There are a handful of women in this world, who due to a mutation in their X chromosome, have four classes of cone cells in their eyes (tetrachromats) instead of the evolution-intended three (trichromats). Having just one extra class of color receptor cells in their eyes allows them to see 99 million more colors than the rest of us.
Imagine being exposed to that kind of an expanded reality and not have the vocabulary to express it. Would the tetrachromats suffer a heartbreak over such an odd censorship or would they get by just fine with a modified vocabulary along the lines of George Orwell’s superlative adjectives from Newspeak like purple, plus purple, and doubleplus purple? I bet they wouldn’t bother trying to communicate their superpower to lesser humans like us because we are not equipped to see what they see. But how do the tetrachromats interpret their thoughts about those extra colors even to themselves when they don’t have the language to support?
A man of science has given me valuable revelations about the non-science in a way that my choice spiritual teachers hadn’t. Or rather it was an error on my part to have overcomplicated a simple teaching just because it was based on an abstract premise called spirituality –
“Silence is the ever-speaking, perennial flow of “language.” It is interrupted by speaking, for words obstruct this mute language.”
Ramana Maharshi
Prof. Noam Chomsky had a significant hand in shaking my rational sieve with his statement, “Internal speech is re-internalization of external speech.” According to Chomsky, 99 percent of our language use is internal. When we are consciously thinking about something, we are using the external language to re-internalize it to ourselves but the actual thinking is just not accessible to consciousness. The same goes with divine inspirations, original ideas, artistic genius, emotions that escape words, and even decisions that seem to have a headstart as electrical signals in the brain microseconds before we become aware of it, all of which seem to originate from a wellspring outside the realm of our reason or realization.
“Consciousness is just a superficial reflection of whatever is going on inside and as long as attention is restricted to what is accessible to consciousness, we are never going to discover anything.”
Prof. Noam Chomsky
Science can stick as many electrodes in the brain as it wants in the hope to pursue consciousness to infinity, but our understanding of anything can only go so far, the farthest point being the edge of our consciousness. Beyond that, past the outer fringes of our conscious mind where vocabulary ends, stretches out a vast land called Silence. This Silence is not simply the absence of words whereby gestures, facial expressions or signs can fill-in for communication. It is the absence of mental activity, a state that transcends words and thought. It is a pre-language frontier where the mind that uses language to interpret reality cannot enter because language cannot know what comes before language.
But a different kind of entity already awaits beyond the bend as the last stop in this journey inward and it happens to be ridiculously straightforward yet immensely difficult.
“In true meditation, the emphasis is on being Awareness; not on being aware of objects but on resting as primordial Awareness itself. Awareness is the source in which all objects arise and subside.”
Adyashanti
