Wake Up From The Language Trance That Is Your Mind

"You're born into a language, you don't invent a language; you're born into a culture, you don't invent a culture. And you just assume that that's the way things are. But it's not true! It's not true." ~ Jeffrey Kripal. This course will take you deep into the rabbit hole of language, psychology, and phenomenology, and offers an answer to the question of what free speech and a free mind truly mean. This is the perspective of the course: as fish do not see the water, so we too--tend not to see our language (symbols and narration) as the flowing, moving, and motivating medium of our awareness. And just like the fish, we get carried away by the currents, if we're unaware of them and don't use our fins. There is a reason that 'to cast a spell' and 'to spell a word' use the same 'spell'. In Hebrew, the word for 'word' and the word for 'thing' are the same; to 'think' is to be under the spell of words. For 99% of humans, this trance goes unnoticed. This dream state has led us into wars, and the distractions of media, and it simply keeps us from living a free life with true freedom of speech and choice. So to move to where we want to, for reasons that live in us rather than those imposed on us, meaning connected to life rather than to stories, we need to be both aware of the currents that carry us--narrative trance and symbolic estrangement--as well as be the masters of our 'fins'--in our case: our mental faculties, including speech. So join me in this course, where we'll lift these psycho-linguistic veils as we travel across the insights of the scientific method, etymology, the theory of evolution, Taoism, Buddhism, Kabbalah, Nondual Tantra, Nonviolent Communication, The Vedas, and the offerings of David Abram, Jeffrey Kripal, Max Tegmark, Galileo Galilei, Edmund Husserl, Plato, Eckhart Tolle, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, The Matrix, and many more, to see how language can be a blindfold... and also, ultimately, how language is the quintessential expression of our human existence and truth: magical, mystical and sacred. Further reading: David Abram - The Spell Of The Sensuous Thomas Hübl - Healing Collective Trauma Edmund Husserl - The Crisis Of The European Sciences Jeffrey Kripal - The Flip Glossary: Epistemology: the study of knowledge & the knowable, 'how knowledge is possible' Phenomenology: the philosophical discipline that studies reality from within experience as the 'always-already-present' nature of existence Ontology: the study of what is, 'what reality fundamentally consists of' Image: Arteum