LIFE IN THE REALM OF LANGUAGE

We live our lives in language. At a most fundamental level, we are linguistic beings. We inevitably create mental maps using our native language and whatever additional languages that we have learned. We cannot do otherwise. And if we don’t, we don’t become human. Is that shocking? It ought to be. And if you ask for the evidence, you have to go no further than the phenomenon of “feral children.”

There used to be feral children—the children who in some way got lost from home, from mother and father, and left in the wild, they were “adopted” and raised by animals— dogs, wolves, etc. Once upon a time feral children were not that uncommon, but fortunately the last ones reported were in the nineteenth century. What we discovered about such children is that if they missed the imprint period of language, that period in which a child enters into the semantic world that’s navigated by symbols— later when the child was discovered and brought into society, it was never able to enter into, and live in, the symbolic world of human culture and language. The feral child would not wear clothes, eat without utilizes (gobble food like an animal), would be unable to talk and use language, etc. He or she would never really enter into the human condition.

We are so inevitably linguistic in nature that without language we cannot be human. If all we could do would be to create visual images, auditory sounds, kinesthetic sensations, olfactory smells, and gustatory tastes and we could not name any of these or relate one to a conceptual idea of meaning, our consciousness would be extremely limited. In NLP we call these sensory experiences our representational systems, our VAK languages of mind. These enable us to detect and work with the movies that we play in our minds.

In NLP we call the domain of language—the meta-representational system. And while there’s lots of problems with it, it is this system by which we can use develop our meta-consciousness (consciousness-of-consciousness). It is the language system that allows us to detect our thinking, adjust it, refine it, and improve it. It is our self-reflexive consciousness that takes fullest use of this higher and more abstract thinking and that enables us, as humans, to create science and art so we can keep improving upon our knowledge over the ages (e.g., time-binding).

Yet language itself is a challenge and a problem. That’s mostly because our languages are not very precise. Both the structure of our language and hundreds, if not thousands, of words are very poor “maps” for using to navigate the sea of experience. And no wonder. Our words and language and ideas have developed over thousands of years and grew up from more primitive times. And growing up during more primitive times, we still have many primitive pre-scientific, unscientific, and erroneous ideas incorporated in our language.

For these reasons (and others), one of the tasks before all of us, if we are to live a sanely and effectively, is to clean up our language. With so much contamination in our words, our sentences, our ideas, our philosophies, and our assumptions— when we use words without consciousness of what we are saying, the premises we are operating from, what we are presupposing without evidence, etc., we thereby contaminate our responses, our relationships, our emotions, and more.

Another factor enters into this consideration. We are not only linguistic beings, we are Neuro- linguistic beings. What does that mean? First, it means that the very creation and generation of our words and language arise in our neurology from how we use our neurology. Korzybski described this in terms of how our nervous systems abstract from the world “out there,” the energy-manifestations that impact our sense-receptors, and then transform those impacts along the neuro-pathways of our body and sent then to the various sensory cortexes where that information is processed. The NLP founders described this as how our nervous systems model the see-hear-feel world of experiences that we encounter by deleting, generalizing, and distorting that information. This enables each of us to create an unique mental model or map of the world and use it in our responses.

[Read more about that in Korzybski’s classic book, Science and Sanity (1933, 1994) and Bandler and Grinder’s The Structure of Magic (1975, 1976).]

As neuro-linguistic beings, using language enables us to send signals to our body and our body (neurology, physiology) responds to that information. When those signals are coded as “beliefs” then the signals operate as “commands” to our nervous systems which they then seek to “actualize” (make real). In Neuro-Semantics we highlight this structure and use it to guide the thought-signals and the belief-commands we want to be commissioning our body to feel and actualize. That’s because we know that “as we believe, so we are” and “so be it unto you.” In this way beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies (or self-organizing attractors).

Is it any wonder then that we need to clean up our language? Do you know what you are doing to yourself with your language? Would you like to? In this and the next articles, I’ll be addressing some of the ways that you can clean up your language and give reasons for how it will improve the quality of your life. There are so many ways in which language can misdirect you and send you off in unproductive directions. Yet the amazing thing is that you can use such language and never suspect this. You can use the most dis-empowering language and not even realize it. That’s why Meta-Coaches learn to listen for that kind of language and then invite awareness, “Do you hear what you just said? Do you really hear what’s implied in what you just said?” That’s step on for cleaning up your language. More are to come.