"At the present, our whole thought process is telling us that we have to keep our attention here. You can't cross the street, for example, if you don't. But consciousness is always in the unlimited depth which is beyond space and time, in the subtler levels of the implicate order. Therefore, if you went deeply enough into the actual present, then maybe there's no difference between this moment and the next. The idea would be that in the death experience you would get into that. Contact with eternity is in the present moment, but it is mediated by thought. It is a matter of attention."
- Bohm
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Monday, November 05, 2007
Language, the Word Virus
Q: Do you think there is a word for everything? Do you think there is stuff which doesnt have a name yet, or there isn't a word for?
A: I think you have to change the question: words are a replacement for, rather than a reflection of what they attempt to describe. Language is the greatest barrier between us and what we experience: as soon as we put a name to something we change it, and as soon as you start thinking about life in terms of language you negate its objective qualities: its everythingness. Words take on their own identity, ultimately usurping the very thing they were intended to represent. Burroughs called it the 'Word Virus'.
"My general theory......has been that the Word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with it's human host....The Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of a virus: it's an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself."
Think about why writing is so effective: is it because the words literally contain meaning, or because of what they stimulate in you? Everyone interprets everything differently, and all language is ultimately inadequate.
So, in a word.
A: I think you have to change the question: words are a replacement for, rather than a reflection of what they attempt to describe. Language is the greatest barrier between us and what we experience: as soon as we put a name to something we change it, and as soon as you start thinking about life in terms of language you negate its objective qualities: its everythingness. Words take on their own identity, ultimately usurping the very thing they were intended to represent. Burroughs called it the 'Word Virus'.
"My general theory......has been that the Word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with it's human host....The Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of a virus: it's an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself."
Think about why writing is so effective: is it because the words literally contain meaning, or because of what they stimulate in you? Everyone interprets everything differently, and all language is ultimately inadequate.
So, in a word.
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