Language Mystic — Joe Perez

The price of limerence

April 23, 2012 By Joe Perez

Hoot! The Price of Limerence

Let’s leave aside for a moment all the mushy poetic and theological language about love. Let’s put on Ebeneezer Scrooge’s worldview and simply ask: how much money is love worth?

Well here’s a short YouTube video that explores that very question. Among the interesting findings: Hearing that someone loves you for the first time is worth the equivalent happiness of $267,000. Being married is the equivalent of receiving an extra $100,000 per year. Committed long-term love live on average 15% longer, so finding a relationship that lasts per life is the equivalent of making another $23,000 to $30,000 extra per year.

The speaker says, “Love is democratic. No matter who you are or how much money you have, people all over the world are feeling it.” Amen.

(Hat tip: The Daily Dish.)

Hoot! Working at your desk sucks. Americans should take lunches like the French do.

Orion Jones writes on Big Think:

By deciding to take a midday break, and taste the food you are going to eat anyway, you will refresh your mind and have the opportunity to mingle with co-workers. You may even get some sunshine. “By taking those few moments to breathe,” said Levy, “you come out feeling refreshed and invigorated. At work, time spent chatting with colleagues can lead to great ideas and cross-pollination between departments. And if you’ve broken bread with colleagues at lunch, it’s going to be easier to approach them in the professional sphere.” Giving yourself a half-hour lunch will increase your productivity, not decrease it.

Paying attention to our daily routine, making it more harmonious with our True Self — or at least make our ego a bit happier and more well-adjusted — is one of the surest routes to finding divinity in the ordinary.

Hoot! Want to know what Barack Obama really thinks about religion?

Religion writer Jeffrey Weiss has followed Barack Obama’s statements on religion from the beginning, and he says there’s no better statement of what he really believes than this:

On the one hand, among the oldest and most complete texts are Obama’s two memoirs. Dreams From My Father has a long account of his journey of faith — from the child and grandchild of people who were indifferent or hostile to organized religion to crying in the pew of a Chicago church. The Audacity of Hope has an entire chapter titled, simply “Faith.”

But for me, the uber-source is a remarkable interview Obama gave in 2004, when he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate and long before he was even whispered about as presidential timber.

He sat down with Cathleen Falsani, then a religion reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. She did a news story off the interview at the time. Later, when Obama became a bit more important than a mere senate candidate, Falsani posted the entire transcript of the interview on her own website. You can read it here.

Here’s how Obama explained his approach to his faith back then:

“I am a Christian. So, I have a deep faith. So I draw from the Christian faith. On the other hand, I was born in Hawaii where obviously there are a lot of Eastern influences. I lived in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, between the ages of six and 10. My father was from Kenya, and although he was probably most accurately labeled an agnostic, his father was Muslim. And I’d say, probably, intellectually I’ve drawn as much from Judaism as any other faith.”

And here is how he explains his attitude toward specific doctrines:

“I’m a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it’s best comes with a big dose of doubt. I’m suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.”

And here is where he starts to explain how his understanding of his faith helps inform his ideas about governance:

“I think it’s perfectly consistent to say that I want my government to be operating for all faiths and all peoples, including atheists and agnostics, while also insisting that there are values that inform my politics that are appropriate to talk about… I can give religious expression to that. I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper, we are all children of God. Or I can express it in secular terms. But the basic premise remains the same.”

For the next eight years, he’s come back to the same basic themes: That he’s motivated by his understanding of the Christian social gospel as an inspiration for his personal service and as a guide for the kinds of policies that he pursues. But he rejects narrow and sure interpretations of religion. And he’s careful to say that government policy must not be narrowly tailored for any faith or none.

But what nobody seems to have done (yet) is to ask Obama about his own spiritual experiences, prayer life, and any mystical intuitions. Has he had any experiences of divinity or enlightenment, and what conclusions has he drawn about that?

Or, if no journalist wants to go on the record asking about that, why not simply ask him: What does “spirituality” mean to you?

Photo Credit: MR MARK BEK

Filed Under: All Posts, Language Mystic

How not to explain the QWERTY Effect

March 12, 2012 By Joe Perez

Cross-posted from my Facebook Page.

Andrew Sullivan today passes along a link to a study on the QWERTY Effect with a false, inane comment.

Here’s my reply to him:

These authors of the QWERTY Effect have identified a valid phenomenon, but they are utterly clueless as to the explanation (as I wrote the other day on my blog when I first read the report). Just think about it: does it make *any* sense at all that letter combinations on the right side of a keyboard are “easier to type” and therefore words that contain those letters have a more positive feeling? It’s preposterous.

It’s an utterly thoughtless hypothesis to explain something whose explanation would have been obvious if the authors had considered one shred of evidence from the study of sound symbolism or phonosemantics. (Google “sound symbolism” or Margaret Magnus, Ph.D., the MIT-educated linguist who demonstrated the essential validity of Plato’s sound symbolism hypothesis that’s 2,000 years old in her groundbreaking doctoral dissertation.)

Even if you only accept a weak version of the phonosemantic hypothesis and not a strong version (e.g., quasi-Platonic), it’s more than adequate to explain the QWERTY effect. There are more vowels on the right than the left, and vowels generally are more positive than consonants, with unrestricted airflow giving the sounds a more Divine quality according to sacred word traditions in various esoteric religious traditions.

The letters on the right hand side of the keyboard have sounds which happen to be associated with more positive affects (the soft, more precise, particular, and peculiar unvoiced labial “p,” on the right contrasted to the brutish, bawdy, and blasting sound of the voiced “b.” The words which are comprised of sounds carry an emotional or subtle resonance with the sound’s symbol — e.g., stopped consonants tending somewhat to refer more to endings and disruptions and glides tending to refer to sustained patterns.)

You don’t have to be a Kabbalist to see the ridiculousness of this paper’s explanation (although the Kabbalists know a lot more about sound than these scientists seemingly ignorant of the relevant literature).

I’m giving you, Andrew, a break because your post consisted in only one word — “Explained” — but it was a very poor choice of word.

Filed Under: All Posts, Language Mystic

The important difference between a feeling and an emotion

February 22, 2012 By Joe Perez

Photo Credit: RejiK

In a Facebook status update tonight, Robert Augustus Masters writes:

Once we really understand that there is no true escape from feeling, including unpleasant or distressing feeling, we may start, at last, to consciously and consistently turn toward such feeling, like a loving parent turning, with full presence and compassion, toward their just-hurt or badly frightened child…

I struggled to express whether I agreed or disagreed with this sentiment and ultimately concluded that much depends on the sense given to the word “feeling.” The word “feeling” is often seen as a synonym for “emotion,” but the two words have a different feeling to them, don’t they? Maybe they even create subtly different emotional responses in you?

A “feeling” is closely connected to what we perceive through the fingers. The first definition in the dictionary says it’s related to the “function or the power of perceiving by touch.” Feelings tend to be warm or cold. Feelings are not responses that are linked to sight, hearing, taste, or smell; thus, feelings have less precision than emotions. Feelings are often vague, and more frequently flow down than up, just as liquid flows downhill but never uphill. People feel bad more than they feel good. They feel pain more than they feel pleasant. Feelings are rarely complex.

On the other hand, “emotions” are very complex. Like feelings, they are connected to the life force or chi; however in emotion, the chi is more directly referenced, not mediated through touch. Emotions take life energy and move them from one place to another, swaying like the tides in the ocean from incredible, tsunami-like highs to waves crashing against cliffs. Emotions involve such things as joy, sadness, fear, hate, love … emotions that may be loosely called “feelings,” but which are much more complex than more tactile feelings like warm and cold, good and bad. Emotions can be easily agitated, and once disturbed they tend to flow in negative or neutral directions.

Yes, “feeling” and “emotion” may be roughly equated, but there are subtle differences. From a spiritual perspective, we must understand that both emotions and feelings enact a process which directly or less directly stirs the life force, making it loose and liquid as with feelings or putting it into motion in ocean-like waves as with emotions.

You may hear spiritual teachers tell you that there is no need to escape from feelings, no matter how unpleasant or distressing, but this is subtly off base. Feelings can be avoided if they are unpleasant or distressing, much as you would remove your finger off a hot stove or remove your foot from an icy pool. There is no need to wallow, no need to lose peacefulness unnecessarily.

It is the emotions that can’t be avoided, and ought not be.

Emotions begin with chi, unmediated, not with an ephemeral bit of friction. It is their nature that they must be encountered; there is no getting around them whatsoever. The only question is where they can be moved, not whether.

Like the ocean, they can rise to the surface or fall to the depths; they can stay out in the wide blue yonder or crash upon shore. And when they crash, they may find their way to soft, sandy, white pristine beaches or jagged, mountainous fjords.

With Robert August Masters, I believe there is wisdom in not bypassing emotions. But I do not see the point to “consciously and consistently turn toward … feeling,” which would do little good but to distract our equanimity with pointless diversions. It is emotion that we must consciously and consistently turn towards, so that we may open ourselves to Love and allow Spirit to move the oceanic waves within us to their most auspicious resolution.

Filed Under: All Posts, Awake, Alive & Aware, Language Mystic

M. Scott Peck on Love: A Critique

February 14, 2012 By Joe Perez

Photo Credit: Steve-h

“Love is not a feeling. Love is an action, an activity … Genuine love implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom …. love as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. True love is an act of will that often transcends ephemeral feelings of love or cathexis, it is correct to say, ‘Love is as love does’.” — M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled

Actually love is a feeling, I believe, but as a feeling it is only one part of something central and radiant at the heart of all things in the universe … and to the extent that it is a feeling, it is only showing its fleeting and furtive face, not its essential nature.

True, love is an action, an activity. But activity is not its origin or its essence, but its final realization. Its end is activity in the same way that the end of forgiveness may be to mend a divided friendship or the end of giving is to release greatness. The expression is important and conclusive, but it is not really what Love is about.

True, commitment is at the heart of love. So too is communication. So too is communion. So too is understanding. So too is enough-ness. Luck is at the heart of love. Luster is at the heart of love. Luxury is at the heart of love. So too is the Sun itself, a radiant source of Light and Luminescence, taking us to higher realms above. So much is implied by love that what can we say about it is to point, as the Buddhists say, to its suchness.

I believe that the exercise of wisdom is connected to Love, but the connection may be more elusive than M. Scott Peck said. Very often love seems closer to loopiness than intelligence. When the power of love is too strong, when its sunshine comes too soon, when its fun turns to foolishness, and when its course is run and it becomes ruined … that’s when love is not at all skillfully expressed. The Sun of Love leaves with lustrous loss; the Moon of Love remains with mournful loneliness.

Is the will to love really about extending oneself for the purpose of another’s spiritual growth? That may be so, when one is looking at love as something one person does to another person. But it looks quite a bit different when one looks at Love as what one person is as his Full Self and what another person is as her Full Self, and that One Self which they have in common.

When One is Love as opposed to one self doing love, the will expressing itself is not his or hers, but Ours; the purpose finding itself too is Ours; the nurturing is the We feeding Us; the spiritual growth is nothing but the finding of our True Nature.

Is it so, as M. Scott Peck says, that love is as love does? I would rather say that love does as Love is and as Love evolves. Love is not something which requires a purposeful act; it is a surrender to the power of Light and Aliveness at the heart of all things, a surrender to God.

Filed Under: All Posts, Awake, Alive & Aware, Integral Spirituality, Language Mystic

Spirituality of the fantastic letter “F”

February 5, 2012 By Joe Perez

Let us take a hands-on exercise today in language mysticism. What, from Spirit’s point of view, is the F? WTF?

Pronounce the sound of the letter F — /f/, the voiceless labiodental fricative consonant — and feel the position of your body.

Feel into the rising jaw, the tightening front of the mouth, the friction of your upper teeth against your inner lower lip.

Feel into the turbulence of air pushed through your throat through your mouth.

Feel into the lack of vibration in your vocal chords (you may need to switch to pronouncing a V to become aware of their stillness.

Feel into the lack of vibration in your nasal cavity (you may need to pronounce a /?/ — as in the first syllable of the Spanish word influencia to become aware of the difference).

Experience the letter F with beginner’s mind. Feel what is happening, be the air pushed through the mouth.

Feel it all, be the sound waves spraying warmth into the cooler air outside.

Wheel of Spirit, "Fire." (Compare to "Fire" in the I Ching)

Is not the sound /f/ the energy of Yang, the energy of beginnings and frontness, pronounced as it is at the opening of the mouth? It is, I think, of the essence of Yang.

Is not /f/ also the energy of Yin, the energy of bringing together the teeth and lips slightly into the inner of the mouth, but not so far forward in the mouth as the labial consonants such as /b/ and /p/ Is not /f/ also inherently about connection, bringing the tongue, lip, and teeth together in harmony to produce a noise? Is it not like rubbing two sticks together to produce Fire?

Yes, F is Yang, but it is also Yin.

It is, I think, more Yang than Yin, when one considers the properties of the other consonants, and looks at the location of the speech organs relative to the entire mouth. That is, when you picture the mouth as a giant Sounding Cave of Spirit, the throat is in the direction of the back and center and the lips are at the outside edge and front.

If F is of a Yang essence and a Yin direction, can we not also add that /f/ may also be described as being in a Yang diposition? Along with /v/, /f/ is the only other common sound in English which is labio-dental, a mode of speech which takes the lips and teeth into war.

To summarize, we may say that:

/f/ is of a Yang essence
/f/ is of a Yin direction, and
/f/ is of a Yang disposition.

Of course, this isn’t the only way of describing the subtle energetics of the letter F. But at the least it is a reasonable and plausible model, I think.

By analogy, you might say that F is like how you start to tell a Fable to a child: you speak out loud, but in a kind way to a younger person, and with an intent to instruct.

By analogy, you might say that F is like how you start to have Faith: you reach out beyond yourself, transcending your limits; you reach out in a hostile, doubting way, but one which embraces; and you begin with a prideful, arrogant, stance. With faith there are always two things in tension (friction) with each other: the belief and the doubt.

By analogy, you might say that F is like how you end up, after many difficult trials, at last Safe: you have penetrated stillness into a new state, finding comfort and calm, and ultimately feeling capable of action. Although capable of action, your vocal chords and your nasal cavities are at rest, so you are still a bit excited but overall returning to a solid place.

Filed Under: All Posts, Integral Divination?, Language Mystic

Where is God REALLY? (or: explorations of the energy of vowels)

February 3, 2012 By Joe Perez

Photo Credit: Inssomnia-PHT

Where is God?

I repeat: Where is God?

Here’s one important way of answering the question, one anyone striving for an integral spiritual outlook ought to consider.

According to an article by Corey de Vos published on Ken-Wilber.com, Wilber and Brother David Steindl-Rast engaged in a dialogue on Integral Christianity in 2008. A key part of their discussion was to address “The Three Faces of God,” a way of approaching spiritual reality for all people (not just Christians).

This integral approach looks at God from three angles: 1st-person, 2nd-person, and 3rd-person. These angles correspond to the most common types of pronouns in most languages: “I,” “We/us,” and “It/its.” Each pronoun is aligned with a different perspective on God, one subjective, one intersubjective, and one objective.

de Vos writes:

God in 1st-person refers to the actual phenomenological experience of God, in the form of satori, kensho, ecstatic reverie, and other sorts of “peak experiences” of the divine. These are most frequently exercised through some form of contemplative practice, such as meditation or prayer, in which we can directly experience consciousness as the “singular to which the plural is unknown”—and the effortless, open awareness behind all of our experiences is recognized as the consciousness of God (or Godhead, as Christian mystics might prefer). In this space, all of our thoughts, emotions, and experiences, as well as the rest of the world around us, are simply and effortlessly witnessed, in much the same way that clouds float effortlessly through the infinite expanse of the sky. And that effortless expanse at the center of each and every moment IS God transcendent, looking at His/Her own immanence through each of our eyes…

My favorite image of God in the 1st person is the Hebrew tradition’s revelation that the name of God means “I AM.” In this illumination, God is not just something we talk about with 1st person pronouns. God dwells within the 1st-person pronoun in a special, unique way. And for the mystic, when we refer to ourselves in the 1st person (“I” in English), we are giving expression to the same divine spirit in God and within all things. There is even an integral practice called an “I AMness meditation” which directs our attention to this inner dimension of divinity.

de Vos continues:

God in 2nd-person is traditionally defined as the “I-Thou” relationship with the divine, where Spirit is experienced as a living intelligence that we can actually interact with in our own lives. As Ken often says, borrowing from renowned theologian Martin Buber, in the “I-Thou” relationship, God is the hyphen connecting the I and the Thou. And of course, our conceptions of God in 2nd-person evolve right alongside the rest of humanity, growing from magical animistic immersion, to the mythic “old bearded white man in the sky” interpretation, to rational and pluralistic recognitions of divinity within our families, communities, and humanity itself, to the simple intuition that we all exist within the unimaginable Mind of some Supreme Being, by whatever name…

This aspect to spirituality is the encounter of God not as an “I” or n “It,” but as a “You.” Relationships are the most meaningful part of existence for Martin Buber, and it is within our worldly relations that he most finds the essence of spirituality. And many types of devotional religion emphasize a personal relationship to a deity (for instance, the Christian evangelical faith’s focus on friendship with Jesus Christ).

de Vos continues:

God in 3rd-person is often described as the “great web-of-life,” and is frequently experienced when observing objects of miraculous beauty such as the Grand Canyon, exquisite music, transcendent art, or the mind-boggling elegance of deep-space photography. Many astronauts returning to Earth have experienced powerful states of transcendence triggered by simply looking at our planet floating in the vacuum of space, the sublime fragility and significance of the human condition clearly reflected in their retinas. As John Glenn said, “To look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible. It just strengthens my faith.”…

Fundamentalist and other traditional views of religion can fall into the trap of insisting that God is an “It” — something completely Other to the person and the world. And many people in progressive spiritual movements have adopted a sort of pantheistic or Nature-centered spiritual outlook which gets rid of the notion of an otherworldly God altogether and simply deifies this world alone, exclusive of any possible transcendent dimensions. Both views of God — the theist and the pantheist — are both focusing on the 3rd-person dimension of God in different ways.

The point of making all these distinctions is to help to ensure that nothing essential is missing in our understanding of spirituality. Anyone’s life is going to be more complete and integral if they are sure to include these three major dimensions.

That’s all well and good. BUT…Where is God REALLY?

In a series of forthcoming posts on Language Mystic, I want to present an experimental approach to this question a little different from anything you have ever heard before (except on the Language Mystic blog, naturally). And I invite you to look at the question “Where is God?” much differently and arrive, I hope, at an answer a little bit more inclusive, more full and rich. The view I will be proposing is noteworthy because if it is successful it will include all of the “Three Faces of God,” and transcend them in an interesting, useful, and elegant way.

This is a thought experiment and a sneak preview of some of my work in progress. You can be the judge of how successful it is.

My answer to the question “Where is God?” is to begin by (1) acknowledging that there are an infinite number of ways to answer; an infinite variety of perspectives and understandings and ways of communicating in relationship to the question. Let’s take this truth as a given, and then move along.

Above: Wikipedia on Personal Pronouns in English

Let’s try to narrow the answer down beyond infinity. Specifically, let’s follow in the path suggested by Integral Theory and direct our attention to the perspectives opened up by personal pronouns. So, as we can quickly see according to a chart from Wikipedia, (2) there are about 70 different pronouns in the English language alone. Every language works somewhat differently, but today we’ll just talk about English and expand the conversation in the future.

So there isn’t just an I, we, and it/its of God. There’s also a me of God, myself of God, mine of God, my of God, ourselves of God, ourself of God, ours of God, our of God, you of God, yourself of God, yours of God, your of God, and so on… about 70 major configurations.

In Ken Wilber’s philosophy, these 70 configurations can be said to correspond to perspectives. Let’s pause and think about this word.

According to Dictionary.com, a perspective is:

1. a technique of depicting volumes and spatial relationships on a flat surface. Compare aerial perspective, linear perspective. 2. a picture employing this technique, especially one in which it is prominent: an architect’s perspective of a house. 3. a visible scene, especially one extending to a distance; vista: a perspective on the main axis of an estate. 4. the state of existing in space before the eye: The elevations look all right, but the building’s composition is a failure in perspective. 5. the state of one’s ideas, the facts known to one, etc., in having a meaningful interrelationship.

So while pronouns are in reality very diverse (more than 70 in English) and somewhat variable from culture to culture, it’s not obvious to me why it is that simply by using a pronoun we are actually drawing a perspective. Sure, that’s one possible metaphor for looking at the ideas that may be formed at some point after the pronoun has been used in a sentence to produce an understanding about something. But why does simply using a pronoun open a perspective, as lifting a window pane opens a window?

More obviously, what using a pronoun literally does — when the pronoun is spoken as opposed to written or read — is re-position the speech organs (lips, tongue, larnyx, etc.)

Let’s put it a bit differently: pronoun use is fundamentally about adjusting the relative positioning of air and the speech organs. Pronouns are about shifting the relationship between air — representing Spirit — and the speech organs — representing the human body, quite literally.

So let’s answer the question “Where is God?” by speaking the answer out loud as opposed to thinking or writing silently, because there’s an important difference. Now, before you take a single perspective, you are taking a new posture/position in your body.

And so (3) we can narrow down our possible approaches even further by looking at the simplest, most fundamental postures that it is possible to take with your body. We notice firstly that there aren’t just 70 different spelt words, but 70 different unique sound patterns.

Now take a small step with me on faith here. What I am going to suggest may not be obvious (though I believe it is intuitive), but it is a useful approach and it does work. Let’s ignore the consonants in those sound patterns and inquire only about the distinct vowel postures that it is possible to take while pronouncing a pronoun.

As you will see in another chart from Wikipedia, linguists at the International Phonetic Association (IPA) have analyzed the patterns of speech production for vowels and deduced that there are about a dozen major positions that the mouth can be in when uttering a vowel sound. (Notice the 11 dots in the diagram — those are the major vocal postures, plus the schwa sound in the middle and a few others. Double these numbers by accounting for rounded versus unrounded vowels.)

Vowels (International Phonetic Alphabet)

Not all of these dozen vowels are created equal. In fact, there are exactly three which have a special biological significance: they are the sounds pronounced when the tongue is at an extreme position in the mouth (sometimes called cardinal vowels). When drawn on paper at the locations in the mouth where the sounds begin, these three vowels form a triangle. Moreover, there is a fourth vowel which stands apart from them at the far bottom corner of the mouth, which when drawn on the same diagram forms a kite-shaped polygon.

So there are four very interesting vowels which represent primordial, extreme sounds based on the kinesthetics of speech. If the mouth is imagined to be a cosmology (or Kosmic Map if you will), these are the four Dragons standing at the Four Gates of the Four Directions of the Universe. These vowels are: a (the open front vowel), i (the close front vowel), u (the close back vowel), and ɑ (the open back vowel).

Let’s adjust the list of vowels in one small way. In English, the vowel a is very rare (not appearing once in a list of the top 100 most common words, except as the first part of the dipthong aɪ). In fact, many English speakers can’t tell the difference between a and ɑ. Therefore, let’s use aɪ to represent the open front vowel.

Essentially, what we have here is the notion that there are not just three prime perspectives that we can take on God; there are four cardinal positions that our body can enter in order to transform air (emptiness) into God, and out into the universe. These are:

aɪ, as in the “I” of God,
i, as in the “me,” “he,” “she,” and “we” of God,
u, as in the “you” or “who” of God, and
ɑ, as in the “y’all” of God.

As we will see as we continue our investigation into “Where is God REALLY?” it is not really the case that these four cardinal postures of God represent or symbolize the Three Faces of God or the Four Quadrants of Integral Theory.

If I am on to something profound, as I think I am, then the Four Cardinal Postures of God are primordial; it is the Three Faces and Four Quadrants models which are cognitive maps overlaid upon the more physically grounded postures. (Not that I’m denying that the The Four Cardinal Postures are constructs; I’m only asserting that they are more primordial, more kinesthetic.)

These four postures are truly universals, and at the grounding of phonosemantic (sound symbolic) universes in every natural language. The perspectives, the quadrants of Integral Theory, and the Faces of God all live in the body. And we don’t just passively think about them, discovering them as Platonic Ideals floating above our heads; we generate them with every act of speech, chant, or song.

We can feel into the Four Positions more deeply than we can think about integral quadrants.

We can feel into the Four Positions more deeply than we can look at the integral faces of God.

Where is God REALLY?

We can approach all spiritual realities from four primordial postures: the opening front posture (aɪ), the closing front posture (i), the closing back posture (u), and the opening back posture (ɑ). God not only looks different when we are in one of these postures, we are in God in a different way, feeling, breathing, and giving voice to the Word of God in different ways. We’re not just seeing or drawing perspectives about God; we are generating the essence of God through the breath of life.

Before our mind takes a perspective, our body takes a position. In a special way, God is in the vowels.

Help me develop the approach to spirituality sketched in this article. Your feedback and ideas are welcome.

Filed Under: All Posts, Integral Divination?, Language Mystic

Don’t chase your tail! Is language awareness mysticism’s last frontier?

February 1, 2012 By Joe Perez

There is perhaps no better example of the difficulty of chasing one’s own tail than the effort to become more aware of one’s embeddedness in language. Open your mouth to speak about the nature of language and you find yourself using it. Think silently, pondering the nature of language, and your mind strings together concepts and words of a particular language. How do you succeed in catching your tail?

There is no getting around it. Words create the framework on which we build our self-awareness and knowledge of virtually everything. Not only are many of the activities of our daily life impossible to perform without language, we cannot even retire into solitude without words creeping into our consciousness as essential to the substance of thought, rumination, daydreaming, and even some forms of meditation.

There is no culture without language, and there never has been. Every religion uses language to define the terms of existence and reality, and many religions distinguish themselves by giving names to gods, demigods, angels, devils, and demons. Even contemplative traditions such as Zen must teach their practices and beliefs through oral transmissions and written texts.

Philosophers have debated the meaning of life and everything for thousands of years and particularly in the 20th century they have begun to give their attention a “linguistic turn.” The most influential philosopher of the last century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, puzzled deeply over language’s riddles, convinced that many of the problems of philosophy have been caused by misunderstanding language.

Today leading ego-developmental researcher Susanne Cook-Greuter, building on developmental theorists such as Jane Loevinger, has discovered that Comprehensive Language Awareness is one of the furthest frontiers of consciousness, a rare developmental achievement found in only one or two percent of the population…and growing.

Who can be a self-aware person today without giving language its due? Is it possible to understand the conflicts and wars in our world without isolating the way in which language shapes them? Might there be greater opportunities for personal growth and collective healing by changing our relationship to words? These are some of the questions which we will explore in this blog.

Welcome to Language Mystic

My name is Joe Perez, and I’m not a professional linguist. I’m a writing professional, mystic, and language lover. I’m the author of two books, including a groundbreaking spiritual autobiography, Soulfully Gay, published by Shambhala in 2007. I currently write regularly for two additional blogs, one in integral spirituality called Awake, Aware & Alive, and another on spirituality for a gay/LGBT audience. Together these blogs keep me connected to my fans, find new ones, and share some of the latest ideas to catch my attention. Two of my current projects are called Phonosemantic Meditations and Lingua-U, but I’ll talk more about them on another day.

Language Mystic is a new blog with a single agenda: to explore language as a universal dimension of human existence, reflect on the manifold ways it conditions our awareness of self and world, and contemplate the benefits of freeing the hold that it has over us. The more we recognize the power of language to restrict our grasp on reality, the freer we can be to live more fully and freely all that we can be.

The mystics have long understood the ineffable quality of existence, and yet our ability to reflect on the opportunities afforded by language awareness have never been more heightened than they are today. Never before in history has there been so much knowledge about 7,000 different languages past and contemporary. But almost nobody has brought together what we know about language from a scientific perspective with what the mystics have said about language for thousands of years: that the emanations of speech are divine emanations, the energy of life itself, the essence of subtle energies.

Sometimes Kabbalah (a.k.a Quaballah) proponents tell us of the magical qualities of Hebrew letters and how their manipulation at different levels of interpretation reveals a sublime map of consciousness still relevant for spiritual development today. And I have no doubt that the divine emanates in a unique and beauitful way through Hebrew. But did God only make one language holy? Are the mystical properties of language only accessible to the few who can read the ancient tongue? I think it is more likely that every world language emanates holy properties, and we can investigate “True Word” and other sacred speech traditions in East and West for important insights.

That’s why we so urgently need integral perspectives capable of bringing together linguistic and scientific perspectives with philosophical and mystical insights. I want you, this blog’s readers. to gain practical and immediate insight that can help you to not only understand language better, but understand yourself better. I want you to not only use language better, but have more richly rewarding and empowered lives. By exploring the words we use in depth to describe ourselves and our beliefs, we can bring more subtlety to our thinking and more harmony to our actions.

Welcome aboard the sometimes dizzying, tail-chasing, paradoxical, illuminating, strange quest to the outer limits of knowledge and consciousness. I’m looking forward to going on this adventure with you!

Filed Under: All Posts, Awake, Alive & Aware, Language Mystic

Ben Marcus envisions a world where language is a disease

January 31, 2012 By Joe Perez

Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet

Imagine a World Spirituality in which language is not seen as merely an obstacle to enlightenment, but a vehicle to a non-dual relationship with our true nature. The sacred breath of God would emanate from our own lips, its energy infusing us with the potential for greater health, well-being, and right relationship with nature.

Or maybe that’s ridiculous and language is just a deadly, nauseating virus. Paul Constant of The Stranger reviews the novel The Flame Alphabet:

[Ben] Marcus’s new novel, The Flame Alphabet, is the story of what happens when language transforms into an epidemic. Words are making people sick. But not all words—adults only develop painful, flulike symptoms and start slipping toward death when they hear children speaking. Marcus’s perverted grammar, written in his deliberate, loping voice, makes you wonder, in some superstitious corner of your brain, if his alien prose can infect your body on a microscopic level, change you fundamentally from what you were before, somehow weaken you. While reading, you become infected by a quiet inner monologue of concern for your own health.

The Flame Alphabet begins with Sam, our narrator, packing a bag full of “sound abatement fabrics” and “enough rolled foam to conceal two adults,” along with “a raw stash of anti-comprehension pills, a child’s radio retrofitted as a toxicity screen, an unopened bit of gear called a Dräger Aerotest breathing kit, and my symptom charts. This was the obvious gear.”

Constant continues:

Finally, he discovers a heretofore- unrecorded Hebrew letter that has a particular power—it doesn’t make him sick to contemplate it. (In this ruined world, people become ill whenever they think of language.) Sam reflects that the opposite of illness is not wellness but apathy:

My gag reflex was not triggered. I felt a mild revulsion and that is all. This is what I wanted. It is what our old poisonous alphabet must look like to an animal. Unpromising, of no interest… When I studied the letter, looked at it from every angle, I was indifferent, unmoved. I just did not care. This was, if you’ll accept the phrase, a breakthrough.

The idea of language as a sickness is nothing new. The excellent low-budget linguistic zombie film Pontypool, based on the novel Pontypool Changes Everything, recently explored the idea, but the Patient Zero of this concept is William S. Burroughs, who famously declared language to be a virus. It’s an inexact but potent bit of symbolism…

via An Epidemic of Words. Caveat: I haven’t read the book, and this short musing isn’t a review.

Postmodernism is really the first wave of thought to not only deepen awareness of language, but also to attack it verbally with a lovely sort of performative contradiction. The notion of language as epidemic is very much at home within this intellectual school. There’s a powerful thread of theological nominalism and mysticism involved in this postmodern turning away from language, but as in Ben Marcus’s vision, seemingly in the end you are left with a spirituality only so tolerant of language that one’s “gag reflex” is not triggered.

The postmodernist’s impulse is to latch onto that moment when a new, non-poisonous relationship with language can begin and accept it as a mystical breakthrough. It truly is, but its journey out of deconstructive (poisonous) phase of postmodernism into a constructive phase is just beginning.

Filed Under: All Posts, Awake, Alive & Aware, Language Mystic

Do musicians age more gracefully?

January 30, 2012 By Joe Perez

Photo Credit: lovestruck

What is the connection between music and the neurological aspects of aging? Researchers have studied the connection between musicians and beneficial aging, including the latest study reported on ScienceDaily:

Measuring the automatic brain responses of younger and older musicians and non-musicians to speech sounds, researchers in the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory discovered that older musicians had a distinct neural timing advantage.

“The older musicians not only outperformed their older non-musician counterparts, they encoded the sound stimuli as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians,” said Northwestern neuroscientist Nina Kraus. “This reinforces the idea that how we actively experience sound over the course of our lives has a profound effect on how our nervous system functions.”

Kraus, professor of communication sciences in the School of Communication and professor of neurobiology and physiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is co-author of “Musical experience offsets age-related delays in neural timing” published online in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.

via Music training has biological impact on aging process.

Other related studies have shown benefits in the brain’s auditory complex and memory among other areas.

Filed Under: All Posts, Awake, Alive & Aware, Language Mystic

A video meditation on the transformative power of words

January 30, 2012 By Joe Perez

A short video on YouTube effectively preaches “the power of words to radically change your message and your effect upon the world.” The short gives an illustration of how a “poetic” or indirect method of communication (“It’s a Beautiful Day…”) is more powerful than simply stating the obvious in an unremarkable fashion.

It’s true. That’s why wordsmiths have such valued roles in politics (e.g., speechwriters), business (e.g., marketing directors), and religion (prophets, poets), not to speak of the arts. If only we could reduce to a formula the magic that goes into writing just the right words on the blind man’s sign so that the coins fall from the hands of strangers like rain…then imagine how the word might change!