When Words Get in the Way

These are, of course, the famous opening verses of John’s Gospel in the Christian New Testament.

But what is going on here? The term “word,” as used by John, would actually have been rendered in Greek as “logos.” In the Greek worldview, a worldview that permeated what we now call the Middle East, the Logos was thought of as a bridge between the transcendent God and the material universe. Therefore, for John’s readers the use of the term Logos would have likely brought forth the idea of a mediating principle between God and the world.

For me, this passage actually touches upon one of the great existential dilemmas that humans have wrestled with since we became human. I believe it is possible to interpret and unpack this passage in secular terms. For me, the “light” refers to a state of grace that is wordless. More on that in a moment. To “become the children of God,” means achieving that state. However, in order to reach that state from our ordinary day-to-day condition, we need an interpreter, we need words.

The phrase, “In the beginning…” also calls to mind the book of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament. Amongst other things, Genesis tells the story of Adam and Eve and their fall from grace. By eating fruit from the Tree of Wisdom, Adam and Eve come to know the difference between Good and Evil. Concerned that Adam will continue to eat from the Tree of Wisdom and live forever and become as a god, the Lord banishes him and Eve from the Garden of Eden and sets them to till the ground and deliver children in pain and suffering.

This notion of a “fall from grace,” of having lost our birthright to be at peace and at ease in the world, permeates many cultures and traditions. Many of us might feel the loss as palpable and personal. And we might feel this sense of loss with a big “L” or a little “L.” On the little “L” front, I am convinced that life was simpler before the invention of the Internet, for example, and I yearn for those days and would return to them if I could.

While many people the world over insist that their holy books record the literal truth as transmitted from God to humankind, most of us in this room are probably also comfortable with a symbolic interpretation of these accounts. Many philosophers and writers have traditionally equated the symbolic fall from grace with the historical transition from a hunter-gatherer way of life to an agricultural one with its attendant toil.

I think that the real fall occurred much, much earlier. Specifically, I think we fell from Grace at the precise moment language was invented. Until the invention of writing some 5,000 years ago, there is no direct evidence for the use of language. What we can see in spades stretching into the distant past, however, is a direct correlate of language: symbolic thought and reasoning expressed in the material culture of our distant ancestors.

Ian Tattersall, the curator of Anthropology at the Natural History Museum in New York City, writes in his excellent book, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins, that “Modern articulated language is the ultimate symbolic activity. If there is one single thing that above all else unites all human beings today, it is our symbolic capacity: our common ability to organize the world around us into a vocabulary of mental representations that we can recombine in our minds, in an endless variety of new ways.”

What is fascinating about this emergence of symbolic cognition is how recently it occurred. The earliest fossil evidence we have for the presence of our species, Homo sapiens, striding the earth dates to about 200,000 years ago. However, the earliest archaeological evidence even suggestive of symbolic activity dates to 100,000 years or more. And the first unambiguous evidence for symbolic thought doesn’t appear for another 25,000 years. Let the clock run another 25,000 years or so, and you get to the stunning Cro-Magnon art in the caves of southern France and Spain announcing that fully cognitively-modern humans are on the scene. (Not coincidentally, all other hominids, including the Neanderthals, have either been driven from the stage altogether, or are on their way out.)

Ian Tattersall again: “The secret to the particular kind of success our species enjoys today lies in the very unusual way in which our brains handle information… It is becoming increasingly clear that the acquisition of the uniquely modern symbolic sensibility was an abrupt and recent event. Indeed, it was an event that took place within the tenure on Earth of humans who looked exactly like us. And the expression of this new sensibility was almost certainly crucially abetted by the invention of what is perhaps the single most remarkable thing about our modern selves: language.”

In other words, fully physically-modern humans existed and thrived for more than 20 times the length of all recorded history before the uniquely human cognitive lights that so define us today switched on.

There is, of course, no way for us to go back in time to observe this “Eureka!” moment. And, of course, it’s likely that there were multiple independent Eureka moments before enough humans were communicating via language for it to ramify throughout the entire, though admittedly small, human contingent of 75,000 years ago as it prepared to fan out from Africa.

There are, however, modern examples of language acquisition that provide us at least a glimpse of what those moments may have been like. Approximately one out of every 1,000 children are born completely deaf. I don’t have time to talk about the tragedy of oralism, the still current view in many circles that deaf children must be taught verbal speech rather than being taught to sign from birth. What is interesting for my purposes is that there are people who are born deaf who remain “languageless” until relatively late in life.

In her book, A Man Without Words, ASL interpreter Susan Schaller recounts the case study of a man she calls “Ildefonso.” She first encounters Ildefonso sitting off to the side of a community college class for deaf adults where she has been hired as an instructor. She describes him as a “beautiful Mayan man” with “obvious intelligence.” However, when she attempts to communicate with Ildefonso, she finds that all he can do is mimic her actions and gestures. It becomes clear to her that he literally—and I use that word with care—does not possess language.

She spends week after patient week trying one approach after another and begins to despair that she will ever get through. She writes, “We were sitting only inches apart, but we might as well have been from different planets; it seemed impossible to meet.”

One day, she tries a new experiment: rather than directing her attention to Ildefonso himself, she pulls up a chair and pretends to show an invisible student the sign for cat while holding up and stroking a drawing of a cat. (I have to think this might have gone faster if she had used a real cat.) She would then swap chairs, and model the role of the student learning the sign and symbols for cat. After repeating this exercise over and over, the approach triggers the breakthrough. In her own words:

"Suddenly Ildefonso sat up, straight and rigid, his head back and his chin pointing forward. The whites of his eyes expanded as if in terror. He looked like a wild horse pulling back, testing every muscle before making a powerful lunge over a canyon’s edge. My body and arms froze in the mime-and-sign dance that I had played over and over for an eternity. I stood motionless in front of the streaked [drawing] of the cat… and I witnessed Ildefonso’s emancipation.

"He broke through. He understood. He had forded the same river Helen Keller did at the water pump when she suddenly connected the water rushing over her hand with the word spelled into it. Yes, w-a-t-e-r and c-a-t mean something. And the cat-meaning in one head can join the cat-meaning in another head just by tossing out the word cat.

"He slapped both hands flat on the table and looked up at me, demanding a response. Table, I signed. He slapped his book. Book, I replied… But as suddenly as he asked for names, he turned pale, collapsed and wept.

"He had entered the universe of humanity, discovered the communion of minds. He now knew that he and a cat and the table all had names, and the fruit of his knowledge had opened his eyes to evil. He could see the prison where he had existed alone, shut out of the human race for twenty-seven years."

After the breakthrough, it took Ildefonso months to understand the concept of words used in combination and that they could represent abstract concepts such as color and the even more abstract concept that objects could possess color as in, “a blue door” and properties such as “behind the blue door.” The concept of time took years to crystallize for Ildefonso. But the point I want to focus on is the instantaneous nature of the discovery of language in an individual. There is a before and an after. Ignorance transformed into knowledge. Sort of like “The Fall.”

Years later, after having lost contact with him, Schaller tracked down Ildefonso to Los Angeles. He was employed as the ornamental gardener at a large medical complex. His facility with sign language and symbolic reasoning had improved dramatically, though he still signed with an accent. Schaller pressed him to try to explain how his inner life had been before his breakthrough. He was extremely reluctant to even try to describe it and, eventually, explained that “he didn’t remember, he simply couldn’t think that way anymore.”

This same insight is provided more eloquently by perhaps the most famous person to suddenly acquire language in plain view, Helen Keller. In 1908, she wrote, “Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. (…) Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.”

Not only is it possible to observe the Fall into language, it is also possible to get an idea of how a language might be invented in the first place. In the 1970s, the government in Nicaragua began setting up state-sponsored schools for children with various disabilities including deafness. Kids who had been born deaf and raised in households where no attempt was made to teach them any kind of language began coming together in these schools. Without these schools, every one of these students would likely have ended up languageless as Ildefonso did, and for the same reasons.

Shortly after the Nicaraguan schools were set up, an American linguist from Columbia University named Ann Senghas began studying the children. Kids who had come together with a disparate set of rudimentary gestures unique to them—what is called “home-sign” or “kitchen-sign”—were suddenly thrown together. Remarkably, the signs they used as a group began to converge and take the shape of a full-blown language with grammar, semantic content, and symbolic concepts. In Ann Senghas’s words, “They created a language. This is what had happened with languages all over the world but not while people were watching.”

Personally, I think it is inevitable that language arose amongst children. I suspect every one of us here has struggled post-puberty to learn a new language and found it frustratingly difficult. With children, in contrast, their brains physically wire themselves under the influence of language. So not only does human cognition change radically under the influence of language, the brains that give rise to that cognition are physically altered by it.

In Masters of the Planet, Ian Tattersall writes, “It seems likely that a random modification of the already exapted brain, plus some children at play, led to the literal emergence of a phenomenon that changed the world.” He goes on to say, “I am greatly entertained by the notion that the first language was the invention of children.”

As a quick side note, in case you’re wondering: from a neuro-physiological perspective, signing activates precisely the same neural circuits as spoken language. The method of communication is not important; rather, any articulated form of language gives rise to the symbolic reasoning that uniquely characterizes humans.

Up to this point, I’ve been talking about the Science. So what about the Spiritual part? A fascinating way to come at spirituality within the same linguistic framework I’m using is to wonder what happens if you remove language from someone who has always had it.

I’m sure most of us are familiar with the general concept of Left-Brained and Right-Brained. The unique aspect of the human brain is the extent of the outer undulated and convoluted cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is responsible for functions that proceed in a linear fashion, such as making a tool or speaking a language. It’s the part of our brain that gives us the concept of time. The right hemisphere is responsible for our spatial sense. When the corpus callosum—the massive bundle of neurons that connects the two hemispheres—is surgically severed, the patient is left with what’s colloquially called a “split brain.”

This state of affairs gives rise to a whole slew of profoundly counter-intuitive cognitive states that call into question our most fundamental notions of self and consciousness. In fact, it’s clear that when the hemispheres are separated, each possesses a fully independent consciousness itself and that, furthermore, these consciousnesses can even dislike and resent one another. The miracle is that when working properly together, they can maintain a vast array of physical and cognitive capabilities, in addition to a unitary subjective experience of both our inner and external worlds.

At the start of the service, I read a wonderful passage that delineates the differences in character and function between the two hemispheres. The author, Jill Bolte Taylor, is a highly trained neuro-anatomist who woke up one morning with an agonizing headache. Over the course of the next several hours, she realized that she was experiencing a massive cerebral hemorrhage in her left hemisphere. A stroke, in other words. This experience and her long, multi-year recovery gave rise to her book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.

Here is how she describes the immediate after-effects of the stroke:

“… I met a growing sense of peace. In place of that constant chatter that had attached me to the details of my life, I felt enfolded by a blanket of tranquil euphoria… As the language centers in my left hemisphere grew increasingly silent and I became detached from the memories of my life, I was comforted by an expanding sense of grace. In this void of higher cognition and details pertaining to my normal life, my consciousness soared into an all-knowingness, a “being at one” with the universe…I learned the meaning of simply “being… Instead of having my moments prematurely stunted, they became open-ended, and I felt no rush to do anything. Like walking along the beach, or just hanging out in the beauty of nature, I shifted from the doing-consciousness of my left brain to the being-consciousness of my right brain. I morphed from feeling small and isolated to feeling enormous and expansive. I stopped thinking in language and shifted to taking new pictures of what was going on in the present moment… All I could perceive was right here, right now, and it was beautiful… My soul was as big as the universe and frolicked with glee in the boundless sea. I’m no authority, but I think the Buddhists would say I entered the mode of existence they call Nirvana.”

Okay, so now we’re definitely onto spiritual terrain. Before proceeding, and since we’re talking about the importance of words, I want to take a moment to talk about the word “spiritual.” It is a tricky word. According to Sam Harris in his new book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “Spiritual but not Religious.” He goes on: “The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning “breath.”

Around the thirteenth century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition. I do not share their semantic concerns, for there is no other term—apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.

In this sense of the word, the Spiritual examination of ourselves and our subjective experience of the world is completely congruous with the Scientific examination of the brain and how it works with our senses to render that subjective experience. Consciousness is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex brain and is a property that we share to varying degrees with other high order animals. How consciousness is actually generated from the substrate of the brain, however, is not yet understood and it may be the case that consciousness is irreducible, that is, it simply is a property of reality: the speed of light in a vacuum is fixed at some value; likewise, a brain of sufficient complexity generates consciousness. QED. We can use tools like functional MRIs to explore the physiology of consciousness, but to explore consciousness directly is the very definition of Spirituality.

Sam Harris again: “Spirituality remains the great hole in secularism, humanism, rationalism, atheism, and all the other defensive postures that reasonable men and women strike in the presence of unreasonable faith. People on both sides of this divide imagine that visionary experience has no place within the context of science—apart from the corridors of a mental hospital. Until we can talk about spirituality in rational terms—acknowledging the validity of self-transcendence—our world will remain riven by dogmatism.”

The roadblock to making personal progress along the spiritual path is language, more specifically, the way that language, prevents us from directly accessing the rich non-linguistic aspect of human consciousness that is just as much our birthright as the incredible cognitive capabilities of our symbolic mind. At present, there are a handful of ways to muzzle the language centers of our brains, a necessary precondition for spiritual exploration:

1. Come very close to dying but recover

2. Have brain surgery or a stroke

3. Ingest psychedelic drugs

4. Meditate

I don’t think any of us would voluntarily choose either of the first two options. If you are no longer—or never were—willing to play Russian Roulette with psychedelics, which can, admittedly, open up vistas of consciousness that are truly extraordinary but also come with real psychic risk if things go wrong, then you are pretty much left with number four: Meditation. I don’t have time to talk about this approach to spirituality in any depth now, but for an intellectually serious treatment of the subject, I highly recommend Sam Harris’s book.

For now, we’ll have to use Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke as a shortcut for a glimpse into what it’s like when the linguistic, analytical, time sensing left brain goes suddenly offline. Taylor says that her “Stroke of insight is that at the core of my right hemisphere consciousness is a character that is directly connected to my feeling of deep inner peace. It is completely committed to the expression of peace, love, joy and compassion in the world. I realized that the blessing I had received from this experience was the knowledge that deep internal peace is accessible to anyone at any time. I believe the experience of Nirvana exists in the consciousness of our right hemisphere, and that at any moment, we can choose to hook into that part of our brain…Peace is only a thought away, and all we have to do to access it is silence the voice of our dominating left mind.”

Thinking of my title for this talk, it would seem that words really do get in the way.

In her book, Jill Bolte Taylor describes her experiences in terms that would be familiar—in fact identical to—those a mystic or drug tripper might use: universal compassion, certain knowledge of the connection of all life and all things, joy, experience restricted to a timeless present moment.

There is a book on the best-seller list right now that might sound superficially similar. It’s called Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Near-Death Experience and Journey into the Afterlife by Dr. Eben Alexander. (It shares space on the list with Heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo about a young boy’s first-hand experience amongst Jesus and the angels, now a major motion picture playing at a theater near you.) Proof of Heaven has spent 98 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List and literally, just this week, dropped out of the top 20. I mention this only because the success of this book represents, in my mind, the worst of the unnecessary baggage that gives “Spirituality” such a bad name. There have been many serious, erudite deconstructions of the book and the claims made by the author. My major complaint, however, is that in contrast to Jill Bolte Taylor’s intellectually serious and scientifically credible book in which she ties her spiritual insights to empirical physical processes and then offers them up as desirable states of mind that are achievable in this life, Eben Alexander with his superficially similar credentials, attaches all of the usual (in this case, Christian) metaphysical trappings to his account and again reserves the possibility of transcendent experience for the afterlife.

I don’t doubt the veracity or veridicality of his experience, or the experiences reported by others who have directly experienced mystical states. In fact, I find it immensely comforting to know that when I die and my brain shuts down, I will experience feelings of tremendous joy, peace, compassion and the certain knowledge that I am one with all of creation. And while I vehemently dispute the traditional religious claims of an afterlife that is literally contiguous with my life now, what could be more profoundly comforting and uplifting than knowing that our final experience of this life will be of an eternal NOW suffused with everlasting peace. That sounds an awful lot like heaven to me. How much better could it be than to know that heaven is grounded in the same reality that comprises the physical universe, that it is promised to each and every one of us by the same biological processes that power our lives now, and that admission to it is not determined by a capricious god or devotion to esoteric dogma and practice.

To quote Sam Harris one final time: “The truth is that, whatever happens after death, it is possible to justify a life of spiritual practice and self-transcendence without pretending to know things we do not know.”

Those are wise words, words that we as Unitarian Universalists, can live by. Words that don’t get in the way.