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.
