Comments on: Hand and mouth

By: Gyrus

Gyrus — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:40:01 +0000

Mickey: Yeah, those mystical insights of the diffusion of consciousness or intelligence through all matter can be good at eroding dualistic distinctions, or act as a good backdrop for reconsidering them. But I personally find those perceptions too amorphous to hang onto, and end up working more “in the thick of it” – complexifying, reversing or rejigging dualisms rather than all-out transcending or obliterating them.

By: mickey morgan

mickey morgan — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 02:04:46 +0000

I don’t know too much about Tibetan Buddhism except for 7 years of listening to monks. What I have learned is that the mind is a continuum that is not located in the physical brain necessarily. There is intelligence in ever cell of my body. Michael Talbot wrote a stunning book called The Holographic Universe which points to the understandin of “emptiness”. It’s as if our individual DNA signature resides in every cell. This undercuts the Western mind/body split.
Vocal efforts of my writing extend the work to another dimension, and yet I find if I use my voice too much, I get agitated because I’ve given myself what the Tibetans call “a wind imbalance.”
I believe that I create my own reality: if I rise in the morning with anger, each person I meet seems to conspire in my afflicted emotion. If I rise in the morning with happiness; each person I meet becomes beautiful.
Therefore, I can choose to view the world from a dualistic perspective of positive vs. negative, or male and female, or love and hate, or black and white . . . all is separated, divided, either or . . . the source of conflicts. You wrote “When writing and speech are placed in opposition,” I was reminded of how much anguish I created in myself by this very same perspective I’ve engaged in the past.
Therefore, I can choose to view the world from a non-dual perspective, which takes a lot of practice and discipline and endurance that I am only feebly beginning. This is free will. I am One. I am whole. My hand, my speech, my calligraphic imprinting on the page, my breath . . . all the same essence.
Thanks for the great insights and provocative thoughts.

By: Joel

Joel — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:14:40 +0000

I always make a point of reading aloud everything I write, so the rhythm is there. If you get the rhythm you fuse writing and speech.

Actually, I think the intellect/body divide is more about the distribution of Latin-derived words and Anglo-Saxon-derived words in the kind of English you speak and write. ‘Truth’ is Anglo-Saxon, ‘veracity’ is Latin. Right there, the whole of the problem. Good writing in English (and also speech, should you class the quality of speech) has a higher than average distribution of Anglo-Saxon.

I first became aware of this when a very learned friend many years ago observed my dinner-table argument with a cigar-puffing professor. He pointed out later that I was winning the argument consistently mostly with Anglo-Saxon words, whereas the professor was rooted in Latin words. Until then, he’d had the idea that if you wanted to sound intelligent you used Latin, but this was merely because that was what you most often saw. He’d never seen Anglo-Saxon used to demolish an argument before. This gave me food for thought, and since then I have been far more conscious of the kind of language I am using in terms of where it comes from.

By: Gyrus

Gyrus — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 12:12:47 +0000

My thoughts on it probably stem from having written loads and never having accepted any speaking invitations – partly out of “stage fright”, despite having enjoyed stage acting at college (another “contrast” to look into, between “acting” and doing a “talk”).

Others may well have different experiences of it, but I think the perspective shift from the bodily relationships is useful if anyone’s stuck in the “writing = intellect / speech = body” opposition.

Another angle I thought of last night: writing earths the intellect, down from the brain through the hands, and speech spiritualizes the body, up from the chest through the mouth.

By: Jim Bliss

Jim Bliss — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 03:27:07 +0000

Hmmmm… to be honest it’s not something (surprisingly enough) that I’ve given much thought to. But, now that I do think about it, I think that may be because — and I speak only for myself — that I don’t feel speech and writing are all that different.

When I write (and again, this is purely personal experience here; others may be very different) it’s as though I’m dictating my own internal voice. I hear the words, as if spoken, before I write them down.

Then again; I’ll often do some minor editing to try and iron out clumsy phrasing. So maybe I need to think about it a bit more….