The Entity Known as “Language” - 07.08.10

Student Comment: I’ve heard you say before that “language has colonized our minds,” which really helps me clear my head during meditation. I would like to know, however, if language really is a non-corporeal entity, or if I am simply literalizing the metaphor.

“It’s an entity in the sense that it is used by the collective consciousness so that language becomes the carrier of particular messages of any given society,” begins Shunyamurti, the spiritual and linguistic master of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And those signifiers then take on a life of their own and create patterns of belief about the nature of one’s self, what should be one’s goals, what should be one’s desires and fears. And to the extent that one is entrained into that social link, then one has lost one’s free will into the will created by language—which, once it is internalized, you imagine is your own thought, whereas it is actually a thought placed there. . . . And so it is only by silencing the mind, and cleaning it out . . . that one can discover who one is before the ego was implanted through the naming and the emplacement of fantasy structures . . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 8, 2010.