Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?

That is a very high level of skill indeed, to be able to differentiate
language and thought in a sequential manner--much less to have some control
over it.  IMHO it takes a great deal of effort for those of us whose
language grooves (thanks Jeff Burke) are deeply worn to even jump out of the
language channel at all to the "before" of a thought.  Getting "beyond the
veil of language" isn't easy, but it certainly seems an aim in meditative
traditions--the monkey-mind keeps chattering on with a running report on
life the universe and everything--trying I guess to get it all "under
control" i.e. "understood" and therefore less uncertain and less scary.
RR

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

> --- On Mon, 3/30/09, RoseRose <faithfulscribe@...> wrote:
>
> > I'm personally of the Whorfian
> > persuasion that different languages "cause"
> > different forms of thinking and different thoughts
> > therefore arise.
>
> My experience, after many years of serious meditation and reflexive
> observations of my own consciousness is that my thoughts form, whole and
> complete, BEFORE they are translated into language.
>
> Observing my inner dialog, if I stop myself from reeling off some mental
> sentence before I have completed that sentence, halt the process mid-word, I
> find that I already know what thought the sentence is going to express. But
> that knowledge is NOT verbal. It is pre-verbal. It is knowing without words
> of any kind.
>
> To first learn this skill took me many weeks of practice at catching myself
> at my inner dialog and turning the dialog off. To really get good at it took
> many years of practice. But once it is mastered one can easily demonstrate
> to oneself that thinking and knowing are both non-verbal. Nor do they
> require images or mental pictures.
>
> When I became truly fluent in German about 40 years ago, I found that I
> could, if I halted my inner dialog, first think the thought, independent of
> any language, and then express that thought to myself in either German or
> English. The thought itself, however, was fully formed long BEFORE the
> choice was made as to which language to use to express that thought.
>
> The inner dialog, in other words, is NOT the thought, but is how we REPEAT
> the thought to ourselves AFTER we have formed the thought non-verbally.
>
> For someone who has not performed this experiment of halting the inner
> dialog this claim seems to violate common sense. It is assumed that thoughts
> exist only as mental words or images. For anyone who has tried this
> experiment for a few weeks or so, however, it becomes blatantly obvious that
> thoughts are NOT words or images, but that we are in the habit of
> TRANSLATING our thoughts INTO words or images AFTER the fact.
>
> If this were not the case, then how would a per-verbal baby think? And
> anyone who has spent time with a baby knows beyond a doubt that they DO
> think. They just haven’t yet formed the habit of talking to themselves ABOUT
> their thoughts, so their thoughts exist only in their pure, non-verbal form.
>
> Thus, it is demonstrably true to anyone who takes the trouble to learn the
> skill and demonstrate it to themselves, that thought comes first, and
> language comes after, and that language cannot effect what can be thought,
> only which thoughts can be expressed and which thoughts remain ineffable.
> However, as long as we remain fooled by the illusion that our inner dialog
> IS our thoughts, then we are also fooled into thinking that the language of
> our inner dialog molds our thoughts. It does not. It only molds our inner
> dialog, but not our pre-verbal thoughts.
>
>
> --gary
>