First, let me make one thing clear: This is not an academic essay. In this essay I present a number of unproven or even unsupported “opinions” about the nature of love, life and reality. If one approaches this essay expecting to be convinced by reason and evidence of some position or another, they’ll automatically reject and dismiss the ideas expressed herein as unfounded. The reason I express the ideas or opinions that I do is in hopes that, for some people, they’ll seem to have the ring of truth, and those people will be inspired by the simple recognition of higher truth or likely higher truth when they see it. Or, if not that, that I’ll at least give some people food for thought, something to consider that will perhaps broaden their framework for asking and answering, or just pondering, questions about the nature of love, life, reality, metaphysics and ourselves. Also, just being aware of certain ideas will cause them to unconsciously be “put on the radar” to facilitate possible actual experience or apprehension of the truths if and when the opportunities arise in the near and/or distant future.

That being said, this essay is not entirely made up of unbacked opinions. There is a fair amount of reasoning involved and a modicum of reasoned argument, as well as a number of links to other essays of mine with reasoned arguments with varying degrees of analytical strictness, so don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!

Thanks for listening.

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Lots of people assume love boils down to nothing more than a type of neurochemical reaction in the brain, probably evolutionary-psychologically developed for the purposes of encouraging things such as procreation; raising children; perhaps long-term unions between men and women so the men can take care of the women so that they can continue to live, procreate and raise children; and maybe people in communities mutually supporting and helping each other to help promote continuation of the gene pool.

This is a clever rationalization of the origin, nature and purposes of love that seems feasible and even likely under a physicalist, mechanistic view of reality, but this view of reality is way too narrow and limited to accommodate the actually maximally rich, full, open-ended and living nature of reality/metaphysics and all of the things, beings, phenomena, principles and story lines that exist within it. It’s literally unimaginable, at least if one’s goal were to apprehend it in its entirety. It’s like the Shakespeare quote you’ve surely heard before and probably dismissed as mere sentiment, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

While Occam’s razor suggests that any particular scientific explanation of a phenomenon ought to involve as few assumed existents as possible, this is for reasons that don’t apply to one’s outlook on reality as a whole. And, metaphysically speaking, why wouldn’t it be just as likely that reality is as rich, full and meaningful as possible as that it’s as simple and limited as can possibly imaginably account for what’s empirically observed? To say nothing of the profound implications of many things people regularly observe that violate our expectations and prosaic understanding of reality. I could say more about why we shouldn’t write off and dismiss such personal and anecdotal experiences due to known cognitive biases or the fact that they’re not scientific or proven, but I’ve done that in other essays already, such as here, here, here and here.

I’ve also shown why material reductionism is untenable considering the existence of consciousness, for different reasons here, here and here, and revealed the questionable reasons people tend toward physicalism somewhere in this essay and here.

This does seem to raise the question of why the physicalist interpretation of the reasons for love seems to coincidentally make so much explanatory sense. Perhaps the answer is that in the living, metaphysically rich world, things are generally designed or otherwise influenced to be beautiful and to just work out; i.e., to be beneficial and to interoperate in a way that’s orchestrated and efficient.

The physicalist interpretation of love (and of literally everything else in life) is sadly deadening/life-denying, bleak, nihilistic and depressive. This would be perfectly fine, of course, or at least perfectly fair, if it were true, but it’s not.

Another problem people tend to have with the notion of love is that it seems to be a nebulous term that can mean many different things according to context or to the person conceiving it. To this I might say that these are all or mostly various expressions of the same underlying thing, or I might also say that people tend to confuse things with love that aren’t love.

For example, most people, when you bring up the word “love,” think immediately/solely of romantic relationships. This is sad, because romantic relationships are a lot more selfish and limited than the expression of love in general. Romantic relationships are largely transactional in nature, as in each person is in it just to get something out of it from the other in return for what they themselves bring to the table. This is why most romantic relationships eventually end up with both sides mutually hating each other’s guts and never talking to each other again, as well as the reason for a lot of lesser fights between couples that don’t (yet) lead to a breakup. It happens because one person has demands and expectations for what the other person will do and be for them, because they’re depending on the other person to make them happy, rather than simply giving the person the freedom to do and be what they wish to and loving them regardless. True love, or love in its purest form, is unconditional and requires nothing.

Just to clear up any possible misunderstanding, this is not to say that a romantic relationship should only exist on a purely spiritual, saintly level; of course things like lust, sex, and other forms of physical affection are great and fun and encouraged, and in practice there may always be the occasional need to work some things out through anger and confrontation. But a good rule of thumb is not to see the other as “the problem,” but to see the problem as a third thing that you and the other are trying to solve. Also, I remember once reading of a study showing that the couples that make it the longest are the ones that react to potential conflicts with humor. There’s a lot more to be said about the nature of healthy relationships in the book Neale Donald Walsch on Relationships by Neale Donald Walsch. I also noticed that Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now contains a page or two in which it says some very insightful and illuminating things about the common nature of strife in relationships.

So, what is love really? Love, compassion, empathy and altruism are founded in transpersonal awareness/the liminal awareness of the unity of all beings, so that you value another’s wellbeing as much as your own, because you know that they’re you, or you see yourself in them—not necessarily your specific personality traits, but your fundamental divine spark. Though for most, being able to recognize more specific things about oneself in another greatly increases one’s ability to love the other.

This kind of knowledge, the knowledge of the unity of all beings, is far from obvious, and most minds never grasp it on a conscious level, though it does seep down into their conscious minds in degrees or in indirect ways, or at least it influences their emotions, desires and choices in unknowing ways.

This knowingly and unknowingly acting and feeling according to the unity of all beings, in other words the fact that separation is an illusion, is something universal that you can hardly help but do to some degree, because it’s an expression of what you’re made of, which is why love, compassion and altruism exist in this world. (See https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2023/01/28/why-altruism-really-does-exist/.)

Of course, any philosophical description or ideation of anything is only grasping at shadows and pecking at surfaces, so the above is by far not a full account of what it means to love. There’s more to be said (and of course, even this more that can be said about it is ultimately just conferring shadows, the understanding of which hardly approaches the reality of the situation).

Love is not just about the fact that all beings are ultimately one, it’s about and endless history over many lifetimes in many worlds, including parallel and current lifetimes, of interaction and communion with others, involving various dramas, bonding, playing, joy, saving one another, growing with each other, daring, working together toward a goal to serve a larger cause than you, etc. You don’t remember all this when you interact with them in this Earthly realm, but it trickles down nonetheless. You may see it in their eyes, feel it in their smile. It colors every element of emotional interaction between you, especially the joy. You may repeat certain aspects of your past interactions, conspirations and relationships with them without realizing it, probably many times over many lifetimes.

This kind of familiarity and interaction and love exists more between you and some people than others, which is why we say we have “soulmates” and “soul families” and why we sometimes feel like we’ve known someone we just met all our lives. And this difference in closeness between you and some from between you and others probably isn’t as absolute as our limited minds would naturally think; it’s probably only the case in some relative sense, expressed through the illusion of the linear passage of time. In other words, we’re just as connected to any other imaginable being in the universe with just as much interpersonal history, only in away that’s less “near” or perceptible or effective in the moment. And probably also, in the same vein, the more you “zoom out,” the more your past history with a loved one isn’t just one or the other specific collection of events, but a superposition or summation of many or all possible interactions or histories with them.

Why would the love in another’s eyes contain not only actual past interactions or histories but also possible ones? Because everything that can possibly happen or exist already happened or exists somewhere in existence, such as in parallel universes of a multiverse, and while these other universes may seem far away and separated from us physically, our consciousness ultimately transcends apparent separation.

The reason I precede “in parallel universes” with “such as” is that even the idea of a multiverse doesn’t do the breadth, fullness, unlimitedness or boundlessness, and completeness of All that Is justice. This is utter boundlessness and completeness expressed well in one of Neale Donald Walsch’s dialog series of books in which God says something like, “I am everything that is, everything that is not, and everything in between.”

(And just so I don’t mislead anybody: I specify “happen” and “exist” separately in the above, but that doesn’t mean I’m suggesting an ontology with exactly two or three categorically distinct types of elements: events and things/beings. Things, and perhaps even beings, seem to be ways in which we perceive and abstract certain kinds of happenings. For example, a whirlpool is just a vaguely delineated area of swirling water in a larger body of water, but we tend to think of it as a thing. Or a person’s body is made up of atoms, which are just processes involving electron fields oscillating around protons and neutrons, which are made up of vibrating quarks, which are in turn just local excitations of various ubiquitous quantum probability fields. And it’s not even like that body will “exist” forever; according to science, eventually its biological makeup will decay and absorb into its environment, and even later its atoms, and then their constituent subatomic particles, will decay into other things, with the end result being that all that’s left is light. And as for beings, there is no fundamental separation between any being and all of life, and even the material universe is most likely made out of, or is a projection of, life/mind/consciousness: see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2020/02/07/why-im-an-idealist/. And not to mention that as far as the individual being’s permanence goes, while a being may never die, it may cease to exist as an individual and meld with a larger body sometime, or maybe even break up into multiple smaller beings. If nothing else, according to the kind of mysticism I subscribe to, all beings will sooner or later become one with God.

On the other hand, come to think of it, it’s not clear what a “happening” even means if it’s not about motion or other change or fluctuation, and motion and other change or fluctuation seems to imply motion or other change or fluctuation of something, and that something would have to be considered to be existent, independently of the motion or other change or fluctuation itself that composes the happening. I don’t know, maybe those existents are themselves further happenings and it’s turtles all the way down. But even such infinite recursion doesn’t seem to necessarily eliminate the need for things and events as primary categories in an ontology, because you’d have to say one or the other is at the very bottom in order for it to be primary to the other, and there is no bottom. But does it solve it if we call the change of a thing a fundamental/inextricable property/aspect of that thing? I’m not sure. Maybe, because maybe it’s the problem of language that caused us to separate the thing from the change in that thing to begin with. But then, what if our whole ontology is itself just a construct of language in the first place, or at least fundamentally depends on/is based on it, with of course the additional element of empirical/sensory/experiential/intuitive input? Even then, perhaps we could say that we successfully unified things and events linguistically/analytically by calling change a fundamental/inextricable property/aspect of things.

*Shrug*, either way, in the end my sensibility tells me that an ontology should not have exactly two (or even three) fundamental categories. Maybe one from which all the others spring in a kind of tree of categories, or maybe a plethora of categories, but two or three is just unnatural. :d Actually, even two would seem justifiable if they were about life/beings versus supposedly nonliving matter, or perhaps something analogous such as self versus other, but the question here is about two different aspects of the material (notwithstanding my inclusion of being in “events or things/beings”). And even in the case of life/beings versus matter or self versus other, I think the distinction ultimately fails. See the essay on idealism linked to above regarding life/beings versus matter, and regarding self versus other, see Zen Buddhism and its concept of nonduality. And take the anecdote I once heard of a person recalling being a baby or toddler (I don’t remember which) riding in the backseat of a car, looking out the window and experiencing the entire landscape including mountains, etc. as being completely non-separate from him. He said it was blissful. This is probably the default state for babies and maybe toddlers, but we eventually learn to identify specifically with the body and hence lose that connection to everything else/the vastness of one’s being.

However, that being said, both monism and pluralism (i.e., just one main category of stuff or many top-level categories) actually seem logically problematic, for reasons I explain in this essay: https://myriachromat.wordpress.inhahe.com/2020/06/18/meandering-notes-on-reality/#Monism.

So, what possible alternative does that leave us? I suppose just a lack of overly formalizing and attempted assimilation of reality on the broadest/most overarching/most fundamental possible level, or in other words, the lack of an ontology altogether. Reality is endlessly deep and largely ineffable, especially to our puny human minds and senses, and more especially considering that we’re currently lost in cultural scientism/rationalism/physicalism/skepticism/left-brained thinking (see https://myriachromat.wordpress.inhahe.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/) and our more longstanding underlying immersion in language and representational thought (see https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2024/08/12/5718/). Though, that being said, at least an ontology that’s not hierarchical but rather web-like or something like that might be more natural.

But anyway, I digress. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…)

I suppose I’ll have to leave the rest of these gems on the nature of love to the initiate who’s made it this far into the essay, the truly tenacious thinker and truth seeker. =P

Our love, cherishing and adoration of each other, of everyone for everyone, on the spiritual level (or at least on some higher level of being and awareness) is greater than we can possibly imagine while incarnated. There is also a lot of care and perhaps a deep feeling of responsibility for each other as a result. And sometimes we have karmic connections and/or binding agreements with each other, spiritual unions or with each other, and/or a profound dedication to each other, that we can’t understand on this level. Sometimes we’re even the same soul and probably the same higher-level or essential/fundamental mind in two or more bodies, though I hear we don’t usually meet our parallel lives until we’re advanced enough to be nearing the end of our cycle of reincarnation, because the interactions are too intense. (It’s likely that we’re the same soul and/or essential mind as many other people, more or fewer depending on what level of soul/mind you’re considering, hence the popular term “soul group” and the existence of God, the level of mind and consciousness at which all beings are unified. But I digress.) Also, sometimes we’re working with others we know (or maybe don’t know) toward a shared goal/for a shared cause, the nature of which is too fantastical and immaterial for us to fully grasp on a conscious/egoic level even if it were explained to us. These goals or causes are always tributes to the greater good, of course, or in other words to a larger arena of life than the group itself, like labors of love.

As a past girlfriend of mine once said, “To love someone is to know that you love them. Not to love someone is not to know that you love them.”

(Why do you think we get angry when somebody yells at you, gives you the finger, or whatever? If it’s a put-down, it may be because of the implied or intended reduction of your social status and hence of your own social potential. But otherwise, the reason we get mad when somebody is upset with us is because, on a superconscious level, we really love them, and hence our natural reaction is to feel grief for having made them feel that way that they had to get ugly toward us, but, on a more egoic level, we don’t actually want to feel that grief, whether it’s because it’s uncomfortable or because we already have enough grief in our lives or because we know that people often get mad at others for reasons that are entirely not their fault so the grief would be unfair, so, instead, we feel anger at them for inflicting or attempting to inflict that grief upon us. Similarly, the reason we care what other people think of us and the reason we engage in insult-slinging fights instead of just walking away is our unconscious emotional investment and trust in our fellow man. (You may tell yourself you don’t care what negative things others think of you when you’re insulted, but you do; otherwise, you wouldn’t bother to get angry and insult the other right back…))

Also, another important point is that your love for every individual person is wholly unique and particular to them, because it’s an appreciation of everything they are, of their true nature, and everyone’s personality and essence is unique. I suppose it’s also about your specific history with them, as explained above, and that would be unique, too.

One more thing I believe about love is that it’s possibly the fundamental nature of everything. Not only is it a natural characteristic of our beings to love, but we are made of love. And also God, being omnibenevolent and perfect, is made of love, and the whole Universe is in turn the body of God and is thus made of love. I don’t know if this is true, or if it’s an exaggeration or a misleadingly logical/linguistic interpretation of the truth, but it’s something that I’ve heard a few spiritualists say, and it struck me as deeply meaningful.

I know the assertion is problematic, as it’s not clear how physical things, mechanics, qualia, minds and thinking, other emotions than love, etc. could arise from love, or what “love” even means in this context. But again, the linguistic interpretation of this fact could be misleading by virtue of its being filtered through language or our logical/rational or rationalistic framework of evaluating and understanding.

Since I’ve brought God into this discussion, it’s probably important to explain which/what conception of God I’m referencing and believe in, at least briefly. Someone who read this essay complained that it’s unspecific and hard to follow because it’s not clear which God is being referred to. The most important things to specify here are that God is not judgmental or condemning, is omnibenevolent/all-loving, is unlimited, and ultimately comprises everything. I say “ultimately” because there are more and less delimited ways of considering “God.” For example, you can think of “God” as specifically the highest, most perfect, most masterful, most unified aspect of God, or you can think of God more as every aspect of everything.

Another delimited way you think of god is to think of God as any God-realized being; it could be a smaller being than everything that exits, but it’s totally aligned with the divine, fluidly melding with the greater whole, and perhaps dynamically melding and unmelding in degrees as it changes, transitions from some intention/endeavor to the next, or travels.

There are other traits that I could mention, such as God is omniscient and omnipotent. (There are philosophical conundrums associated with the concept of omnipotence, so let’s just say that, according to God, God has “full power to match intentions with results.”) More fully, I believe in the God of Neale Donald Walsch’s books, but of course you’d have to read them to know what that means.

Oh, I just remembered, in one of Neale Donald Walsch’s dialog series of books, God says this about love and fear: “Fear is the energy which contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms. Love is the energy which expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.”

As God, He/She would naturally have full understanding of the nature of life and the Universe and would be able to give an optimal definition of love with respect to that, given our intentions in inventing and using the word “love.” I’m totally convinced that Neale really is communicating with God in these books, for reasons explained in https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2017/02/05/is-hatred-ever-truly-justified/ and in this thread: https://x.com/iyaelsorai/status/1704529464791601607.

God also says in one of the books that fear is the opposite of love, but it’s also not as real as love, maybe an illusion, or that it doesn’t exist on the same level, as it actually exists within love or as a creation or expression of it. I don’t remember the actual words, but you get the gist. God says the purpose of fear is to make you feel like you have to do something. Perhaps that’s the fundamental motivation for a spirit to act, as God also says that ultimately nothing really matters, and I suppose the spirit would naturally know that, or would know it if not for the fear. Maybe I’m just totally misinterpreting the books in the last sentence, I don’t know.

Another thing I just remembered is that in Conversations With God, Book 3: Embracing the Love of the Universe, God says the following:

God
Life
Love
Unlimited
Eternal
Free

Anything which is not one of these things is not any of these things.

I suppose one might also add Spirit and Consciousness to the list, and perhaps Soul. But maybe I’m just thinking too much.

So, we can conclude from this that, among the other characteristics of love I’ve elucidated, love is unlimited, eternal and free. And it’s also God and Life itself, which seems to imply that everything really is fundamentally love, that there is nothing else, as some spiritualists have said. Though admittedly that sounds like a form of monism, which I argue against in an essay linked to above. But I guess it’s really just a way of ascribing all of the characteristics associated with love to every possible element or substance in the universe.

Oh, another thing I just remembered is that God also says in one of Neale’s books that “love endures all,” though I have to admit I don’t fully understand that. I.e., if you don’t endure all, does that mean you’re not love? And how can one possibly endure all imaginable punishments for all imaginable lengths of time, anyway? But I suppose endurance happens on the deepest level always, the core of the self is not harmed or made to cease because it is love, and it may or may not happen on more relatively superficial levels depending on whether one embodies love in its more limited sense of being the opposite of fear with the aforementioned characteristics of its energy. Idk, obviously I’m being too analytical about this.

Bet MacArdle asked in the Epistemology group on Facebook,

“It is my observation, as a psychotherapist for over 50 years, that ‘faith’ is always based on some sort of evidence or experience. Yet the word is used to suggest adherence when there is no evidence or reason to justify adherence. When my patients, or indeed any other person, uses the word faith, I look for what might be the basis of their adherence. There is always something. I have yet to encounter a case of ‘blind faith,’ even if the subject themselves declares it. Your thoughts?”

This is my response:

It’s funny you say this, I just had this conversation a couple of hours ago:

[08:06] <metayeti> the good thing about meditation and spiritual practices is you don’t really have to understand how they work 
[08:07] <metayeti> you just need a certain degree of faith that they do work
[08:07] <inhahe> yeah, i don’t need faith either, i can just go by the evidence that it’s worked for many others.
[08:08] <inhahe> what’s faith?
[08:08] <inhahe> belief without reason? 
[08:09] <metayeti> yeah
[08:10] <metayeti> you need a certain degree of it even if you don’t like the idea
[08:10] <inhahe> metayeti: well let’s say I wanted to adopt some degree of “belief without reason.” If there were no reason, how would I know which beliefs I should adopt and which I shouldn’t?
[08:11] <inhahe> how would I know I want to adopt strong determination meditation instead of, say, flat earth theory?
[08:13] <inhahe> there’s always a reason, even if the reason is ‘this knowledgeable guy says it works’
[08:14] <inhahe> ‘and describes how it worked for him’
[08:16] <metayeti> yeah, it’s a hard problem
[08:16] <metayeti> you use intuition
[08:16] <metayeti> and intelligence, i guess
[08:16] <metayeti> but there is definitely a degree of faith to the practice
[08:17] <metayeti> for example meditation won’t work overnight
[08:17] <metayeti> you have to have faith that it will
[08:17] <metayeti> but you do that will everything else anyway. exercise won’t work overnight either
[08:17] <metayeti> but you have faith that overtime it will
[08:17] <metayeti> knowledge, skill, anything that takes time and patience, needs a certain degree of faith
[08:17] <metayeti> even blind faith sometimes
[08:18] <inhahe> yeah, it’s more of belief that it will based on what you’ve heard, but you must stretch yourself to overcome the reluctance to try it for so long. that ‘stretching’ could be considered faith in some way.
[08:18] <inhahe> ‘faith’ is a rather dynamic word
[08:18] <inhahe> which is why Christians abuse it
[08:18] <inhahe> to justify their beliefs

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So, even though faith ultimately always has a reason, it can tend to be a less valid means of knowing because it’s used as an excuse to accept things without much logical validation or evidence.

Though I would strongly say that another use of the word “faith” is to point to things that we only liminally know, say through intuition or some other transcendental means, such as the experience of countless past lives or of related parallel lives, but yet give credence to them. Mainly, such a thing we would have faith in is that things always eventually work out for the better, i.e., that the universe is a [thing i don’t have words for, sort of like ‘good’ or ‘successful’] place, and this would in turn give us hope, and the faith and hope would keep the back door open for good things to come.

On Facebook, Jim Adams had the question in the Epistemology group,

“Years ago I stumbled into an argument wherein I argued that pragmatism is not a viable mechanism for determining truth. I do believe this statement is actually true. Pragmatism is fraught with problems. American pragmatism is summed up as, “truth is what works”.

In this argument I, however, found my self stumbling and frustrated because the act of arguing against pragmatism, for any reason, seems ludicrous. The argument fell into petty squabbling and ended in rancor.

I would be interested in hearing your ideas on pragmatism as an epistemological argument, its problems as you see it, and its strengths.”

My answer was as follows:

Okay, my thoughts on pragmatism are that

First, it’s true, or at least strongly arguable, that all truth is fundamentally utility. I.e., just like how physics validates its models through their predictive power (and hence utility) and can’t possibly validate them any other way, our ideas of what’s true and real are validated by their ability to allow us to predict and successfully navigate our environment. This is the only way we can validate or generate them, because we only know via our indirect senses, and if we (perhaps illogically) imagine there’s such a thing as absolute, objective truth, all our own ideas that we call truth don’t necessarily have much correspondence to it, because they’re modulated by the arbitrary facts and structure of our biology, which wholly frame how we perceive reality, including how we perceive our own biology and sensory organs and their supposed relationships to reality.

Really, there are other ways of apprehending truth–transcendental ways–but for the purposes of this argument, truth is based in utility. E.g., for an empiricist, all truth would necessarily be based in utility according to the above argument. And even outside of empiricism, truths you divine through some kind of mystical practice would probably be considered extraneous to the pragmatic view of a pragmatist (because they’d likely be seen as absolute, or at least more than just useful, if a pragmatist ever believed in some sort of divination), so they’re not relevant to this argument.

Now, this argument may seem to validate pragmatism on the surface of it, but it doesn’t necessarily. The thing about pragmatism is that it tends to disregard the more theoretical or indirectly logically deducible, and maybe even some of the more directly empirical yet not directly useful, aspects of truth. That’s why they call themselves pragmatists and distinguish themselves from other types of thinkers. So, pragmatism only accepts a subset of all those truths that we infer that arguably fall under the umbrella of utility, and may even accept some things as truth that we would invalidate as truth under the larger umbrella of utility, i.e. in non-pragmatism, because they’re useful on a more … direct (or “pragmatic”) level.

For example, a pragmatist may reject the idea of electrons because you can never see them, feel them, etc. or directly use them, and they may accept the idea of flat Earth because it’s corroborated by everyday perception and useful for most everyday purposes. I don’t really know if pragmatism goes that far, I don’t know specifically what types of things they accept or reject, I’m not that well versed in it, but on a level of general principle, you get the idea. And, in this sense, pragmatism could be seen to embrace things that aren’t ultimately rational/reject things that are ultimately rational.

We collectively suspect that language has a profound influence on how we think, such as with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but do we really know to what extent this is true and how profound the drawbacks are? I don’t think we do.

We’re really completely lost and trapped in our language, or in what my friend Darin calls “representational thought,” which came hand-in-hand with the acquisition of language. It’s kind of like walking around in a territory and seeing the map of it you have way more than you see the actual territory.

When we see a tree, to a large degree we don’t really see, or feel, or experience the tree. We see an instance of objects of class “tree,” which is a subcategory of the class of objects we could call “vegetation” or maybe “flora,” which is a subcategory of a class we could call “life,” which, by the way, we in turn think of as mere collections of nonliving molecules. Seeing the tree this way—that is, representationally rather than relationally, and with our eyes only as opposed to with the wholeness of our being—is what impels us to chop them down wholesale, despite the fact that they are truly living things (“beings” would actually a better word), or even to cut them down for reasons as trivial as “improving the view.”

Here’s a couple of good quotes on the matter that I know of:

“The moment a boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.” ~ Eric Berne

And one I just found out about just now:

“There is not a—I don’t put a moral judgment on this, but it has to be said that, in the tradition of the West, this has been viewed classically as the fall. This is the fall into names instead of realities, into constructs of reality rather than reality itself. And this has now been inculcated into each and every one of us as both the glory and the trauma of human existence, which is our extraordinary ability to reside in and be in language. So, for instance, I’ve made this example before: a child lying in a crib, and a hummingbird comes into the room, and the child is ecstatic, because this shimmering iridescence of movement and sound and attention—it’s just wonderful. I mean, it is an instantaneous miracle when placed against the background of the dull wallpaper of the nursery and so forth. But then mother, or nanny, or someone, comes in and says, “It’s a bird, baby. Bird. Bird.” And this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile and places it over the miracle and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum. And from now on the miracle is confined within the meaning of the word. And by the time a child is four or five or six, no light shines through. They have tiled over every aspect of reality with a linguistic association that blunts it, limits it, and confines it within cultural expectation. But this doesn’t mean that this world of signification is not outside, still existent, beyond the foreshortened horizons of a culturally validated language.” ~ Terrance McKenna, ‘Man Thinks God Knows, God Knows Man Thinks‘

And maybe this one is worthwhile too (another one I’ve just discovered):

When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. ~ Eckhart Tolle, ‘A New Earth’

This same effect of language or representational thought is what allows us to objectify each other—not necessarily in the sexual sense, but to literally see each other as objects—and all other animals on the planet, which in turn allows all forms of selfish manipulation, exploitation, injury, and betrayal. I read an aphorism once that all sin starts with seeing others as objects.

There is of course another reason people are selfish and hurt others, which is the same reason even babies can fight with each other and animals are okay with preying on and eating each other, which is that naturally we experience the world from the vantage point of our own selves, from behind our own eyes and feeling with our own innards, outward toward the greater universe, and also that we’re primarily responsible for managing and taking care of ourselves, so it naturally follows that we’d be a bit self-centered and we’d be more directly aware of our own well-being than of others’ so we’d regard it with higher priority. But still, I believe the objectification problem is a major aspect of the problem of selfishness and evil in humans.

Representational thought is tightly coupled with the cultural problem of an imbalance in left-brained verses right-brained thinking, in favor of left-brained thinking, as talked and written about by Iain McGilchrist; see Dr Iain McGilchrist: We are living in a deluded world – YouTube for a good summary. Some scientists believe there is evidence that the two hemispheres of the brain think any differently from each other, but even if they don’t, the terms “left-brained” and “right-brained” thinking serve as very useful nomenclature to point to a general difference in possible modes of thinking, which have changed throughout history. And in any case, Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience recounted in her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey seems to cast doubt on the claim that there is no huge difference between the modes of thinking of the left and right hemispheres.

In a nutshell, left-brained thinking is more holistic, open, emotional, relational, creative, imaginative, dynamic, perceptive, receptive and experiential, while right-brained thinking is more coldly analytical, logical, rational or even rationalistic, evaluative, fixed, narrow, and constantly modeling its environment.

Language, representational thought and/or Left-brained thinking has the effect of separating us from ourselves, each other, God, Nature and spirit. It causes humankind to be omnicidal, while, despite the evil of carnivorism (and actually even the eating of plants should be included) rampant in nature, the rest of the species on this planet essentially live in balance and harmony. We deem ourselves to be the best species on the planet, while we’re actually a rogue, acutely insane species that’s on the verge of collapsing the entire biosphere and has done loads of damage already.

Here’s an interesting, if questionable, email that’s one of many that I sent my friend recently after having experienced a mild spiritual awakening, after the awakening had mostly left but I still remembered it rather clearly:

Sometimes I can see us (people) on two levels at once. I can palpably *see* how we’re all dulled and suppressed and enslaved (by the workforce), there’s soo much pain, even though ostensibly it’s just some people standing in line quietly or working behind the counter.. and I swear it’s not only psychological forces such as shame or fear that oppress or dull us, it’s also our fundamental mode of cognition that robs us of the context for self-expression and relation and such. We microfocus on one little thing at a time and constantly are in the throes of working things out logically. I know, it sounds dangerous, like I’m advocating being illogical. It’s not that simple. I’m not. I think of the guy who has to focus on making his credit card work in the machine, and he’s having difficulty, and meanwhile the worker seems to be a little impatient, and meanwhile we’re doing similar things in our heads at every step in everything we do. 

This lack of being able to adequately express our immediate emotional reactions to each other, in ways more creative than mere language and rationality will allow, including the spiritual love we would discover if we weren’t so disconnected, leads to all manner of interpersonal frustration, strife and misunderstanding, and thus causes the shame and fear that I mentioned in the above email, much of which comes from perpetually passed down generational trauma.

A lot of that trauma is due to the fact that parents themselves are too young and inexperienced and emotionally immature to be raising children, plus the fact that children weren’t meant to be raised by two people alone, and a lot of those problems stems from the advent of the Industrial Revolution, a product of the Age of Enlightenment and technology (more on those later), that caused people to start living in nuclear families. But I somewhat digress.

Oh, and the parental trauma and conditional love is greatly magnified by the fact that there’s so much pressure on parents to force their kids to go to school and do well, and school is essentially mental labor camp for kids. And some more of that trauma comes, of course, from bullying among children in school, especially of those who don’t conform to the norm in some way, and also by children who are taking out the pains their parents inflict on them on others.

I once read a person’s remembrance of how, as an infant or toddler, he was riding in the backseat a car and observing the mountainous scenery, and he actually felt completely at one with the scenery. There was no separation, no duality between “self” and “other” that’s delineated at the edges of our bodies. I suspect that all babies feel this way, and somewhere along the line we teach them something that takes this experience away from them, if they don’t just adopt this duality through the everyday manipulation of matter and bodily navigation. I also suspect that all, most or many children too young to talk, as well as all, most or many animals, can naturally see auras.

According to Darin, right-brain dominance, which is actually the ideal way of living (besides the fact that it may or may not be practical in today’s world of academia, the workforce, civilization and technology), literally feels like death to the left brain, so it’s terrified of it and will do anything to stop it, prevent it and maintain control.

Btw, it wasn’t Darin who said that right-brain dominance may or may not be practical in today’s world; that was me. If anything, Darin himself is living proof that you can be right-brain dominant and still function just fine in society. I once saw Darin claim that he has the “bicameral mind,” which is a term coined by Julian Jaynes that basically means the right-brain dominance that our ancient ancestors once had. I naturally assumed this was just ego and hubris on Darin’s part, but then much later I talked to him on the phone (as opposed to exclusively online as our correspondence had been), and it became evident to me that he really does have the bicameral mind. And meanwhile he has/had a technical job repairing a certain class of machines, and he’s once worked on writing a multi-player text-based RPG in C++.

I vaguely remember asking him once how one could write code while having right-brain dominance, or whether that was possible, or maybe it was how he could write code while being left-brain dominant, and he said, “Why wouldn’t [I/you] be able to?” I was at a loss for words so I didn’t answer.

On a subject that may or may not be tangential to the discussion of language and left-brained thinking, I’ve discovered that there are a few gurus who teach that thinking is itself the problem and only brings us misery. Here are two videos to that effect: YouTube – Barry Long – How to Stop Thinking audiobook and YouTube – David Parrish – This is free psychotherapy.

Also there are also some enlightened folks, such as Youtube’s since-deleted MysticTheo (if I remember the name correctly), who claim not to think, who are still somehow able to perfectly effectively talk, respond and navigate life, as if it’s something that simply happens, or happens through them, as described by MysticTheo.

I suspect these people actually do think, though, or they wouldn’t be able to understand questions and articulate responses or record teachings, but they think in a way that’s so much more natural and more fluid and better than the way we think, and than the way they once thought themselves, that they liken it to a lack of thought. 

Oh, update: I showed this essay to someone I know, and he says that they really don’t think. It’s as if some other force takes over. This force always has the perfect response, which the ego isn’t even capable of. He agrees with me that this force could be called one’s “higher self” for lack of a better term, but he thinks it’s best not to label it at all, because then we “reduce it to the known.” He says he was smoking salvia once and his friend asked something like, “Can you light it up?”, and something spoke through him and said, “Just let us know what to burn and where and we’ll burn it.”, which he claims was hilarious and the perfect response. He says this is the kind of wittiness with which all Zen masters respond, and that this channeling of perfection applies to their actions, too. He then showed me an “automatic writing” he once did while coming down from shrooms, without thinking about it at all but rather just watching himself type it out on his phone, and the text appeared to me as a number of perfectly articulated and extremely high, pure spiritual truths.

I myself once tried automatic drawing, with my eyes closed, and the result was a single continuous line that seemed to bear a striking resemblance to a person wearing a monk robe sitting in front of a lit candle.

So, it may be that you can perfectly function without thinking, but it’s unclear to me whether not thinking at all is a different animal, above and beyond simply being right-brain dominant, or if it’s essentially the same thing or a certain form or variation of right-brain dominance.

By the way, language isn’t the only factor in our cultural left-brain dominance. The problem didn’t used to be as bad. School is a major contributor; that is, not the mere act of learning, but the way we teach children. We metaphorically clip their wings, and they’ll more or less never be happy and vital again.

Another factor is the proliferation of technology. It takes very analytic and measured thinking, and perhaps a degree of what I’ll call “microfocus,” to interact with technological machines and devices. And it’s something we’re doing all the time. We’re swamped in them.

Another main factor is the rise of the Age of Enlightenment, which holds a mechanistic understanding of the universe, values hard empiricism over any other possible means of perception, wholly emphasizes modeling nature as the means of understanding it, and greatly proliferated the act of reading, which causes us to absorb language from yet a second, less natural neurological attack vector, and to do so in a way that’s totally abstract and divorced from any personal interaction, including voice and body language, and from any other aesthetic qualia. Darin once said that the earlier a child learns to read, the more they’ll be constrained by/immersed in (what I’ll just call) The Problem, for the rest of their lives, which will only make them miserable.

Going back to the subject of school, I wrote this recently in a reply to a reply to comment on Quora:

If the subject was more about school in general, school, at least/especially the way we currently do it, is a tragic form of child abuse, and most of society is too heartless to see that, and/or too entrenched in culture/the current ways of doing things to recognize it. And they also can’t see it because they’re afflicted by the exact same things we afflict children with, because of the workforce and because they were subjected to the same abuses as children.

Of course, there are some clear disadvantages to not having schooling at all. It would severely upset the economy. I don’t really think a strong economy is a good thing because it directly correlates to environmental destruction and unsustainability, and I don’t think civilization or technology has overall made people any happier, despite the overt advantages it gives. It also takes away with even more/more important subtle disadvantages. The Native Americans, for example, were demonstrably much happier than the colonizers, but I won’t get into that here, this post is too long already. But there’s really no going back to the state of nature at this point, either, in any way that won’t result or the the result of the death of billions. But anyway, again, it could be more about *how* we educate children (and what subjects we force upon them) than whether we do.

And of course, this is relevant to the more general discussion here because the entire enterprise of schooling (at least as anything remotely resembling its current form) is a product of left-brain imbalance and primarily representational thought.

So, how do we fix all this? The only realistic solution that comes to mind, with the exception of regular meditation (which many, many people enthusiastically report is essentially a godsend) is carefully paying attention to and modulating/tempering how we relate to our own language. Probably the more early on we start doing this the better, so it ought to be something taught in schools. But what exactly would doing this look like? What shape would it take? Unfortunately, I don’t know, so I’ll just bow out here and allow those reading this to continue on with filling out the details.

Btw, the title of this essay is taken from a very good essay I once came across that I’ve archived here: Laurel Thompson: Language is the Problem and More Perception is the Solution. Another relevant essay is from the same blog: Richard Heinberg: The Critique of Civilization. And by the way, the blog’s name was ‘Another Way of Knowing’, which is strikingly similar to the title of Darin’s website, ‘New Ways of Knowing’. (As far as I know, neither person was or is aware of the other’s works.) My views here have been heavily influenced by Darin, who writes much more amazing things about the true way of knowing and relation, and about the pitfalls of modern thought, than I’ve included in this essay. Darin’s works can be found at the following locations: Facebook, organelle.org (click on the images to get in), Medium, YouTube, Quora, Medium, WordPress, Tumblr, Facebook, and Formspring on archive.org.