We rely on words to process the overwhelming bulk of our thoughts and feelings. Human evolution accelerated at an astonishing rate with the acquisition of language. Child development is measured by the acquisition of oral skills, but spiritual development is determined by how well we can slip into silence.

Oral traditions carry the values, technology, culture, and laws of social community through the generations but simultaneously act to reduce consciousness to a manageable, minimal flow.

"Every individual is at once the victim and the beneficiary of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born--the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experiences, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

Most people only know what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve."--Alduous Huxley.

Those who by-pass the reducing valve of consciousness are the gifted spiritual adventurers, among them internal martial artists.

The mind is a process primarily composed of words. Language focuses consciousness, forms self-concept in relationship, internally defines and then expresses personal philosophy, morality, and psychology. Even visual art, music and movement are expressions formed in an environment of internal dialogue, and discussed in the branch of philosophy known as "aesthetics." We experience the flow of mind, the stream of consciousness in time as a rush of words, but the spirit needs to slip into the silence between word-thoughts for a glimpse at immortality.

"Words move, music moves only in time; but that which is only living can only die. Words, after speech, reach into silence."--T.S. Eliot.
Copyright 2004 by Jack Livingston