CONSCIOUSNESS AND LANGUAGE
Human language comes from conscious act of representing and communicating about things and events. Communication happens because it resonates with emotions, and has survival advantages like coordinating with others to hunt or avoid danger. It is conveyed through subconscious or conscious body language. Body language is a conscious act if it is learned and replayed purposely.
The use of language creates IFPs fired in neural circuits. Interactions from these IFPs may broaden the scope of consciousness, which in turn will increase further development of neural circuits for language, if such positive feedback interactions take place in that species and its environment. In so, then linguistic representation of things and abstract ideas, as IFPs in neural circuits of that species, will proliferate and become both specialized and diversified.
1) genesis
Verbal language is one species of body language. It involves making sounds that reflect feelings, such as to warn or to attract. In addition to verbal sounds, humans uniquely have written language. The written language originated when the act of verbal communication is somehow associated with visual markings, on rock or wet clay or some other media. Human's verbal and written languages are invented, used, and then reproduced in the offspring through learning. The evolution of human language reflects aspects of evolution of human consciousness.
Verbal language: Birds sing and wolves howl. It reflects how they feel. Humans do that also. But humans have also managed to make specific sounds to represent specific objects and events, perhaps even abstract ideas about objects and events, in ever finer gradations. This specific association of sounds and objects must have originated accidentally in the past. But once it has happened, it then gets reinforced, proliferated, and reproduced because of the advantages that come with it. The refined human verbal language enables complex social cooperation, which enables humans to prevail over other species lacking such social cooperation, in terms of grabbing territories and controlling resources.
Written language: The origin of using visual markings for communication can also be attributed to accidental inspiration or combination of circumstances. These markings then get copied by those who found usefulness in doing so. This copying gets more evolved as more members adopted them, turning them into a written language.
Written language can be phonetic like English and Korean. They consist of alphabetic symbols that can be combined to form various sounds. Written language can also be character-based like Chinese. The characters represent some aspects of things. The simplest and oldest Chinese characters are pictographs (象形), representing the outline of things. The character mountain 山 looks like a drawing of mountain, and the character water 水 looks like ripples of a stream.
In Chinese, pictographs are followed by ideographs (指事), or things pointed out. They are about ideas, like top and bottom, instead of objects. 本 means root. It is a tree 木 with an extra stroke at the base. 末 means apex. It is the reverse of 本, a tree with an extra stroke at the top. The Egyptian hieroglyphs also contain pictographs and ideographs.
Ideographs can change meanings through change of associations. The change of association can come from combination with other characters. This will be transfer or loan words (轉注). Both 老 and 考 meant old person. 考 is changed to mean "to investigate" through frequent use in different contexts. The written strokes are slightly altered also. Change of associations can also come from borrowing of words of same pronunciation. This is an application of homophones (假借). 來 to come, and 麥 wheat. 北 north 背 back. Homophones can lead to and come from miswriting. When trying to write down a dream while semi-awake, one often misspell the word with something of same or similar pronunciation, like piece for peas. This type of conscious or subconscious "mistake" happens often and is part of evolutionary changes like mutation.
The early Chinese written language consists of pictographs, ideographs, and phonograms (or phonetic characters). A phonogram is an ideograph used for its pronunciation. In phonetic languages like English they are just alphabets combined together. Some of which form word roots or radicals that can be further combined to make compound words. Phonograms tie written language to verbal language, associating visual symbols with phonic sounds, and opening a path of change through homophones. The combination of ideographs with ideographs (會意 compound ideographs), and ideographs with phonograms (形聲 phono-semantic compounds), make up the bulk of Chinese characters used today.
2) differentiation
An established language will differentiate into sublanguages due to reinforcement of different associations used with that language. The differentiated sublanguages can be minor like slangs or jargons, or major like dialects or even language family. English and German and Dutch are all Germanic language.
Different reinforcement of associations, between the linguistic signals or symbols and the things represented by them, can start with the people speaking the language being separated. Separation allows isolated people to form unique associations in language. There are age and social separation. Older people may not understand some of the younger generation's lingos, like rap or video games. And younger people may not appreciate older people's language when they talk about insurance. A socialite will not know what a carpenter is saying about block planes, and a poor man may not fully understand the meaning of five-percent compound interest spoken by rich bankers.
Then there is geographic separation which may totally block linguistic communication between people, leading to pronounced differences in their languages. The Chinese and the Japanese Kanji is an example. The Japanese Kanji is a copy of the written Chinese in the 5th century. Over time, the characters of Kanji are pronounced differently by the Japanese and the Chinese. And the meaning of some Kanji words become different as well for the two countries, while the majority of the words retain the same meanings.
Some Kanji words have preserved the traditional meanings better than the evolving Chinese, while some other words are the other way around. The word for actress is 女優 in Japanese Kanji and 女演員 in Chinese. The character 優 means an actor. In classical Chinese, 優伶 are actors and musicians of a stage show. The modern Chinese has changed and associated a different phrase for actress. 女優 is no longer in its vocabulary as the Japanese does. On the other hand, the character 藤 means wisteria in Japanese Kanji, which has deviated from the tradition meaning of vine that is still in use in Chinese.
The changes in the pronunciation and meaning of words between Kanji and Chinese come from changes in people's associations with those symbols. Since China and Japan are geographically separated, these changes emerge and are then reinforced in separate ways in the two nations. Such differentiation or transformation of associations can also be seen in a popular game called telephone.
The game of telephone (or Chinese whispers) is played by passing a message down a line of people through whispers. A person at the beginning of a line reads or hears a message alone, and whispers it to the next person in line without letting others hear it. The person hears the whispered message repeats the same act to the person after him or her, and so on until the message reaches the end of the line. When the message reaches the end, it is very funny to see how different the message has become.
In Chinese or in English, a language spoken in the first century can hardly be understood by speakers of the 21st century. Each generation will change the associations in that language a little, just like the person who whispers the message in the telephone game. Small individual changes accumulate into pronounced differences over multiple relays, resulting in the later one bearing little or no resemblance to the initial one. Thus a language will differentiate through people's associations and interpretation of the message in different ways. And those associations / interpretation will have more ways to be different when the speakers are separated, which break up feedback loops of communication.
3) complexity
The complexity of a language can come from different ways of associations between the language and the things they represent. But it is also from the combinations of the written or phonetic symbols themselves.
Phonetic Written language: words can be combined into phrases, phrases into sentences, and so on to even paragraphs and articles. The combination can happen at the word level as well. Single-syllable words like bed and room can be combined into multisyllabic word bedroom. Some word are called radical like com (together) in combine, company. Combining a radical with another word root to form a compound word is similar to the structure of compound-ideograph words in Chinese. Words like bedroom, bedtime, volleyball, basketball.
Character Written language: In Chinese characters, there are pictograms (象形), ideograms (指事), and phonograms (假借). Phonograms are ideograms borrowed for its sounds, like homophones with the same sound but different meanings. There are also ideographs called (轉注). The meaning of 轉注 characters are changed something else from its original meaning, due to association with other contexts. These different types of simple characters can be combined into two compound types: 1) compound ideographs (會意) For example, 休; xiū; 'shade, rest', depicting a man by a tree, and 2) phono-semantic compounds (形聲) For example, 拍 淋. They can also be called phono-ideo compounds, the phonogram part provides cue for pronunciation while the ideogram part provides clue to its meaning. These compound characters (會意 + 形聲) make up over 90% of Chinese characters.
(picture) roof + pig = home, roof + woman = settlement.
4) reproduction
Language is reproduced from one group of people to another through education, a building of memory circuits that link verbal sounds and visual symbols to things. The traditional Chinese education style is learning by rote. Pupils recite the classics after the teacher over and over, sometimes without any explanation on the meaning of the text they recite. But that repeated recitation is sufficient for learning to read. Comprehension of the text may come from the teacher's explanation, or may come from some life experiences later.
So reading a storybook to an illiterate child while he looks at the book can really help that child learning to read. The process of seeing written words and hearing sounds together is like a process of synesthesia. This synesthetic process builds sequential and associative memory circuits in the cortex that link visual symbols and sounds together. In such circuits, a linguistic input of one type can prompt output response of another type. A learned pupil hearing the sound of "duck" can instantly recall how it is written, and vice versa, because the spelling and the pronunciation are synesthetically linked after learning.
The written language can be synesthetically linked to abstract word-symbols, like acronyms and mnemonic devices, for abbreviations. Abbreviation is a trend for efficient representation of things. In this case, the thing is some words or phrases themselves. The usefulness of efficient representation is why language got generally adopted by people in the first place. But this trend towards efficiency also can have problems. The abbreviated version can loose context overtly, and become ding-an-sich.
Ding-an-sich, a thing in itself, can be words that seem to have meaning in themselves as word-definition pairs recorded in a dictionary. That can be a problem of efficient representation. The definitions for words actually derived from the combination of the words with some associated contexts. That is, words (text) have meaning (to people) only when used in combination with context. Without context, they are ding-an-sich.
(picture) tower of Babel.
The Bible tells the story of the Tower of Babel (KJV 11:1-9). God stopped people from building a tower that could reach the heaven by confounding their language so they could not understand each other. This "confounding" act is perhaps an expression for the natural tendency of people reducing language to ding-an-sich. It causes people to misunderstand each other because the implicit contexts needed for understanding may be missing with the words used for communication.
(picture) Hermann Hesse
The book "Glass Bead Game" (also called "Magister Ludi" in another translation) by Hermann Hesse has a passage in regards to synesthesia of experiences, conveyed by words with contexts.
Well now, every experience has its element of magic. In this case the onset of spring, which had enthralled me as I walked over the wet, squishing meadows and smelled the soil and the buds, had now been concentrated into a sensual symbol by the fortissimo of that elder shrub’s fragrance. Possible I would never have forgotten this scent even if the experience had remained isolated. Rather, every future encounter with that smell deep into my old age would in all probability have revived the memory of that first time I had consciously experienced the fragrance. But now a second element entered in. At that time I had found an old volume of music at my piano teacher's. It was a volume of songs by Franz Schubert, and it exerted a strong attraction upon me. I had leafed through it one time when I had a rather long wait for the teacher, and had asked to borrow it for a few days. In my leisure hours I gave myself up to the ecstasy of discovery. Up to that time I had not known Schubert at all, and I was totally captivated by him. And now, on the day of that walk to the elderberry bush or the day after, I discovered Schubert’s spring song, "Die linden Lüfte sind erwacht" and the first chords of the piano accompaniment assailed me like something already familiar. Those chords had exactly the same fragrance as the sap of the young elder, just as bittersweet, just as strong and compressed, just as full of the forthcoming spring. From that time on the association of earliest spring, fragrance of the elder, Schubert chords has been fixed and absolutely valid, for me. As soon as the first chord is struck I immediately smell the tartness of the sap, and both together mean to me: spring is on the way.
In the minds of American football fans, the sound of "touchdown" is synesthetically linked to the gesture of raising both arms. Strong synesthetic linkages can be established incorrectly. They go unnoticed if they are repeated often enough. The word "Indian" for native American is an example. "Indian" really means people of India and not of the Americas, but it does because people continue to repeat the mistaken association Columbus had that he landed on India in his 1492 voyage.
A big part of spiritual practice is to recognize false associations in our mind, particularly in regards to the notion of Self. In Zen buddhism, that spiritual practice may be full of riddles. Zen koan stories are used to illustrate false associations that people have about the words buddhahood and enlightenment. But what is the real meaning of buddhahood is not revealed, because language as ding-an-sich can not communicate that. The practice is to train oneself to find answers through associations and contexts in the experience of life. There is one criteria for the answer though, and that is it can stop sufferings.
LANGUAGE AND SPIRITUALITY
Spirituality is a species of secondary consciousness that exists only in adult humans. It is a consciousness abstracted from perception and composed of imagination and memory. It may be about questions such as the purpose of one's life, or how to deal with sufferings.
When the Buddha was a young Siddhartha Gautama, he approached spirituality through asceticism. He went through years of self-discipline to master his body, to overcome problems of suffering - the pain of birth, old age, sickness, and death. He probably thought that the body is the source of such sufferings. That ascetic approach did not give him the solution he looked for. So he abandoned it and switched to a psychological approach, with meditation. After reaching enlightenment through a long meditation, he taught others how to relieve sufferings. His oral teachings later got written down as sutras. Some sutras described what consciousness (Surangama Sutra) was, and some prescribed means to deal with suffering (the Amitaba Sutra, the Heart Sutra, ).
There are many pathways to spirituality, each with its own set of practices and answers. But they all require that language be a prominent part of the transmission of spiritual teachings. Language is used because spirituality involves abstract ideas and not just direct sensations, emotions, and perceptions. Only through language can abstract ideas be conveyed from the masters to the novices.
Yet language can represent abstract ideas only partially. There are scriptures, karmic stories, zen koans, rites and ceremonies, and dialogs, which are all partial representation of spirituality. Without these, a seeker does not have a direction to explore. On the other hand, if sutras and spiritual teachings are the only means available, a seeker can not advance far either. Because those are just pointers and not the path itself. The seeker still has to explore life and find cause-effect connections for himself, to weave together answers that make sense personally.
1) genesis
(picture) The Buddha
(description) Spirituality in a person is usually initiated by some traumatic events. It may be the loss of a loved one, or having deep questions about life. When Siddhartha Gautama was a young man, he was a carefree prince with no knowledge of the hardships of common people outside of the palace. When he finally went outside the palace and saw for the first time the sufferings among the people, he was greatly troubled. And that triggered his journey to spirituality. He resolved to find the answer that can end suffering. He found his answers, and the teaching of which becomes the basis of Buddhism.
(picture) person near temple, church
(description) Actually, the solution to pain and suffering associated with birth and sickness are not found in the Buddha's answers, or in any other spiritual faith. They have largely been solved by medicines. However, spirituality is a better solution than medicine to psychological sufferings such as fear, depression, anxiety, anger, loneliness, sense of loss, and hopelessness. These psychological sufferings come from social interactions, or the lack of. So, as long as there are family and communal interactions, or the lack of, there will be some situations that will induce psychological sufferings to some members. If such suffering is serious enough, it may lead a person to embark on a journey towards spirituality, or to paths where alternative solace can be found, like food or money or drugs or prestige.
In very rare instances, some people may awake to spiritual journey by vision of saints, or seeing miraculous workings of God. Joan of Arc is a famous case. Her spirituality was inspired by her hearing of voices from God, and she rose up to save the French city of Orleans from the siege of the English army.
2) differentiation
(picture) meditation
(description) Spirituality may start with questions about suffering or mystery of life. But the journey of finding the answer will diverge into different pathways for different people, leading to different practices and mindsets. The divergence arises from different emphasis on what is relevant for each person. The differences in relevance get reinforced and amplified, and become divisions of spiritual developments.
For example, a person may think that there is a God or there is no God. That idea about God will be reinforced further by other experiences. Each reinforcement will further divide and refine the idea about God. God is sometimes present to help or guide us, and sometimes not. There is one god in each mountain, lake, and giant trees, or there is only one great God and not little separate gods. There are many good gods and many more bad devils, or one great God and one big Satan. And there is one God for this nation and another god for that people. God is always just, or sometimes not just. The injustice of the world is the work of devil only, or God let it happen... These diverse and differentiated ideas, sometime mixed, exist among believers of God. And it is through reinforcement that these ideas remain differentiated.
There are two types of events that are significant in the differentiation of spiritual development. One is the initial encounter that triggers follow-up responses. The other is reinforcement of the responses.
INITIAL ENCOUNTER
The encounter that precipitates ongoing follow-up responses about the question of spiritual solution is the encounter that matters. Such encounters may be seeing or hearing a spiritual master's work. Or it can be experiencing a tragedy that breaks one's heart.
The quest for spiritual solution may also happen to people who go to church regularly. That is an accumulated experience rather than a sudden impact. Usually, the spirituality of the church members is similar, as they follow the same doctrines of the church religion. Their views on spiritual questions can diverge, however, by events that provoke different responses.
Sometimes, people go to church for the social interactions there. Social interactions at church actually may relieve psychological sufferings for some members. Those social interactions - helping in time of need, or doing joyful activities together, or bearing the faults of others - become a kind of spirituality itself. This branch of spirituality differentiates a God-centered religion to a people-centered one.
REINFORCEMENT (FEEDBACK or ASSOCIATION)
Reinforcement of the initial spiritual experience will happen to those who recognize the urgency and relevance in that experience, and seek out more of it. The reinforcement can come from positive feedback loops or interactions, which reward the participants for their responses and make them respond more. Reinforcement can also occur by repeated emphasis on certain associations in the initial experience and the experiences to come. The emphasis can be a result of memory. Repeated emphases will strengthen the ties of associations in the seeker's mind, turning them into associative memories that may become sequential memories through repetition. These memories will then influence the seeker's responses to future experiences.
A person reading a book by a spiritual master may be deeply moved by it. The words melt away his worries and anger. Then he seeks out more books by this master and by other writers, to get more of that wonderful feeling from reading.
From such reading experiences, the seeker may then travel to somewhere, or join a sangha to practice the teachings, meeting interesting and unusual people, debating with himself and others the merits of the teaching, finding faults here and there, and patching in nuggets of wisdom from elsewhere - tradition, folk tales, myth, psychology, science, life stories of people, trees, bird song, relatives... These experiences combine together to form a unique mixture yet similar in some generality with others, like trees that have similar general shapes while having unique branching.
As the seeker go through these experiences, the accumulated spirituality in him becomes more and more differentiated from that in others. They are different in the encounters, and in the associations that get reinforced.
A religion can be viewed as spirituality of a group of people. That can also differentiate through group experiences en masse. The Japanese buddhism comes from China, but they differentiate into different branches over time. Japanese buddhist priests can marry while Chinese cannot. The Japanese zen buddhism emphasizes sudden enlightenment, while the Chinese buddhism focus on gradual cultivation of merits and virtue. They use the same sutras, but the meaning and interpretation are somewhat different, because they are colored by their respective language and culture.
The transmission of one teaching will diverge into different branches because it goes through different people with different experiences and cultural backgrounds. It gets transformed as adaptation takes place in both the people receiving it, and the teaching itself.
3) complexity
The complexity of spirituality is due to various experiential encounters and learning of spiritual teachings. The encounters and teachings can be combined in multiple ways, thus giving combinatorial complexity. These different combinations have been reinforced into multiple established branches, such as Animism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, Muslim; and subbranches such as Quakers, Catholics, shamans, Zen Buddhists, forest monks; and also unique individuals such as Mother Teresa, Thich Nhat-Hahn, or a next door neighbor who goes to church regularly. The combinations will keep going, and complex branching of spirituality will also continue.
Some examples of experiential encounters and spiritual teachings: Experiential Encounters (E) can be loss of loved one, poverty, illness, unable to get desired job/love, seeking meaning or knowledge of life. Spiritual Teachings (T) can be: there is a God, or a prophet, or a Buddha. There is enlightenment or heaven, or no enlightenment. To withdraw and meditate, or to reach out and engage. To accept things as is, or to strive for higher standards. To find joy or to work dutifully. God's laws, or reality of flesh and needs.
The combinations can be 1) T-T: learning of one teaching and then another, and finding them compatible or not compatible with each other. 2) E-T: having an experience followed by learning from a teacher . 3) T-E: having learned a teaching and then going through new encounters that agree or challenge the teaching. 4) E-E: a combination of experiential encounters, of having much and then lose them or vice versa.
In all these complex combinations and branchings of spirituality there is a common theme, and that is to have a solution to relieve sufferings, in others and in oneself. That common method is to effect a change in one's conscious awareness, from that of pain to something else. It is a method of substitution, substituting one content with another.
In Christianity and Islam, that method is prayer: praying to a higher authority to take care of the trouble. Or it is reading of the Bible or Koran, and finding consolation or answer in there. In Buddhism it is to chant mantras or recite sutras. Thich Nhat-Hahn has another way called mindfulness, which is to focus on one's own breathing and the situation at hand like an observer. These are all method of substitution, aimed to provide immediate relief to a consciousness from that filled with hurtful feelings and memories and imaginations to that without.
Other than quick substitution methods, religions also have longer-term substitution methods. These take longer to implement because they require practice. They are substituting one attitude with another instead of moment-to-moment consciousness. In Christianity, the method is to obey God's law. In Buddhism and Confucianism, it is to be a good person by helping and respecting others. Both promote doing missionary work and spreading the teaching, which is still another way of substituting one set of consciousness with another.
In the secular world the solution to suffering is similarly a method of substitution. Here the substitutes can be drugs, money, fame, work, hobby, sex, food, clothing, power, etc. The desire to have a solution to suffering is common. What is different are the substitutes in the methods. The choices will depend on chance encounters and biases. Whether spiritual or material, if the substitutes are expedient, sustainable, and harmonious with the environment, then they will work for the seekers.
4) reproduction
