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Dialogues 3: End of Language Discussions

(This group of dialogues represent the last in the current dedicated 'Language Series' in that they begin to shift away from that particular topic and terminate it. More language issues get raised when considering the 'Engineering' aspects of Krishnamurti's teachings elsewhere on this site.)

27 Nov 2000 Dialogue #15 The Origin of Self

David - I've been thinking about our chats. We each bring our earnestness, our individual conditioning, call it our individuality, to the dialogue. That includes your past investigation, engineering and linguistic experience and so on… not to mention your significant intellectual capacity. Within that is your passion to investigate and I sense from that comes your strong desire to change the environment we live in.Then I ask myself what do I bring? I have an earnest desire to investigate my internal and external environment. My conditioning does not include scientific training or linguistic experience but leans more toward the business and artistic side. My history of investigation was sidetracked as I spent a couple of decades 'looking out for number one' as my culture so glorifies. It has been mainly in the past year that circumstances brought me back to my personal investigation and thanks to help from some compassionate people on the K page, in particular Ram and others, and my reading, questioning and observation, that I bring my rather average intellect to this point. Perhaps it is a stunted view on my part, or perhaps I am disconnected from my heart, but I have little desire to change the world. I realize that statement may shock but it is never the less honest. I do have a powerful drive to learn. And that is what brings me here to our dialogues. To understand my conditioning has been my focus for most of this year.If you want me to continue to dialogue I felt you needed to understand this even though you may have already deduced much of what I've said. Of course nothing is static. My views no doubt will change but before I try to change 'what is', I think I need to know more about it.
Morf - Not an unreasonable point of view. Perhaps as we change ourselves we (inevitably) change the world. I certainly don't intend to start going out preaching!!!
David - Yes... the result is a by-product of right thinking and acting.
Morf - I shall (mis)quote K: when one sees a snake on the path, one acts.
David - Yes, in the moment. So then where does that lead us in our discussions? Oh I hope you know that Ram and my joking a little at your expense the other day was not done with malice of ill will...
Morf - As for the language stuff, I think the rest of you can more or less forget it for the time being. I can now see what needs to get done and I have to sit down and figure out in some detail 'how' to do it. I won't provide anybody with the 'how's', rather I may post some of my ultimate findings for discussion in here/on the dialogue board.
David - Ha! Ok then... I would very much like to see what you come up with and I think it will help me to understand what you're trying to get at.
Morf - I suppose the one thing we need to have awareness of regarding language is that it confines our attention to that which it encompasses/describes - a major limitation of perceptionDavid - Yes I see that pretty clearly.
Morf - So, seeing as I've led the discussion lately, you take the lead now: consider this a new set and that the 'languaging' dialogues (for now) are done. Anything you want to pick up on which we have covered previously?
David - A self-limiting tool... well... you caught me short, I was going with the flow you established. I thought you had other areas in mind that were related.Morf - I've got about 20 areas,
David - but they all relate to language and will all bring us back to the point where we ended up last week. I found a good Castaneda site at weekend...
David - I'm not opposed to seeing with clarity how language limits us and creates our limited reality... if you want to go there... What's the URL for Castaneda?
Morf - Author does it from 'energy' terms http://homes.acmecity.com/animation/penandink/390/
Morf - Any things that we discussed, apart from language (which is done for the time being) in the earlier dialogues - that we need to go back on. I seem to remember we had lots...
David - I think you're right... trying to think... Metaphor and infinite reality…or we bunch our emptiness when the ego fears it is nothing... we bunch it with emotion and then attach labels to conform and provide continuity to our reality sense.
Morf - You want to take that up? Dave?
DaveA - Sure, I've been looking at why I chat to myself internally, filling the emptiness, as you say, David.
David - It's because of our discomfort with the emptiness, isn't it?
DaveA - Yes, the emptiness seems odd.
Morf - By observation, it appears that a lot of it is pure habit in me: object enters field of perception, name (and/or) activity gets attached to it and associated things.David - Then the organism feels an emotion, labels it fear, determines it is something it wants to avoid, then labels it with reasons and comparisons and then places it in memory for future comparison and avoidance and reinforcement… it also provides the ego with a reality that reinforces the ego.
DaveA - I read something of K's today, he said aloneness is different from loneliness because to be alone is to be all one, entire, therefore complete… our ego can't feel this it seems.
David - Yes, it seems to be the ego, the self idea, that names the emotion and sets up defenses that either create pain or pleasure. Where as if the underlying feeling had remained unnamed and uncategorized it would have been experienced as something quite different.
DaveA - The thinker and the thought appear to be seperate, where as they are not, the naming gives a sense of reality to the duality.
David - So basically it's the fear mechanism that creates ego… almost everything man does, culturally, socially, it seems can be traced to fear.
DaveA - What causes fear to arise?
David - Well... how about separation from the womb as the way… the cord is cut, we're smacked in the ass, the nipple is pulled out of our mouths... that's all pretty traumatic and frightening!
DaveA - Do you remember a talk we 3, and C and geo had months ago, I spoke of my unfounded psychological fear? Bringing that out in the open dissolved it, by confronting it in front of others, acknowledging it its power, I dropped it.
David - That must have been a life altering moment... that dawning must have been significant.
DaveA - If I feel it arising now I acknowledge it, leave it alone and it has no power.
David - Look how long it can take us to see that... some never see it.
DaveA - Psychological baggage, heavy yet light as nothing.
David - Yep... we get ourselves in a bunch.DaveA - Going back, I think you're right about birth and infancy.
David - It seems to get the ball rolling and sets the groove and repetition creates the habit, the underlying fear from separateness
Morf - Memory - locked into the system memory - but necessary (survival) memory and unnecessary memory seem to overlap, the latter causing 'psychological' difficulties.
DaveA - We keep coming back to the overlap of the necessary and the not.David - The categorizing of the experience seems to involve comparison and that's how the chatter maintains it's feeling of substance, by comparing every new moment instead of seeing fresh.Morf - (I suppose it's a value judgement as well! Who defines 'necessary'? Perhaps we need to!
Morf - You don't need words or internal dialogue for memory to work.
David - No the memory has already filed away the emotion… fight or flight before words have even had time to form.
Morf - Some memories don't have attached emotions (I can drive my car utterly silently, in terms of dialogue/internal dialogue, and without any emotion. I can still remember how to drive it and how to stop at traffic lights etc. Stop on red: no fear, emotion or words involved.
David - Well habitualized activity had thought and effort at one time.DaveA - Trouble is, most of the time we can do that with all the nonsense in our heads too, and not crash, jump lights etc.
David - Consciousness seems to hold habitual memory.
Morf - I'm just pointing out that we have visual and aural memories (as do animals) which humans have had for millions of years. This stuff is a lot deeper wired than any word type memories we might have & works far more rapidly (in parallel) and powerfully. You can easily check it out crossing a busy road. Start 'thinking' - as in internal dialogue - too much and you'll end up dead. The nonverbal intelligence gets you safely across.
DaveA - So is the 'problem' in the frontal lobes?
Morf - Yet the nonverbal intelligence can be (and sometimes is) attached to emotion… a child that has been beaten with a particular stick will (quite rightly - survival) feel fear and the urge to flee if s/he sees such a stick.
DaveA - Is emotion exclusive to humans, the connection with a symbol of fear or pain, like a stick would affect a dog the same way surely?Morf - And because memory operates on 'situations' and across all modalities (ie situations get remembered as much as isolated events) any elements that might arise which relate to the past situation will cause activation of (apparently unrelated, because forgotten association) feelings. Hence the arising of apparent 'phobias'. See NLP stuff on 'Anchoring' with regard to this.
David - I suspect animals feel emotions particular to their species... and inherited tendencies like being in packs… biological functions like reproduction and elimination and eating.Morf - Biological form, emotional pattern, intelligence all according to species, yes.
David - And so do we.
Morf - Of course. A man having the emotions of a wolf would not survive in the company of men - and vice versa
David - Not too sure about that. I'll bet there are parallels.
DaveA - Remember the Koestler stuff? we may be an aberrant biological species
David - And even mutual accommodations.
DaveA - Some 'potentially fatal engineering error built into the circuits of our nervous system'
David - You mean the urge to kill each other.
DaveA - 'The neocortex and the hypothalamus, the new and old brains out of synchrony'Morf - Animals, and us, rapidly compare incoming sensory data with internally stored images So do we (all nonverbal)
Morf - The stored images may be in image form (from present life memory)
David - Or past.
Morf - Or hard wired as 'instinctive' memory - probably at a cellular or molecular level.
David - Species memory.
DaveA - The urge to kill is a real, sometimes necessary, survival device, but our forebrain is appalled by this and tries to deny it, non-violence etc.
Morf - Can somebody remind me what the thread is here?
David - Ha! I'm lost too!
DaveA - How the necessary and unnecessary get tangled? …and what the necessary is.
Morf - Right. We have necessary (practical/survival) thoughts and behavior - but they seem to get tangled with (possibly use the same facilities as) the non-essentials. Also, what does 'essential' and 'non-essential' mean. (That's changed a bit from our original point of departure, but never mind!)
David - Necessary seems to be what the body needs to survive as a first tear...food shelter, biological needs, etc... then ego decides it has needs based on it's experiences.
Morf - And since ego only exists when thinking occurs, one condition of 'non-essential' means that it's something we think about and churn over - the desire process. (but having said that, I see no problem in thinking how I might keep warm!)
David - Nor in how I might keep warm when I'm old and gray.
Morf - Provided it doesn't cause floods in Bangladesh of course (Mr. Bush please note!)Morf - S'OK if you're old and gray.
DaveA - I'm gray (of hair) now.
David - Me too… so it's even more important to us!
Morf - OK, let's cut this a bit and say: 'living simply without too much thought for the morrow and without getting caught up in the image/thinking/possession nature of the desire process.
Morf - If we don't agree on something like that between us, I feel we'll stay here arguing the toss about the Third World, pollution, food and fuel maldistribution, consumerism, the impending third world war and the rest
David - I'm on board!
DaveA - How far apart from being psychologically nothing is having a chatting mind , but knowing it and giving it the contempt it deserves?
Morf - So are we (more or less) happy that necessary = live simply
DaveA - Yes.
Morf - Can I shock you both (I hope)?
David - If we give it contempt we've made a judgement and extended the chattering.
David - Blow us out of the water, Morf!
DaveA - Ok, I just mean seeing it for what it is David, go on Morf.
Morf - I believe - and supporting evidence exists - that the 'I' has existed in one form or another for at least 3,500,000 years (not a mere 6,000 years as those who associate the I with memory would have it)
David - The 'I' as ego or the aware being?
Morf - So what we deal with here represents nothing new - and others before us have attempted to come to terms with it. The evidence arises in the Stone Age - the Paleolithic period
DaveA - Human forbears had a sense of 'I', separate personal identity?
Morf - Fragments of stone tools were found that demonstrate tool making skill pre 3,500,000 years ago.
David - Hunting must have some sense of I, planning... which direction to come from... how to track… build a trap… make a tool… what to do with the carcass.
DaveA - You know a site containing shaped flints, apparently, turned out to be a ford across an ancient stream and animal hooves had randomly 'shaped' the stones.
Morf - One cannot (and work though this in engineering terms) manufacture tools unless one has a fairly well developed imaginative capacity - the ability to visualize the task, visualize oneself doing the task (normally), visualize oneself doing the task with the aid of the tool, and visualizing the raw material and means of manufacture of the tool. To do all this demands that some 'entity'; a rudimentary - perhaps visual 'I' exists. One can start with randomly shaped flints: at some point, somebody figured out to manufacture them (and the flints they've dated were manufactured) Now that I - so the linguists tell us - lived for one hell of a long time without what we would call language, apparently up to about 4000BC (A figure which I personally disbelieve - but that's what they say)
David - I find it hard to believe there was no rudimentary communicative measure… growl or whatever.
Morf - Bottom line here is that the (parallel processing) nature of our raw visual and aural senses has tremendous precedence over what we would call language. We can function with the former alone, but not with the latter alone. The parallel process power of the eye alone is phenomenal (word language is basically linear at the immediate level)
Morf - OK - time to stop.