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Episode 114 The linguistics of loss
Episode in
Structured Visions
Photo by Jonatán Becerra
Join me on a journey from humanism to posthumanism with a focus on how we understand language, more-than-human communication, semiosis and information theory.
We discuss Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think, specifically his ideas about the Earth’s open and emergent semiotic system, of which human meaning-making is a subset.
We explore the idea of human language as a unidimensional system for organising information within the multidimensional information systems of the Earth and the cosmos. Inhabiting human language means we stay separate from the wisdom of the Earth, which makes us lost.
We visit our panicky and devastating experiences of loss, recalling that the Earth offers gateways to re-belonging (sometimes in the form of psilocybin mushrooms).
I ask to join in the conversations that James Glattfelder is having about idealism and information theory, especially his interview with Stuart Preston in The Consciousness Podcast
The story I read is ‘Momento mori.’
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01:03:16
Episode 113 We are all grammatically distant
Episode in
Structured Visions
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko
Join me in the pleasure of observing conversation, particularly times when people report the speech of others. They can do this using direct speech, indirect speech or narrative reports of speech events. Here are examples of all three:
Mrs Jenkins told the class shat she was cancelling the field trip (indirect)
There was a roar of protest (narrative report of a speech event)
‘It’s just not fair,’ said Jenny. ‘We’ve been so looking forward to this trip.’ (direct)
In fiction, you could try free indirect discourse, which is mostly indirect with some touches of direct. Here’s an example:
Mrs. Jenkins told the class she was cancelling the field trip. There was a roar of protest. It just wasn’t fair. They’d been so looking forward to the trip.
To convert direct speech into indirect speech requires a little grammatical finagling. The point of view shifts from the person speaking to the person talking about the person speaking, so pronouns, tense and other deictics might change.
Indirect speech, I say in this episode, requires a certain grammatical distancing.
And then, after all that logical discussion of the linguistics and stylistics of speech reporting, I go a little mystical.
What if all human language keeps us at a grammatical distance from the here, the now, the magical mystery tour of multidimensional consciousness that is the Earth? What if ‘mundane reality’ were the astronomical opposite of mundane? What if what keeps us from seeing this mysterious reality is the shroud of language?
Key takeaways:
We’re not the only conscious beings on the planet
The Earth is teeming with multidimensional consciousness—of the kind some folks have ascribed to ‘God’, ‘the Divine’, ‘the universe’
If you get the feeling that it’s hard to be on this planet—don’t blame the planet
Blame language. But don’t really blame it. Simply recognise that it’s restricting your consciousness
Whatever you create from within that position of restrictedness—is one of the Earth’s great achievements
Here is the transcript of the conversation with Rachel and Mary I discuss in the episode:
Rachel: Or, like, like when she told me, when she told me that Marilyn was- she’s more American than me? We’re like- we’re like, “OK, both of us have light skin, blue eyes freckles, one of us happens to have blonde hair, one of us has- happens to have brown hair,” like
Mary: does that make you, y’know-
Jodie: No, the only thing is that you’ve been in France before, so, y’know you’re probably more comfortable with the language
Mary: right
Jodie: and that’s probably why she thought
Rachel: But she said we look. She’s like, “Oh, you look more American” (.) and Marilyn was like really offended
Mary: Well, what di- wha- did you ask her what- what you look like? like, “What do I look like?”
Rachel: No, because we were trying to get her to go away.
Mary: I would’ve had to ask her though, I would’ve been, “W(e)ll, what do I look like?”
Rachel: That was, like 45 minutes into the one-sided conversation.
The stories I read are ‘Point of view’ and ‘The effects of language on the body.’
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48:06
Episode 112 Love language
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Structured Visions
Photo by Nathan Dumlao
To what extent is who(m) you’re allowed to love analogous to syntactic structure?
In this episode I explore the idea that human beings, in initiating themselves into language, surrender the higher consciousness that the rest of the non-human world enjoys.
This is a problem when it comes to love. If we see the world in terms of nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions, then love becomes part of a transitive syntactical arrangement which requires a subject that is separate from an object.
But it’s worth considering the distinct pleasure of separation. It makes it possible to experience the uniqueness of being loved, of being unknown, of being a mystery. As I always say, intimacy is embedded in the structure of language.
The research I discuss comes from Chapter 8 of The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality. You can get a copy from Sheffield Hallam University’s institutional repository.
Here are the transcripts.
The story I read is ‘A glimpse.’
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44:32
Episode 111 The linguistics of tapping
Episode in
Structured Visions
Photo by 莎莉 彭
What’s your favourite way to alleviate anxiety? Mine is tapping, also known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Linguistically, tapping is fascinating, because it reveals an inherent contradiction that your body ends up resolving for you.
When we tap into (pardon the pun) the world beyond language—our bodies, the earth—we access the worlds ‘created from silence’, the mystery, and the spaces where something new can emerge.
The stories I read in this episode are The origin of all destruction and Vasilisa.
My favourite EFT resource is The Tapping Solution.
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45:59
Episode 110 Clap if you believe in fairies
Episode in
Structured Visions
The Fairies by Adolphe Monticelli
Do you believe in fairies? In his 1911 book, American anthropologist Walter Evans Wentz hypothesises ‘tentatively’ that the invisible world of fairies should be examined ‘just as we examine any fact in the visible realm wherein we now live, whether it be a fact of chemistry, of physics, or of biology’ (pp. xvi-xvii).
In this episode I put forward my own hypothesis: that human language is what keeps us from seeing fairies… and all the other multidimensional mysteries of the material world.
What is it about language that so comprehensively excludes us from a more expansive experience of the world? I draw upon principles from M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar to explain what aspects of the ‘architecture of language’ keep us confined within the dark prison of selfhood. Each of Halliday’s metafunctions contribute, I posit, to how selfhood confines us, through the linear experience of time (the textual metafunction), the need to vie for social status (the interpersonal metafunction) and the assumption of separate worldviews (the ideational metafunction).
We can learn about the world we can’t access by examining the restrictive shapes of selfhood that human language produces. We can also imagine the possibility that our experience is restrictive by design—that the Earth developed a means to create separate consciousnesses so that it could experience the mystery of intimacy.
The story I read in this episode is ‘F in the ELLPH.’
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53:03
Episode 109 What makes you so special?
Episode in
Structured Visions
Photo by Natalia Luchanko
The paradox of being human in a Western, settler, colonizing culture is you’re supposed to be special and… you’re not supposed to be special.
It’s a culture that’s clinging to the idea of human exceptionalism, which is the assumption that humans are better, smarter and more conscious than the rest of the world. Human language is held up as evidence of what makes humans so special.
Posthumanism is a movement that challenges this assumption.
My position is that language does make humans exceptional, but not exceptional in the sense of ‘better.’ I think language makes us less conscious than the material world.
A lot less conscious.
Find out what I mean through an exploration of nouns and copular verbs.
The stories I read in this episode are ‘Possessive’ and ‘The problem with talking to trees.’
If you enjoyed the ‘think of a word’ exercise, you can do it again in Episode 64, ‘The intimacy embedded in language.’
If you’d like to hear more about how language makes humans less conscious than the rest of the world, listen to Episode 94, ‘Language and the afterlife’ and Episode 104 ‘Consciousness is more than just a little cutie pie.’ If you’d like to hear about the Earth’s language, try Episode 96.
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You can see what I did with the words my History of English students wrote on scraps of paper in Grammar for Dreamers, the screenplay, available here: jodieclark.com/screenplay
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48:26
Episode 108 Adulting, and stuff like that
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Structured Visions
Photo by gaspar zaldo
Conversations with final-year university students has brought back all the fears that I had in my mid- to late twenties about having to be a grown up. The secret to soothing those fears for me was… studying linguistics. More specifically, it was ‘like’ and stuff like that (discourse markers and general extenders).
If you’re curious about what made me want to investigate American speakers’ use of like in conversation, have a listen to Episode 86 (Feelings are, like, inside things).
In this episode I discuss general extenders, which take the form CONJUNCTION + PROFORM + (optional) MODIFER: and stuff (like that), and things (like that), and everything (like that), and all (that), or something (like that), or anything (like that). I discuss an article by Maryann Overstreet that examines how general extenders have become grammaticalized over time. They have followed a common pattern in grammaticalization, where linguistic elements go from being mostly propositional or ideational, to mostly interpersonal. In other words, when bits of language become more incorporated into grammatical structure, they become more subjective, more oriented to self.
But my obsession with the mysteries of language, which was sparked in my terrifying early adulthood, has led me to wonder if all the grammar of human languages is oriented to self—organised around the principle of selfhood.
The assumption that human beings are more conscious because they have language often remains unquestioned. But what if human beings—limited as they are by a self-producing human language—are less conscious than the rest of the material world? In this episode I propose that the more-than-human-world is organised according to principles other than selfhood. There is no division. There may be layers of perspectives, but not the division of selfhood that requires perspectives be separate from each other.
Here’s the transcript I was reading from.
The story I read in this episode is ‘The Earth’s boast.’
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01:01:47
Episode 107 Heaven and Earth
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Structured Visions
Photo by Davide Cantelli
The idea that human language comes from the land is not new. It’s rooted in Indigenous ontologies of language. But for those of us who haven’t grown up in an Indigenous culture and are swimming in the ideas of a Western, colonising culture, it can be very difficult to see language as anything other than a human construct.
In this episode we ponder the heaven-Earth binary and wonder about what it may have to do with the differences between saying and doing. We marvel at the verbal processes in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ and imagine a world in which the loving Creator of human beings is the Earth itself. If the Earth is speaking, perhaps we are part of its verbiage.
The story I read in this episode is ‘Logogenesis.’
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53:26
Episode 106 Prosody and peak experiences
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Structured Visions
Photo by Haley Rivera
Have you ever had a peak experience? Did you ever try to tell someone about it? Also, how good is your singing voice?
If you’re a native speaker of a tonal language like Mandarin, you may have an excellent singing voice (or at least, you’re more likely to pass a test for perfect pitch, according to a study reported in Scientific American). But in a language like English requires you only to grasp the difference between rising and falling tones—and these only in relation to each other—and this only for paralinguistic information (like whether someone’s being sarcastic).
If human language had evolved differently, we might all be amazing singers. Or so we might glean from Steven Mithen’s book, The singing Neanderthals (which I also discussed in Episode 78 of Structured Visions). Mithen proposes that human language evolved from music. All that remains that’s vaguely musical in language now is prosody. But what a diminished form of music it is!
In this episode we explore the quality of human language to reduce, constrict and thereby oppress, especially in relation to trying to put peak experiences into words. One of the features of a peak experience, according to Abraham Maslow in Religions, values and peak-experiences, is that ‘the whole universe is perceived as an integrated and unified whole.’ One of the reasons, I suggest, that it’s hard to express these mystical experiences is that language is structured around the principle of the self. Peak experiences refuse to be contained within the membrane of self.
And yet, when you look for it, it’s there. Within your self, somehow.
That’s the contradiction: the you that dissolves in a peak experience remains present by its inability communicate it.
What if we think of human language as developed by the Earth itself, as part of the Earth’s agentive evolution? What if the Earth produced selfhood to experience mystery?
Entertaining that possibility offers us the opportunity to explore the mysteries within us, and to keep sacred the mysteries of others.
Have you ever had a peak experience? Tell me all about it.
The story I read in this episode is ‘The luthier.’
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01:00:34
Episode 105 Given, new and the selfless know-it-all
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Structured Visions
Photo by Etienne Boulanger
What if you could know everything, but you had to lose your self in the process? We discuss two layered structures in human languages. The first is word order, such as Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) and Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). The second is information structure, which is the system by which people in interaction navigate their interlocutor’s knowledge state, orienting what they say to make a distinction between given and new information. All human languages start from the assumption that human beings in interaction know different things, or are putting their attention to different things.
In this episode we play with the idea that individual minds, with different states of knowledge, didn’t precede, but are produced by language. We pose the hypothesis that human language shapes the experience of selfhood—which therefore restricts our capacity to know everything.
We also talk about Ted Chiang’s brilliant novella, The story of your life. But if you want to know what will happen in the future, you’re out of luck, because the future is a projection of the self, moving in a linear way through time.
What are your thoughts about the ideas discussed in this episode? Because I have a self, I can’t know until you tell me.
The story I read in this episode is ‘The dark art of world-building.’
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53:30
Episode 104 Consciousness is more than just a little cutie pie
Episode in
Structured Visions
Photo by Zakaria Ahada
Do human beings have more or less consciousness than the rest of the living world? Is language an addiction? We’ll explore both points by examining the relationship between language and time.
To participate in the world of human language, we have to reduce ourselves to little cutie pies known as ‘selves,’ who exist at a precise moment of time and who orient to their world in relation to their deictic centre.
What might it look like if we could see beyond the linearity of language and thus, the linearity of time?
The story I read in this episode is ‘The end.’
Some time sensitive things to act on now:
Refreshing Grammar (jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse) will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: jodieclark.com/rg-unlimited-access
Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: jodieclark.com/SDT
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55:42
Episode 103 Inhabiting language
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Structured Visions
Photo by Erlend Ekseth
In this episode I’ll try to convince you that using language to express the self is like a dog chasing its own tail… or a snake eating its tail, if you prefer ouroboros imagery. My perspective is that human language is the one-dimensional structure that shapes the self and thus limits access to the vast multidimensionality of consciousness. Language can’t refer to anything beyond itself (or beyond the self).
The good news is, that when human language draws a circle that says ‘this is you,’ it creates a space that you can look inside. What you might find is not the you created by language, but instead the part of all the worlds that is uniquely designated by that self-circle. Transformation comes from truly inhabiting the space that language creates.
On the journey of this episode we’ll be rambling through the realms of phrasal verbs, conceptual metaphor theory and the challenges of learning English as a second language. The blog post I mention in the episode is ‘What’s up?’ by Elaine Hodgson.
The story I read is ‘The Museum of Language.’
Lots of things going on…
Refreshing Grammar is open now (jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse), and will be free until 12 November 2024. You can get the unlimited access version for a very special, limited-time price here: jodieclark.com/rg-unlimited-access
Also check out the amazing offer on my other amazing course, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: jodieclark.com/SDT
Come join me on 11 October at Off the Shelf Festival of words for a free, interactive online writing workshop, The Impossibility of Words: A Linguist’s Cure for Writer’s Block.
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53:26
Episode 102 How to belong
Episode in
Structured Visions
Photo by Tim Mossholder
Have you ever felt like you don’t belong? My own red thread through the labyrinth of linguistics has been the theme of not belonging. We explore the grammatical shape belonging takes in everyday conversations about fitting in. We discuss how selves can grammatically ‘detach’ from bodies, and the transformative possibility of embodied selves. Join me in a hopeful dream where humans belong on planet Earth. We’ll explore how human language, which seems to divide us from wider consciousness, might be re-envisioned as an invitation to co-creation with the Earth itself.
The story I read is ‘The last stage of the Earth’s evolution.’ I also mentioned my story ‘Summers with Mad Gran.’
Connect with me on jodieclark.com. Refreshing Grammar begins on 16 September 2024. Sign up here: jodieclark.com/refreshingcourse
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01:09:40
Episode 101 You, me and big egos
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Structured Visions
Photo by Annie Spratt
What’s the difference between me and you? And what’s so bad about big egos, anyway? In this episode we explore the relationship between ego and language. We move from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to D.T. Suzuki’s explanation of the Zen Buddhist perspective. We explore Suzuki’s analysis of two poems about encounters with flowers, one by Basho and one by Tennyson.
The story I read in this episode is ‘Ego angels.’
The essay by D.T. Suzuki I discuss is:
Suzuki, D. T. (1960). Lectures on Zen Buddhism. In E. Fromm, D. T. Suzuki and R. DeMartino (Eds.) Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis (pp. 1-76). Grove Press.
It’s available on Internet Archive.
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58:36
Episode 100 Selfish wishes for social change
Episode in
Structured Visions
Photo by Saad Chaudhry
What are your top three wishes? Are they selfish?
As it happens, your wishes may be worse than selfish—they may be toxically self-effacing. If you participate, on whatever level, in a society in which people are continually and oppressively bullied into thinking they need to be someone other than who they are, then you may be wishing for things that obliterate your own unique selfhood.
In this episode we explore the linguistics of wishing—with a close look at realis and irrealis expressions—and discover what grammatical structures can reveal about a desire for a transformative society. We explore the possibility of a social structure in which individual selfhood is protected and sustained by a mutually supporting community.
The book I refer to in this episode is Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds, and you can learn more about the analysis I did there in Episode 58, ‘Communities of Sara Mills’.
The stories I read in this episode are ‘Beyond desire’ and ‘Ala’s lamp.’
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45:22
Episode 99 Linguistics and astrology
Episode in
Structured Visions
Photo by Josh Rangel
What new language would you most like to know? Is astrology on your list?
Does astrology count as a language?
Maybe the language of the stars could be classified as a pidgin, a language without native speakers.
But if, as discussed in Episode 96, ‘The Earth’s language’, languages are ways of organising information, then it might be more accurate to describe astrology as one of the Earth’s languages.
If the Earth has a language, it’s using it to tell us:
You don’t just exist as an ego, as a first-person pronoun, or a proper name
You don’t just exist in relation to all the things that people have said about you…or that you say about yourself
You also exist as a being who took their first breath at a precise moment in the Earth’s movement through the cosmos.
Get your birth chart on astro.com.
The story I read in this episode is ‘Pidgin.’
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55:27
Episode 98 Linguistic singularities
Episode in
Structured Visions
Photo by Chrissy Jarvis
Counting… that’s maths, right? Actually, it’s language. And as we’ll discover through a series of absurd tasks (like, ‘count everything you can see’), you can’t count anything until you know what ‘counts as’ a thing. Language draws the lines around what counts, and it shifts and changes as it does so.
In this episode we celebrate the rich lineage of linguists and language philosophers who offer detailed, rational arguments against an objectivist paradigm of language. Language does not refer to things in the world, they explain. Language is not, as Wallis Reid (1991, p. 54) explains, a ‘mirror of nature.’
My own perspective on the objectivist paradigm resonates with these, but it’s less rational, more mystical and speculative. What if we experience the world in many dimensions, and language is the most restrictive of these dimensions, as I discussed in Episode 95, ‘Your name without language?’ What if language restricts us from fully accessing the other dimensions?
Here are my radical, irrational views in a nutshell: Language is a way of structuring information. Human language structures information according to a particular organising principle—the self. Human language presumes, constructs, projects a self. And we can see the process by which this happens by looking closely at the structures of grammar.
The structure of grammar we’re looking at in this episode is grammatical number. We’ll discover that different languages have different grammatical number systems. Many have singular and plural. Some have singular, dual and plural. Some have singular, dual, trial and plural. Some have singular, dual, paucal and plural.
One thing all these languages have in common is ‘singular’. Understanding how language structures the ‘singular’ can help us understand the structure of our own selves, and the beauty that might be found there.
The story I read in this episode is ‘Fairest.’
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Work cited: Reid, W. (1991). Verb and noun number in English. Longman.
50:07
Episode 97 The intimacy of denial
Episode in
Structured Visions
Photo by Drew Hays
What’s the weirdest thing about human language? We explore linguistic polarity and all its bizarre implications. Embedded in every human grammar is a way of turning a positive clause (I’m listening) into a negative clause (I’m not listening). Grammatical negation is one of the ways we can do denial. (‘I’m not scared of that dog,’ said the three-year-old whose body was telling an entirely different story.)
What would a language without negation look like? My story ‘Negative space’ refers to an (imaginary?) alien language where everything is expressed in the affirmative. Closer to home, we could speculate about the Earth’s own language.
If languages are ways of structuring information, then human languages are uniquely structured around selfhood. Negative polarity works to structure the relationship between self and other, which sometimes means denying the other, sometimes affirming them. Either way it’s a route to intimacy. If human language draws a boundary or a membrane around the distinct self, then the intimacy of negation can be a way of acknowledging and celebrating those boundaries.
The other story I mention in this episode is ‘Lessons in Latin’.
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59:29
Episode 96 The Earth’s language
Episode in
Structured Visions
Image by Elena Mozhvilo
We start the episode, as always, with a couple of questions:
What are the differences between spoken/signed language and written/printed/digital language?
Where are you?
There’s an answer to Question 2 that will be true for anyone who says it. ‘I am here.’ But if you write it on a piece of paper, and then leave the room, it stops being true.
Does that make spoken language more genuine?
Or is written language more reliable because it’s more durable, less ephemeral? (‘Put it in writing.’)
We explore questions around spoken/written language in relation to what French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls the ‘metaphysics of presence’. And also in relation to a quite touching France Télécom advert from the ’90s.
The discussion leads to a conversation about non-human language, specifically, the language of the Earth itself. Both human language and the Earth’s language are systems for structuring information. Human language is structured around the principle of selfhood, which leads us to the whimsical fancy that the separate, distinct self exists prior to the grammar that created it.
The story I read in Episode 96 is ‘The loneliness of the literate species’.
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55:59
Episode 94 Language and the afterlife
Episode in
Structured Visions
Photo by Christopher Windus
What happens when we die? Ideas about the afterlife (or the lack of an afterlife) requires theory building based on either faith or experience. What if you don’t have faith in stories about the afterlife and you’ve never experienced anything resembling a near-death experience (NDE)? In this episode I’ll guide you through a language-based exercise that might help you with your theory building about worlds beyond everyday experience.
The task is to ‘experience your world’, first through the filter of language and then without the filter of language.
The intention is to open up the possibility that there are at least two different (simultaneous) worlds, layered on top of each other—at least two different dimensions of experience.
If we accept that, why might there not be at least one more? Or even many, many more?
The other thing that we might notice is how the filter of language presumes and produces a distinction between self and other, which disappears when we remove this filter. Because the linguistic dimension restricts us to the experience of selfhood, it might be the most constraining of all dimensions. And we can speculate about the existence of a soul that survives death and lives simultaneously in many (or all) dimensions.
But before we get swept away in our excitement about this transcendent soul, we might allow ourselves to enjoy a certain fascination with living within a restrictive, linguistic existence and the creativity that might emerge from this level of constraint.
The story I read in Episode 94 is ‘Moving language’.
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53:27
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Documentales Sonoros
Este podcast está pensado para las personas como yo, que nuestros ojos ya no nos permiten ver lo que uno desea o le interesa y tienen curiosidad de aprender y conocer, también para aquellas que constantemente están fuera de casa por su trabajo o viajan asiduamente y aquellos que se desplazan en metro, en autobús o en cualquier otro medio porque su trabajo así lo requiere. Todos son Audios de documentales.
Todo mi trabajo está realizado de manera altruista y no busco ninguna compensación, solo la satisfacción de saber que ayudo a otras personas. Un gran abrazo a tod@s.
Updated
Todo Concostrina
Programa de historia con la peculiar mirada y estilo de Nieves Concostrina. Updated



