(no subject)
Apr. 27th, 2008 04:18 pmThere's a crazy mystical philosopher named Jan Cox. He studied in one of the Gurdjieff groups back in the day and now he runs this extremely weird web page. (Which is great fun to read when you're high off your ass, by the way)
His basic premise is that people's internal languages are basically mostly random bullshit. Your brain is constantly having this sort of meaningless conversation with you, and you're getting that confused with "you", with your actual consciousness. This leads to great hilarity, and makes communication not work so great, since most people repeat what their brain is saying to them. When it's functional things that can be translated into concrete actions, it works well enough. Like if I said "Please pick up that fork over there", your mind has a way of translating that into your own internal representations, assuming you're familiar with picking things up and forks. But if I said "It sure is a nice day", these things don't quite translate so well, I mean, you can still get pieces of my original meaning, but it's getting more nebulous. What makes a day "nice" for instance? And do I mean "day" as in a 24 hour span of time, or do I mean "the part of that span where it's light out"? You will supply your own answers, but there's a good chance they're not the same as mine.
One way around that is to try and silence that internal conversation. Another is to "stop listening" to it. Let the brain ramble on, but just take it as the ravings of a madman. You might even want to make up fun voices to talk back to it, just for laughs, but don't take it as anything else but that.
His basic premise is that people's internal languages are basically mostly random bullshit. Your brain is constantly having this sort of meaningless conversation with you, and you're getting that confused with "you", with your actual consciousness. This leads to great hilarity, and makes communication not work so great, since most people repeat what their brain is saying to them. When it's functional things that can be translated into concrete actions, it works well enough. Like if I said "Please pick up that fork over there", your mind has a way of translating that into your own internal representations, assuming you're familiar with picking things up and forks. But if I said "It sure is a nice day", these things don't quite translate so well, I mean, you can still get pieces of my original meaning, but it's getting more nebulous. What makes a day "nice" for instance? And do I mean "day" as in a 24 hour span of time, or do I mean "the part of that span where it's light out"? You will supply your own answers, but there's a good chance they're not the same as mine.
One way around that is to try and silence that internal conversation. Another is to "stop listening" to it. Let the brain ramble on, but just take it as the ravings of a madman. You might even want to make up fun voices to talk back to it, just for laughs, but don't take it as anything else but that.