Language is evil

SolarSoul

Padawan Learner
Why do I say that language is evil? Because I believe that the structure of language itself is a form of entrapment of the being, in the sense that it is an imposed system of believes, ideas and meanings that alienates the being from itself. Of course it is an essential part of the human experience and our mode of communication, but it can never really express truth, it can only ever talk around it and by doing this one is first of all distorting the truth and second will be missinterpreted by those who read/listen to the words.
I go even so far as saying that the false reality we live in is caused by language and the essential horror oft he human existence is in its core connected to language. And Language is intimately connected to time.

Time, tie me in time through language, like Prometheus I am bound on the rock of eternal suffering, fallen from Eden and crucified on the cross of matter.

Language is word, word is thought, thought defines reality, creates meaning, fixes the fluid, traps the movement, constructed illusion beyond the eternal moment, stiff and cold I am stuck in a mind that is not mine. In a structure that is inhuman, inherently human.

That is why a poet brutalizes language, tortures and rapes it, cuts it up and enforces his will upon it, expressing creativity of his spirit, a desperate attempt to try the impossible, to express his innermost feeling, his truth.
Like Howard Lee said when I met him, the poet comes closest to truth, he moves on the veil, touches the veil but can never really cut threw it. I think what he meant was that he still uses Language he is still caught in the human illusion.
But what is beyond thoughts, beyond the forms, what is there in the silence of nothingness? Is there a place beyond time? A point beyond space?
 
It's just my opinion but I think you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, Solarsoul. :)

In Comets and the Horns of Moses, Laura talks about Berger and Luckmann and their book The Social Construct of Reality.

Laura said:
They say that the elements that shape a person's thinking are language, institutions (religion, government, school) and socialization practices

Language shapes our thinking and thus participate to our biases, programs and enslavement. But maybe language, despite all its biases and programs, can also be used against all this? After all, if it shapes our mind one way (=enslavement), it probably can shape our mind the other (=breaking free). I think this is one of the first thing this forum helps people do: learning a common language whose words have a precise definition that is, hopefully, known by all members. Without this common language, no proper communication is possible. This language will slowly allow people to read and understand the world around them thereby slowly deconstructing the brainwashing.

It is also language which enables Laura and other authors to communicate vitally important information, thus having a positive impact and making a difference in so many people's lives. Language is what enables us to network.

I for one have seen many times the power of language: when you search all your life why some people are the way they are, why they are acting the way they do and suddenly you read a word that makes it all crystal clear. I think words like psychopathy, ponerology, narcissistic wound have a huge impact on people's lives once they are understood. Being able to finally put a word on a phenomenon you could not name before is very empowering, osit.

I think language is not intrinsically evil, but, much like a knife, can be used for good or for evil.

My two cents.
 
I understand your point, of course we need language to communicate and since we are human we are forced to do it and we can deconstruct an ideology or a worldview through thought and language and so on. But my point is a more radical one and the difficulty to get it across is precisely the problem I am trying to point out. We need language because we are caught up in it but to remain in the realm of words is just to construct a new ideology/worldview, as if you are just reconstructing your prison cell making it more comfortable or bigger, but it is still a construct. It all depends on where or how far do you want to go.
All I am saying is that the realm of words and language is in itself always a false reality a kind of handicap that seems to have replaced something more real. Language itself separates the being from its essence and poetry for example is an attempt to bridge this gap. I mean every religious or mystical text is at the end a work of poetry and because it tries to express that which is unspeakable it is forever missunderstood, rationalized and falsely interpreted. I mean why does poetry, art, music, religion, philosophy exist if everything could be contained within words they would be unnecessary. Science would be the highest expression of the human spirit. True Alchemy for example is the attempt to liberate the inner being from the imprisonment of matter one could say and language is part of the imprisonment, the words in our head.

I am not saying you are wrong, in the dimension of human society, words are an powerfull tool and the higher the ignorance the more powerfull words are. Words in themself do not have power they are just an collection of strange sounds, people give power to words. But can we move beyond that?
Have you ever read the stories of the ancient zen-masters (the teachings of the rinzai for example)? The way they use language or do not use language to express their state of being?

So yes I remain with my statement language is evil and has to be conquered until someone can prove me wrong!

And of course everything I wrote is necessary a distortion of what I really wanted to say!
 
It's a poetic view but not realistic.

SolarSoul said:
So yes I remain with my statement language is evil and has to be conquered until someone can prove me wrong!

Have you taken any steps towards this yet?

SolarSoul said:
And of course everything I wrote is necessary a distortion of what I really wanted to say!

It's a bit contradictory to your aim, no?
 
andi said:
It's a poetic view but not realistic.

As I said before in the realm of langage poetry is for me closest to the real as you can get!

SolarSoul said:
So yes I remain with my statement language is evil and has to be conquered until someone can prove me wrong!

Have you taken any steps towards this yet?

I do not fully understand your question here, could you be more clear?

SolarSoul said:
And of course everything I wrote is necessary a distortion of what I really wanted to say!

It's a bit contradictory to your aim, no?
yes it is. Exactly the dilemma I am experiencing.
 
There is good, there is evil, and there is the specific context in which they present themselves and can be identified. Most blanket statements of 'something is evil' fail to address this and so are not worth much. Language can be used to hide the truth and tell the truth, for just one example, so I'm not sure what you really mean by your statement.
 
Maybe there is a happy compromise between the two extremes of, on the one hand, thinking that the use of language is completely unproblematical and directly correlates to things-as-they-are, or the world-as-it-is; and on the other hand that language is “evil” and completely unable to convey any meaningful information without excessively distorting it.

I gotta use words when I talk to you
- T. S. Eliot in Sweeney Agonistes


The book The Lost Language of Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner (2002) also had some passages on this theme:

Like all language, botanical language shapes how the world is perceived and the unexamined assumptions that are embedded within it are reinforced the more it is used. Gregory Bateson expressed concern about how the hidden perspectives in such languaging affects children (and the adults they become) when they are taught it.

There is a parallel confusion in the teaching of language that has never been straightened out. Professional linguists nowadays may know what’s what, but children in school are still taught nonsense. They are told that a “noun” is the “name of a person, place, or thing,” that a “verb” is “an action word,” and so on. That is, they are taught at a tender age that the way to define something is by what it supposedly is in itself, not by its relation to other things.
- Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (1979)

In a like manner Buckminster Fuller took issue with phrases such as “sunset” and “sunrise" noting that the sun neither rises nor sets and that such usage creates a kind of insanity in people by divorcing them from the world in which they live and inculcating a “picture” of the workings of the universe that is not accurate.

Ecologists have begun to take issue with Linnaeus’s system of naming for the same kinds of reasons, insisting that for ecology to succeed “classical taxonomy will have to give way to functional classifications” that essentially would group “together those plants with similar ecological properties, rather than those plants which necessarily look similar, or have similar evolutionary origins.” To understand plants and Earth’s ecosystems they have to be viewed as living systems, not isolated collections of unrelated mechanical bits – an illusion embedded within the language of Western taxonomy.

[. . .]

“Intellectual activities have their verbalisms, their confusions and misdirections and these may also accumulate into what are practically diseases. Every science, of course, needs its technical terminology but all have suffered from the verbosity of nomenclatures and, notoriously, botany most of all.” – Sir Patrick Geddes (in Tompkins and Bird, The Secret Life of Plants)
[. . .]

“Wherever [Linnaeus] went the laughing brook died, the glory of the flowers withered, the grace and joy of the meadows was transformed into withered corpses whose crushed and discolored bodies were described in a thousand minute Latin terms. The blooming fields and the storied woods disappeared during a botanical tour into a dusty herbarium, into a dreary catalogue of Greek and Latin labels. It became the hour for the practice of tiresome dialectic, filled with discussions about the number of stamens, the shape of leaves, all of which we learnt only to forget. When the work was over we stood disenchanted and estranged from nature.” – Raoul France, (in Tompkins and Bird, The Secret Life of Plants)
- The Lost Language of Plants, by Stephen Harrod Buhner (2002), pages 175-177.
Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine,
or to the bamboo
if you want to learn about the bamboo.

-Basho [17th century Japanese poet], quoted in The Lost Language of Plants, page 244.
 
Ben said:
There is good, there is evil, and there is the specific context in which they present themselves and can be identified. Most blanket statements of 'something is evil' fail to address this and so are not worth much. Language can be used to hide the truth and tell the truth, for just one example, so I'm not sure what you really mean by your statement.

Of course my statement (language is evil), was a provocative expression, to trigger a maybe interesting discussion. Good and evil are in the end relative expressions, and also belong to the realm of language. Good and evil can be only applied from a subjective standpoint and require intention or motive as well as an ideology or worldview that attaches a specific meaning to the things/world/life. In the sense that everything that goes against my intention is evil and everything that supports my intention is good. If life can be seen as "oneness", how can there be something good and something evil? It requires that life itself has an Intention and that one knows this intention. But if there is something that goes against the intention of Life then this would implicate that it is somehow outside of Life, how could that be possible?
So from a standpoint of someone who wants to be free from illusion, it can be said that language is evil, because language can never tough objective reality, because its nature is to construct a interpretation of reality that is like a superstructure on top of the real. Being caught up in that superstructure one needs language to deconstruct language itself.

So let me change my statement into: Language is a necessary evil!
 
That's a little shallow to think language is evil. I mean you think, speak, express, and even see with language it gives name and form. And what do you mean by language? Math is the universal language according to the C's and there's body language, emotional, telepathy etc. How did poets learn? By communication through some form of language. Words aren't perfect but you couldn't live a connected life without them and evil does arise from separation and selfish desire. Freedom from illusion in zen terms means freedom from emotional attachment ie selfish desires but the illusion is there to teach us and if we don't confuse it with the Reality it teaches us about Reality.
In the end words/language are forms of communication which unifies us all and connects us with objective reality. And unity of life is good.
 
ajseph 21 said:
That's a little shallow to think language is evil. I mean you think, speak, express, and even see with language it gives name and form. And what do you mean by language? Math is the universal language according to the C's and there's body language, emotional, telepathy etc. How did poets learn? By communication through some form of language. Words aren't perfect but you couldn't live a connected life without them and evil does arise from separation and selfish desire. Freedom from illusion in zen terms means freedom from emotional attachment ie selfish desires but the illusion is there to teach us and if we don't confuse it with the Reality it teaches us about Reality.
In the end words/language are forms of communication which unifies us all and connects us with objective reality. And unity of life is good.

Your reaction portrays exactly the problem I am trying to convey. The way you express yourself pressupposes that you know things threw the words themselves, and the words do have a absolute and fixed meaning to them that is objective. That "the truth" (whatever that may be) could be written down somewhere and everyone who reads it would be immediately enlightened. Please, this is no offence and of course there is a subtle provocative humour in my statement that you did not get. What baffles me about language is the GAP between the actual experience of life and the way in which we translate the experience into words. This translation of feeling and intuitions into thought and word is a very mysterious process, so I find. Its seems almost like a separate world that is created threw language that defines how we think about things, how we feel about things. It creates also our Identity as if the individual self only exists because we create it threw language. Outside of this world nothing really exists in the way we think it exists....

But maybe what I am trying to say is an exercise in futility :lol:

For me Language is a mysterious work of black magic, for those who believe in its reality, it is a trap and for those who know its workings it is a powerfull tool of manipulation. I have not yet figured out its secrets.
 
I understand where you're coming from with reality seeming to be created through language but why assume that there isn't an objective language that can't express reality? Instead of thinking it is a trap maybe language is a means, a bridge between the transcendent reality beyond time and space and the temporal one we perceive now. Just a vehicle to convey a meaning or a relationship and yes this form of communication may be primitive and inadequate in absolute terms but use it for what it is nothing more nothing less.
 
[quote author=SolarSoul]
But what is beyond thoughts, beyond the forms, what is there in the silence of nothingness? Is there a place beyond time? A point beyond space?[/quote]

Beyond (verbalized) thought and form there exists deep, intuitive understandings available to those who have a capacity for them.

[quote author=SolarSoul]
So yes I remain with my statement language is evil and has to be conquered until someone can prove me wrong![/quote]

The dialectic cannot prove you wrong. That is, prove you wrong in any absolute or final sense. IMO, any motivated attempt to do so would naturally deteriorate into "Yes it is!", "No it ain't!"

[quote author=SolarSoul]
Exactly the dilemma I am experiencing.[/quote]

What dilemma are you experiencing? Did my first reply help? If not and you need an example, I will post the first 'chapter' of the original Chinese version of Tao Te Ching [Dao De Jing] along with eleven different translations just in the English!

From that, you might viscerally "get" that words alone will not lead to enlightenment, but maybe they can serve as transport medium so that the gap we eventually have to "jump" is not so wide. Welcome differing views. Then, blend those 'maps' with yours, remove redundancies and experience a deeper understanding than you had before!

[quote author=SolarSoul]
Of course my statement (language is evil), was a provocative expression, to trigger a maybe interesting discussion.[/quote]

Be careful with that. I have similar insights about language and could hardly avoid falling for the philosophizing and wiseacring trap when attempting to expound on the subject.
 
The thing about language is that we wouldn't even be able to think without it. It's not only just necessary for communication, it's necessary to develop the ability to understand concepts and use those concepts to discover new truths about reality. To say it's evil is like saying bodies are evil, or emotions are evil. Sure, they CAN be evil, because they limit our abilities, but they also ALLOW for those abilities to exist in the first place and be directed in such a way that we can learn. Language is part of 3D for a reason, and 3D is the way it is for a reason: to help us learn. It's a necessary 'grade' and we can't just skip it if we want to advance to higher grades.
 
FWIW This begs me to ask the question 'What exactly is telepathy?'

I understand it as thought transference. But is not a thought a use of language albeit not spoken?

Evidently before the Fall we were telepathic beings?
Language was introduced around the time of Babel to confuse it seems
We communicate in 5D via telepathy or during an OBE

However other than intuitive emotional understanding is not a form of language exchanged?
How can any communication take place without it?
Maybe a universal language hidden from us by the veil?

I am not meaning the type of telepathic experiments done here ie pictures, though images could be used as in clairvoyance/symbolism etc

Language used aka in Beelzebubs Tales? Is that just made up by Gurdjieff or is he using a language we would all normally use when not in 3D?

In what language does our real 'I' communicate with us?
 
happyliza said:
FWIW This begs me to ask the question 'What exactly is telepathy?'

I understand it as thought transference. But is not a thought a use of language albeit not spoken?

Like you mention below, in ESP experiments, the primary thing 'transferred' is images, not words. In remote viewing experiments, for example, abstract ideas don't 'send' very well. Coordinates for locations are received as images of those locations, not the coordinates themselves, and it's why experimenters use pictures and videos in ganzfeld experiments rather than simply words or ideas. I think our consciousness is probably more fundamentally in terms of images than words, but it's our capacity to make words (arbitrary symbols) represent concepts that allows us to manipulate them and work them out logically to come to true statements.

Evidently before the Fall we were telepathic beings?
Language was introduced around the time of Babel to confuse it seems
We communicate in 5D via telepathy or during an OBE

Again, I think it's relative. Sure, compared to a higher-dimensional communication (perhaps where concepts are communicated without the use of arbitrary symbols), language would be seen as 'confusing' and limiting. But again, without it, there would be no way to progress from animal consciousness to higher consciousness where truth can be discovered.
 
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