Swimming is to Water as Knowing is to Language
When we think about knowing and not knowing, the known and the unknown, sooner or later we have to start thinking about language. Language is the currency of knowing. Realizing this is like swimming for years before realizing that you were not just swimming – you were swimming in something – water. Analogously, we are not just thinking, we are thinking in something – language.
Swimming in fresh water is different than swimming in salt water and both are different from swimming in oil, mud or wet concrete. Thinking in one language is different from thinking in another. And thinking with one vocabulary set is different from thinking with another. Language cannot be separated from thinking. And what we think determines what we know – or at least that is the question I want to open up.
When I was a teenager I had a friend named John. One night he was trying to explain something and couldn’t say it clearly. As his friend I taunted him saying that he didn’t know what he was talking about. In frustration he blurted out, “I know it, but I don’t understand it!” I almost fell over laughing at what I thought was ludicrous statement. Now years later and after having read many pages of philosophy I realize that John was actually making a profound point (although I doubt he realized it) that I had no way of appreciating at the time.
I put forth that understanding, aka knowing, is something that can only happens in language.* Think about it. Can you know something without knowing it in words and sentences? Take for example the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Can you know that fact in any other way except in a sentence that says, “The Earth revolves around the Sun?” If you can, then how do you know it other without using words?
Maybe this seems too “abstract” a piece of knowledge. Let’s pick something simpler. Can I know that blue is my favorite color without resorting to the use of language? You might say that of course I know what my favorite color is without having to have a sentence in mind that tells me it is. It might be true that when you see something blue it makes you feel more pleasant than seeing any other color. But feeling pleasant when you see a color isn’t the same as knowing that is your favorite color. In fact, feeling pleasant when you see a certain color isn’t the same thing as knowing you feel pleasant when you see that color.
What do we mean when we say we ‘know’ something? Usually we mean that we are holding something in the mental space of our mind that corresponds to something that is true outside of our mind in the world. You can perceive the color blue and you can perceive a pleasant emotion arise in you , but that isn’t the same as holding in your mind the idea that this color is my favorite color, or even that I like this color. Those ideas are abstractions deduced from the original perceptions.
There is a long road that must be traveled before our experience of pleasure at seeing the color blue and the thought that “blue is my favorite color.” And that thought when it appears always comes as a sentence in your mind.
If it is true that everything we know we know in language then what we know is dependent on the language at our disposal and our skill in using it. And what we believe to be true is similarly limited by the language at our disposal and our skill in using it. If it is not true and there are other ways of knowing then what are those ways?
*Please note that I am specifically talking about the language of the written word, but language in the widest sense can include any symbolic system of communication from the dances of some native cultures to the mathematics of science.
ok .. that’s the first step, thoughts are words, the mind is a collection of thoughts …
but there is pre-verbal mental activity, and there is awareness without object .. common experiences to mystics. in fact, mystics will say that thoughts are after the fact, and not at all important.
so i am going to reverse part of your title .. swimming is to water as language is to knowing ..
Gregory I don’t disagree with you…as you say this is the first step. What we need to start looking into are the different ways that we know and the different ways that language can help us express what we know. There is the possibility that the knowing of the mystic will be completely lost if we define knowing only as the knowing of language…but to many of us that is knowing and thinking and language have become all there is….read on in my future posts and lets look into these distinctions together.
The comment on mysticism does bring up an interesting point, and is one that can be looked further into. I think Jeff was speaking more level to the surface and I can definitely relate. I don’t write about complex concepts often enough and therefore often find it hard to express my thoughts even though in my mind it all makes complete sense. I suppose there’s only one solution to this.
As for mysticism, pre-verbal mental activity accounts for the Interior Individual and represents so much of ourselves. To express this one must break that barrier to and interpret and express in the other 3 quadrants. For me, it’s a daunting task… as most of my “Interior Individual” stays there. Expression of this is not limited to language though. I think there is equal validity when expressed through art, music, dance, etc…
What is knowing? It is indeed a very interesting thing to contemplate, and my experience with this is when I hear someone speak, particularly if they are on a path toward enlightenment, about spiritual matters and eternal truths, there is a part of me that knows that what I am hearing is the truth; in fact a part of me already knows it! This happens in 12 step meetings all of the time, or when I am listening to Andrew–I have a “knowing in my knower” that I am hearing the absolute truth. Yet if asked to articulate it with langauage, unless I have direct (spiritual) experience with it, it is difficult.
The solution as I see it is to do the work to die to self so I am not so distracted by self and can focus on that which is eternal, true, and already known by the part of me that is beyond the form. Then I can articulate easily from the heart (and this too happens in 12 step meetings if we do the work)—a spontaneous arising of truth, based on direct experience!
The first thing that came up reading your blog was the memory of a deaf person in my work who was brilliant in localizing pictures of unknown places in Amsterdam. He compensated his not being able to hear (language) with images. I looked a bit on the Internet and it seems that visual thinking has been argued to be an origin for delayed speech in people with autism. One person said: ‘I THINK IN PICTURES. Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head. When somebody speaks to me, his words are instantly translated into pictures. Language-based thinkers often find this phenomenon difficult to understand, but in my job as an equipment designer for the livestock industry, visual thinking is a tremendous advantage. Visual thinking has enabled me to build entire systems in my imagination.’
I looked a bit further and found ‘’Theorist Linda Kreger Silverman suggests that less than 30% of the population strongly uses visual/spatial thinking, another 45% uses both visual/spatial thinking and thinking in the form of words, and 25% thinks exclusively in words. According to Kreger Silverman, of the 30% of the general population who use visual/spatial thinking, only a small percentage would use this style over and above all other forms of thinking, and can be said to be ‘true’ picture thinkers like a certain Albert Einstein.
Visual thinking should also not be confused with logical (mathematical/systems) which may also be visualised using lines and mind maps but is not pictorial.
There is not much doubt that picture thinking is a real phenomenon, and that only a small percentage of the population are true picture thinkers. Persons who mainly think using pictures to the exclusion of thinking linearilly using language. Although there is resistance to the idea by some psychologists, a lot of empirical evidence was discovered for the existence of this phenomenon.
One other thing that I found is ‘drawing’. It seems that when we are at the age of seven or so our brain changes and instead of natural drawings, we start to draw ‘concepts’ for example we do not draw an eye, we draw a concept of an eye which makes it very difficult to learn drawing at al later age. A way to ‘fool’ the brain is to draw ‘upside down’ than the automatic habit of the brain to turn all we see into concepts of what we see doesn’t work anymore. It is really amazing how different we draw when we do that.
I actually agree with Gregory to change the sentence to swimming is to water as language is to knowing ..that leaves a bit of space for the visual..
In terms of what I am thinking about I wonder if even if someone thought in a “picture language” they are still thinking in language. After all letters are also pictures of a sort, they are more abstract than pictures that are meant to visual represent something, but they are still shapes that we see. The question about what is language is an important one and it dominated a great deal of 20th century philosophy. I am really becoming fascinated by thinking abou it.
What I wrote was a bit double, some pictures are representations. But what I was talking about is the real ‘picture thinking’ which means not a representation of something. I could not find anything about dreaming but I think that is also an example of connection of picture- and language thinking. Sometimes strange connections are made which proves (to my idea) that both are distinct forms of thinking. A spiritual teacher told me once that we do in ‘waking’ state the same as in dreaming which means pictures and thinking connects –not always in a logical way. But this might be slightly different.
But from my own experience I am absolutely sure that picture thinking exists.. for example when one is hungry or in love… This morning at the front page of the newspaper there was a huge picture of two sides of a face of a guy in trouble. Two different sides of a face, one can never catch that in a language like so many other pictures (beauty), we have them in our brain.
Faces are easy to remember, but no names to faces. A picture thinker has standard tricks (ie associations) for easier remembering.
In Holland there is a lot of investigation in picture thinking, here is some stuff I translated from the internet:
– Image thinking, thinking in images and events. It can be described as spatial thinking. Picture thinkers organize their world, preferably with non-linguistic means. They see images of situations and events, where multiple issues are simultaneously visible, interact and form a meaningful whole. It is a simultaneous and non-verbal thinking, a manipulation of spatial representations.
– A minority of people think in pictures. It is a spacious, wordless thinking. This way of thinking proceeds not gradually, but the picture thinker sees as it were on the whole, however, they may just miss the details. Except that everything is interconnected meaningful, the thinking is often emotionally colored. Language must first be converted into images and their own images must first be converted into language to communicate. That means searching for words and that takes time.
– Image thinking is non verbal reasoning, instinctive thinking, knowing there and there is a solution. The capacity can visualize that what you want to express, like a painting or a sculpture, but also as an entire orchestra can hear you play. Of Mozart and Beethoven heard the music in their heads and saw the band play and wrote that. The solution is seeing, not all reasoning to a conclusion. A thinker sees an image solution and will then work backwards trying to explain why his solution is correct.
-Imagination is the ability to see things and situations as if they are real. Everyone has this capacity, even though not everyone is using it. And few, but perhaps more than we think, artists, doctors, architects, engineers, etc., use this capacity to perform their job better.
Everyone has a degree of image thinking in itself, because until our fourth year we all think in pictures, but then we go – slow or even fast, no one knows exactly – towards word thinking. Our education system is based on the word thinking (this connects to my story of the drawing capacity).
– The power of a picture thinker: seeing large connections, strategic; a lot of information can be saved at once; Is very creative in thinking and / or expression, comes up with original solutions; The images appear simultaneously. Not in a neat order; Faster thinking in 32 frames per / sec, language thinker: 2 to 3 words per / sec.
A picture tells more than a 1000 words. Confucius
Logic will get you from A to B, Imagination takes you everywhere. Albert Einstein
Dear Jeff I don’t know about this. Equating Knowledgea nd Language is what I have been taught at the French school.
“Ce qui se pense bien s’énonce clairement
Et les mots pour le dire arrient aisément”
From the French classics Corneille
“ What is well though is well enunciated
And the words to say, arrive easily”
[ my poor translation doesn’t give the incredible lightness of the whole sentence which is (for me) part of the French genius, if one still recognize one to our culture ( which we should) !].
But well, since I started to work at the brink of Science and Spirituality I had many surprises on this matter. Sometimes I think of a problem, a scientific problem, and I suddenly “know” that it is solved, that I already “know”the answer to it. I cannot express the answer in language, not even in mental images, and don’t even think of the final check of symbolic equations which is far far way form Intuition, I just “known” that I already know the solution , and that just letting it emerge in its own time is enough. It is a very strange phenomenon but never failed me ( so far) .
I remember when I met Andrew the first time, I “knew” that something very important just had “already” happened. I had no clue what it was, I just knew it.
If you ask me now, I just “know” that I will do something great with Andrew and with all of you. I just know it. I have no clue what it will be of what form it will take. I just “know ” that somehow everything is pushing so that this happens. That some very impersonal force is at play here.
Can we express this kind of knowledge in language ? I believe not, maybe in the future, as a more evolved species, we will be able to communicate between us at this level of communion,but at the moment we are stuck with symbol and language.
Isn’t it very very frustrating ?
Hello Catherine, I don’t believe that knowing is only thinking, but that is the way most of us are conditioned to relate to our experience. It is also the way we consciously act a great deal of the time. If there is a knowing that exists outside of language then it would be good for us to keep discussing what that knowing is, what the source of it is, and how to trust what it can and cannot know. If we are able to get clear about the fact that there is a knowing that is not contained in language then we may be able to articulate that understanding in language in ways that will make it “known” in the language sense to many people. Language may not be the only way we know, but I do believe that it is the currency of the known, which means that until we are able to put our most subtle insights, recognitions and intuitions into language they will remain personal which means believed in vehemently by the person who holds them, but only shared with those who share the same intuitions. Languaging profound intuitions is what I see as the work of creating a rational spirituality or a rational romanticism.
Isn’t language more a limitation at the moment ?
James Clerk Maxwell is my favorite physicists of all times.
What took my heart about him is precisely his investigation of the role of language as a means to favor scientific intuition. He didn’t believe in formalism to achieve this goal, but advised his students to alway write their scientific results in prose, and he himself was putting them in verses…. !!!
So we get solutions of mathematics problems in English versification, by this outmost scientific genius [ Scientists always fight between him, Newton and Einstein for the greatest one. Maxwell has made the first unification, of the laws of Electricity and Magnetism, and is also partly responsible, with Boltzmann, for the Kinetic Theory of gases, which lead way to statistical mechanics. The first unification has changed the world forever.]
A Problem in Dynamics
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A poem in Dynamics
An inextensible heavy chain
Lies on a smooth horizontal plane,
An impulsive force is applied at A,
Required the initial motion of K.
Let ds be the infinitesimal link,
Of which for the present we’ve only to think;
Let T be the tension, and T + dT
The same for the end that is nearest to B.
Let a be put, by a common convention,
For the angle at M ’twixt OX and the tension;
Let Vt and Vn be ds’s velocities,
Of which Vt along and Vn across it is;
Then Vn/Vt the tangent will equal,
Of the angle of starting worked out in the sequel.
In working the problem the first thing of course is
To equate the impressed and effectual forces.
K is tugged by two tensions, whose difference dT
Must equal the element’s mass into Vt.
Vn must be due to the force perpendicular
To ds’s direction, which shows the particular
Advantage of using da to serve at your
Pleasure to estimate ds’s curvature.
For Vn into mass of a unit of chain
Must equal the curvature into the strain.
Thus managing cause and effect to discriminate,
The student must fruitlessly try to eliminate,
And painfully learn, that in order to do it, he
Must find the Equation of Continuity.
The reason is this, that the tough little element,
Which the force of impulsion to beat to a jelly meant,
Was endowed with a property incomprehensible,
And was “given,” in the language of Shop, “inexten-sible.”
It therefore with such pertinacity odd defied
The force which the length of the chain should have modified,
That its stubborn example may possibly yet recall
These overgrown rhymes to their prosody metrical.
The condition is got by resolving again,
According to axes assumed in the plane.
If then you reduce to the tangent and normal,
You will find the equation more neat tho’ less formal.
The condition thus found after these preparations,
When duly combined with the former equations,
Will give you another, in which differentials
(When the chain forms a circle), become in essentials
No harder than those that we easily solve
In the time a T totum would take to revolve.
Now joyfully leaving ds to itself, a-
Ttend to the values of T and of a.
The chain undergoes a distorting convulsion,
Produced first at A by the force of impulsion.
In magnitude R, in direction tangential,
Equating this R to the form exponential,
Obtained for the tension when a is zero,
It will measure the tug, such a tug as the “hero
Plume-waving” experienced, tied to the chariot.
But when dragged by the heels his grim head could not carry aught,
So give a its due at the end of the chain,
And the tension ought there to be zero again.
From these two conditions we get three equations,
Which serve to determine the proper relations
Between the first impulse and each coefficient
In the form for the tension, and this is sufficient
To work out the problem, and then, if you choose,
You may turn it and twist it the Dons to amuse.
James Clerk Maxwell
If language is a limitation to our deeper intuitions then we should either expand the way we use language or stop using it. I see our job as the former, trying to expand our use of language to bring out our intuitions. Martin Heiddeger along with earlier Romantics like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Samual Taylor Coleridge believed that poetry and poetic writing could better point toward direct recognitions of truth than other ways that language was used.
Yes I completely agree with you. Somehow we shall expand the way we use the language and invent new ways of communicating together.
Where I don’t follow, is when you say that that language is the only way to make the Intuitions Impersonal. I don’t have a conclusion on this, I have simply never thought of language that way.
It seems to me that my Intuition , for example, the first time I met Andrew, that this encounter is very important, this intuition was absolutely impersonal.
Now if this intuition is correct, then something “will” emerge out of our interaction, and what emerges shall be the proof , or the reflexion into the world of Form of this impersonal Intuition.
Language was not used in this example, except if one considers our own life as a form of language or communication.
Another example out of my interaction with Andrew, is that the first thing he asked me to do, was to keep silent for a while. With him I feel even if he doesn’t talk something gets communicated to me. If it is possible with him, surely it is a possible way of communication beyond the example of Andrew?
last example of what I want to say : in my experience the most profound ways of communication were not through language, r maybe a single word sometimes was enough. It was another organ which operated for the communications that really counts, and even if it was through language, this other organ was somehow beyond language.
“If language is a limitation to our deeper intuitions then we should either expand the way we use language or stop using it.”
Maybe transform language as well ?
I see this as a goal for the Autonomy and Communion spiritual Ideal , very present in Andrew’s teachings. When one is really together, one almost doesn’t need to talk, or talks proceeds in very different ways.
I feel we agree on this …
Can we directly access to “togetherness” without the use of language ?
Maybe it is not the best example, but one which is dear to me: Albert Schweitzer account for his first meeting with Steiner who was his elder by 14 years and especially this sentence :
“His face with the wonderful eyes met an unforgettable impression on me”. Maybe it is all we need to change a life ? an unforgettable impression ? maybe really togetherness is far beyond language ? bath Schweitzer and Steiner were beautiful examples of impersonal Forces in our world.
Young Schweitzer and established Rudolf Steiner meeting at a Theosophical society meeting… enjoy!!
“In the afternoon we stood around together, not paying much attention to what was happening at the theosophical conference.
When the discussion turned to Plato I could participate more. Steiner surprised me here as well, in that he revealed to me hidden and not yet appreciated aspects of Plato’s knowledge.
When Steiner asked me what concerned me especially in theology, I answered that it was research into the historical Jesus. Well, I felt the moment to have come in which I could take the conversation in hand and began to lecture him about the state of the life of Jesus research and about the problem of which Gospel contained the oldest tradition. To my astonishment, a discussion about this subject did not come about. He let me lecture on without saying a word. I had the impression that he was mentally yawning. I got off my theological social scientific high horse and put it in the stable, and waited for what would come.
And something remarkable happened. One of us, I don’t remember which, began to speak of the spiritual decline of culture as the fundamental, unnoticed problem of our time. Thus we realized that we were both occupied with it. We had not expected it of each other.
A lively discussion resulted. We learned from each other that we had both taken on the life mission of working for the emergence of a true culture enlivened by the ideal of humanity and to encourage people to become truly thinking beings.
We parted with this consciousness of belonging together. A re-encounter wasn’t decided upon. But the consciousness of togetherness remained. We each followed the activities of the other.
To take part in Rudolf Steiner’s flights of thought in the spiritual sciences was not granted me. I know though that he elevated many people through this and made new men of them. His disciples have made excellent contributions in many fields.
I have continually followed Rudolf Steiner’s life and activities with heartfelt participation. The successes until the First World War, the problems and hardships which accompanied them, the courageous efforts in the post-war confusion to create order through his teachings about the Threefold Social Organism, the founding of the Goetheanum in Dornach, where his thought-world found a home, the pain caused by its destruction by fire on New Year’s Eve 1922/23, the courage with which he went about its reconstruction, and finally the spiritual greatness which he retained in tireless teaching and activity during the suffering of the last months of his life on earth.
On his part, he also didn’t lose sight of me. When in 1923 my Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur and Kultur und Ethik were published together, he took note and was appreciative of the analysis of the cultural problems offered in them in a lecture, whereby he made no secret of his regret that I undertook the solution to the problems with only profound ethical thinking and without the help of spiritual science.
During my meeting with him his face with the wonderful eyes made an unforgettable impression on me.”
I just want to interfere making some clarification. I was very sorry later that I wrote that ‘as soon as it sounded like non-sense it was OK in some previous post. While reading the above it connected with me to ‘beyond te mind’. Trying to put something into words that is beyond the rational sounds like non-sense to a rational mind. When I said how precious Andrew is, I meant that he is able to help people with this. Either himself or with the process, which means finding out with others. It connects to what you printed from Steiner. Talking from the ration mind is boring because it is already known. It is something totally different. I hope Jeff will talk more about this. This has indeed nothing to do with pictures.
Thank you for the post, its interesting. You could check out Lakoff and Johnson, “Metaphors we live by”. They have theorised on the (for the most part unconsious) corporal and spacial “embeddedness of thought and language. At the same time, they are pointing out structures of thought as language. Thoughts and knowing that we are seldom conscious of, but do see, if we examine language closely. In a way reading their theory also exemplifies, that knowing/understanding very well could be language, as you propose. I remember having the thought, that they were digging out (and at the same time expressing themselves) “thinking as language”, on a rather subtle level. Its a couple of years back, though.
“We learned from each other that we had both taken on the life mission of working for the emergence of a true culture enlivened by the ideal of humanity and to encourage people to become truly thinking beings.”
isn’t it so close to what Andrew wants to do and yet Andrew comes at a later times and now I feel it is possible…
It makes me very excited. Maybe one days I shall try to write why Andrew is, to me, the true heir of Steiner. Having such an heritage and never claim it, it mesmerizes me !!!!
Steiner and his Eternal Becoming, so close to Andrew’s Evolutionary Enlightenment…
I just re-read the piece of Steiner and what I experienced reading is not really mentioned, so I think I should explain. For me the communication must have been authentic. It must have been so because it touched both of them so deeply. I think this has anything to do with the impersonality Jeff is talking about. I think that the deep communication those two men had can never be on a personal level. That is ‘ I know’ meeting ‘you know’ which is a kind of ‘ exchange of information’ and that comes from a place of already knowing. It is only when it gets impersonal, which means it is about truth itself that one can be so deeply touched. This is because it gets to a level of finding out something that goes further than the already knowing..
When finding out on an impersonal level it is very dynamic and it can be really shared. It goes beyond the personal knowledge. That is where the intimacy and interest comes from that the two men had. I think you (Catherine) have been describing this on a level of science: even though ‘knowing’ is already involved, the intimate connection only starts when this ‘knowing’ ends and together there is searching for truth that lies beyond that. That is where true intimacy is found, this goes beyond personal truth. At a moment like that there is no sense of identity event though one is using all the identity one has. The fact that those two men got so interested in what the other did the rest of his life was because it was a shared (impersonal) consciousness from where the actions came from . They where not so much interested in the person, but they where interested in the actions that came out of that shared consciousness.
I think the difference between the personal and impersonal can be very subtle. One can have found a lot of truth by oneself, and be able to find out a lot more on an individual level, but somehow it is something I ‘own’, while the intimacy starts when one finds this same ‘ownership’ together with others. I am quite sure that the actions of one of those men felt for the other deeply connected with his own actions. But Jeff knows more about that.
Yes Liesbeth,
I like this text by Albert Schweitzer very much, and I love what you write about it. The first time I read this text, the last sentence with the “wonderful eyes” made me cry. I just couldn’t help wondering how those “wonderful eyes ” could be so that they leave such an indestructible impression to Schweitzer. I also love the subtle silence of Steiner while listening to his younger friend lecturing him about the life of Jesus, and in the younger friend the subtle sensation that Steiner is inwardly yawning to the talk. And then Schweitzer’s courage to just stop being an intellectual and wait of what could come. Now they are in the unknown, anything can happen…. and it does and they meet at a very deep level.
Yes I really love this text with all my heart.
It has been reported that Albert Schweitzer has visited Steiner in Dornach a few times, and every times Steiner was talking for days about his visit before he came. He was very excited saying how much Schweitzer is an “important man” for him. He also was very heart broken that Schweitzer didn’t embrace his New Way of Spiritual Science, but apparently even this was not affecting the deep love between them. This is also impersonal to me; they were meeting in such an authenticity and at a level which is so elevated that the question of the personal didn’t present itself anymore.
dear Jeff, you write
“. If there is a knowing that exists outside of language then it would be good for us to keep discussing what that knowing is, what the source of it is, and how to trust what it can and cannot know. If we are able to get clear about the fact that there is a knowing that is not contained in language then we may be able to articulate that understanding in language in ways that will make it “known” in the language sense to many people. ”
I find it is one of the most noble goal that there could be, to determine the “knowing that lies besides the language”. So I am completely with you and ready to be very serious about this enquiry.
When do we start this investigation ?
I read a bit more about Steiner: in the chapter about philosophy of freedom he is quoted talking about purifying the thinking process ‘this purification means freeing it from all emotions, wishes and other illusions’. If a person acts from impulses, that are –without him being aware of it – at the basis of his thinking from which he acts, it means he is not free. It is not he who is acting, but ‘it’, which means the emotions that determine the actions… The spiritual is active only when the impulses of his actions in the field of thought, uninfluenced by sensory perception, are moral intuitions. Only than he is acting himself. Only than he is free: a being acting by himself. The level of a human being is the depth and power of his moral intuitions, which is the source of the actions of a free human spirit. In willing freedom is practiced, in feeling it is experienced, in thinking it is recognized..
Jeff,
I follow your blog. In this one, there is something even deeper than image and the word for the image, and that is structure. We sense structure before we can even connect word to object. I tseems to me you are talking about chicken and egg, subject-object relation, and all you have said is true. Underlying subject-object, text and context, is structure. I’m writing a book on structure so this is something I’ve been studying for many years. It is through structure we arrive at form, i.e., object. Thanks to structure, we establish and organize our basis relationships with reality. If we can’t know or at least sense the structure of something, then we have no meaningful context and hence can never say we “know” something. Until we can identify the structure and create an object (form) that “fits” into our understanding, we do not know how the object relates to us, what it means, and its importance, accuracy, truthfulness, relevance, etc.
So the question that grabs me is not the form, word or object, but the structure in which these manifestations will form relationship. It is “looking at the field” instead of looking at the “object (word or form) ” in the field. Field is structure.
What is structure is the question we as a seekers of knowledge need to ask. It’s time to raise structure to a stand-alone art and science of its own so that when we ask, “what is the structure of the human personality, what is the structure of the atom, the universe?”, we have no descriptive scaffold large enough and abstract enough to cover such diverse departs of knowledge.
So the formulation of comprehensive Theory of Form and Structure is how I spend me my day. Would like to discuss this with you one day and get your perspective.
Don
Hello Don, Thank you for this and I agree with you that there is something underlying all this. You referred to it as structure. I believe that the Pragmatists were pointing toward the same thing with the way they used the word ‘habit.’ Habit was the underlying structure if you will of how everything worked. Habit is what held everything together – groves of ways of being that shape everything that falls into them. It is challenging to get a sense of what I belive the Pragmatists meant by the words habit, because it is so much more fundemental than the way we use the word today.
Thank you again, Jeff
Jeff, et all,
Catherine has identified the “knowing that lies besides the language” as where the leading edge of awareness would be, if I read her meaning correctly. The Vedic sages and Yogis have given this a lot of thought for several thousand years so it might be helpful to look into what they have discovered. In Samkghya philosophy, used by yogis, there is prakriti, the stuff of reality and purusha, the consciousness that acts upon prakriti to manifest reality. Both have to be present. Prakriti has a structure, locality, whereas purusha (consciouness is a totality). Prakriti is made up of finite little entities possible infinite in number, called “grantis”, which translates to mean “knots”. Granti make up “akasha” which is the stuff of Prakriti. The description given grantis resembles and behaves like the description physics gives to a Planck mass, the smallest entity theorized in physics. Prakriti is related to Purusha the way knots are related to the string on which they are tied.
The implication is that manifest reality, the knots, are inseparable from consciousness, the string. Knots are objects, words, forms, images, discrete entities concrete or abstract, while string is singular. Stringness, i.e., consciousness, only manifest when the string decides to form itself into knots. So words, forms, objects, etc., are in this manner formed from the non-dual singularity of consciousness.
Here’s the catch….The knot cannot know consciousess by studying its knotness. That which makes a knot a knot has nothing causal to do with what makes a string a string. WHY? Because when the knot is untied, everything that is pertinent to describing a knot disappears leaving only stringness. For a knot to understand the string, it has to put aside knotness and contemplate its stringness. Much of what we do in the halls of learning is as the knot to explain the string in knot terms and that cannot be a fruitful endeavor. Almost every discipline you can think of has fallen into this trap and hence failed to find the fundamentals.
This is why mediation is an essential tool to the truth seeder. I hope this bears on the subject of your blog. If it is too foreign an approach, I apologize.
Don
It definately does…in the same way if our intelect is limited to the intelligence of language then we cannot know outside of what we can know in language. If we can know something that exists outside of language then we have to know it in some form other than in language. What is that form of knowing. Often it has been assumed that some personal revelation is that form of knowing – but then the question how can that knowing be communicated. In spiritual traditions this is usually thought of as happening through some form of transmission, but in the modern world where knowing is almost exclusively related to in terms of the kind of knowing that is contained in language this form of communication is often dismissed. The great poets tried to use language to use words to point attention at a reality that lies beyond words. The poetic use of language is something that I am currently exploring. I think that what you refer to as structure has to do with the way things are that cannot be captured in words.
Dear Don,
actually you illustrate for me fantastically what I call the limitation of language. I know for having listen to you a few hours and because you have generously let me ask all the questions , however stupid they are, that I wanted, that what you are up to with the string and the knot is great stuff. Extremely elegant intuitively, and maybe an alternative able to reconcile at term, quantum mechanics and relativity.
But somehow it is very difficult to convey the meaning, and the stature of it in one blog like this. Somehow all these wonderful ideas need to be understood , first slowly by a few human beings, but really understood I mean really those human beings putting effort and getting an understanding “in their hearts”. And then those human beings will have to reformulate, recast them, so that the Intuitive meaning becomes transparent. I know it is a difficult process, and that’s why I feel language is a limitation for all of us. It is quite of a curse, actually.
I would give my life to be “together” like Steiner and Scheitzer are, and to be able to spread this “togetherness”. I feel it is the future, but it doesn’t seem to pass only through language. Or maybe we need to push the language so that it takes us to the frontier of the unknown, and then when we are in the unknown, we are “together” ?
Jeff,
I always thought that “some kind of transmission ” is absolutely necessary for communicating this form of knowing and insight.
can it ever be communicated only through language,
without the transmission ?
Or maybe shall we investigate “what transmission means” and what it consists of ?
Don I wrote “ actually you illustrate for me fantastically what I call the limitation of language.” Re reading it I notice that it can look offensive. It is not at all what I meant… I am convinced your ideas are unusual and have a real potential. Some intrinsic elegance which is very appealing.
It’s just illustrates how difficult it is to communicate sophisticated ideas between us, with the usual means of language.
I will give another example. In 1905, when Einstein started his miraculous year, he had read thoroughly one book of physics, by Ludwig Boltzmann. On could say that at that time, he was one of the very very few men in the planet who truly understood Boltzmann. For me I cannot under estimate the impact of this deep understanding of Boltzmann into his further discoveries.
All in Intuition so he said was forged in this book.
What would we be as human being if we could be “together ” at a level so deep that we could easily communicate, or transmit understanding of ideas of that kind.
I believe even in physics one needs “transmission”. A true understanding of a deep idea, comes from a transmission, not only from language.
Even though what you are talking about is different, in the sense of transmission like a spiritual teacher can do. I had to think of Rupert Sheldrake reading the post…
I looked for the video ‘the extended mind’ (on you tube there a lots of video’s also from others) and I read some of the comments
– ‘he just explained the quantum physical paradox of altering far distant objects by viewing them and thereby causing their probability fields to collapse. If the projection is also a non local phenomenon there is no longer any paradox, its just reality as normal
– ‘I think that the word to describe this innate phenomena is… “instinctual”…. anyone who works in the psychotherapeutic field knows this well… and I’m totally sure that both myself and my clients feel this phenomenal emotional psychic reaction when a “psychological truth” is met in the client work within the room… it is “intimate…” between the two “auric fields” of the participants…..
– the brain is a tool to translate information in a language their spirit can understand. its like converting stereo into mono. .
Dr. Bruce King talks about meditation and Silent Awareness. Research shows that expert meditators were able to affect the pH of water.
I am so totally fascinated by this, I am sorry but I just want to say it one more time. I was thinking of all the connections I had with it and it all connects to what Tolle described: one instant you ‘wake up’ realizing that you are not that ego-shouting mind but that there is something beyond it. I experienced this in groups but also alone, I had it while reading a book (Goethe) but also watching (art) pictures. It is about Truth and it is Universal. It seems definitely clear is that it is consciousness that is not produced by the individual brain. It seems that the difference between Enlightened people and many others is that they are able to stay in that awareness while others just ‘see it’, but lose it again and get lost in that individual shatter..
I just need to say that ‘transmission’ is not only happening about Truth.. three examples came to my mind. First ‘instinctual’ (a field) like explained by Freud, like being in a riot and the anger somehow just takes possession which leads to actions one normally would not do. Next: propaganda, one of the worst examples of that where the Germans during WO II promoting hatred towards Jews. One of the things they used was just putting images behind each other and in that sense creating some kind meaning, an idea of evil..I saw a small part of Der Juden Süss and the mind just experiences it as truth. Another example I experienced in group consciousness, this consciousness does not have to be persé about truth.
Just like there have been great men who were able to express higher truth through examples that connect with the culture –like Jesus or the Greeks- there have just as well been examples of evil transmitted. This brings back the idea of ‘structure’ in thinking, the connection of words, images that bring about a (provoked) awareness which just slowly brings about a certain thinking.
I saw an interesting program about evil. The Aztecs where the most cruel killers ever, ripping the heart out of 40.000 alive humans and then cutting their heads off. The victims were taken from other tribes, the Aztecs civilians looked at this killing as an offer to the sun. At the same time it created fear: if they did not accept the leadership it could happen to them too. Accepting or creating the suffering of others or other groups is connected with evil, as opposite to ‘mine, ours’. In higher and collective consciousness exactly this ‘mine or ours’ is dropped, in the willingness to totally come together as one. There is no evil there. Also universal truth has no ‘others’…
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