I’m going to start this piece off with a story:
Some time in early 2015 I saw an interview on TV with Lin Manuel Miranda talking about his play “Hamilton”. He said that the show was moving to Broadway in the summer. Now I have no interest in that kind of entertainment but I do follow politics and it sounded like it was a part of the story of our political history. It was also mentioned that both Bill Clinton and Rupert Murdoch had given it excellent reviews. I found that second part most intriguing. I was going to be in New York for a weekend in July so got online and purchased two of the remaining 23 seats available for the only evening that both my wife and I had free. That was the entirety of what I knew before entering the theater. I had no idea what I was about to experience that night. It was breathtaking.
Since then I’ve seen many stories, interviews and video clips of the show. What came to me was that some aspect of this identity was, through these gateways, trying to recreate the experience that I had that evening. That simply wasn’t going to happen. I had become attached to the forms of articulation pointing to the experience in an apparent attempt to recreate that experience. No experience hangs around. It occurs and is gone in the very next moment and yet I seemed to be trying to retrieve one.
With that example, I’ll go back to something that I have addressed before, both in the book and this Blog, and that is the relationships between language and experience. Here are two passages that I’ll begin with. The first points to the primacy of experience and the second to the way language seems to act like a link to experience.
“My first observation of the relationship between words and experience occurred in my early years of doing yoga. I noticed that I could get completely absorbed in the flow of frequencies and my thoughts would simply stop altogether. What I saw in this process was that the words instantly “vaporized” once I was immersed in the flow of frequencies that were passing through, and I “saw” that the words were just riders on that horse. My thought afterwards was that the words lacked substance unless they were attached to an associated frequency. In order for them to have any impact, they needed to be substantiated with something “real”, which to me a frequency was. I couldn’t “experience” words but I could clearly experience a vast array of these frequencies. I decided that frequencies were real and words were not. At the time, I thought this matched up well with meditation, which was all about silencing the mind, and separating words from frequencies did just that.”
“When delving into unknown territory, what I initially sense is just an energetic, moment by moment flow. If an insight or linguistic observation does not present itself, that frequency is gone. This is by far the majority of my experiences because my mind simply cannot keep up with naming the immensity of motion out there…..But without language I have no anchor with which to easily return to any new frequency once I have dipped “myself” into it. If I am to move my identity forward on its evolutionary trajectory, at least some of these new experiences need to be graspable once discovered.
It appears to me that cognitive links are the primary mechanism that I use for this function.”
As pointed to above, it seems to me that all particular experiences are transitory but that language survives. What I found of interest here is that there appeared to be a mechanism attempting to recreate the enjoyment of the original experience via the speaking of others. And this is not a hopeless pursuit. There are clearly times when sharing does recreate a flavor of the experience and art is a great example of that. There are songs that have really struck a cord in me and I’d listen to them over and over, until they no longer achieved the same affect.
Here I will once again point to our attachment to pleasure and bring back Steve McIntosh’s quote:
“What does a universe of existential perfection do for an encore? It transcends itself through the development of creatures who can experience becoming perfect in time. That is, to achieve evolutionary perfection freely by choice, by effort, and even occasionally struggle, is to create an aspect of reality that did not exist in the state of existential perfection that we recognize as prevailing in the universe prior to the Big Bang.”
We are creating the next perfect moment in order to “experience becoming perfect in time” and experiencing perfection “in time” is pleasurable. We are pleasure seekers at heart, as Freud and others have said. Assessing what is best for the long term, as opposed to immediately pleasurable, is, I would argue, still pleasure seeking. It is just taking our grander visions of perfection into account when making immediate choices.
I am coming to think that perhaps thoughts are a method consciousness has developed in order to regulate the velocity of its own exquisite journey of creating and appreciating. I could say that it both creates, via making distinctions and choosing, and points to our experience in language to reveal the space to others so that it may be mutually appreciated. When newly shared, this seems to actually have the ability to transmit to others an experiential link to the space in which that experience occurred. As long as the way we express it presences that space, it does appear to successfully serve that purpose. What strikes me as most fascinating, is that when sharing my own experience with a person that I know, it was much more tangible than attempting to recreate it for myself by other means, like looking at a video. It also appears that I cannot not adequately recreate an experience that someone shared with me to a third party, even though I felt it when they shared it. Perhaps others can.
It appears to me that there is another side to this mechanism. As the description ages, the less of a link to experience it seems to provide. The degree to which my locution loses contact with the initial experience, is the degree to which I cannot presence it for another, nor for myself. At that point it is gone, as it should be and cannot help but be. However, what also seems to be occurring is that those lingering descriptions provide a kind of handhold, which my identity uses to provide a perception of fixity, a kind of safety net within which it defines its borders. Its borders are, in part, its experiences locked into place by the descriptions made about them. These may provide portions of my exterior presentation to those in my environment, as aspects of my personality/ego. Thus to some degree, I have come to see myself as what I have shared. As long as this “self” is used as a temporary stabilization platform, it serves a useful purpose, a resting place for a fluid identity within the maelstrom of creative flows.
So language can be used like an oar in the water. It speeds us along by using its firmness to push against the liquidity in which we travel. In our wake, others can follow, if called to, from the new frontier so that we may enjoy the new space together. Language adds focused deliberate choosing, both as an accelerant to the dance of its component parts, and as a transitional anchor from which to peer out at the universe. From there we can bask in the new experiences and share them with others via that tool. And it is not only the new experience that we delight in. The shared enjoyment also presences the ecstasy that comes with the process of re-unification itself.