The process of retraining the mind, just as the process of training it was, is one that requires active attention. Each of the many individuals who have devoted a significant part of their lives to figuring out whether or not this was actually possible gave the process a different name.
Remembering was one of those names. This word, on the surface could be taken simply and from a commonly accepted perspective. It could on another hand, be taken to mean forgetting.
Or in some sense, simply detaching from memory. Doing the thing that we all did from the moment of birth until that time around the age of five or six when the system of language as a vehicle for understanding/learning/knowing replaced the one which we all had/have, the vehicle with which, the system called language was learned. Does that make sense? Is it actually possible that the thing which produces a smile on the face of an infant is not some qualitative reaction to a stimulus but rather a quantitative display of knowledge gained?
Why is the concept of a seventh sense, perhaps the one which might be identified as the first sense, one which provides for knowing in the absence of language such a bizarre concept? How is it that at this very moment and at every single moment of time for the last 150,000 years at least, while this very process is/has been occurring all around everyone everywhere it escapes our collective attention? How did it come to be true that the first sound uttered by a child began to elicit some value judgment about it's content and not a remark like wow, how did that happen? How do you learn language without the pre existence of language in the learner?
Excuse me if that is a dumb question but it's become a favorite and not one that elicits a Duh! response followed by the simple observable example that some others do. Is part of the explanation that language-less communication has simply come to be viewed as an oxymoron?
Or is this simply another example of anthropomorphic narcissism? This may be entirely due to ignorance but that question takes on a similar taste to the one which asks: can the mind actually observe the mind? Is there some corner into which the inquiry can not reach as that place is occupied by the inquiry itself? Or is that line of thinking simply one constrained by a faulty western cultural world-view which has for a few hundred years ignored a big big chunk of reality? One which makes the expression 'the universal mind' not that difficult to imagine as a real possibility.
At about 60 minutes into the video you can find at the end of this link http://thesciencenetwork.org/BeyondBelief/watch
/watch.php?Video=Session%2010
you can find an amazing talk by Neil DeGrasse Tyson which can bring tears to your eyes where this scientist gives an incredibly understandable explanation for how you are one with everything that exists in the universe.
What does that have to do with language? Well, in the big picture, language is actually a pretty small part of what IS, not to mention the fact that it has been around for what amounts to a pretty short span of that good old thing we call time. The essential question that comes out of this inquiry for me is this: Is language the medium through which we actually ever know anything or is it simply one methodology that we have for expressing what amounts to a quantity that transcends language in the same way that the universe transcends our galaxy?
Put another way, if language is a vehicle for transporting knowledge in the way that jets and bicycles are vehicles for transporting matter, is it possible that as a species, we have allowed one vehicle for knowing to atrophy?
and is there a very simple method for reversing that process which we can practice every day? a practice that we all engaged in for four solid years and abandoned at the flip of some random culturally conditioned switch?
end of post
Remembering was one of those names. This word, on the surface could be taken simply and from a commonly accepted perspective. It could on another hand, be taken to mean forgetting.
Or in some sense, simply detaching from memory. Doing the thing that we all did from the moment of birth until that time around the age of five or six when the system of language as a vehicle for understanding/learning/knowing replaced the one which we all had/have, the vehicle with which, the system called language was learned. Does that make sense? Is it actually possible that the thing which produces a smile on the face of an infant is not some qualitative reaction to a stimulus but rather a quantitative display of knowledge gained?
Why is the concept of a seventh sense, perhaps the one which might be identified as the first sense, one which provides for knowing in the absence of language such a bizarre concept? How is it that at this very moment and at every single moment of time for the last 150,000 years at least, while this very process is/has been occurring all around everyone everywhere it escapes our collective attention? How did it come to be true that the first sound uttered by a child began to elicit some value judgment about it's content and not a remark like wow, how did that happen? How do you learn language without the pre existence of language in the learner?
Excuse me if that is a dumb question but it's become a favorite and not one that elicits a Duh! response followed by the simple observable example that some others do. Is part of the explanation that language-less communication has simply come to be viewed as an oxymoron?
Or is this simply another example of anthropomorphic narcissism? This may be entirely due to ignorance but that question takes on a similar taste to the one which asks: can the mind actually observe the mind? Is there some corner into which the inquiry can not reach as that place is occupied by the inquiry itself? Or is that line of thinking simply one constrained by a faulty western cultural world-view which has for a few hundred years ignored a big big chunk of reality? One which makes the expression 'the universal mind' not that difficult to imagine as a real possibility.
At about 60 minutes into the video you can find at the end of this link http://thesciencenetwork.org/BeyondBelief/watch
/watch.php?Video=Session%2010
you can find an amazing talk by Neil DeGrasse Tyson which can bring tears to your eyes where this scientist gives an incredibly understandable explanation for how you are one with everything that exists in the universe.
What does that have to do with language? Well, in the big picture, language is actually a pretty small part of what IS, not to mention the fact that it has been around for what amounts to a pretty short span of that good old thing we call time. The essential question that comes out of this inquiry for me is this: Is language the medium through which we actually ever know anything or is it simply one methodology that we have for expressing what amounts to a quantity that transcends language in the same way that the universe transcends our galaxy?
Put another way, if language is a vehicle for transporting knowledge in the way that jets and bicycles are vehicles for transporting matter, is it possible that as a species, we have allowed one vehicle for knowing to atrophy?
and is there a very simple method for reversing that process which we can practice every day? a practice that we all engaged in for four solid years and abandoned at the flip of some random culturally conditioned switch?
end of post
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