Language and how it shapes our thoughts.

One thing that I have stumbled upon recently has been the issue of language and words we use and how it affects our thoughts. It has primarily come about by listening to and reading Bohm who also was a linguist and had an obsession about finding out the origins of a word and going to the root of it and then more importantly comparing it with what that word is trying to describe and see if it fits. Well he didn’t try to see if it fits. He raised the questions and leaves it to the reader to make up his or her mind. A true philosopher who was not strait jacketed by any belief system and bogged by concepts and steadfastly believed in dialogue and arguments to talk things through and see if things can be made clearer.

Apart from using the correct word at the appropriate time, Bohm also shed light on problems the Subject-Verb arrangement of words does in our thought process. In English we have to have a subject who needs to be doing something or something needs to be happening to it for there to be a complete grammatically correct sentence. This happening or doing is denoted by the verb.

So for e.g. we can have a sentence like:

  Ram   Laughed

Subject+ Verb.

So a two word sentence( subject  and verb) would be the shortest possible sentence in English. IN such a format the subject takes exaggerated importance. There has to be a doer of action for there to be action. This is in contradiction to lot of eastern philosophy( hindu,buddhist) where we  say there is action. The Verb is all important in that set up.

Bohm then  gives the example of a common  English  expression " it is raining".

What is this "it" that is raining. Logically we should say  "Rain is falling of "There is rain"

Bohm says this is due to our contrived way of thinking and giving so much importance to the subject and not being able to think wholly and just seeing things in parts.

While it may seem as an extreme example, you can see the point he is trying to make from a larger philosophical point of view. If we accept that language shapes our thoughts then surely when we learn to make sentences where the doer of the action is going to be paramount that shapes in our mind an image of the importance of the individual. The "I". The "ego' .That becomes our default setting if you will.the way we look and interpret things and event.

if some ill luck befalls us and we are in rut we think of people to blame it on or blame ourselves for it. We find difficulty in accepting that things just happen and there maybe no one to blame for it. There was no grand cosmic plan to fail us on that day .Things happen. You handle the present moment and then you move on to the next moment. Or maybe you don’t move on anywhere, the next moment happens and  you react in it

So stuff to munch on,,this subject verb thing and on a wider scale how language shapes our thoughts.

David Bohm-Wholeness

I have been reading about David Bohm and his theories off late. David Bohm was a theoretical physicist who also had a long association with Krishnamurti. He had come up with lot of interesting theories or looked at existing theories and gave some out of the box takes on them.

Some of it has been heavy reading as one needs some basic knowledge of physics to make sense of it all which I don’t have. but once you can look through and beyond some of the technical scientific words used you do come upon some profound stuff.

He talked about wholeness in the universe and beyond. Everything  is connected or has a relationship with everything else. While we talk about this as a philosophical concept it just looks words to us in this increasingly fragmented world. But to have a man of science explain this concept of wholeness as a scientific concept was a new experience for me and probably gives it more legitimacy in my mind  .

My rudimentary explanation ( taking some liberties with the science )would be that everything is made up of matter. Matter in turn is made up of particles and when you study the movement of particles you see a few patterns:

a.       Particles move discontinuously i.e the tend to jump from point A to point B rather than a continuous movement. this movement of the particle without leaving a trace suggest that they have some relationship to the particles nearby and to the overall eco system in which they are operating. There seems to be an indivisibility in that relationship  which allows these particles join together and take form

b.       Particles( or the sub parts;atoms and electrons)  also respond to the environment that they are in. they break up and again take up some shape based on changes applied to them.There again is a relationship between them which allows them to act interdependently.

Electrons which influence each other non-locally must both be regarded as  in Bohms words as “projections of a higher dimensional reality:” i.e., these particles do not simply interact between themselves but rather are projections of the same higher dimensions. There seems to be an order in this relationship in which particles function and Bohm calls this relationship as the implicate order.

The movement of the particles is based on the theory of relativity and the Quantum theory which Bohm then develops  into this concept of wholeness.

Bohm basically says in this theory that everything is enfolded into everything else and everything unfolds to take shape of things that we see with our eyes. There is no separation due to this enfolding.

He then goes on to suggest this particle movement properties also is how our thoughts work. we have one thought and then we have other thoughts. Sometimes one thought leads to another thought but most times we seem to jump from one thought to a completely unrelated thought. Because our mind works at a very fast speed we feel its been a discrete movement i.e one thought leading to another inter connected thought. While that may happen at times ,it does not happen at other times. The thought process is capable of or is designed in way where it jumps from one thought to the other.

This is were probably understanding of Bohm and his theory of wholeness and implicate order can help us.It could be laying a good explanation for how our thought process works. we probably need to understand the process and observe the process rather than spend so much time trying to control our mind or thoughts. The thought process is not designed to be controlled. It moves discontinuously . This is where Krishnaji and Bohm meet in their  theories /philosophy also. Instead of trying to control our mind we need to observe it. In that observation we will get to a quiet mind.. or atleast a quieter mind.

Defintely food for thought.We don’t have to agree with Bohm or Krishnaji.but enough there to try and test out.There is a lot more of Bohm which I will touch upon later.