Enough about yoga, boys, and sometimes other nonsense. I'm needing to get really deep into the essential thing we as human animals have in common...to ask questions about our existence.
Yet, we have no way to truly speak to the Great Mystery of life. Our words lack an unfolding necessary to describe how we were created and continue to evolve. The difficulty gets more...er, difficult when we attempt to talk about "the universe." We use the article "the" to describe an object, particularly one outside of ourselves. If there's anything I've come to appreciate this semester it's seeing ourselves as a part of the universe...not separate from it. It's the difference between gazing at the fuzzy place of stars in the night sky and saying, "oh there's the Milky Way" and instead realizing it is us gazing at the horizon of ourselves as a vast galaxy.
In English there are eight parts of speech - noun, adverb, adjective, verb, adverb, conjunction, preposition, and interjection - in case you needed a review. Here's the kicker, over half of them are nouns; the largest percentage of any other language (or so my Cosmic Conversations book tells me so). Our language has no space for processing and evolving, the way previous cultures and other languages did and do. Without acknowledgement of consistent change we become attached to things/matter/objects. This shows up in many ways, among them the fact we ascribe God/Source/Sacred to things outside of us...rejecting our own divinity. Well, I'm stopping that thousand year habit by making an effort to stop using so many nouns (and stop saying "I" so much). ;)
Today I'm grateful for verbs, conversing, and universing.
Yet, we have no way to truly speak to the Great Mystery of life. Our words lack an unfolding necessary to describe how we were created and continue to evolve. The difficulty gets more...er, difficult when we attempt to talk about "the universe." We use the article "the" to describe an object, particularly one outside of ourselves. If there's anything I've come to appreciate this semester it's seeing ourselves as a part of the universe...not separate from it. It's the difference between gazing at the fuzzy place of stars in the night sky and saying, "oh there's the Milky Way" and instead realizing it is us gazing at the horizon of ourselves as a vast galaxy.
In English there are eight parts of speech - noun, adverb, adjective, verb, adverb, conjunction, preposition, and interjection - in case you needed a review. Here's the kicker, over half of them are nouns; the largest percentage of any other language (or so my Cosmic Conversations book tells me so). Our language has no space for processing and evolving, the way previous cultures and other languages did and do. Without acknowledgement of consistent change we become attached to things/matter/objects. This shows up in many ways, among them the fact we ascribe God/Source/Sacred to things outside of us...rejecting our own divinity. Well, I'm stopping that thousand year habit by making an effort to stop using so many nouns (and stop saying "I" so much). ;)
Today I'm grateful for verbs, conversing, and universing.
1 comment:
indeed... in the romance langauges (apart from french) 'I''s 'you's etc are in the general flow of things not used - only really bieng used to make a sharp distinction. The 'i's and the 'you's' are implict in the verb so that one might say the person and the action are in some important sense unified, i.e. being-in-the-world as opposed to a thinker thinking about things. However, an important thing to notice is that self-relexivity is a fucntion of the 'i' 'you' notion so that it is dependnat on it. I would definatly favour thinking in terms of the romance langauges AFTER all the horrible nuisence of realising we are not seprate from our actions and obejcts has been kindly swept away by our poor imprisoned forfathers. ;)......
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