Humans Have Developed Language Because of Their Inability to Truly Communicate … We Substitute Pseudo for Real Activity: Ritual as Shadow, Part Eleven

Language Versus True Communication: Language Is Communication Metaphor and With Its Absence Comes a Greater Ability for Psychic Communication

Language As Communication Metaphor … It Is a Reflection of Real Communication

In the same way that ritual is a reflection of experience and is not real experience — that it is an attempt to “magically” evoke real experience and instead prevents real experience by filling up with falsity the psychic space and existential moment in which real experience could happen — so also language is only a reflection of real communication, is only a pseudo-communication, which not only substitutes for the real thing but also prevents the real thing from happening by filling up the space available.

Real Communication

But then what might that real communication be? To discover that, it might be helpful to go back to the times and places where language is not available for communication. These times are (1) the preverbal state of the human fetus and infant, (2) the preverbal state of our primate progenitors, (3) the nonverbal state of various sages who have adopted this mode, and (4) the nonverbal state in meditation or other altered states of consciousness.

What is characteristic of all these states — to the extent we can know it — is that with the absence of the substitute of language comes a greater ability and awareness of psychic communication — that is, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, empathy . . . you name it. This is widely accepted as true for sages, of course. And it is fairly well established for meditators.

But we are finding it is true of many similar nonverbal states produced by various consciousness-altering techniques — for example, primal therapy, holotropic breathwork, rebirthing, the ingestion of LSD. That it may also be true of the preverbal state of the fetus and infant is also gaining acceptance, both because of the experiences of those in the various regression psychotherapies who’ve reexperienced those times and their accompanying states, as well as the accumulation of empirical data.¹

Now, as for our primate progenitors, we must speculate. But we can do so based upon some important trends. One is the tendency for greater psychic communicative ability to be characteristic of current “primal” peoples, who are less split from Nature, and thus closer to our primate “biological” foundations, than is the average dissociated Westerner. The other is the argument and the evidence presented by the provocative work on the “bicameral mind” (Jaynes, 1976).

We Substitute Pseudo for Real Activity

Anyway, the point of all of this is that we see a tendency for greater “direct” communication to occur (to be possible) in situations where less overt communication is being done. Is it possible then that those who we think of as having no language are language-less because of no need for language? Here again we have an example of where the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” philosophy may apply. And here again we show the human species’s unerring tendency — a characteristically neurotic one — to go mucking where there is no need to, as a substitute for attending where the need truly is (that is, focusing on the spiritual), to therefore go substituting pseudo and desperately frenetic activity for real activity.

Footnote

1. See “Are Telepathy, Clairvoyance and ‘Hearing’ Possible In Utero? Suggestive Evidence as Revealed During Hypnotic Age-Regression Studies of Prenatal Memory” by David B. Cheek, M.D.

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Continue with The World Is Rife with Messages — Personal and Universal — Regarding the Meaning of Existence, Our Place in the Universe, and Guidance for Getting Us hOMe

Return to Consciousness Expansion Is Inevitable in Human Development … We Will Always and Everywhere Do and Be What Is Perfect: Ritual As Shadow, Part Ten — The Psyche Heals Itself

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