Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - Re: Out of Control

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "georg parlow" <georg@websuxxess.com>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Out of Control
  • Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2001 22:08:42 +0100


i feel pretty similar to you, toby, thinking that this is a great and very
educating thread. the first 2 or 3 posts still sounded like ivory tower
verbal somersaulting to me, but more and more i really do grasp what you
guys are talking about - and find that these are things that i am gnawing on
in my own mostly non-verbal way for years and years now, mostly unable to
communicate about it, since words are a backbone in getting it across to
others. the real communication happens on other planes for the most part,
but without the vehicle of words meaning has a hard time travelling to more
than one person at a time (as any zen-master knows from tough experience...)


> someone, could explain to me in a couple paragraphs of simple language how
> all words lie, I'd love to read it.

i define a "lie" as a piece of communication, that creates an "untrue"
picture with the listener. so all words lie in 2 ways:

the shallow and often cited way of me saying "dog" and having the image of a
pudel, you hearing "dog" and creating the image of a terrier in your mind.
and minds do work surprisingly different, so the more we go into abstracts
and other intangibles, the thiker this soup gets. "amazment", "joy", or
"anger" are extremely simplifying 'category toppings', used for a plentitude
of different osycho-emotional experiences - and i have no clue if your
palette of "amazement" resembles mine or not or only partially? and if we
talk a lot about it, we might gain some understanding and "inner certainty
about somewhat correct duplication of each others experiences" - but this
can _never_ be accomplished by words alone, but only by emotional resonance
based on myriads of subtle details as voice and mimic and breathing patterns
and eyemovements and who knows what, propably also including some levels of
mild telepathy (the latter being strong in 'disembodied communications' like
chats - propably because we can less rely on the physical peception. or
maybe these chat-experiences of deep connection and understanding are mere s
elf-delusion, i dunno).

different angle: words draw the light of attention onto certain aspects of
reality, thus hiding other aspects. the simple example known to everyone is
the fighting kids, when asked by their mom aboput what happened, everyone
talks only about what the others did to them.

now when you take into consideration, that usually even the speaker believes
that he/she is seeing the whole picture they are struggling to describe,
while actualy vast streches of their inner processes are happening below
their threshold of consiousness (propably only because they havent learned
words for them, so they are 'useless' in social survival and thus blinded
out), how can the listener possibly get an accurate picture of reality?

digital music is lying to the ear, only giving it 'particles' of sound, and
our mind fills in the gaps and makes smooth sounds out of it. words putting
the light of attention onto some aspects of reality and not on others could
be compared to a spotlight in a dark (and cluttered?) room picking out this
and that at random - and our mind fills in the gaps somehow, clustering the
lighted spots together trying to make us believe that this is the whole
picture.


hope that did make some sense.
words....


georg







Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page