Language – Frequency Soup

I’m going to start this piece off with a story:

Some time in early 2015 I saw an interview on TV with Lin Manuel Miranda talking about his play “Hamilton”. He said that the show was moving to Broadway in the summer. Now I have no interest in that kind of entertainment but I do follow politics and it sounded like it was a part of the story of our political history. It was also mentioned that both Bill Clinton and Rupert Murdoch had given it excellent reviews. I found that second part most intriguing. I was going to be in New York for a weekend in July so got online and purchased two of the remaining 23 seats available for the only evening that both my wife and I had free. That was the entirety of what I knew before entering the theater. I had no idea what I was about to experience that night. It was breathtaking.

Since then I’ve seen many stories, interviews and video clips of the show. What came to me was that some aspect of this identity was, through these gateways, trying to recreate the experience that I had that evening. That simply wasn’t going to happen. I had become attached to the forms of articulation pointing to the experience in an apparent attempt to recreate that experience. No experience hangs around. It occurs and is gone in the very next moment and yet I seemed to be trying to retrieve one.

With that example, I’ll go back to something that I have addressed before, both in the book and this Blog, and that is the relationships between language and experience. Here are two passages that I’ll begin with. The first points to the primacy of experience and the second to the way language seems to act like a link to experience. Continue reading Language, a Tool of Consciousness

Firstly, I want to acknowledge Jeff Carreira, whose eight month “Intensive” ended with a four day retreat last weekend (June 7-12). My book was an “articulation project”, which each participant created in some form. Writing it, and presenting it at the retreat, has left me with an experience of a deep emptiness. At this point Becoming’s urgency, at least as I had encountered its most intense aspects, has vanished from my experiential environment.

On the last day of the retreat, Jeff had us go for a “saunter” (R.W. Emerson style) with a partner and share the history of our spiritual path. One thing I’d forgotten in my reporting, but came at the end of the walk, was that at times when I was very young I often felt like I was at the bottom of a vortex of energy, much like water going down a drain. It seemed inescapable, as that intense flow was driving “me” downward. The experience was what I would describe as depression. On occasion, however, I’d drop into a deep silence. I was safe there, but the world always called me out of that space – for dinner, chores or just the noise of parents and 5 siblings – and the doorway out of that space led me back through the depression energy.

When sharing this with my partner, what came to me was that I felt very much in tune with that silent space and that the energy of wanting to be a recluse, which has been growing very intense over the last 6 months or so, was the call to go “home” to that silence. My retirement is approaching and represents a time that I could actually do that for the first time in my life and I can remain there if I so choose, though I was not conscious this connection. What came up in thought form was “I want to go home”. It brought me to tears both the moment that I saw it, and when I shared it with the group shortly thereafter. What is most curious now is that the intensity of the pull to be a recluse disappeared for a time. I am having sensings of it, now and then, since the weekend but the cognitive understanding of the link quickly releases its gravitational pull.

Continue reading Linking Energy and Language