Do you Speak Life 🐣 ?
On the forgotten art of breathing life into what we express and create
What is the difference between a letter-based language like English and a symbolic language like Hieroglyph or, more casually today, communicating only in emojis?
Let us take an example. Try to contemplate for a moment the following emojis:
💃🟣✨🟡🌊🔥🦅💨🌍
What thoughts and feelings are evoked when you contemplate this? What could be the meaning?
When we use English, we transcribe our thoughts with impressive structural precision, but often only in form. I could say we create a body, but we don’t always breathe life into that body. Consider a human being: their physical body might give us a glimpse of who they are, but it never fully reveals their whole living nature. A corpse moments after death, may appear identical to the human being, but it is no longer them. It is no longer alive.
So what does it mean to be alive? Where is the human relative to their body? The human lives in breath, thought, feeling, action, reaction, interaction, gesture and movement. A human cannot be located as their body is in a point in space or time, they unfold throughout time in space. Meeting someone for some time, doesn’t reveal what it would be like to live with them, witnessing their nature unfolding. The key word with a human is that they live. A human is infused with spirit, a corpse is not. A human is in a constant state of transformation, motion, growth and decay, change and evolution. A corpse remains in place in a process of decomposition.
The same analogy applies to language. English often reveals with great precision the body; or even the corpse, of communication. But it reveals little of the life or meaning unless, the listener actively engages with it. Meaning is not only given by the clarity of expression, it must be evoked through effortful interpretation. We could call this thinking-feeling; it is thought enlivened and made dynamic by the power of feeling.
We may read the noblest human truths, if we don’t engage with them in thinking-feeling, they will not move us, they leave us indifferent.
As one saying goes:
The untrained mind reads the secrets of the universe and sees nothing.
The wise reads a bubble gum wrapper and sees the secrets of the universe.
Being able to use a word such as freedom is a huge leap in precision of expression of thought, yet it could leave us indifferent to the ideal of freedom if we don’t engage with what lies behind the word. Most of us know the word freedom. But how many understand its ideal? And among them, how many have pursued the living experience of freedom?
Symbolic Language
A symbolic language, on the other hand requires more effort to understand but it reveals meaning more intimately. When we encounter a symbol, we must not only explore its literal 🙃 reference, but also the metaphors and qualities it might evoke.
If I want to express the idea of freedom in symbols, I might use 🦋 or 🦅, or most likely a combination of more symbols, but let's keep it simple for now. When I do so, I don’t mean a literal butterfly or eagle, rather the qualities they might evoke. A 🦋 might evoke freedom to the extent to which it can evoke in the reader the contrasting feeling of the experience of metamorphosis; from a crawling worm to a soaring butterfly. But, it might also evoke a sense of delicate, fleeting, ephemeral, short-lived kind of freedom.
🦅, might evoke a stronger freedom with vision, height, clarity, sovereignty, precision, sharp focus. Yet it might equally evoke feelings of preying, attack, solitude and domination.
None of this is necessarily readily available to our minds when we first see a 🦋 or 🦅. We have to put in the effort to recall all that we know, and feel, about those objects used as symbols. What do I think when I see a butterfly? What do I feel? What might these thoughts and feelings be trying to express?
Misunderstanding often arises when we focus too much on words more than meanings. When are truly seeking the meaning, I could use 🦋 or 🦅 or the word freedom, as long as the thought-feeling is evoked, you would forgive my imperfect choice of symbol. There is no perfect symbol to the idea itself anyway. Once we live the idea, move from object to essence, form to spirit, the symbol has fulfilled its function, it is no longer needed and can fall away.
Symbolic Perception
This is symbolic perception. And it is not limited to symbolic languages. It is an attitude; a way of engaging with experience itself. Symbolic languages simply forced us into this mode. Literal language offered us precision, but made it easier to miss the meaning altogether.
Literal language helped us map the external world with great refinement and precision; to build, to describe, to systematize. (Imagine I had tried to write this article in Emojis). But in doing so, we lost clarity within our inner world. Symbolic perception offers a way back: a way to map our inner lives with the same clarity we use to map our outer lives. But the question here is not of choosing between the two, but of integrating them. To express and create not just with extreme precision, but with essence and meaning.
Creating Without Meaning
By analogy, we might relate to this dynamic in our world. We have become brilliant at building forms: products, processes, systems, structures, technologies. But the forms we build don’t always carry meaning or humanity.
In my past life as a Software Engineer, I spent hours refining technical implementations of elaborate features, but not nearly enough time contemplating the purpose or the need of the user. But without meaning, the most elaborate forms will still be meaningless.
"The convergence of interpretive modalities within the framework of contextual flux generates a semiotic resonance that defies categorical articulation."
This, of course, is an example of an elaborate meaningless sentence generated by ChatGPT.
Our task now is to infuse our creations with sincere, meaningful human ideas. To build not just with efficiency, but with purpose and delight.
Reading the Living Texts
Of course, English can also be used symbolically. This is the spirit of sacred texts or what some may call occult texts. These texts are occult not because they wish to obscure. They are obscure because their meanings are so alive, layered, and nuanced that only a living, nuanced engagement can reveal them. To interpret them only literally is to profane and reduce their living nature to corpses, in the same way that we can’t find the human in their body alone, it would be missing their essence and spirit.
Occult texts obscure only to the extent that the reader would not put in the effort to seek the qualities and attributes of the allegories and symbols behind the apparent form expressed. However, once those texts are read with symbolic perception, with thinking-feeling, they come alive. They reveal truths in movements, like interacting with the spirit of a living being.
Learning to understand this language, or what I may call the Occult Script, means moving from the symbol, to the qualities, to the idea and finally, if one is fortunate, to the experience itself.
Experience is the key.
In English we can speak fluently about anything and everything. We can give opinions about the things we understand but also the things we don't understand and the things we have never experienced, just because we know of the words. We can discuss God, Freedom, Love or Death without having lived any of their meanings. The fact that I know a word, does not imply that I understand the idea or have lived the experience. We often confuse knowing the word with understanding its meaning.
Practicing symbolic perception is the first step to understanding Occult Script. Not in a nebulous mystical sense, but in a reasonable and practical way. Occult in its original meaning, simply means hidden. Hidden not behind veils or rituals or secret societies, but in plain sight. Hidden only for those who will not put in the effort, who are not willing to engage with thought-feeling. The occult lays in plain sight for the sincere seeker.
The Language of Life
So to return to the original question:
Do you speak life?
What if, in the language of life, we must live through the vocabulary before we can weave it into sentences, chapters, stories? Not just to speak but to speak with meaning.
Imagine every time you wished to know a word, you had to live it. You would spin a whole universe and live the experience of each word you are speaking, not only from one perspective, but from the perspective of as many characters as possible, just like in good storytelling 😉. Perhaps then, we would be more careful what we speak into existence 🫢
Which brings us to a final curious question:
Can we ever truly know what we have not experienced?
Thank you for reading,
🟣✨🟡
Written in Auroville, India 🇮🇳