The Role of Words in Spirituality

You’ve probably been to organizations where many words are dispensed, as everyone has their version of the truth. Yet here, in the real world, where it feels right, where you need no faith and can believe in any claptrap you choose, and where you are encouraged to grow in your own truth, we have hardly any words.

There are many groups where all they have are words, but despite the emphasis on words, and everyone believing that these words are the focus of the group - take note as this is a most important lesson - no one goes there for the words: they are really there for how the meetings make them feel.

Part of the problem is the unknown baggage of words. If someone tells you that they've just bought some skis and are going to Colorado with Susan, how are they supposed to know that Susan was the name of your clinically insane first wife, that your one and only trip to Colorado ended in bankruptcy and your twin brother died skiing? Only in relationships is it called baggage, but it's there all the same, hanging over our lives in everything we do.

Spiritual Practice
Imagine that a man moves to a new town.  He is a keen on fishing, so after a couple of months he joins the local fishing club. He is amazed to discover how much there is to learn at their meetings: He learns about bait, hook sizes, the various kinds of weight and how much to use, lines and reels and rods and poles and so much other stuff that he didn't know existed.  He goes to additional meetings to learn about the local fish, then another course on different types of bait, then a weekend seminar on casting. There seems to be a never-ending supply of new methods, new equipment and new fishing techniques.

After a year he asked a few people at the club about going fishing. "Oh no," they replied, "We don't actually go fishing, we just like learning about it... "

That's exactly what spiritual endeavour is like for most people. We all love going to meetings, churches, seminars, services and workshops. We devour books, tapes and videos. We learn all about spiritual.

Yet no one does "spiritual".

Thesaurus
As I am surrounded by ernest and sincere people doing their best to circumvent anything connected to the spiritual, we are clearly not operating on the same page. If we are very lucky we will discover that we come from different spiritual traditions. Either way, let's kick off our joint Thesaurus Esoterica with a few in-house local definitions:

   Spiritual - relating to higher energy.
   Spirituality - the practice of allowing higher energy to flow through us.
   Spiritual Development - the acquisition of higher bodies formed from higher energy.
   Higher Energy - energy that is of a finer form than is normal for the person or system in question.

Based on this, you can see why my considered opinion is that people are going out of their way to avoid spirituality, and why there is nothing even remotely spiritual in any form of words or book learning whatsoever. And no, I'm not attached to these words and open to suggestions. Any words will do.

Now, it may occasionally happen that an eloquent whisper or an inspiring sermon or any uttered nonsense may inadvertently induce some Spirit or higher energy into the local atmosphere, and that cannot be anything other than a wonderful thing. In which case, my question is: if this person is really capable of invoking a higher atmosphere, then why do they need words?

It might be mre relevant to ask:
Why do our self-appointed spiritual authorities have so little understanding of the human condition?

The Addiction of Words
Don't get me wrong, words are wonderful things. Words are particularly useful for conveying information where other communication mediums are unavailable or impractical. This web page is a good example, and it's certainly more convenient than trying to explain this to each of you in person. Although, as YouTube and its imitators are well aware, we much prefer to see the video.

To describe a particular scene it might make more sense to send a picture. To better describe a sequence of events it would be easier to send a video, yet none of those (by the above definition) can get us to "spiritual". The problem of the inexactitude and ambiguities of words does not concern us here.

It's just that imparting information is less than useful in this context. Surely, if The Good Lord had wanted us to be regurgitating organic encyclopedias he would have given us schools. Instead of looking inwards and upwards for guidance we refer to our pre-programmed database of words. Even though we didn't program it in the first place, we trust the data because it's what we were taught. We trust the database and we feed it, again and again, in a cycle that's hard to break.

Owen Barfield's Camera Man is starting to look ominously prophetic, for we appear to have been deliberately conditioned to experience the world through the tunnel vision of words.

If words are the lens of your world view, read on.

All in The Head
You already know that words are not a perfect form of communication, but that's only a tiny part of the story. The real problem with words is much greater than anything described above. The main problem is a very simple mechanism that is hardwired into our brains.

It might be helpful if you read this article first:  http://lightonearth.com/docs/Gyrus.pdf

The secular world was first made aware of this rather obvious snippet of esoteric wisdom a few years ago when it was discovered that witnesses could accurately recall faces and pick people out from a lineup but not if they had first been asked to describe the faces. Specifically, we use the Fusiform Gyrus to recognize faces but the Inferior Temporal Gyrus to describe them.

Attaching words to the images in our mind appears to damage the recollection of the image. You can test this yourself by picturing in your mind a celebrity or someone you don't know very well. Then write down a description of that person and immediately afterwards try and picture the face. Even for well-known faces it becomes much harder, because you have moved an image from critical discrimination apparatus into an ill-equipped part of the brain and it is very difficult, often impossible, to move it back.

This phenomena of words overwriting and sometimes erasing experience is known to psychologists as Verbal Overshadowing, and if failing to pick criminals from police lineups was its only manifestation, then what a wonderful place the world would be. Another interesting example - here.

For instance, imagine a teenager telling his friends about an experience he had five years earlier.  He exaggerates slightly, to improve the story, as we all do. In retelling the experience, the actual memory of the experience has moved from the Fusiform Gyrus to the Inferior Temporal Gyrus. As a result, in future, when he tries to remember the experience he will be confronted instead with the memory of his exaggerated retelling of the experience.

That's why it's so easy to believe our own lies. We have programmed a new fictional truth.

This shift from the Fusiform Gyrus to the Inferior Temporal Gyrus is, in most cases, irrevocable. What this really represents is a shift from objective experiential reality to subjective interpretation. From intuition to exposition. Putting it bluntly, what happens is a shift from truth to fiction.

That's why witnesses rarely tell the same story. And that's why what you say is what you remember. And that's why women "know" things, but can't explain it, and men can explain, yet know nothing.

The good news, once the effect was widely accepted, is that it crept into usability studies. That's why you now have icons on your computer instead of a row of identical buttons with different legends. And why acres of mind-numbing prose (like this) are easier to understand with pictures. Aha!

The Double Edged Sword
The Inferior Temporal Gyrus (if you read the article) has given us so much, yet all this apparent creativity comes at a very high price. The high price is that we have been taught to believe this 50 pound Swiss-Army-Sledgehammer and its clunky database is the right tool for every occasion.

The other high price we perhaps ought to mention is that the people that taught (or programmed) us can now control us. We have been spoonfed a great big bunch of programming. In computer terms, they have loaded us with a complete operating system, including applications, trojans and viruses.

When we meet another person, we instantly and instinctively know much about them. Especially, we know whether or not we trust them enough to like them.  We feel that we have been given a moment of clarity, a window on their soul, a brief glimpse of the real person, a taste of the cosmos through their eyes.

Until we swap words.

Then a conversation starts, and it is as if there were two people miles apart on the tops of mountains and now they have come together in the valley to speak. What happened was that you travelled down your experiential elevator to the basement of indiscriminate autosuggestion where words matter. Suddenly, closer together is really further apart.

You are not fishing, you are discussing technique.
You are not eating the meal, you are reading the menu.
You are not laughing in the rain, you are watching the weatherman on TV.
You are not living, you are running a program.

That's how come the slimy guy that you instinctively disliked ended up selling you a used car with a dud engine and now he's dating your sister. Most of the time we just don't listen to our intuition, preferring instead the grounded comfort of words that we were taught offer us security but often deliver lies.

It doesn't feel right, and that's why it's sad and why inside it hurts; why Eckherd Tolle calls it The Pain Body; why Jesuits prostrate, Sanyannis delegate, Moslems flagellate and Budddhists abdicate. Old-time-religion calls it sin and that's why Gurdjieff's way out of Remorse is Conscious Suffering.

To answer an earlier question, our self-appointed spiritual authorities are part of the system and a large part of the problem. They invite us to a dinner of reality and serve empty pizza boxes of words.

A double-edged sword indeed, but the pointy bit on the end is much, much worse.

Death by Dymo
We stick labels not only on objects and experiences, but on other words as well. Gnosis, for instance, is glibly labelled as knowledge and a Gnostic as one with knowledge, even though we all know from its context that it doesn't mean knowledge in the everyday sense. The Bible uses quaint mediaeval English to convey the same obsolete metaphorical usage when it says things like: "And they lay together, and he knew her." (Let's hope he knew her name as well.) A Gnostic, of course, is someone that has experienced the Divine and knows Spirit in the sense of communicating with rather than remotely knowing of. There's lots of wriggle room in knowing: I know Gwyneth Paltrow, but she doesn't know me back.

See that the very act of naming an object is the essence of objectification as it removes us from the true experience of the object. With all due respect to Linnaeus, giving names to things has been going on for quite some time. Indeed, it is the backbone of what passes for "education". We are taught in school and university to label and pigeonhole everything in order to deny experience and further distance us from nature. I suspect that this is deliberate as the last couple of hundred years have seen the accelerating destruction of spiritually meaningful cultural inheritance.

In other words, your grandfather can point to the sky and say, "Look, I feel freedom. My soul rides the wind with that bird." And you can say, "Actually, I think that's a juvenile female Buteo Lineatus." We imagine this is progress, when in reality it is nothing less than culturally inflicted Autism.

The purported mechanism of teaching real experiences through words is broken. That's like typing something on a computer, printing it out, then carrying it over to another computer and rubbing the printout on the keyboard in the hope that it somehow gets inside. We know it doesn't work like that, yet it doesn't prevent us from stuffing as many words as we can in our head because we think they are "spiritual". As if dead ink on dead paper has a message for live people. Let the dead bury their head in dead books.

Just as your computer needs data in an electrical form – not paper, the human needs information in the finer energy form of genuine experience. Not labels.

There is No Yoda
We are forced to conclude that this, then, must be how our well-intentioned but naive spiritual authorities imagine the system works:

Mr Guru-Preacher has a life changing event. It was important to him, so he thinks that other people should hear about it, irrespective of the very specific individual needs of their particular spiritual journeys. Instead of leading others and allowing them to live the experience, Mr Inexperienced Guru-Preacher relates the experience in words, in the process dragging it from his Fusiform Gyrus to his Inferior Temporal Gyrus.

Mr Acolyte pays to read or hear the words. The words, being largely hot air, magically rise up from his Inferior Temporal Gyrus and settle in Mr Acolyte's Fusiform Gyrus allowing him to experience first-hand Mr Guru-Preacher's life changing spiritual event.  These people must be on drugs.

No, there is no Yoda, he is fiction. Nor are there Sat-gurus. Well, not, at least, outside of us. If you can clamber back up the ladder from the word-encrusted basement-brain dictionary self you will find your very own built-in True Yoda. That's right, one in every packet free there is. In your head he is living.

Word Hypothesis
I think that God doesn’t give a crap about what words, yours or anybody else’s, you can remember, but is very, very interested in what you feel.  Give it a try.

Anyway, that's my two cents.
 
Yours in peace and silent service (and just occasionally in words),

Ken