Week 9 – Questions of Language and Pointing

Photo courtesy of: ‘Words’ by StarzySpringer – Pixabay
https://tinyurl.com/y7n35lft

The human language is a means of communicating meaning through symbols. We use an alphabet and word symbols and structure them into coherent sentences to communicate meaning. In the human language a ‘phoneme’ is supposed to designate the smallest structural unit that distinguishes meaning, they are cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them. An example of one phoneme is the /t/ sound in the word “tip”, however, some linguists consider phonemes to be further decomposable into ‘features‘, such features being designated as the true minimal constituents of language. Features overlap each other in time, (like the fricative consonant sound when placing the lower lip against the upper teeth to say the letter “f”, and ‘suprasegmental‘ phonemes in oral language such as changes in emotionality that manifest in pitch and speed while speaking.
Paraphrased from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme

Looking for features and suprasegmental phonemes through the continuous and mostly unobservant use of everyday language reminds me of the TSK practice of looking for unnoticed ‘moments between moments‘… A diving deeper, ever smaller, beyond even the continuous string of linear time that language presupposes. Speaking seems to involve an embodiment of narrative, and because there is embodiment, I think, there’s a periodic touching of presence, an opening to knowing space. Often while speaking I pause and wait in the open moment for knowing space to present the words I want, in order to convey the ‘refined‘ thought I intend.

I can imagine and experience that at some point, in terms of sound for instance, silence is exposed. In terms of time and space… at some point there can be exposing of an open dynamic that is prior to activities of a narrator-self that gives meaning to events by ‘pointing‘ them toward a ‘persistent’ future, AND the interpreter-self that defines and labels based on past ‘pointings‘, and other basic self activities. In terms of space, just observing the process of mental narratives as self-concerns relax, more room is exposed for observing, eventually revealing, what Rinpoche describes as the, “unestablished prior availability of unoccupied space”.

The interpreter-self defining and labeling based on the past, exposes the near continuous circular act of referring to prior knowledge, this referring activity seems the essence of rhythm. The narrator-self gives meaning by incorporating past definitions and labels into intentions, navigating toward future desires (or away from fears).

The interpreter circling the past and narrator circling the future, each touching the present, like a vehicle O∞O confined to a linear time-track, a self-propelled (rear axle, front engine) acceleration that draws the self forward. Even though there may be other self-activities in play… just these two are enough to turn rhythm into momentum, and to flatten time and space into linear sequencing of stories.

A skillful description of the hypnotizing affect of narratives can be found at LOK pp. 174-6, which talks about “single-minded knowing“. (Quoted in the comments below) In essence the momentum of the narrative uses linear time to flatten space and narrow experience by compressing focus in the service of the self’s consolidating tendency toward making experience meaningful.

David