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ourselves, and immersion in it has caused us to have a profound bifurcation from our interior and exterior experience of time.
Ralph: Well why should language have a function of separating us from history and eternity?
Terence: Because it lies.
Ralph: It has tenses, past, present and future.
Terence: But it's particular. And nature is not particular. You can never understand nature as long as you particularize it, and language cannot
do otherwise.
Rupert: But nature is particulate. For example flowers of the lily family have petals arranged in groups of three. The petals, sepals and other
parts of flowers are quantized.
Ralph: They're very particulate.
Terence: Now what we're doing here is we're talking fractals.
Ralph: I think this language should somehow be capable of imaging the extension and interconnection of all and everything, but maybe
language as it evolves in our context has somehow become impoverished in those metaphors while emphasizing others.
Terence: It has. This is why we're all so attracted to visual technology. Language is an impoverished metaphor. I think we sense that the way
out of the language trap is through the image.
Ralph: What about musical experience? It's an antithesis of all this language restriction. Most people listen to music on the radio or on
recordings for quite a bit of time every day. And this experience transcends language. We don't have any words for the musical experience
and yet we have no trouble. We can recognize songs that we've heard before and so on. And a song can't be recognized from a single note.
You need the entire sequence. And that is not an eternity, but a fairly long temporal extension of a song which fits in our cognitive apparatus.
Terence: I think outside of our linguistic programming, sound is light, and light is sound. Somehow inside our linguistic and neurological
programming there'd been a bifurcation of this processing,
Ralph: Maybe language was originally like music. You have the song and the lyrics, and then after the song was dropped off by accident you
had the lyrics standing by themselves. The vedas were chanted rather than read. I've been reading about the pronounciation of ancient Greek,
as reconstructed by classical scholars. It sounds like singing. Greek poetry was orated. Nobody read a poem. It was later on that people got in
the habit of silent reading, reading a book without saying anything. So this degeneration of musical language into dumb speech is something
very recent in our evolution. There is so much we've forgotten, so difficult to recover.
Terence: That's why an archaic revival is indicated.
Ralph: The song is actually prelinguistic language. A prelin-guistic history which is actually linguistic in the sense of communicative music
goes way back into Homo erectus prehistory. And when we're talking about the communication between dogs and their owners, then maybe
this is about a rediscovery in the deep unconscious of these prelinguistic modes which are the natural modes of the mental field.
Terence: The Australian Aborigines say that one sings the world into existence.
Rupert: Singing doesn't usually play a very explicit part in the relationship between dogs and their owners.
Terence: No, but no human has as much experience with dogs from prehistory as the Australian Aborigines. And they're very much the
keepers of this gnosis of a dream time, an alternative dimension outside of history. It's all about modes of time. If you perceive time in this
ahistorical mode, then what returns to you is a nature become alive, full of intent, intelligence, and information. If you don't have that view of
time nature becomes dead, a resource for exploitation. Don't you think?
Ralph: Oh I think that dogs chant sometimes. They sing to music, they howl at night. Coyotes howl in choruses between different packs all
through the night. And it could be with the way we're speaking with our pets it's actually the music that they're getting.
Terence: I recall that Robert Graves tried to make a case that there was a kind of Ursprach, a primary poetic language that could directly
address the emotions. That human emotions could be addressed through shamanic poetry. He traced the function of language back deeper and
deeper into the function of a poem, and what poetry seeks to evoke.
Rupert: Yes, quite. But what dogs and cats seem to pick up is intentions. They pick up when people are about to go away on holiday even
before they've started packing. They pick up when people want to take them to the vet, and will often hide. Dogs often pick up when they're
going to be taken for a walk. Dogs can be trained to respond not just to words and whistles, but even to silent, mental commands. Many dogs
and cats seem to know when a person they are bonded to has died, even when this happens far away. They seem to be sensitive to changes in
the field that conects them to their people. This field is affected by the activities, emotions and intentions of their people whether they're
coming back or going away, whether they've died, whether they're in pain or trouble, whether they want to play. The animals seem to be
picking up not specific messages but rather general changes in the tension of the field...
Ralph: In the mental field.
Rupert: Mental is perhaps not the right word. The field concerned is a social field, interrelating animals to each other, as in a flock of birds, or
people and animals, as in the case of pets and their human families.
Terence: It's always said that shamans can talk to the animals and that animals will come to visit a shaman. I've even heard stories of
contemporary ayahuasca groups where deer and racoons would practically overrun the group in the night, come to join the circus.
Ralph: I think when you begin to take these ideas seriously then I'm going to see you become a true vegetarian.
Terence: But Ralph, the most intelligent entities we know are plants.
Rupert: One thing that we haven't explored much are the evolutionary connections between people and animals. Long before animals were
domesticated, people were paying close attention to wild animals, if only so they could hunt them more effectively. And long before people [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]