1 result for (book:notp AND session:776 AND stemmed:express)
[... 5 paragraphs ...]
It is not so much that he personified the elements of nature as that he threw his personality into its elements and rode them, so to speak. As mentioned, love incites the desire to know, explore, and communicate with the beloved; so language began as man tried to express his love for the natural world.
Initially language had nothing to do with words, and indeed verbal language emerged only when man had lost a portion of his love, forgotten some of his identification with nature, so that he no longer understood its voice to be his also. In those early days man possessed a gargantuan arena for the expression of his emotions. He did not symbolically rage with the storms, for example, but quite consciously identified with them to such a degree that he and his tribesmen merged with the wind and lightning, and became a part of the storms’ forces. They felt, and knew as well, that the storms would refresh the land, whatever their fury.
[... 10 paragraphs ...]
In your terms, the use of language began as man lost this kind of identification. I must stress again that the identification was not symbolic, but practical, daily expression. Nature spoke for man, and man for nature.
(Long pause at 10:18.) In a manner of speaking, the noun and the verb were one. The noun did not disappear, but expressed itself as the verb.
(Long pause at 10:20.) In a kind of emotional magnification unknown to you, each person’s private emotions were given an expression and release through nature’s changes — a release that was understood, and taken for granted. In the most profound of terms, weather conditions and the emotions are still highly related. The inner conditions cause the exterior climatic changes, though of course it now seems to you that it is the other way around.
(Long pause at 10:26.) You are robbed, then, or you rob yourselves, of one of the most basic kinds of expression, since you can no longer identify yourselves with the forces of nature. Man wanted to pursue a certain kind of consciousness, however. In your terms, over a period of time he pulled his awareness in, so to speak; he no longer identified as he did before, and began to view objects through the object of his own body. He no longer merged his awareness, so that he learned to look at a tree as one object, where before he would have joined with it, and perhaps viewed his own standing body from the tree’s vantage point. It was then that mental images became important in usual terms — for he had understood these before, but in a different way, from the inside out.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]
I said before that early man felt a certain emotional magnification, that he felt, for example, the wind’s voice as his own. In a manner of speaking your languages, while expressing your individual intents and communications, also represent a kind of amplification arising from your molecular configurations. The wind makes certain sounds that are dependent upon the characteristics of the earth. The breath makes certain sounds that are dependent upon the characteristics of the body. There is a connection between alphabets and the molecular structure that composes your tissue. Alphabets then are natural keys also. Such natural keys have a molecular history. You form these keys into certain sound patterns that have particular meanings.
(11:19.) This provides you with a certain kind of communication, but it also allows a molecular expression that is natural at that level, and then used by you for your own purposes. I am not saying that molecules speak. I am saying that they are expressed through your speech, however — and that your speech represents an amplification of their existence. Through your words their reality is amplified, in the same way that man’s emotions once found amplification through the physical elements.
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
(11:33.) Its meaning comes from the pauses between the sounds as much as it does from the sounds themselves. The flow of breath is obviously important, regulating the rhythm and the spacing of the words. The breath’s integrity arises directly from the proper give-and-take between cells, the functioning of the tissues; and all that is the expression of molecular competence. That competence is obviously responsible for language, but beyond that it is intimately connected with the patterns of languages themselves, the construction of syntax, and even with the figures of speech used.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
The words you speak to someone else are in certain terms broken down by the listener to basic components, and understood at different levels. There are psychological interpretations made, and molecular ones. The sounds and their pauses will express emotional states, and reactions to these will alter the body’s condition to whatever degree.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]