Language, deep listening and the need for a new mythos

In-depth studies of linguistic diversity suggest that the language people speak shapes their experience of the world.

The Australian Aboriginal Guugu Yimithirr people use the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west to determine their locations instead of using ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘forward’ and ‘backwards’. This gives them a different sense of spatial orientation, which is more relatable to the Earth and probably even to the sun.

A word possesses powerful meaning which gives animation, significance and dimensionality to any form or experience. It stamps an associative symbolism to the form which can be recalled, memorised and reanimated in the human mind. A person who has a certain degree of mastery of a language can use metaphor and can manipulate the meaning of words in accordance with context.

Owen Barfield believed that the meaning of words varies over time according to their contextual application. Barfield believed that when considering words historically they contain within them a record of mutations that have occurred in human consciousness.

He suggests that words are able to ‘expand’, and ‘contract’. Expanded words have a more voluminous expression which are inflated by imagination. An example is given of how the words ‘spirit’, ‘wind’ and ‘breath’ are contracted words that emerged from the Greek word ‘Pneuma’ which meant ‘that which is breathed out or blown’.

Contracted words are used to give more exacted definitions in the context of a more habitual framework. Barfield argues that perception without imagination is the severance between spirit and matter, and that through the strengthening of the imagination it is possible to synthesise these two elements and deeply perceive wholeness.

The integration of imagination mirrors Goethe’s four steps to develop ‘new sensory organs’ to perceive nature at its core. In Goethe’s first step, ‘Exacting the Sense Perception’, the perceiver is asked to not let any preconceptions contaminate the form that is being experienced and to restrain from using terminology or names and definitions, and to experience the form in its true essence.

This suggests that though language is a powerful medium through which the external world can be experienced, it also contaminates the perceived through definitions. Words can set boundaries and fix things in time. A word or a name will immediately evoke past impressions, experiences and thoughts, which are overlaid onto reality, limiting human interactions and creating division.

The second step requires the perceiver to ‘Exact the Sensorial Fantasy’, using their imagination, to be able to perceive the ever-changing qualities of the form in its passage through time. One has to imagine the form, not as a static representation, but as a metamorphosing modality affected and decaying through the passing of time.

In the third step, ‘Seeing in Beholding’ the perceiver must become an open receptacle that allows the form to resonate within them and utter its ‘Logos’ or ‘inner signature’. The fourth step, ‘Being one with the object’, the perceiver who has absorbed the form in its totality is able to express it through conscious, creative expression and language.

Words can set boundaries and fix things in time

The practice of ‘deep listening’ suggested by Pauline Oliveros is a method for this kind of communion. The listener does not only listen with one’s ears but experiences the form in its totality with all one’s being, becoming a sound board that allows the outer world to resonate and manifest within them.

Similar practices are described by spiritual teachers like Jiddu Krishnamurti who advocates deep listening with full attention and without allowing pre-thought or biases to contaminate the experience. Human perception is usually hampered by words, explanations, prejudices, judgements and memories which thwart one’s understanding of reality.

In the third chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice encounters a fawn as she enters the woods, but she has forgotten what to call the woods and cannot remember her own name, or the name of the animal that she is interacting with.

The fawn does not recognise itself, or that Alice is human, and together they realise that they have to leave the woods to be able to remember what they are. Once out of the woods, the fawn suddenly dashes away as it realises that it was a fawn and that Alice was a human, a threat to the fawn.

In current times sound bites and headlines are the harbingers of information conveyed through abbreviated language, sugar-coated sensationalism, and watered-down complexities.

Social media feeds dopamine addiction, instant gratification, cognitive overload and endless seas of information, misinformation, disinformation and other attention-seeking mechanisms that rapidly degrade the human capacity for empathy, stillness, attention, purpose and truth.

A new mythos would need to be realised, where integrative intimacy is required for the human being to experience the outer world within oneself, and for the outer world to experience the inner domain of the human being like a ‘looking glass’ that harmoniously reflects both sides into each other.

Meaning and understanding needs to move away from the limits of binary thinking and become more integral to be able to navigate through the multifaceted nature of life. This is achieved not just through the accumulation of data, but the deeper and more intimate realisation of things.

Through this level of depth and inquiry into the nature of a creature or object, a language of presence is needed which emanates from a deeper level of understanding and intimacy, which conveys an ecological relationship where, if one was to utter the true name of a river then one would have to relate to it as kin and not as a resource.

Explore more of the concepts discussed in this article through the project Opus They, which studies how artists, architects, designers and others can contribute to an integrative approach to addressing global crises, through processes that promote cooperation and ethical action while critiquing dualistic distinctions between subjects (human beings) and objects (the external world, knowledge, matter and others). Opus They is a project funded through the Artistic Research and Development Scheme by Arts Council Malta. Visit https://www.opusthey.com/ for more.

Dr Michael Quinton is a sound designer and researcher.