Session 776

Nature of the Psyche, Session 776

There are channels of interrelatedness, connecting all physical matter – channels through which consciousness flows.

In those terms of which I am speaking, man’s identification with nature allowed him to utilize those inner channels.  He could send his own consciousness swimming, so to speak, through many currents, in which other kinds of consciousness merged.  I said that the language of love was the one basic language, and I mean that quite literally.  Man loved nature, identified with its many parts, and added to his own sense of being by joining into its power and identifying with its force.

It is not so much that he personified the elements of nature as that he threw his personality into its elements and rode them, so to speak.  As mentioned, love incites the desire to know, explore, and communicate with the beloved; so language began as man tried to express his love for the natural world.

Initially language had nothing to do with words, and indeed verbal language emerged only when man had lost a portion of his love, forgotten some of his identification with nature, so that he no longer understood its voice to be his also.  In those days, man possessed a gargantuan arena for the expression of his emotions.  He did not symbolically rage with the storms, for example, but quite consciously identified with them to such a degree that he and his tribesmen merged with the wind and lightning, and became a part of the storm’s forces.  They felt, and knew as well, that the storms would refresh the land, whatever their fury.

Because of such identification with nature, the death experience, as you understand it, was in no way considered an end.  The mobility of consciousness was a fact of experience.  The self was not considered to be stuck within the skin.  The body was considered more or less like a friendly home or cave, kindly giving the self refuge but not confining it.

The language of love did not initially involve images, either.  Images in the mind, as they are understood, emerged in their present form only when man had, again, lost a portion of his love and identification, and forgotten how to identify with an image from its insides, and so began to view it from outside.

I would like to emphasize the difficulty of explaining such a language verbally.  In a way the language of love followed molecular roots – a sort of biological alphabet, though “alphabet” is far too limiting a term.

Each natural element had its own key system that interlocked with others, forming channels through which consciousness could flow from one kind of life to another.  Man understood himself to be a separate entity, but one that was connected to all of nature.  The emotional reaches of his subjective life, then, leapt far beyond what you think of as private experience.  Each person participating fully in a storm, for example, still participated in his or her own individual way.  Yet the grandeur of the emotions was allowed full sway, and the seasons of the world were jointly felt.

The language or the method of communication can best be described perhaps as direct cognition.  Direct cognition is dependent upon a lover’s kind of identification, where what is known is known.  At that stage no words or even images were needed.  The wind outside and the breath were felt to be one and the same, so that the wind was the earth breathing out the breath that rose from the mouths of the living, spreading out through the earth’s body.  Part of a man went out with breath – therefore, man’s consciousness could go wherever the wind traveled.  A man’s consciousness, traveling with the wind, became part of all places.

A person’s identity was private, in that man always knew who he was.  He was so sure of his identity that he did not feel the need to protect it, so that he could expand his awareness in a way now quite foreign to you.

Take the English sentence: “I observe the tree.”  If that original language had words, the equivalent would be: “As a tree, I observe myself.”

Or: “Taking on my tree nature, I rest in my shade.”  Or even: “From my man nature, I rest in the shade of my tree nature.”  A man did not so much stand at the shore looking down at the water, as he immersed his consciousness within it.  Man’s initial curiosity did not involve seeing, feeling, or touching the object’s nature as much as it involved a joyful psychic exploration in which he plunged his consciousness, rather than, say, his foot into the stream – though he did both.

If that language I speak of had been verbal, man never would have said: “The water flows through the valley.”  Instead, the sentence would have read something like this: “Running over the rocks, my water self flows together with others in slippery union.”  That translation is not the best, either.  Man did not designate his own as the only kind of consciousness by any means.  He graciously thanked the tree that gave him shade, for example, and he understood that the tree retained its own identity even when it allowed his awareness to join with it.

In your terms, the use of language began as man lost this kind of identification.  I must stress again that the identification was not symbolic, but practical, daily expression.  Nature spoke for man, and man for nature.

In a manner of speaking, the noun and the verb were one.  The noun did not disappear, but expressed itself as the verb.

In a kind of emotional magnification unknown to you, each person’s private emotions were given an expression and release through nature’s changes – a release that was understood, and taken for granted.  In the most profound of terms, weather conditions and the emotions are still highly related.  The inner conditions cause the exterior climate changes, though of course it now seems to you that it is the other way around.

You are robbed, then, or you rob yourselves, of one of the most basic kinds of expression, since you can no longer identify yourselves with the forces of nature.  Man wanted to pursue a certain kind of consciousness, however.  In your terms, over a period of time he pulled his awareness in, so to speak; he no longer identified as he did before, and began to view objects through the object of his own body.  He no longer merged his awareness, so that he learned to look at a tree as one object, where before he would have joined with it, and perhaps viewed his own standing body from the tree’s vantage point.  It was then that mental images became important in usual terms – for he had understood these before, but in a different way, from the inside out.

Now he began to draw and sketch, and to learn how to build images in the mind that were connected to real exterior objects in the presently accepted manner.  Now he walked, not simply for pleasure, but to gain the information he wanted, to cross distances that before his consciousness had freely traveled.  So he needed primitive maps and signs.  Instead of using whole images he used partial ones, fragments of circles or lines, to represent natural objects.

He had always made sounds that communicated emotions, intent, and sheer exuberance.  When he became involved with sketched or drawn images, he began to imitate their forms with the shape of his lips.  The “O” was perfect, and represents one of his initial, deliberate sounds of verbalized language.

Regardless of the language you speak, the sounds that you can make are dependent upon your physical structure, so that human language is composed of a certain limited number of sounds.  Your physical construction is the result of inner molecular configurations, and the sounds you make ae related to these.

I said before that early man felt a certain emotional magnification, that he felt, for example, the wind’s voice as his own.  In a manner of speaking your languages, while expressing your individual intents and communications, also represent a kind of amplification arising from your molecular configurations.  The wind makes certain sounds that are dependent upon the characteristics of the earth.  The breath makes certain sounds that are dependent upon the characteristics of the body.  There is a connection between alphabets and the molecular structure that composes your tissue.  Alphabets then are natural keys also.  Such natural keys have a molecular history.  You form these keys into certain sound patterns that have particular meanings.

This provides you with a certain kind of communication, but it also allows a molecular expression that is natural at that level, and then used by you for your own purposes.  I am not saying that molecules speak.  I am saying that they are expressed through your speech, however – and that your speech represents an amplification of their existence.  Through your words their reality is amplified, in the same way that man’s emotions once found amplification through the physical elements.

Certain sounds are verbal replicas of molecular constructions, put together by you to form sentences in the same way, for example, that molecules are put together to form cells and tissue.

There are “inner sounds” that act like layers between tissues, that “coat” molecules, and these serve as the basis for exterior sound principles.  These are also connected to rhythms in the body itself.

To some extent punctuation is sound that you do not hear, a pause that implies the presence of withheld sound.  To some extent, then, language is as dependent upon the unspoken as the spoken, and the rhythm of silence as well as of sound.  In that context, however, silence involves merely a pause of sound in which sound is implied but withheld.  Inner sound deals primarily with that kind of relationship.  Language is meaningful only because of the rhythm of the silence upon which it rides.

Its meaning comes from the pauses between the sounds as much as it does from the sounds themselves.  The flow of breath is obviously important, regulating the rhythm and the spacing of the words.  The breath’s integrity arises directly from the proper give-and-take between cells, the functioning of the tissues; and all that is the expression of molecular competence.  That competence is obviously responsible for language, but beyond that it is intimately connected with the patterns of languages themselves, the construction of syntax, and even with the figures of speech used.

Again, you speak for yourselves; yet in doing so you speak a language that is not yours alone, but the result of inner communications too swift for you to follow, involving corporal and subjective realities alike.  For this reason, your languages have meaning on several levels.  The sounds you make have physical effects on your own and other bodies.  There is a sound value, then, as apart from a meaning value.

The words you speak to someone else are in certain terms broken down by the listener to basic components, and understood at different levels.  There are psychological interpretations made, and molecular ones.  The sounds and their pauses will express emotional states, and reactions to these will alter the body’s condition to whatever degree.

The listener then breaks down the language.  He builds up his own response.  You have so connected words and images that language seems to consist of a sound that suggests an image.  Yet some languages have had sounds for feelings and subjective states, and they had no subjects or predicates, nor even a sentence structure that you would recognize.

Your language must follow your perception, though the sound structure beneath need not.  You say: “I am today, I was yesterday, and I will be tomorrow”, yet some languages would find such utterances incomprehensible, and the words, “I am” would be used in all instances.