A week of language. So, this week we are spending all the videos talking about language in the context of a series on how Nonduality and Native wisdom intersect.
If you want to see it all in order, it’ll hopefully make a whole lot more sense. Look for the course on Nonduality and Native Wisdom on this site .
So… we’re spending the whole week using language to talk about language. In particular, we’re using one language, English, to talk about language itself.
Hopefully, what this does is opens up the realization, ‘Oh! Language is the thing that has hypnotized me my whole life. Everything that I’ve seen has been translated into language. All the stories that have come to me have come to me using this particular language. I’ve been taught this since I was a small child. My ability to interact with the world is deeply intertwined with the language that’s in my head. Even thinking about it has to be done with language!”
It’s mind blowing.
Hopefully, when you start looking at it this way, you can start disengaging from the magnetic attachment that your language is giving to your consciousness.
What happens when you just look at things? It’s so much easier and nicer to do this in nature. For instance, I was just looking at some trees. It’s much nicer to just look and enjoy without the labeling mind. If the mind is engaged it’s constantly chattering useless stuff, “Leaves are changing color, and what kind of a tree is this? Looks like it might need water…” you know, all the things that language does.
We have a direct connection to life when we’re not describing it. And this is what Nonduality is trying to tell us: that you are not your thoughts. That, in essence, that’s what Nonduality means: you are not your language. You are the one having the thoughts. You are more like the space over which the thoughts flow. You are you. Thoughts are thoughts.
We’re also using this week to explore how our particular language informs our worldview. English itself is a divisive language because of it’s history and the way it is formed. Our language was created to describe a divisive worldview and it also works to keep us divided and stuck in this worldview.
We English everything.
Like we want to save the world, right? The best idea we can come up with is love. We immediately give it a word. If only we could have more love, we could save the world. But it doesn’t seem to work, does it?
This is because, to us, love is a noun. It’s a concept. Every person defines it differently and everyone also assigns it as something outside of our true being. We think of it as an emotion. Look at it this way: if love can come and go then it is not you. It is something inside your body (yes), something inside your mind (yes), but if it can go away from you it is not intrinsically you.
Love doesn’t work as a noun because defining it that way tries to give it edges.
Love—what is it really? If we have love as a noun, a thing, the more we try to have it the more unloving we become. This is starkly obvious in Christianity, which is supposed to be a religion of love. It’s also obvious in our relationships. We try to have relationships built on love, and then after a while the feeling is gone. Without a humongous feeling of love we decide we have to leave the relationship, and go look for someone else who can spark the emotion.
This is a good example of the difference between noun thinking and verb thinking. Thinking in actions, verbs, can get us closer to a true human experience of love. There really isn’t such thing as ‘love,’ but there is loving. There is caring for others, thinking about others before you think about yourself. There is considering how your actions affect others.
If we see loving as steps and actions that can constantly be taken then out of that, now and again, the feeling of love arises. And when the feeling of loving goes away it doesn’t matter, because we know that taking up our steps and actions again will create loving. Loving isn’t a fixed thing. It’s more like an arising feeling. It’s an arising state of being, almost like an awareness, “I love this!”
Loving moves. It does not stay alive unless it’s constantly fed, like a garden. So, loveing—loving is a thing that has to constantly be created.
Same thing with War. In order to whip people up into a point where they’re willing to run out and kill other people and be killed somebody’s got to be constantly cracking the whip, making people afraid of each other. Emotions are created through actions.
All these things come to us through our language.
All of your worries are language in your head. Next time you’re worrying, stop and catch yourself and go, “Oh! It’s words!” You can be sitting there and all of a sudden you’ll notice that you’ve just played this huge story through your head.
Worrying is language that goes around in a painful loop. Very often, it’s a real problem. I do not ever discount that. Too many spiritual teachings want you to discount the worrying itself. But I’m saying to at least make it useful! The language that the worrying comes to you in is also the language that you are then going to try to use to correct the situation. That’s why it’s a vicious loop. Sometimes stopping—stopping the language altogether can help. Stopping can open awareness where the picture is always bigger. There’s always another side.
Language, our language, particularly English, is very fixed. This is why art and music are so fabulous because it steps us out of this fixed place of language into a place of creativity.
So, think about language… in the language that you have to think about language with. That’s crazy! Right?
Finally, who is it that is actually thinking? That’s a nonduality question. Becoming this thinker beyond words drops you into a place of unity.
Native wisdom is more concerned with the quality of what you are thinking because Native Wisdom comes from a place that starts with unity.