Nicholas Jensen Denton 4-27-18
Religions of the World Journal Article Review
The Metaphysics of the Dao – Linguistic Encryption - Epistemology
I can pontificate that one of the most difficult aspects of trying to translate the nature of the Dao, would be first to translate classical Chinese into English. Words are deeper than their dictionaries definition. Words convey ideas, concepts, and emotions; they express what your character is. They are a definite force that engages in intangible physics. Language is one of the most special aspects of the Human Experience in that our communicative style is superbly unique to the rest of the natural kingdom but also in that language is a physical tangible directly experiential force in our material reality that has its immediate roots in the mystery of that transcendental conscious Other.
Language is one of the only tools we have that bridges the gaps from the subjective plane to the objective experience. We truly have to first analyze the language of the Dao and translation to see what we are looking at, or perhaps what were not looking at. The ideas and emotions behind the Chinese words are more often than not lost in translation as time goes on and language evolves, the receiving end, being English in this case, can loose a significant amount of meaning. It is often said that language shapes how we see reality, how true is this though? As physics would dictate, when you are reading and writing, your brain tracks along in a similar manner. Your neural circuits fire in a pattern that is a super set of the linguistic structure of which you are using. When you are fluent in English, your mind is encoded, programmed, filtered, and fractured into 26 rudimentary areas. We use these letters, which are like lenses, to project out of our minds eye an informational matrix that supports our sociological view of the world. With labels of the world and labels of how the processes of the world work we can better act within the world. This presents a schism for Free Willed Observers who exist outside of space and time, in this world but not of it (to put it like Jesus). The language we are using to describe this world is in it and of it, its apart of the structural integrity, yet still sourced outside of the world. Hence the schism.
Language as an institution is an artificial construct and therefore is the first barrier in discussing phenomenology. On a neurological level, when we encode our mind with language, since language has an innate mathematical property and has connections to the atomic structure and to the geometric make up of time-space itself (which is another article), it can literally act as a map of time and space on multiple levels of reality and drastically influence your perception of both. One of the most interesting things is this though, when we change the foundational idea of how we perceive Time, this also changes the medium by which ideas are transferred. So to look at how ideas are transferred, first you must look at the structure of language. We read English from left to right top down and this is reflected in our neural networks. But traditional Chinese was (a symbolic language) read from top to bottom and from either side of the X axis. This is a complete
rewiring of foundational neural networks and orientation in space-time. This main difference in information flow has a significant impact on the brain and how the mind perceives reality. (1) “The details of a language – in this case an apparently superficial feature of how people in a given culture interact with its written form, seems to shape the way that people think about something totally unrelated. As Griffin (2004) argues, “eye movements are tied to our organization of information. Patterns of interaction with writing appear to seep out beyond the borders of language. Learning to use a writing system creates routines of interaction with space that affect how we map time onto it.”
So when I say language looses a part of it self when it is translated, I’m speaking of entire linguistic structures, cultural ideologies and characteristics, myths and lore, tradition and ritual, sub cultures and local knowledge, your neurological orientation along the time space continuum itself is transfigured when a language is lost or mutated. When that happens the information embedded within those structures must be translated to fit the confines of a new space-time rule-set entirely different from the original. (linguistic rule-set, though we see now that time/language is subjective and inherently related to our perception of language/time.) Thus there is a large disparity of communicable ideas across the broad spectrum of language that makes me wonder, what haven’t we thought to think of because our language has kept us from it? These are a taste of the limitations the Dao has given us. Perhaps this is why there is so much confusion in our world, especially over the Big Picture, human purpose, how to run politics, psychology, etc etc.
Other sacred languages are also read from right to left such as Arabic and Hebrew. In order to ever be able to truly grasp the original meaning of the Tao Te Ching, we first must temporally and spatially reorient ourselves to even be in the proper place to begin to receive the message.
In this article by Leo K. C. Cheung, he tries to reconnect the ideas that have been lost to time in attempt to reveal the true nature of the Dao, enforcing its polarizing characteristics such as “Great” and “far-reaching” and “functioning everywhere” yet it is “unknowable” and “hidden,” “Vague and Elusive.” What’s being done in the Tao Te Ching is someone or something has translated an idea of something whose metaphysics does not allow it to be put into language. “Dao is hidden because, even though Dao has substantive contents and we are parts of Dao, it is unnamable, and thus language cannot convey anything specific about Dao.” This was evident to Confucius. Following is the very first chapter of the Tao.
“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal name The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things
Thus, constantly free of desire One observes its wonders Constantly filled with desire One observes its manifestations
These two emerge together but differ in name The unity is said to be the mystery
Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders.”
When the brain processes words, there are two man functions of doing so, one is connecting the words to all of the semantics, syntax, grammatical laws, relationship to other words and letters, and associations to events, people, places, and things stored within your immediate subconscious. This initial process is a superficial one, the following milliseconds of neural linguistic decryption involve going beyond simple analytics to comparatively analyze and attaching everything you know, believe, and feel to be true about that word, sentence, or bit of information just processed to your stored database of experience. This second process allows a person to mentally generate new thoughts and extrapolate new ideas to compare to the freshly assimilated information. These are two processes that are a product of evolutionary behavior that has evolved in tandem with the advent of language.
Is language organic to the human being, or has there ever been an Organic language? Jeremy Narby the author of The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge would insist, and I tend to agree, that linguistic information is encoded within DNA and relayed to us through trance and entheogenic endeavors which resulted in the first use of a spoken languages, later written, and later faultily transcribed. This suggests a genetic transmission of information concerning
communicative abilities that were given to Individuated Consciousness with a physiological and geometric correspondence to DNA that originated as molecular information within our genetics, the language we are using today would be an outgrowth of that initial blossoming of communication from within mans biology, to the biological man himself, then from man to collective and collective to man and back down the ladder. Does environment shape the person or the person the environment?
So the question arises, if language is a means of relating to the self, to the Individuated Consciousness, and acts as a feedback mechanism for the environment both within (emotional, mental, physical well being) and without (environmental, spatial, temporal perceptions) the Observer, what information is being recognized that goes beyond the grasp of not just our instruments and measuring devices but beyond language itself, so complex that it cannot be fully interpreted linguistically, yet still known and understood intellectually. Chomsky, a prominent neurolinguist suggests a Universal Language that every human brain (or perhaps genetics) have pre installed in them.
The argument being made by Cheung in The Metaphysics and Unnamability of the Dao is suggesting that you cannot name the Dao, that this question can only be posed and not answered fully. When studying language, many questions arise that would appear to have fundamental answers but nevertheless remain unanswered to the day by societies most prominent neuro-linguists and philosophers. If it is true that something within us generated this language, ideally an aspect of the Dao,
perhaps one of our endowments (In Dao Ment), it would follow that this process has two potential interpretations of us language users, that it either is not capable of describing its source, we find this philosophy in neurology dominant, that because consciousness is a product of the brains chemistry we conscious observers do not have the capacity to comprehend the brain itself, hence all of the unknowns in that particular field, or that our biology designed language specifically so it could be reverse engineered acting as a map back into whence it came, which I believe could be a testament to Kabbalistic studies. It seems Cheung, would insist on the latter. He says, “All sounds in nature (These sounds include the organic outgrowth of language from the nature of mans being) belong to Dao's constituent aural aspectual totality (pg 3),” he continues, “There are things in Dao, and thus Dao has substantive informative contents (in this instance, the informative content is language). Also, Dao keeps on transforming without conforming to any specific forms or regularities.” Suggesting an ever-changing nature composed of impartial constituents. Our impartial constituents, or non-conformity to any specific form could be allusion to the structure of language and its multitude of ways of expressing human thought and spirit. The 10 million things in Dao, the limitations of language and what the personal meaning it brings to you are its informative contents. Could Cheung be talking about the evolution of language and the ideas they bring to us? I consider all the different languages there have been and how they were able to capture different ideologies and form different cultures, how language has morphed and we lost the ability to capture certain ideas in trade for ones we could not conceptualize before.
I do not agree with Cheung in that the Dao should remain nameless. It is far too evident that there is this thing that is staring us right in the face yet we still cant seem to comprehend it. To simply remove it as if we don’t see it and remove any type of language that allows us to discus it would be an act against God, or a supreme showing of your intellectual ass. We may as well name it “The Unmissable Yet Indescribable.” The Metaphysical aspect of the Dao is that words and letters who’s forms and meaning change with time continue to bring influence and information to Conscious Creators of Reality, this meaning can have to do with the physical Reality or with Phantasia and both realms of thought can influence your actions, subsequent thinking patterns, and ultimately change your physical environment and the person you are and people you are around. Those who are In- Dao’ed know that those who are Masters of the Phantasm Communications, they carve out slivers of an ethereal, disorderly yet orderly, limitless yet limited void ~ Subjective Plane ~ into little symbolic images, words, and phrases ~ Objective Realm ~ which help the perplexed human comprehend the unknowable forces that govern our interactions and evolutions. There are those too though, among the 10,000 things, who use the Metaphysics of the Dao for nefarious deeds whom the just must remain ever vigilant and intent on their subjugation and re-pairing of the informational realms to produce a harmony between the internal worlds of individuals and the external world.
The Dao is the entirety of language itself. In the same sense that Haim-Hillel says God reveals his own characteristics through the language of the Torah. The Dao is every language, but since language came from Dao, language is not the source of
Dao. The Dao can only endow language with the ability to acknowledge that which birthed it, yet not fully encapsulate for the simple law that the linguistic programming is a subset of a larger program. If the Dao were the ocean, then language is like a net. You can cast out your words and figure out what is in there, fish, algae, seaweed, rocks, maybe some trash, coral, you could capture an essence of the ocean itself, its taste and texture, salty and wet, etc. etc., but you cannot capture the ocean itself. However you can grab hold of some droplets, and like they said in Cloud Atlas, what is an ocean but a multitude of drops? Like they say in the Occult, As Above So Below. And like they say in Latin, Portionemque Totius – Part containing the whole. Holofractographics
I suppose what Im getting at is that language is the Dao, English is one aspect of God, Arabic is a facet of The Divine, Hebrew a sliver of Yahweh, but with all of these nets, again, the ocean remains un-capturable.
Citation
Cheung, Leo K. C."The Metaphysics and Unnamability of the Dao in the Daodejing and Wittgenstein." Philosophy East and West, vol. 67 no. 2, 2017, pp. 352-379.
(1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3322406/