BOOK - James Low??
13
Each of us has the unique specificity of our own experience and yet we are able to use language to communicate about it as if we were living in the same world and seeing the same things.
Language is like a group hallucination.
14
It is useful we can communicate about practical things.
Yet the immediacy of our own experience cannot be communicated.
Words create a parallel universe as the actual phenomenology is beyond appropriation.
Language
Two confusions arise:
- we are confused about what we are seeing and encountering
- we are confused about the nature of language
Words do not have a one-to-one correspondence with "the world"
Language creates a mode of experiencing.
Compassion & Language -- 15
Within Buddhism, language is linked with compassion.
It's through language that we meet and try to connect through the use of signs and signifiers.
The source of suffering: either I am in control or everything is out of control.
The Middle Way
To find ourselves at home in this rich complexity.
This freedom arises not from blocking language, but allowing language to take its place and not do things is can't do.
The Burden of Trying to be in Control
We allow language to do what it can do.
What it cannot do, we have the 'mind.'
The mind has an intrinsic clarity.
It is not generated out of anything.
It is just the given quality of the mind itself.
Education and enculturation enforce the burden of making sense of what is going on.
We learn to make use of information and learning techniques which allow us to chop up the world and make sense of what's going on.