Language sucks.
It is a flawed representation of truth.
I've studied a lot.
I'm studying a Master of Counselling.
I've looked into a variety of different modalities,
Different spiritualities,
Different religions.
And what I get hung up upon is the fact that all of it,
All of it seems to be talking about the same creature,
The human animal,
The human experience.
And yet,
It all uses different language and often that language is in conflict with one another,
Right?
Often religions block each other off.
If one is true,
All others are false.
But they all feel that way.
Same thing for spiritual practices.
Some are inclusive,
Some are eclectic,
But most are exclusory,
Right?
Same thing for psychological theories or theories of therapy.
They all tend to frame the inner perspective around certain assumptions and beliefs.
But how can that be true?
How can there be believers,
Followers,
Scientific evidence for truth when it's all pointing to the same human experience,
The same animal,
The same genetics?
It doesn't make sense to me.
And I think the problem is we're trying to convert physical sensations,
Mental phenomena,
And spiritual experiences into code.
Language is code.
The bigger your vocabulary,
The more access to the code you have,
But ultimately it's still code.
What you're hearing right now is me interpreting my inner feelings,
My brain mush,
And expressing it to you through words.
It comes through the computer,
Through the earbuds,
And you decode it into your brain mush.
But what you're hearing and what I'm saying aren't exactly the same,
Because you're reading code.
You're interpreting the words on a page or the audible sound.
Now,
Yes,
You've got tone.
Yes,
You've got inflection.
Yes,
You've got volume and all of those other non-verbals,
But ultimately it's still not a full representation of what I'm hoping to commit,
What I'm hoping to share.
And the same thing is true for religious texts.
I've had this discussion with multiple people from multiple religions,
And they insist that their book,
Their beliefs are the true word of God.
And I'm not pointing to any one tradition or practice.
This is often universal.
And I always get hung up because I'm like,
Okay,
Even if I was to believe you,
That your book and your God is the one truth,
How can I possibly interpret God's words?
How can I,
A fallible human,
How can any human actually understand God's truth?
Because it's communicated to us through words in a book.
And once again,
This isn't any one religion or any one practice.
This seems to be universal because the same thing's true for the psychology theories that I'm reading.
Through the ages,
From Freud to Jung to Pavlov to insert any psychologist,
Psychiatrist,
Therapist,
Any modality,
They all explain with a variety of different premises and words and things what's happening in the inner world.
But once again,
The way to understand it,
The way to communicate that,
The way to connect to it is through the written word,
Textbooks and studies that are presented through words.
But the truth seems to be beyond,
Right?
How can you condense the truth of the inner experience to words on a page?
I don't think you can.
Because the interesting thing starts to happen the more I study,
The more I read,
The more I introspect,
The more I discover is that truth seems to be post-verbal,
Seems to be universal.
If you sort of blur your eyes a little bit,
All of these different things seems to be pointing to universal truth.
But we just get bogged down on the language,
We get bogged down on the ritual,
We get bogged down in the sort of minutia and the discussion of the words and sort of lose the forest for the trees.
If a certain practice points us towards God,
Or a certain practice points us towards peace or clarity or knowing,
Or insert anything there,
That attainment is the goal,
Not the way of the attainment.
If I do a prayer through a certain religion,
Or a certain movements of physical yoga,
For example,
Or a other sort of breathwork practice or whatever it is,
And it gets me to the place,
To the connection,
To the divine,
That's the truth.
But the moment I try and bring it back to you,
The moment I try and share my experience is the moment it gets codified into words,
And that's the moment that it loses a lot of itself.
I feel like we get caught up on non-important nuance in the form of language,
And that stops us.
And this is why I can't help but be eclectic,
And I can't help but find truth and folly in every belief,
In every system,
In every practice,
In every theory,
In every religion,
In every everything,
And even in myself.
It's like we get caught up in just this never-ending process of trying to understand and explain and codify and break down.
I'm in the process of a mental phenomena map,
The idea of breaking down the mental phenomena into different things,
So you can see it in the same way that you would a body scan,
Head to toe.
Well,
What about your senses,
Your thoughts,
Your moods,
Your emotions,
Your imaginations,
Your impulses,
Your states of consciousness,
The metacognitions,
The drives?
There's all of these things that are occurring internally,
If you introspect.
I'm in the process of mapping that out,
And what I'm discovering is that the act of trying to deconstruct and textualize and break it all down is inherently flawed,
Because I'm putting language and words onto a mental phenomena.
I'm purposely trying to codify it.
Now,
Yes,
The act of codifying and labeling and all of these things allows information to be communicated,
But if it's just wrote learned,
If it's just taken at face value,
Something is lost.
I've trained martial arts my entire life,
And I practice and I drill,
And you follow the instructor,
And it's all great,
But unless you add a little bit of your own,
Unless you embody the movements,
You are too slow.
It's too forced.
It's too clunky to work,
And I have a feeling that the same thing is true for spiritual enlightenment,
For connection to God through or for emotional release through psychology theory.
It all seems to be pointing to the same place,
And perhaps there's wisdom to be gained from all of it,
But if we get locked into one practice,
One process,
And forsake others,
Or if we hold onto each process too much,
We miss something.
We lose something.
This is why I'm not a fan of words entirely.
We're forced to use them.
We're forced to go through the process.
I mean,
Hopefully,
You're getting something from this talk now through the words,
But my hope is,
I guess,
To be an energetic connection,
Feeling the process below or behind or through the words,
Not just the words themselves.
That's what I'm hoping.
That's what I hope to do with all of my intuitive guidance work,
All of my meditation instruction,
All of my work that I do with people is not just the words themselves.
Offering people words is surface level,
And yes,
It's helpful,
But there is so much more.
Anyway,
Let me know what you think,
With words perhaps,
But perhaps beyond as well.
Catch ya.
