Hologram, Ecogram, Mandala, Part VI---Language, Thought, and Reality
As we get a little deeper into the relationship between language, thought, and reality, it may serve us well to contemplate Whorf’s intriguing essay, “Language, Mind, and Reality.”
Whorf speaks of science as the “Grand Revelator of modern Western culture”. He says this Grand Revelator has unintentionally reached a frontier, and now it must either “bury its dead, close its ranks, and go forward into a landscape of increasing strangeness, replete with things shocking to a culture-trammeled understanding, or it must become in Claude Houghton’s expressive phrase, the plagiarist of its own past.” He says this frontier is foreshadowed in the Myth of Babel.
Science has made a “heroic effort to be strictly factual,” but there is no way it could actually avoid “entanglement with the unsuspected facts of the linguistic order.” In other words, there are facts about language which scientists never thought they had to confront—because they were being so “factual”. If we think we are being thoroughly “objective,” then we may never consider the possibility that our way of speaking itself, the structure of our language might itself, might compromise our “objectivity”. Spiritually speaking, if we need to think a thought we cannot currently think, and our very language constrains us from every angle, pushes us at every moment away from that thought, then we will find all our words working against our spiritual and scientific evolution (which we should see as essentially the same thing).
Whorf says these facts of language were taken for “the substance of Reason itself” (246). He says that what we call “scientific thought” is “a specialization of the Western Indo-European type of language, which has developed not only a set of different dialectics but a set of different dialects. THESE DIALECTS ARE NOW BECOMING MUTUALLY UNINTELLIGIBLE” (246). Whorf uses the example of “space,” pointing out that a psychologist and a physicist might both endeavor to be strictly “factual” and “objective” about the term “space,” but that, no matter how they try, they will not mean the same thing when they use this term in their work.
Things are worse in philosophy, which is supposed to be LoveWisdom: No one in the general public can make much sense of what today’s philosophers write, and no ordinary person means the same thing by “love” and “wisdom” as philosophers mean by “philosophy”. It has become a catastrophe of the soul, and the unintelligible dialects of professional “philosophers” remain central to the tragedy.
Our linguistic ancestors (speakers of proto-Indo-European, those living in the high plateaus of Asia) were quite possibly captured by many elements of their way of life, rather than being liberated by them. Living in the stark plains, they could have become exquisitely sensitive to the subtleties of life, but it would perhaps have been easier to become lazy, and to focus on stark contrasts, and to ignore the sensitivities of their prey (Horse), the relationship to whom later became their model for conquest and slavery—Horse became reduced to beast of burden and principal tool for dominating other species as well as the land (the development of herding and then invasive agriculture, in contrast to the non-invasive agriculture practiced by some Indigenous peoples as part of a holistic lifestyle).
Humans in this conquest lineage eventually became increasingly detached instead of increasingly rooted. We became subject-object thinkers, materialistic, atomizing thinkers. Many of those ancestors may also have become thinkers of lack, thinkers of privation, thinkers of againstness—living against life and against others rather than with life, from life, as life, in communion and community, in sublime relationality in every direction, interwovenness through and through.
Our linguistic ancestors, in the main, became a bunch of raiders and cattle rustlers, horse killers and horse enslavers, so we speak dialects of rustling and raiding, manipulation and control. When you have property to protect and defend (an orientation that reinforces atomizing thinking, patterns of thought constellated in terms of objects and possessions rather than processes and mutual exchanges, and so on with the rest), you also may end up in a more “patriarchal” culture, with bands of men hanging out together in possession-prone, warlike mindsets.
Whorf says that our problems with language do not “simply breed confusions of mere detail that an expert translator could perhaps resolve . . . Every language and every well-knit technical sublanguage incorporates certain points of view and certain patterned resistances to widely divergent points of view” (247). Hans Jonas uses the word “pattern” quite a bit, and he has this image of a divinity looking at life, and he asks what the divine would see. It might be something like a fractal: Patterning Woven Into Patterning—a sacred-creative-ordering, alive and alove.
Patterned resistances would be resistances to sensing—resistances to sensing patterning, sensing sacredness in its primordial and its unfolding nature.
Norbert Wiener evokes the spirit of pattern when he says, “We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.” Of course, there isn’t a “stuff” somehow separate from the patterning, and we must think not of “patterns” as objects (as our conquest language seduces us to do), but think of dynamic patterning, an activity alive and alove. It’s patterning all the way down, or a nonduality of cosmic ocean and cosmic patterning/waving/flowing. No pattern, no ocean; no ocean, no pattern—and neither reifiable.
The river Wiener evokes can only be primordial awareness. The sheer openness of that river makes it terrifying to the ego, while the nonduality of that openness with its spontaneous presence and immediate responsiveness makes it inconceivable to the ego. We can release into the river without releasing all our habits of time, space, and identity—without thereby becoming “nothing” or in any way leaving the interwovenness. Our mutually unintelligible dialects can prevent us from helping each other access this interwovenness.
Whorf says the problem of mutually unintelligible dialects holds most strongly when we fail to understand language as a “planetary phenomenon.” Instead, language is typically just “taken for granted, and the local, parochial species of it used by the individual thinker is taken to be its full sum” (247). He says these resistances, “not only isolate artificially the particular sciences from each other; they also restrain the scientific spirit as a whole from taking the next great step in development—a step which entails viewpoints unprecedented in science . . .” (247). Whorf claims that,
certain linguistic patterns rigidified in the dialectics of the sciences—often also embedded in the matrix of European culture from which those sciences have sprung, and long worshipped as pure Reason per se—have been worked to death. Even science senses that they are somehow out of focus for observing what may be very significant aspects of reality, upon the due observation of which all further progress in understanding the universe may hinge. (247)
Further:
my task is to explain an idea to all those who, if Western culture survives the present welter of barbarism, may be pushed by events to leadership in reorganizing the whole human future.
This idea is one too drastic to be penned up in a catch phrase. I would rather leave it unnamed. It is the view that a noumenal world—a world of hyperspace, of higher dimensions—awaits discovery by all the sciences, which it will unite and unify, awaits discovery under its first aspect of a realm of patterned relations, inconceivably manifold (247)
Whorf proposes a different view. As he describes it,
This view implies that what I have called patterns are basic in a really cosmic sense, and that patterns form wholes, akin to the Gestalten of psychology, which are embraced in larger wholes in continual progression. Thus the cosmic picture has a serial or hierarchical character, that of a progression of planes or levels. Lacking recognition of such serial order, different sciences chop segments, as it were, out of the world, segments which perhaps cut across the direction of the natural levels, or stop short when, upon reaching a major change of level, the phenomena become of quite different type, or pass out of the ken of the older observational methods.
It is as if, looking at a wall covered with fine tracery of lacelike design, we found that this tracery served as the ground for a bolder pattern, yet still delicate, of tiny flowers, and that upon becoming aware of this floral expanse we saw that multitudes of gaps in it made another pattern like scrollwork, and that groups of scrolls made letters, the letters if followed in a proper sequence made words, the words were aligned in columns which listed and classified entities, and so on in continual cross-patterning until we found this wall to be—a great book of wisdom! (248)
So, what appears as gaps, as anomalies, as noise, as emptiness, as confusion, as incompleteness may in fact arise as intimate relationship. As we take “the backward step” of LoveWisdom, the gaps or whathaveyou emerge as participants (or participation) in a larger patterning. We see bushes and gaps, but the gaps turn out to be flowers. Then we see flowers and shrubs and gaps, but soon we see birds, flowers, shrubs, and gaps, then bees-birds-flowers-shrubs-and-gaps.
Each new vision recontextualizes, which means all the elements take on new meaning, and deepened meaningfulness. A new level of complexity reveals itself. We enter further into the interwovenness of all things.
The intimate relationship we might call flowering-and-shrubbing manifests one kind of patterning, the relationship of birding-flowering-shrubbing manifests another. Bird participates (birding is participation) in/through/as the perpetuation of flowering and shrubbing, and flowering and shrubbing participate in/through/as the perpetuation of bird.
We mean here development, evolution, creation, discovery. The activity of birding-and-flowering reproduces and cultivates onward the activity of birding-and-flowering, as well as the whole activity of life, the activity of the cosmos, which in turn cultivates onward the birding-and-flowering.
We see something cosmic in birding-and-flowering. We see the in-forming of birding, flowering, shrubbing—and then beeing, wasping, spidering, foresting, and so on. The life of birding-and-flowering furthers itself as it furthers all things, and all things in turn further birding and flowering. It’s process, dance, not anything static. It is not a dance “between” “things,” but just dancing.
Whorf continues:
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 [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. (249)
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. (249)
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 specification 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. (250)
Here we see different uses of “energy”. The physicist or engineer building a radio does not use “energy” the way a yogi, psychotherapist, physician, dancer, or cook uses it. The energy of prayer does not seem connected with the energy in our microwave oven, but anyone who has prayed with passion or practiced qigong with sincerity and skill understands how well “energy” functions as a term in those contexts.
Perhaps we could suggest we find more overlap in the meaning of “energy” as we get closer to life, which in practical terms means biology or ecology—and so, a spiritual path inevitably becomes a path of Nature, a path walked with the whole planetary and Cosmic community of life. The patterning sometimes manifests in ritual, ceremony, celebration, poetry, prayer, music, drumming, chanting, and so on. In all these cases, the sacred creative ordering, or the primordial patterning and energy, only properly manifests with a proper spiritual/philosophical orientation or some rootedness in wisdom, love, and beauty. In other words, “celebration” does not mean “having a party,” and “music” does not mean “making pretty sounds”.
Zhuangzi, Kongzi (Confucius), and many others emphasized the role of music, dancing, and proper celebration (again, what we might dismiss as “mere ceremony” or “mere ritual” is not what we mean here by ceremony and celebration, rite and ritual). By means of these arts of awareness, we attune ourselves to the patterning that connects, the sacred creative ordering. We must emphasize this attunement, as it evokes a vision of ourselves as ecological and Cosmic tuning forks which can resonate with ignorance, reactivity, delusion, and ultimately various kinds of evil, or which can resonate with wisdom, love, beauty, insight, inspiration, creativity, cooperation, and endless wonders of magical mutuality.
If the Cosmos unfolds as mythopoetics, if the Cosmos thinks in deep story and song, if it “reasons” by means of “syllogisms in grass,” then we can call it a speaking, singing, dancing—and not a “thing” or collection of “things”.
There is patterning—patterning arises as all things—and we can re-pattern ourselves, in attunement with primordial patterning. We get “told” in patterns of insanity—trapped in limited and limiting stories we and our culture tell us about ourselves. We can also be Told-and-Sung, Storied-and-Danced in wisdom and love, in beauty and harmony, in magic and mystery, in creativity and compassion. We can be discursive “stories,” or expansive mythologies; we can be doings or we can be Dancings.
We can speak of strategic initiation. This is not the right word, but it riffs off of Whorf’s use of “strategic” above. We must decide: Will we initiate ourselves into further suffering, or will we opt for strategic initiation into wonder and bliss? We walk a Medicine Path at all times. Life arises as ceaseless initiation, a nonduality of teaching-and-learning. Will we make more suffering and further the patterns of insanity? Or, will we become the Medicine by initiating ourselves into wisdom, love, and beauty, into great joy, co-discovery-and-creation, intimate and immediate participation, in a nonduality of individual and collective, in a sacred-creative-ordering to which we already hold ontological responsibility?
That all sounds technical. It just means we have a duty to sacredness, because sacredness is more real than our insanity, and it sustains us; therefore, we must sustain sacredness. All beings sustain us; therefore, we must sustain all beings.
Technical-sounding or not, orienting ourselves this way presents some daunting challenges. Whorf describes someone with a very different worldview than the one we got used to in the dominant culture:
For him bodies do not fall because of a law of gravitation, but rather “because there is nothing to hold them up”—i.e., because he cannot imagine their doing anything else. He cannot conceive space without an “up” and “down” or even without an “east” and “west” in it. For him the blood does not circulate; nor does the heart pump blood; he thinks it is a place where love, kindness, and thoughts are kept. Cooling is not a removal of heat but an addition of “cold”; leaves are green not from the chemical substance chlorophyll in them, but from the “greenness” in them. It will be impossible to reason him out of these beliefs. He will assert them as plain, hard-headed common sense; which means that they satisfy him because they are completely adequate as a system of communication between him and his fellow men. That is, they are adequate linguistically to his social needs, and will remain so until an additional group of needs is felt and is worked out in language. (251)
The patterning of body, speech, mind, world, and Cosmos . . .
Whorf suggests we cannot possibly “reason” a person out of the basic beliefs, the “common sense,” the common feel for life, that constitutes what we call culture.
In the case of the dominant culture, we need a new vision, a new set of premises—but we can hardly “reason” ourselves out of the basic beliefs we have. And once language develops a certain inertia, we get more and more stuck.
Some of the wisdom traditions disagree on this point. A major thrust of the dialecticist centrism of Madhyamika philosophy involves using reason to deconstruct basic beliefs about time, space, and identity. Platonic philosophy seems to have had a similar orientation in its dialogic and dialectical practices.
In many streams of LoveWisdom, reason gets employed at a very high level of skill and intensity as part of the practice of liberation. Those traditions might grant that an isolated “reason” cannot perform this function, but full-bodied reason in a holistic ecology of practice might even appear as necessary for many, if not most, human beings. These considerations place Whorf’s suggestions in a broader context, rather than merely contradicting them.
Whorf says we might suppose talking is an activity in which we are “free and untrammeled,” but such an understanding of language is “nothing but statements of the NEEDS THAT IMPEL US TO COMMUNICATE.” Our understanding of the processes of language are, sadly, “not germane to the process by which” we actually communicate.
LoveWisdom invites us to enter the spaciousness of inspiration, and this abides “outside” the pattern of insanity. Put another way: The pattern of insanity arises already within “something,” and we have only to liberate out of the pattern by directly realizing this spaciousness that allows all insanity to arise, and which itself abides as an undefilable sanity.
As we transmute the needs that impel us to communicate—as we transmute our agendas and egocentric purposes into eco-centric/holo-centric spiritual intentions—we change the nature of communication, and we allow ourselves intimacy with the process by which we actually commune and communicate. This transforms everything, not least the way we create and engage with art, the way we conceive of “economics” and “business,” the way we organize society and engage with the political, the way we practice “science” and maintain families, the way we relate with the whole community of life.