Daily Dedroidify:
LanguageRandom Quotes
E-Prime: abolishing 'to be'
Alan Watts on nouns & things
Alan Watts on symbols & meaning
Unconscious mind does not process negation
Terence Mckenna: evolution of language
Terence Mckenna on visible language (vid)
Sanskrit: What is Maya?
Just a teaser post with excerpts. So I included the sublinks here too.
QuotesYou change all the lead sleeping in my head (to gold)
as the day grows dim I hear you sing a golden hymn
the song I've been trying to sing!
Arcade Fire
The only thing that you keep changing is your name,
my love keeps growing still the same.
Arcade Fire
"Animals only suffer physical pain; humans suffer both physical pain and an additional psychological pain from the thought (verbal construct), 'I should not have to suffer this.' This causes us to struggle for social progress, better medicine etc. but it also causes us to feel the same bitter sense of 'injustice' or 'wrongness' when there is nothing concretely that can be done to ease the pain. In short, without language we'd have less suffering and no progress."
Robert Anton Wilson
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
Philip K. Dick
"By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth."
George Carlin
"Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about."
Benjamin Lee Whorf
"Language helps form the limits of our reality."
Dale Spender
"The aim of the work of Aristotle and the work of the non-aristotelians is similar, except for the date of our human development and the advance of science. The problem is wether we shall deal with science and scientific methods of 350 B.C. or of today. In general-semantics, in building up a non-aristotelian system, the aims of Aristotle are preserved yet scientific methods are brought up to date."
Alfred Korzybski
E-Prime"'Is', 'is'. 'is' - the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense.
I don't know what anything 'is'; I only know how it seems to me at this moment." (The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine)
Any proposition containing the word "is" creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies.
E-Prime is abolishing all forms of the verb "to be" from the English Language.
Why? Because nothing 'is' and everything changes.
A conversation tends to get a lot less aggressive & retarded when you say for example 'it seems to me...' instead of 'it is'.
When you say something 'is', it only 'is' according to you - so why not say it like it 'is' ;) and express yourself more consciously?
eg:
1A. The electron is a wave.
1B. The electron appears as a wave when measured with instrument-l.
2A. The electron is a particle.
2B. The electron appears as a particle when measured with instrument-2.
3A. John is lethargic and unhappy.
3B. John appears lethargic and unhappy in the office.
etc
Alan Watts on 'nouns & things'And so what I would call a basic problem we've got to go through first, is to understand that there are no such things as things. That is to say separate things, or separate events. That that is only a way of talking. If you can understand this, you're going to have no further problems. I once asked a group of high school children 'What do you mean by a thing?' First of all, they gave me all sorts of synonyms. They said 'It's an object,' which is simply another word for a thing; it doesn't tell you anything about what you mean by a thing. Finally, a very smart girl from Italy, who was in the group, said 'a thing is a noun.' And she was quite right. A noun isn't a part of nature, it's a part of speech. There are no nouns in the physical world.
There are no separate things in the physical world, either. The physical world is wiggly. Clouds, mountains, trees, people, are all wiggly. And only when human beings get to working on things--they build buildings in straight lines, and try to make out that the world isn't really wiggly. But here we are, sitting in this room all built out of straight lines, but each one of us is as wiggly as all get-out.
from 'The Nature of Consciousness'
Alan Watts on 'symbols & meaning'Matter comes from the Sanskrit word 'matr' which means to measure. Lay out say the foundations say for a building, so we get to 'maya', and maya is generally translated illusion, although it also means magic, creative power.
The word illusion, switch over, we get that from Latin and that comes from 'ludere;' to play (note from webmaster: and survives in english as 'lewd' :p). Let's pretend that we matter, haha! And so also from the root matr, you get 'mitar,' that is also to measure, you get 'meter' in Greek, 'mater' in Latin, which means mother, the mother of Buddha was called Maya. Marie, 'ma' again is the mother of Jesus, ma ma ma ma ma!
But 'ma', you see, is a matter of form, pattern. The Chinese call the basic principle of nature 'li', and the character for 'li' means the markins in jade, the fibre in muscle, the grain in wood. So organic pattern. And that what's going on, and there's no stuff involved, what stuff is, is a pattern seen out of focus, where it becomes fuzzy, like kapok, kapok is the stuffing of a cushion, and that stuff is seen like goo, but when we examine the kapoc closely, we find structure, that's what you'll find and there never will be anything else. Crazy because it completely flouts our common sense!
We say but surely, when philosophers beat tables that are in front of them, and they say it is there, bang, you know. It must be something that is stuff that is substantial. The only reason you can't move your hand through a table because the table is moving too fast. Haha. It's like trying to put your fingers through an electric fan, only it's going much faster than an electric fan. Anything solid is going so fast, that there is no way to get this trhough it. That's all. So you say what is it that's going so fast, well that question is based on a grammatical illusion, the grammatical illusion is that all verbs have to have subjects. Can you imagine anything more weird than the idea that a verb or an action or event, must be set into motion by a noun. A non-event or thing.
What's the difference between a thing and an event, I can't for the life of me tell! We say this is a fist, that's a noun. What happens to it when I open my hand, this thing is unaccountably dissapeared, so I should call this a fisting, and this is a handing. It may also be a pointing. So we could devise a language such as that of the Nuku Indians, where there are no nouns, there are only verbs. Chinese is very close to that. I think the superimposition of the idea of noun and verb on the Chinese language is a western invention. I can't think of any Chinese word for a noun.
But all those languages of Indo-European origin have nouns and verbs in them. They have agents and operations, and that's one of the basic snags when we divide the world into operations and agents, doers and doings. Then we ask such silly questions as 'who knows,' 'who does it,' what does it,' when the what that's supposed to do it is the same as the doing! You can very easily see that the whole process of the universe may be understood as process. Nobody's doing it because when you go back to doing it, you go back to the military analogy the chain of command, the boss who goes bang, and the object to base, it's a very crude idea, very unsophisticated, so if you can bear it we have suddenly eliminated a spook. And the spook was called stuff.
from 'Symbols and Meaning'
The Unconscious Mind does not process NegationChoose your words wisely!
The mind focuses on what it directs its attention to. Words and languages have been manipulated to suit governmental control over the populace.
When you repeat to yourself: I will NOT fail, I will NOT fail, I will NOT fail!
What are you focusing on? On what you're negating, thus in this example: failing! Instead we should learn to say and think what we DO mean.
For instance, I saw another bulletin about the Anti-War movement... the absolute failure of what's called "The Anti-War Movement" to accomplish anything is simply on its focus: Anti-War, the mind only sees War.
Mother Theresa wouldn't join an anti-war protest once, she said if you start calling it a peace-protest then I might join.
Let's take a look at some of the ten commandments, at what they state - how they are actually processed:
Thou shalt not make for thyself an idol - go ahead
Thou shalt not make wrongful use of the name of thy God - please do
Thou shalt not murder - imagine murdering someone
Thou shalt not commit adultery - look at that chick!
Thou shalt not steal - take it
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor - you could though
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house - you already do by me bringing it to your attention
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife - same same
Imagine if these lines were replaced by the positive reverse and how that would chime through history.
Let's take a look at warnings:
For instance, a WWE commercial says: PLEASE
DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!
the DON'T is in red, seemingly to emphasize, but actually the mind sees PLEASE TRY THIS AT HOME clearer. Consider a slippery floor warning sign, it shows someone falling!
Now you can analyze the crap you're bombarded with daily much better in the media and on the street, soaps, shows, advertisements, the news always cleverly use the power of suggestion for many purposes to make you feel insecure, sick, unfulfilled, unpopular, and all that other shit you don't like so you can go spend money on whatever shit they're selling to make you feel better.
The truth is you only need to learn more about language, your psychology, learn about mind expansion, practice mind expanding practices daily instead of watching TV, and peace and fulfillment will come with ease, at no cost. (and screw all these organisations that are charging heaps of money to teach you any meditation or technique, there are excellent ones that are free and won't take monthly wages!)
Terence Mckenna on the evolution of languagePart of what makes it difficult for us to think about language clearly in english, is that this word language is used by us to mean spoken language and it also means the general class of linguistic activity as in computer language, body language, so forth and so on.
And to think clearly about language we need to have a clear distinction between spoken language and the general syntactical organisation of reality. Language, because that is old, honeybees do it, dolphins, termites, octopi they all do it different ways, there is much of language in nature. In fact you could argue that all of nature is a linguistic enterprise because the DNA essentialy is a symbolic system. Those codons which code for protein are arbitrarily assigned, assigned in other words by convention, there is no chemical relationship between the codons and the proteins they code for - anymore than there is a relationship between an english word and the thing it intends, those are just conventionalised by probability over time. So language is deep in nature.
What is not deep in nature, is speech, speech is as artificial as the water wheel, the bicycle pump, the tesla coil and the space shuttle. Somebody figured this out, somewhere. So well then to say this is hard to understand, this is hard to picture how it could happen. Well here's how I think how it happened. It's that, all kinds, all non-genetic behaviours, which are called - reasonably enough ethogenetic behaviours are nevertheless, they're not simply expressions of free will. They are under the control of a looser system of rules, than the genetic rules which are chemical and absolute, the ethogenetic behaviours are under the control of syntactical constraints, in other words we need to expand the concept of syntax from the rules which govern the grammer of a spoken language to the rules which govern the behaviour of any complex system.
So for example, before speech among human beings I think it was probably very touchy feely, if you watch monkeys you see this, they touch eachother, they stroke, they grunt, they groom, they goose, they push, they do all of these things. The repertoire of this kind of behaviour if you're good at it, may be on the order of having 4 or 5000 words in your vocabulary.
Well when we watch primates do this kind of behaviour we don't think of it as a language, but in fact it is, it's a gestural language. A couple of years ago some research was done when people took preverbal infants, and they thaught them standard american sign language before they could speak. So these little tiny children could sign pick me up, please change me, where's daddy, I'm hungry, I wanna watch tv, before they could ever utter a word. Well now what we're always told about spoken language is it's this miracle and we're genetically hardwired for it, well these experiments seem to imply we're even more genetically hardwired for standard american sign language which is something very few of us will ever learn to use, what does this mean? Well it means that the gestural capacity is deeper than the ability to verbalise and hence probably older, so I think there was a gestural language as complex as standard english probably in place before everyone uttered a word.What the psychedelics seem to suggest is you can get so hyped up on tryptamines that your body goes into some kind of almost convulsive shock and the normally accoustically modulated processing of language flows over into the voice box and you begin to literally articulate syntax. You begin to make a noise which is a tracking noise for this ongoing syntactical stuff that's organising gestural intent and it's like going from carving in stone to colour tv. You are a listener, it immediately transfers loyalty to this much more spectacular form of behaviour, and so it's like literally that the words burst forth full blown based on a platform of gestural syntax that have been maybe million of years in its formation, it was just this ability to redirect the energy of syntactical intent through the body, so instead of coming out of the end of the fingers, it came out of the end of the tongue flapping in the airstream and this thing happened.
It's amazing to me that the straight linguist, if you go to an academic university and study linguistics, will teach you that language is no more than 35 to 40.000 years old. That's like yesterday, I mean: fire is half a million years, chipped flint a million and a half years, language 35.000 years old. Language is everything we are, everything we do you can't think without it, you can't do anything without it. And yet if it's that new, than what it represents is simply a technology, a form of media that squeezed out other forms of media. It's not hard to see why after all it works in the dark, that's good. It allows politics, you can make speeches to large groups of people, and it's well, it's just very portable. It's the cleanest technology ever put in place.
When you think about it it's one of the weirdest abilities human beings exibit, when you go forward to reading you realize this is an animal in some kind of informational tizzy, I mean the idea that you would make marks in clay which signify tongue noises which signify designated objects so that these pieces of clay could be lugged hundreds of miles so that other people can reconstruct your thought by looking at these pieces of clay. This is bizarre for animal behaviour, this is absolutely, how they managed to do that?!
From the lecture: "Into the Valley of Novelty"
Language is a funny thing :p
-
GEORGE BUSH - HE BUGS GORE
GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH - HUGE BERSERK REBEL WARTHOG
RONALD WILSON REAGAN - INSANE ANGLO WARLORD
DORMITORY - DIRTY ROOM
EVANGELIST - EVIL'S AGENT
PRESBYTERIAN - BEST IN PRAYER
DESPERATION - A ROPE ENDS IT
THE MORSE CODE - HERE COME DOTS
SLOT MACHINES - CASH LOST IN ME
ANIMOSITY - IS NO AMITY
MOTHER-IN-LAW - WOMAN HITLER
SNOOZE ALARMS - ALAS! NO MORE Z'S
A DECIMAL POINT - I'M A DOT IN PLACE
ELEVEN PLUS TWO - TWELVE PLUS ONE
MADONNA LOUISE CICCONE - OCCASIONAL NUDE INCOME
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE - I AM A WEAKISH SPELLER
This was just a teaser post. More at the
Dedroidify Language Page.
Robert Anson Heinlein (July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988) was an American novelist and science fiction writer. Often called "the dean of science fiction writers", he is one of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of "hard science fiction". He set a high standard for science and engineering plausibility and helped to raise the genre's standards of literary quality. He was the first writer to break into mainstream with unvarnished science fiction. He was among the first authors of bestselling, novel-length science fiction in the modern, mass-market era. For many years, Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction. Check the rest of the wiki, he was influenced by Alfred Korzybski too. Quotes:
One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
Robert Anton Wilson's Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software programs You and Your World (read and download here) focuses primarily on the metaphysical and epistemological problems of Aristotelean reasoning and its use in everyday language, covering E-Prime and how it addresses many of the semantic (and resulting perceptual) "spooks" that common language lets in.
The first step to expanding your reality is to discard the tendency to exclude things from possibility.
New Dedroidify page: Robert Anton Wilson
Preface to the Falcon Press Edition, 1986
This remark was made, in these very words, by John Gribbin, physics editor of New Scientist magazine, in a BBC-TV debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity on the part of most viewers. It seems to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must "believe" something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse of X.
Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.
"Reality" is a word in the English language which happens to be (a) a noun and (b) singular. Thinking in the English language (and in cognate Indo-European languages) therefore subliminally programs us to conceptualize "reality" as one block-like entity, sort of like a huge New York skyscraper, in which every part is just another "room" within the same building. This linguistic program is so pervasive that most people cannot "think" outside it at all, and when one tries to offer a different perspective they imagine one is talking gibberish.
So much for "reality" as a noun. The notion that "reality" is singular, like a hermetically sealed jar, does not jibe with current scientific findings which, in this century, suggest that "reality" may better be considered as flowing and meandering, like a river, or interacting, like a dance or evolving, like life itself.
The only "realities" (plural) that we actually experience and can talk meaningfully about are perceived realities, experienced realities, existential realities -- realities involving ourselves as editors -- and they are all relative to the observer, fluctuating, evolving, capable of being magnified and enriched, moving from low resolution to hi-fi, and do not fit together like the pieces of a jig-saw into one single Reality with a capital R. Rather, they cast illumination upon one another by contrast, like the paintings in a large museum, or the different symphonic styles of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Mahler.
Finally as a matter of some entertainment value, not all the mail I have received about this book has been intelligent and thoughtful. I have recieved several quite nutty and unintentionally funny poison-pen letters from two groups of dogmatists -- Fundamentalist Christians and Fundamentalist Materialists.
Quotes
E-Prime
Alan Watts on 'nouns & things'
We say but surely, when philosophers beat tables that are in front of them, and they say it is there, bang, you know. It must be something that is stuff that is substantial. The only reason you can't move your hand through a table because the table is moving too fast. Haha. It's like trying to put your fingers through an electric fan, only it's going much faster than an electric fan. Anything solid is going so fast, that there is no way to get this trhough it. That's all. So you say what is it that's going so fast, well that question is based on a grammatical illusion, the grammatical illusion is that all verbs have to have subjects. Can you imagine anything more weird than the idea that a verb or an action or event, must be set into motion by a noun. A non-event or thing.
Terence Mckenna on the evolution of language
Since discovering Jacque Fresco's genius work and popularizing it as much as I can, I got contacted by an associate of his and I grabbed the chance to ask if his wonderful way of applying the scientific method to language and society was derived in anyway from Korzybski, who also influenced another one of my heroes Robert Anton Wilson so much, the answer was yes. So I'm gonna read this 900+ page monster of a book called Science and Sanity and put up a little post.
New early draft RAW page at Dedroidify.com.
