Wordless knowing

Jeroen

I was thinking about U.G.’s saying that all our thoughts are given to us by other people, and it occurred to me that this was very true not just for thoughts and concepts, but even for words and the way in which we express ourselves. So even trying to find our own voice is a pointless endeavour, you arrive back at your parents’ lap who taught you words and letters.

But before all of that, when you were just a baby, there was a “wordless knowing”, a state before knowledge and language, when you were just learning the sounds of voices and the smile on faces. The earliest forms of communication, in which both babies and parents are complicit, have nothing to do with words.

And before even that, when you were just learning to open your eyes as a just-born baby and getting to know the world. In mankind’s early evolution there was likely a stage where man’s sophistication didn’t reach any further, where baby noises were all we knew of language.

person

Something a spiritual friend gave me early on that struck a chord and has stayed with me was the idea

“At the beginning, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; then, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; finally, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters"?

Meaning spiritual understanding is a progression rather than a regression. It isn't so much that we are returning to a past state than it is we are gaining a wisdom that sees more clearly. My take is that the first and last states are similar but one has total wisdom while the other is complete ignorance.

person

Listening to a podcast today, someone said something else that reminded me of my thinking around this topic.

It was about how animals are aware and present in their surroundings and that biblically humans ate from the tree of knowledge and were banished from the garden of eden.

I've kind of related that to the progress of human evolution rather than anything literal. Humans evolved from animals to a state where we do have knowledge and meta cognition. That does help us, but it also confuses and masks our awareness. Our journey as a species though is not to "get ourselves back to the garden" as the song says, or maybe it is in a way, but with knowledge and understanding grown into wisdom and a mature sort of awareness.