Language: Behind The Barrier
Language, more than anything else, separates man from other animals. It plays a dominant role in shaping our conceptions about the world. Language is a means of transmitting and storing information, generally with words or other symbols. Animals do communicate but how is not entirely understood. They do not communicate with words, but perhaps some “languages” are not based on words or symbols. There are animal languages more primitive than human language; it is possible that some are more sophisticated.
Most sentences anyone hears or utters during his lifetime are new; that is, they have not occurred before in his personal experience. But individuals find no difficulty in immediately understanding almost everything they hear nor, for the most part, in producing sentences to suit every situation. This ease makes it hard to realize the extent of man’s linguistic competence.
Animal communications are, by contrast, tightly circumscribed. Indeed, the ability to communicate about things outside the immediate environment, which is fundamental to speech, is known only in the so-called language of the bees. By carrying out various conventionalized movements (referred to as bee dances) in or near the hive, bees are able to indicate to others the locations and strengths of the nectar sources. But nectar sources are the only known theme. Surprisingly, this system, close to human language in function, belongs to a species remote from man and is achieved by different physiological activities from those involved in speech.
On the other hand, the animal performance superficially most like human speech, the mimicry of parrots and of some other birds that have been kept in the company of humans is wholly derivative and serves no independent communicative function. And man’s nearest relatives among the primates, though possessing a vocal physiology similar to that of humans, have not developed anything like a spoken language.
“Reasoning” is extremely limited in animals, compared to the abilities of children old enough to talk. Babies up to eighteen months are said to be not much superior intellectually to chimpanzees of the same age; only when they learn to speak do they leave the apes behind. Even adult humans, when they cannot speak, show no distinctly greater intelligence than animals. In the absence of linguistic clues man sees things, hears things, feels things, and explores his surroundings very much like animals.
The particular size and structure of the human brain is vital for appreciating symbols and using language. While mammalian brains in general are remarkably similar, there are definite differences among brains of different sizes. There is more silent or associational area in the cortex of larger brains. A critical brain size may be necessary for the acquisition of language as we know it. In the case of the adult human this seems to be 900 to 1,000 grams. According to John Lilly, “In the primate series, the macaque monkey, whose brain weighs 100 grams, has no silent area; all of his cortex is sensory-motor, that is, engaged in the business of seeing, moving, eating, and regulating body functions. In the chimpanzee, who is able to use his hands for very rapid sign language, the silent areas are small. In the human, the silent areas have expanded; of the 1,500 grams of brain weight, most of the expansion over that of the macaque and of the chimpanzee is in the silent areas and their related nuclei.”
However, he also points out that the brains of sperm whales are four to six times larger than human brains, and that this increase in brain size is devoted to enlargement of the silent, computational areas. From an evolutionary viewpoint, sperm whales may be as advanced in relation to humans as we are compared to the macaque monkey.
The cerebral cortex of man forms the large convoluted structure which sits on the lower brain structures. A fissure, running from front to back, divides it into the left and right hemispheres. Basically, the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, while the right hemisphere controls the left side. This crossing of bodily control and sensation is also a feature of the brains of other primates and lower mammals. However, it is a unique aspect of the human brain that, in the case of the more complex kinds of mental processing, the right and left hemispheres appear to have quite different modes of operation that are not yet entirely understood.
In the last century certain aspects of speech control and use were located in the left hemisphere of the brain in Broca’s area. Along with language, the left hemisphere specializes in communicative gestures, the appreciation of time, and abstract, analytic thinking such as mathematics and logic. The special abilities of the right hemisphere include the appreciation of space, imagery, fantasy and dreams, music, and body language.
For most people the left cerebral hemisphere becomes dominant when they start to talk. People who develop right-hemisphere dominance often have some language difficulty. It has also been suggested that damage to the left hemisphere reduces man to something very like the ape. A man so damaged can still see, and react appropriately to normal objects, but he may lose the uniquely human ability to use symbols effectively.
The ability to communicate seems to grow with enlargement of the lobes of the cerebral cortex. Assuming the evolutionary process has not halted and that the brain will continue to enlarge, what new abilities will emerge? Some claim that psychic abilities such as extrasensory perception are the new sixth sense and a mark of higher consciousness. But it is equally probable that such a faculty may be a general, but at present unrecognized, element in the animal world. The late Sir Cyril Burtt wrote in Science and ESP, “If we accept the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, it would be natural to suppose that from time to time genetic mutations must have produced a rich proliferation of unfamiliar cognitive capacities. If, at the time such variations occurred, they proved useless or detrimental, they would fail to survive on any extensive scale. If, on the other hand, they were helpful under primitive conditions, they might at first have survived and even spread: then, under civilized conditions, when their utility diminished, they would doubtless have atrophied or become suppressed. Many of the animal instincts inherited by prehistoric man have apparently suffered some such fate. And a good deal of evidence has been reported, which, taken at its face value, would suggest that many animals and birds, and certain primitive races, often employ extrasensory methods of perception. Since civilized people have discovered more effective means of obtaining and communicating information, these side-lines, it is argued, have naturally gone out of use, or survive only in vestigial form.”
Obviously, one must be careful in interpreting apparent evidence of ESP in animals, since they have sensory powers humans lack. Many insects find their way by polarized sunlight; bats, by supersonic echoes. Yet, there are well-authenticated instances of animal behavior which make sense only in terms of the paranormal, such as the “homing instinct” in pigeons and the sudden changes of direction of flocks of birds or shoals of fish. Pets are often able to find their owners after they have moved to a new house and left the animal behind. If a heightened sensory capacity, such as scent, is to be seriously considered as an explanation for cases involving a hundred miles in distance and weeks of elapsed time, then we are dealing with a type of sensory acuity just as unknown and remarkable as ESP.
Evolution has provided animals and humans with three sense organs for distant perception: we can communicate at a distance by seeing and hearing, and animals, in addition, by scent. What could telepathic communication add to these? What biological effect could it have? For animals, it would have approximately the same effect that radio transmission has for modern man, which by far exceeds “natural” communication.
Revolutionary as the development of language has been, there is nothing in it to lead one to expect anything like the emergence of ESP as some new faculty of man; it might have had the reverse effect of repressing a possibly more “primitive” means of telepathic communication in favor of the new linguistic method which can transmit more precise information. Perhaps when man learned to speak, psychic abilities became repressed; the answer may lie in the older brain structures, behind the barrier of language.
As you read the words upon this page, you realize that the information that you are receiving is not an attribute of the letters of the words themselves. The printed line does not contain information. It transmits information. Where is the information that is being transmitted then, if it is not upon the page?
The same question of course applies when you read a newspaper, and when you speak to another person. Your actual words convey information, feelings, or thoughts. Obviously the thoughts or the feelings, and the words, are not the same thing. The letters upon the page are symbols, and you have agreed upon various meanings connected with them. You take it for granted without even thinking of it that the symbols — the letters — are not the reality — the information or thoughts — which they attempt to convey.
Now in the same way, I am telling you that objects are also symbols that stand for a reality whose meaning the objects, like the letters, transmit. The true information is not in the objects, any more than the thought is in the letters or in words. Words are methods of expression. So are physical objects in a different kind of medium. You are used to the idea that you express yourselves directly through words. You can hear yourself speak them. You can feel the muscles in your throat move, and if you are aware, you can perceive multitudinous reactions within your own body — actions that all accompany your speech.
Physical objects are the result of another kind of expression. You create them as surely as you create words. I do not mean that you create them with your hands alone, or through manufacture. I mean that objects are natural byproducts of the evolution of your species, even as words are. Examine for a moment your knowledge of your own speech, however. Though you hear the words and recognize their appropriateness, and though they may more or less approximate an expression of your feeling, they are not your feeling, and there must be a gap between your thought and your expressions of it.
The familiarity of speech begins to vanish when you realize that you, yourself, when you begin a sentence do not know precisely how you will end it, or even how you form the words. You do not consciously know how you manipulate a staggering pyramid of symbols, picking from them precisely those you need to express a given thought. For that matter, you do not know how you think.
You do not know how you translate these symbols upon this page into thoughts, and then store them, or make them your own. Since the mechanisms of normal speech are so little known to you on a conscious level, then it is not surprising that you are equally unaware of more complicated tasks that you also perform — such as the constant creation of your physical environment as a method of communication and expression.
(Jane Roberts, Seth Speaks)
‘Silence’ never ceases to imply its opposite and to depend on its presence: just as there can’t be “up” without “down” or “left” without “right,” so one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognize silence. Not only does silence exist in a world full of speech and other sounds, but any given silence has its identity as a stretch of time being perforated by sound.
(Susan Sontag, Essays in Radical Will)
Speech is the best show man puts on. It is his own “act” on the stage of evolution, in which he comes before the cosmic backdrop and really “does his stuff.” But we suspect the watching Gods perceive that the order in which his amazing set of tricks builds up to a great climax has been stolen — from the Universe!
The idea, entirely unfamiliar to the modern world, that nature and language are inwardly akin, was for ages well known to various high cultures whose historical continuity on the earth has been enormously longer than that of Western European culture. In India, one aspect of it has been the idea of the MANTRAM and of a MANTRIC ART. On the simplest cultural level, a mantram is merely an incantation of primitive magic, such as the crudest cultures have. In the high culture it may have a different, a very intellectual meaning, dealing with the inner affinity of language and the cosmic order. At a still higher level, it becomes “Mantra Yoga.” Therein the mantram becomes a manifold of conscious patterns, contrived to assist the consciousness into the noumenal pattern world — whereupon it is “in the driver’s seat.” It can then SET the human organism to transmit, control, and amplify a thousandfold forces which that organism normally transmits only at unobservably low intensities.
Somewhat analogously, the mathematical formula that enables a physicist to adjust some coils of wire, tinfoil plates, diaphragms, and other quite inert and innocent gadgets into a configuration in which they can project music to a far country puts the physicist’s consciousness on to a level strange to the untrained man, and makes feasible an adjustment of matter to a very strategic configuration, one which makes possible an unusual manifestation of force. Other formulas make possible the strategic arrangement of magnets and wires in the powerhouse so that, when the magnets (or rather the field of subtle forces, in and around the magnets) are set in motion, force is manifested in the way we call an electric current. We do not think of the designing of a radio station or a power plant as a linguistic process, but it is one nonetheless. The necessary mathematics is a linguistic apparatus, and, without its correct specifications of essential patterning, the assembled gadgets would be out of proportion and adjustment, and would remain inert. But the mathematics used in such a case is a SPECIALIZED formula-language, contrived for making available a specialized type of force manifestation through metallic bodies only, namely, ELECTRICITY as we today define what we call by that name. The mantric formula-language is specialized in a different way, in order to make available a different type of force manifestation, by repatterning states in the nervous system and glands — or again rather in the subtle “electronic” or “etheric” forces in and around those physical bodies. Those parts of the organism, until such strategic patterning has been effected, are merely “innocent gadgets,” as incapable of dynamic power as loose magnets and loose wires, but in THE PROPER PATTERN they are something else again — not to be understood from the properties of the unpatterned parts, and able to amplify and activate latent forces.
(Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Wharf, edited by J.B. Carroll)
Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C.D. Broad, “that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.” According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born — the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated record of other people’s experience, the victim insofar as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
(Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception)
. . . strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though a person can be the truth one can’t ever say it.) Still, things that are said can sometimes be helpful — which is what people ordinarily mean when they regard something said as being true.
(Susan Sontag, Essays in Radical Will)
One of the reasons for the divergence between the line of knowledge and the line of being in life, and the lack of understanding which is partly the cause and partly the effect of this divergence, is to be found in the language which people speak. This language is full of wrong concepts, wrong classifications, wrong associations. And the chief thing is that, owing to the essential characteristics of ordinary thinking, that is to say, to its vagueness and inaccuracy, every word can have thousands of different meanings according to the material the speaker has at his disposal and the complex associations at work in him at the moment. People do not clearly realize to what a degree their language is subjective, that is, what different things each of them says while using the same words. They are not aware that each one of them speaks in a language of his own, understanding other people’s language either vaguely or not at all, and having no idea that each one of them speaks in a language unknown to him . . . People can communicate to one another information of a practical character, but as soon as they pass to a slightly more complex sphere they are immediately lost, and they cease to understand one another, although they are unconscious of it. . . . As a matter of fact, no one understands anyone else. Two men can say the same thing with profound conviction but call it by different names, or argue endlessly together without suspecting that they are thinking exactly the same. Or, vice versa, two men can say the same words and imagine that they agree with, and understand, one another, whereas they are actually saying absolutely different things and do not understand one another in the least. . . .
It is quite clear that, for proper study, for an exact exchange of thoughts, an exact language is necessary, which would make it possible to establish what a man actually means, would include an indication of the point of view from which a given concept is taken and determine the center of gravity of this concept. The idea is perfectly clear and every branch of science endeavors to elaborate and to establish an exact language for itself . . . People continually confuse the languages of different sciences and can never establish their exact correlation. And even in each separate branch of science new terminologies, new nomenclatures, are constantly appearing. And the further it goes the worse it becomes. Misunderstanding grows and increases instead of diminishing and there is every reason to think that it will continue to increase in the same way. And people will understand one another ever less and less.
For exact understanding exact language is necessary. And the study of systems of ancient knowledge begins with the study of a language which will make it possible to establish at once exactly what is being said, from what point of view, and in what connection. This new language contains hardly any new terms or new nomenclature, but it bases the construction of speech upon a new principle, namely, the principle of relativity; that is to say, it introduces relativity into all concepts and thus makes possible an accurate determination of the angle of thought — for what precisely ordinary language lacks are expressions of relativity.
When a man has mastered this language, then, with its help, there can be transmitted and communicated to him a great deal of knowledge and information which cannot be transmitted in ordinary language even by using all possible scientific and philosophical terms.
The fundamental property of the new language is that all ideas in it are concentrated round one idea, that is, they are taken in their mutual relationship from the point of view of one idea. This idea is the idea of evolution. Of course, not evolution in the sense of mechanical evolution, because such an evolution does not exist, but in the sense of a conscious and volitional evolution, which alone is possible . . .
The language in which understanding is possible is constructed upon the indication of the relation of the object under examination to the evolution possible for it; upon the indication of its place in the evolutionary ladder.
(Georges Gurdjieff, quoted by P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous)
“A universal language is possible,” said G., “only people will never invent it.”
“Why not?” asked one of us.
“First because it was invented a long time ago,” answered G., “and second because to understand this language and to express ideas in it depends not only upon the knowledge of this language, but also on being. I will say even more. There exists not one, but three universal languages. The first of them can be spoken and written while remaining within the limits of one’s own language. The only difference is that when people speak in their ordinary language they do not understand. In the second language, written language is the same for all peoples, like, say, figures or mathematical formulae, but people still speak their own language, yet each of them understands the other even though the other speaks in an unknown language. The third language is the same for all, both the written and the spoken. The difference of language disappears altogether on this level.”
“Is not this the same thing which is described in the Acts as the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles, when they began to understand diverse languages?” asked someone. . . .
“I don’t know, I wasn’t there,” he said.
(Georges Gurdjieff, quoted by P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous)
There is intentional communication and there is unintentional communication. Tolstoy said everything we do expresses something about us, but nothing we do expresses everything. Expressing one’s self is as real a human need as hunger. Yet, to avoid that nagging feeling that one is not saying what one means, one must first know who he is. Paradoxically, to solve that problem one must periodically abstain from communicating anything. That is, spending time alone the better to know one’s self and to avoid the miring of the self in a swamp of superficiality. Everyone needs occasional refueling. There must be unimpinged upon time for experience to be digested, assessed and assimilated. Otherwise self-expression remains on a cliched level, while the soul, unheeded, yearns to grow through an expanded understanding of the universe through which the body is and has been moving.
Everyone has to say something to someone, whether it’s in words or via some other means. The bottling up, the lack of an outlet for the self, is as lethal as cancer. In fact, it can probably cause cancer.
Trained to see it only in certain modes, we fail to perceive the ongoing phenomenon of communication among all that lives.
We must not lose patience. We must learn to read. We must learn to live now.
When you can’t get through, your hands are tied, but you know there’s more than usual there. Do not struggle and squirm. Simply give in, roll with it down dusty rivulets of time, dried up arroyos sometimes abrasive, returning tit for tat and putting up the illusion of resistance.
Holy space encourages communion. Treat it with respect and deference, displaying not your bestiality but your potential for oracular grace. You want communication? Fear not, you’re handling all you can. Remember LSD? Too much, huh? All channels wide open. Circuits jammed. Party line full of gossipers. Don’t worry, you’re not missing out. Walk down the lane, absorbing all you can, but don’t dare to judge the plenitude or lack of it all.
Truly — it must be seen that, while we are talking, it is all sliding hither and yon, drawn to us when we are ready, pulsating eternally and illuminating our environs.
Overheard on Franklin Street:
“It’s all rumor before it happens and memory afterwards. It’s only happening a short while in between, with a lot of leeway on either side.”
Once, in Roman times, long after the eras when books were so few that national libraries were transported by wheel, there lived an old man on a farm. He had retired to the fields after a brief, but well-blossomed, career as a song-maker. He brought with him many books but neglected to purchase any seed.
When Spring came and the waters slipped from the earth, the old man knew planting season had arrived. Only dimly aware that the project was absurd — lacking either foresight or seed — he planted the alphabet. Carefully using his nail-clippers, he sliced from the pages of his dictionary the letters A-Z using both capitals and females.
The following Winter, having failed to harvest a single word, he puzzled over the problem. When Spring appeared once again, he planted the words themselves. Commencing with A, he spent several years putting the orphaned lexicons into the earth. Undismayed by years of failure, he purchased an encyclopedia and planted the entire set over several years, all into the same plot.
As age crept over his bones and the enormity of the task began to dawn upon him, he took to planting entire volumes, each in a hole dug by the neighbor’s boy for a modest fee. The boy grew up, however, time passed, and the old man’s sight failed.
Dispensing with plowing or any other pre-selection procedure, he ripped newspapers, magazines, books, into shreds, partly in anger at his growing helplessness and partly in sorrow because he could no longer spend a few pleasurable evenings reading that which he was about to sow.
He planted his last crop: pamphlets he had been pressed to accept years ago, some well-thumbed favorites from his youth and the family Bible with the history of his ancestors neatly inscribed in the first volume, and died in somewhat mysterious circumstances which are under discussion to this very day.
During his long years as a farmer, the old man had harvested no crop, but his songs were heard for generations after his death.
The field itself lay dormant and unclaimed, falling back into the encroaching forest. Gradually the field disappeared altogether. Under scrabby bushes in the shade of the youngest trees grew small diamond-bright flowers, but none came to see them. And even today, nestling among the roots of sapling oaks, grow tiny slim stalked mushrooms, gathered only by the forest folk.
A friend of the editors put it this way:
“Sometimes you can give some words to people. That’s your action. But in Chapel Hill there are too many words. You don’t want to say it. You’ve heard it too many times.”
Mind is the window through which we see the universe. The universe is all-inclusive: the unity of what we are as being(s) functioning on all planes of existence in and out of time. Knowledge is the product of mind. Association is the process of mind. Association gives rise to the illusion of movement which is knowledge. Association is the product of knowledge and knowledge is the product of association. Knowledge and association together form mind.
Communication is the association of mind which brings two into one. Communication exists only if mind is seeing two things come into one. Dissipation exists when mind sees one thing becoming two. Communication and dissipation give rise to form and formlessness, creation and destruction, yin and yang, matter and energy; all of which give rise to mind.
Love is the window through which the universe sees us. Love is all inclusive and is the expression of the unity of what we are as well as the source of that expression. Love plants every seed and collects every harvest. Love is the illusive form of all realities and the realistic form of all illusions. Love gives rise to formlessness out of form and form out of formlessness. Communication and dissipation, yin and yang, matter and mind are all parts of the universe. The universe is a translation of love into itself. Whatever you seek, you will always find love.
Love is the only mechanism of mind.
Words
The immortal words were no worry, they would keep. But what about the others, boxes upon boxes? Phrases to polish, sentences to shape. How long before they spoil? How long before the air is soured with mistaken meanings? While he searches for the right word, how much is sacrificed?
If only he could forget the whole damned business. But there’s no way out. Downstairs, books block the exit. In the upstairs room, the windows are boarded up with broken promises and small lies.
He calls downstairs. “Listen,” he says, “the books are nothing but letters we mail to ourselves. We read until we discover the signature, and call it genius. Once you understand this, you keep on reading, or you stop. It doesn’t matter.”
“Sounds good,” the manager yells back. “Let me have it in writing.”
Alternatively,
An issue on communication would be incomplete without mention of THE ANVIL.
After nine years, THE ANVIL, a weekly newspaper of politics and the arts, is still an aggressive champion of reform causes, covering stories the major papers often ignore. The writing is often dry, and the paper has been criticized for its narrow, sometimes strident politics. But THE ANVIL stands above most of the nation’s “alternative” media for courage and reliability.
A word, too, about WDBS. We’d prefer more public affairs programming and less commercially safe music, but, that said, we acknowledge there’s no better place to set the dial for consistently thoughtful radio.
