that quotations, particularly those seen as having religious or spiritual significance, are readily communicated via the internet without any sense of the need for verification of source or accuracy. While the sentiment may be “cool” and the poster may gain some kudos for saying “cool” things, I do think that this necessarily does the original source of the quotation a disservice. The Einstein quote I refer to above was used in one of those books so popular recently that attempts to link New Age philosophy with quantum speculation, but was misquoted as

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty

Now, this is utterly different to the original as sourced through primary sources (see blow). The wording is significantly changed to support the idea behind the book and to create an emphasis on Buddhist thought that simply didn’t exist in Einstein’s statement.

There appears to be some sort of metaphor here for the distortion of our original involvement in reality. That by a process of wish fulfillment and carelessness we create a perception of the world that becomes increasingly other than it really is. Not because the original is unbearable or povertised in anyway, but simply because we try to make it in the experience of out own image. Einstein was right… the striving to free oneself of this delusion is the one issue of true religion.

Einstein's letter

The Sanctity of Language

Adam — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:08:40 +0000

Greg Hill made a really interesting post on his blog today in which he discusses the contention raised by the philosopher Galen Strawson that physicalism entails panpsychism, or the stance that all physical matter is conscious. Now I don’t propose to develop that specific argument, but in comments I have discussed the idea that it is not so much that matter is conscious but that consciousness resides in the experience of relationship (it turns out that Strawson defines consciousness in terms of the ability to experience, so that is quite handy).

Greg refers to the experience of Jung where he “reported an experience he had as a child: ‘Am I sitting on the stone or am I the stone on which he is sitting?’”. To me, it is not so much that I experience the rock and the rock experiences me, but that there is an experience of relationship between me and the rock. Consciousness manifests experience, which in turn requires distinction to acquire form. From the creation of distinction (what G Spencer-Brown would have defined as perfect continence) comes identity and the experience of an experiencer and that which is experienced; subject and object.

So I fall to wandering. If the process of manifesting consciousness as experience gives rise to duality (in order for experience to have form), then this process appears to be mirrored in language and music. Unformed sound becomes language, words, sound with form that creates distinction. Every word cleaves our perception of the world in two. The word sand divides the world of experience into sand and not sand. Music defines a structure of sound against the chaos. Language shapes our experience of the world and gives it form in ways that mirror that primary manifestation of universal consciousness as experience.

There is potentially a tie in with Professor Julian Jaynes’ hypothesis that includes the premise that consciousness is a learned process based on metaphorical language and gives rise to the ability (amongst other things) to introspect, to self-examine. While this is a different definition of consciousness, it does stress the importance of developed language in understanding the experience of experiencing. And if language mirrors the process of the emergence of form-as-experience from consciousness, while giving rise to the ability to understand how that process shapes our sense of self… then it seems fair to understand language itself, and every word, sentence, song, poem, story as sacred. As truly and fully participating in that process of emergence and co-creation.

Words of Power, Part I

Adam — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:22:32 +0000

Words dissemble
words be quick
words resemble
walking sticks

plant them
they will grow
watch them waver so

Jim Morrison, American Prayer

It has been suggested in a forum I contribute too that words only have the power that we give them. This is an idea that I would like to explore on several levels. I’m not proposing a certitude either way, I’m just very cautious of coming down to such a binary conclusion.

Words are strange things. I recall a Reith Lecture in which the neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran demonstrated a synaesthetic relationship between word sounds and visual and kinesthetic senses. By showing people two pictures, one of a soft rounded amoeba-like shape, and the other of a spiky, sharp spiny shape, and telling them that one was called a booba and the other a kikki before asking them to identify which they thought was which, he demonstrated that in excess of 90% of people would associate the word booba with the soft rounded shape and the word kikki with the spikey shape. While I’m guessing we could account for this through a learned cultural phenomenon, Ramachandran’s studies into the phenomenon of synesthesia have lead him to conclude that low level synesthesic experiences are common, even normal, and that the root of language development in our species may in part be attributed to this experience which appears to be genetically determined.

So it seems plausible, even likely, that the experience of hearing a word works on at least two levels.

First is the level of sound. But even the experience of hearing that sound goes beyond the sense of hearing itself, and includes visual and kinesthetic experiences at least internally and some of these experiences are common to most of us, independently of culture and learning.

Secondly is the learned meaning of the word, which will overlay the first experience with further visual and kinesthetic representations and associations. But this second experience will have two components… firstly the learned meaning, the received understanding of the word passed down through learning… the definition. Secondly, our own associations of meaning associated with the word. We all know what the word “Father” means, on the first level…. and we all use the word according to a set of rules that allow us to apply it consistently and make sense of that meaning. But do I truly know what the word “Father” means to you? Do I know what the experience of being parented entailed and what associations that word may have, what emotion you may put behind the word?

From the point of view of words having a “magical” inherent power, power over us and power over (maybe) the external world, independent of the power that we give them, I’m most interested in the first point… words working on the level of sound. The second point, about the learned meaning and experience associated with words, is more associated with the power that we give words… but even that is a power not to be dismissed lightly, a power that derives not just from a life filled with association meaning and story, but from the life of the community, the evolution of our language itself; to suggest that we give words that sort of power is only to suggest that it is human derived, it is not to suggest that it is something we can “give” and “take back” lightly. It isn’t.

Tantric sources distinguish between lettered and unlettered sound, and sanskit is interesting because of its direct association with a concept of the subtle body through the chakra system (where by letters/sounds from the Sanskrit system are associated with “petals” of the chakra) and with a complex understanding of the process of coming into being of all existence, of manifestation from the primal source

A very profound doctrine is connected with these Letters which . . . . . . . has been set out in greater detail in the Serpent Power (Kundalini) which projects Consciousness, in Its true nature blissful and beyond all dualism, into the World of good and evil. The movements of Her projection are indicated by the Letters subtle and gross which exist on the Petals of the inner bodily centers or Lotuses.
Sir John Woodroffe, Shakta and Shakti

What is interesting is the way in which Sanskrit letter sounds or phonemes can be arranged according to the part of the mouth used to form the sound. There is a clear correlation between the location of the mouth used and the location of the chakra, so phenomes formed at the rear of the mouth are associated with higher level chakra in the body.

This interests me because psychologists understand that we perceive vowel sounds differently that we perceive sounds formed at the back of the mouth, round, ooo or oh sounds as larger than sounds formed at the front such as ee sounds. Recent research for example seems to show that this effect can be expoited to create a false perception of the size of a price discount… Products with “small-sounding” sale prices (like $2.33) seemed like better deals than products with “big-sounding” sales prices (like $2.22) with the former perceived, on average, as a discount of 28.1% on $3 and the latter as a discount of 24.13% discount on $3! Clearly the discount on the former is significantly less than the latter, but the effect of the sound on our perception of the size of the cost has a direct impact on our judgement. This effect appears to be cross cultural. In another experiment, the researchers used a pair of sale prices — $7.88, which sounds “big” in English, and $7.01, which sounds “small” — but are the other way around in Chinese. Chinese and English speakers had opposite perceptions of the products’ relative value. While this research is not yet released formally and is reported in a newspaper (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/business/18drill.html) it is none the less indicative of a psychological power that resides in words beyond the simply learned.

Moving even further in to the realms of speculation, we can wonder where such responses to sound-in-language came from. I strongly suspect that they are evolved responses and they they are pre-linguistic. As a species evolves, it’s neurology develops to respond to sensory stimuli in particular ways to adapt it to its environment. So somewhere along the line we have evolved to associate certain sound “shapes” (in this example “oooo” and “eee”) with an internal perception of size (and probably more).

It can be an interesting experience to stand in an empty room and close your eyes, before starting to intone vowel sounds, resonating different parts of the body and paying attention to the internal sensory experience.

So, so far we have considered a range of effects that words and lettered sound may have upon us as human animals at a psychological level. It isn’t clear how these effects relate to language and its development, but it would make sense to assume that we have a somewhat chicken and egg scenario… where (from Ramachandran and others) internal experiences of sounds correspond to external world experiences beyond the onomatopoeic and into the realm of true synesthesia as a mode of engaging with experience.

Words

Have a learned effect

as language, learned meaning
according to the way that they are layered with personal and individual meaning from life experience

and an unlearned effect, yet still psychological

as sound creates consistent internal experiences that engage the full sensory spectrum, an internal landscape

I haven’t even made a start on considering the direct physical effects that the vibrations of words are capable of having on the human and other animal. On the whole, I strongly suspect that this can be discounted in any real empirical sense… the world bathes us in the experience of sound vibration all the time, and words make up a minute proportion of that experience, and I suspect that there is no correlation between any physical effect and the development of language (though I wouldn’t immediately discount the possibility in some contexts). However, in specific ritualistic contexts, when experiential variables are highly controlled, and those present are functioning in highly altered states of consciousness, I don’t think we can entirely rule out the possibility that direct physical experience of vibration of words could have a very specific and manipulable effect.

I don’t plan to leave this here… I would like to cover other related areas… the use of a person’s “true name” in folklore or the use of specific words of power, for one. And a consideration of the animated nature of words, words with spirit, for another. But in the mean time I would like to leave you with a video. I don’t know if you have ever come across the phenomena of Chladni plates before. A Chladni plate is a metal plate undergoing forced vibration and creating 2D standing wave patterns… granules of a fine material are placed on the plate and gather at the points where the plate undergoes least vibration. The artist in this video used this phenomena to engage artistically with her voice and the geometrical patterns created.

taboo, contract and the making of the world

Adam — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:00:41 +0000

A blogger who’s posts I admire wrote what he called “sketch for a short story” a while back. In this story, a credible construction from an indo-european perspective of the sort of things that may have been practiced and believed by the original druids, although in and of itself wholely a work of fiction, the two central characters (a Roman and Druid) talk through a rite that lasts for a period of weeks, when it becomes the task of the druids to take over from the Gods in the making and recreating of the world. The sense conveyed in this short sketch was very powerful, describing an unstable world eternally teetering on the edge of chaos, and fearful rituals needed when the Gods withdrew once every nineteen years in order to maintain existence and prevent its plunge into the abyss of howling monsters.

On one level, it got me thinking that we do indeed continually maintain our reality, if only in sustaining and maintaining that sense of stability and continuity that defines our sanity. And if we do this on a personal level, through the development and unfolding of a continuous personal and mythic narrative, how more so do we do it on a community or social level… what rituals we enact, what proscribed and prescribed patterns of behaviour and what stories we tell and develop to create and maintain our consensus sanity?

One after the other, each ‘owner’ would then sing his stretch of the Ancestor’s footprints. Always in the correct sequence.

“To sing a verse out of order”, Flynn said sombrely, “was a crime. Usually meant the death penalty.”

“I can see that,” I said. “It’d be the musical equivalent of an earthquake.”

“Worse,” he scowled. “It would be to un-create the Creation.”

Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (p58)

More recently the issue of taboo came up on a forum that I participate in. Actually, this is an issue that has come up over the years on several forums I have been involved with, and again it gets me to thinking about this relationship between proscribed behaviour, narrative and the maintenance of the experience reality.

To me, a taboo is not an inherently religious issue, but it does seem to be an inherently deep psycho-spiritual one. As a culture, we tend to use the term to describe things that it are good to break in some sort of iconoclastic sense… “the last taboo” is always a media favourite… or we use to to describe comparatively trivial transgressions. But the real taboos… the actions that place the transgressor “beyond the pale”… are actions that unmake the world. The phrase, beyond the pale, would have meant beyond the stake, or outside of the fence… cast out of society, outlawed.

In engaging with our community there are rules, expectations. Some of these are so deeply enculturated that it is almost impossible to articulate them, as hard to perceive as the air that we breathe or the light that we see by. We have contracts, agreements that are unconsciously extended and accepted, between us, that require us to refrain from certain behaviours that would threaten that fabric of consensus stability. Those who break those contracts we have need to weave into our narratives as monsters, to place them outside, howling with the other demons threatening to destroy the world. In doing so though, I wonder what it is that we become in our attempts to deny the truth of our own monsterhood?

Something Old, Something New

Adam — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:49:11 +0000

Lance Foster (The Sleeping Giant) raised some points in respect of my blog post entitled “Animism:Souls or Relationships?” that got me thinking about the language related to ‘new animism’ and ‘old animism’ and has left me feeling a little uncomfortable.

Core to any animism seem to be “ways of relating”, but in contemporary western society, the use of the words “old” and “new” are synonymous with “out-dated” and “improved”… as a distinction, I’m not sure that it is a respectful one… with an implication that “New, improved, animism” is shinier, more iPhone friendly.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that this is an attitude inherent in those who ascribe to the new animist perspective and none of the above was implicit in anything that Lance has said, but words have a way of relating that is all of their own. I think I might prefer terms like “deep animism” and “animistic rationalism”. Descriptive at least rather than purely distinctive.