The Cult of Language

[LastThursday]

3 hours ago, Rafael Thundercat said:

Thoth as the Creator of Words: Thoth, the god of wisdom, writing, and magic, was believed to have created language to allow humans to document, create, and maintain order.

It's worth thinking about whether writing is just a system for representing spoken language or if it is a separate from of language. I'd say it was the latter, writing is a visual language like sign language. What you're reading here is a visual dialect of spoken English. Often writing and the spoken word get conflated.

[Natasha Tori Maru]

2 hours ago, oOo said:

Close, but poet DOES encode meaning. Impact emerges from state-dependent decoding. Orthogonal truths.

Still not inherent! It relies on interpretation on both ends, rules and context prior to any clear meaning being found. Inferences mostly. Compressed reality.

[oOo]

1 hour ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Still not inherent! It relies on interpretation on both ends, rules and context prior to any clear meaning being found. Inferences mostly. Compressed reality.

Constraint IS content. Your interpretation orbits my intent.

[Yimpa]

18 hours ago, CARDOZZO said:

Is it a good talk? Spira seems a very grounded decent guy.

These kinds of gurus are useful up to a point. They helped me transition from atheist to nondualist.

[Basman]

A great example of the culture of language is how we define the relationship between working and not working. Linguistically, we define the time your not working as "leisure", which is defined by the absence of work, implying that work is the default state and that leisure is merely taking a break. 

In contrast, in Rome they used the word "odium" to define the time when you are not working and which was considered the "default". Otium when translated directly translates into leisure, but in Rome otium meant to engage in those activities that made you human in an earnest and serious way. Otium was the goal and your real "job" (to put it into a normative modern tongue). "negotium" -work, on the other hand is defined by the absence of otium. Not having to work was a reward in of itself for the Romans. It be like if we called work "unleisure".