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Conscious Language
This nOde last updated June 20th, 2001 and is permanently morphing...
(1 Et'znab (Knife)/1 Tijax (Blade) - 118/260 - 12.19.8.5.18)

Addressing precisely this same theme - of Conscious Language in the concluding chapter of Symboland the Symbolic R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz wrote; "To cultivate oneself to be simple and to see simply is the first task of anyone wishing to approach the sacred symbolic of ancient Egypt.  This is difficult because the obvious blinds us.  ....Instead of starting from an imaginary construction, instead of relying on intellectual speculation, ancient Egypt shows us the path of an infallible recognition of the forces and laws that rule the Universe....., pharaonic Egypt is essentially practical.  One can study the symbolic of any time and any people.  If I prefer Ancient Egypt to India, China, Babylon, or Greece, it is because it is more accessible to us by dint of the authentic "testimonies" it has left us, and because its entire culture is founded on a symbolic form of writing....Any manner of writing formed by means of a conventional alphabetical, arbitrary system can, over time, be lost and become incomprehensible.  On the other hand, the use of images as signs for
the expression of thought leaves the meaning of this writing, five or six thousand years old, as clear and accessible as it was the day it was carved in the stone, for a chair, a falcon, a vulture, a piece of cloth, a placenta, a leg, a human posture, etc..., will not change as long as there are men on earth.  This concerns hieroglyphic writing."

In _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_ in the chapter 'Consciousness' Julian Jaynes writes; "Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics....Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository....If consciousness is this invention of an analog world even as the world of mathematics parallels the world of quantities of things, what then can we say about its origin? Consciousness  comes after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious."

If subjective consciousness is an analog of behaviour in the physical world - and that by the work we can imbue this analogical "construct" (central nervous system state) with a more permanent physical substrate - of what is this more permanent substrate comprised?
 

Julian Jaynes continues: "I have endeavored to examine the record of a huge time span to reveal the plausibility that man and his early civilizations
had a profoundly different mentality from our own, that in fact men and women were not conscious as are we, were not responsible for their actions, and
therefore cannot be given the credit or blame for anything that was done over these vast millennia of time; that instead each person had a part of his
nervous system that was divine, by which he was ordered about like any slave, a voice or voices which indeed were what we call volition and empowered what they commanded and were related to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully established hierarchy.

Technology, agriculture, astronomy, engineering, the infrastructural systematization of human life as we experience it today was established prior to and in the absence of subjective speech.  Essentially Jaynes makes a compelling case that archaic man was possessed of a hive mentality. The human hive mentality was mediated by an archaic and non-subjective form of speech (gods) emanating from the right cortical hemisphere (instead of our contemporary left hemispheric subjective speech function). When the human-hives controlled by the voices of the gods became large enough and/or when they encountered one another and began trading goods, (before money or writing - symbols of energy and language respectively) then conditions arose under  which some of the control mechanisms of the archaic hive mind (voices of the gods) were weakened and modified (hieroglyphics are replaced by hieratic
and cuneiform writing) and a proto-subjective speech construct instantiated in this writing became gradually established in the left cortical hemisphere.
What is writing?  Writing proceeds from pictures of visual events (hieroglyphics) to symbols of phonetic events.  And that is an amazing transformation!  Writing of the latter type, as on the present page, is meant to tell the reader something he does not know.  But, the closer writing is to the former (hieroglyphics), the more it is primarily a mnemonic device to release information which the reader already has."
 

Since most important and complex behavior (technology and civilizing infrastructure) was done prior to modern subjective speech - and this behavior was mediated by the gods - could it be that the "higher influences" always working within us and toward which the work seeks a path and a method for our reintegration - could these higher influences" be anything other than the "gods" of antiquity?

Language is central to everything we do; therefore, a deep understanding of language is prerequisite to a deeper understanding of our "selves".  It is language that has the power to make metaphors and analogies including "I" and "me".  Since we know that natural language (along with a panoply of complex behaviours) is epiphenomenal to our genetically determined brain structure - and that language use itself is an automatic behavior - e.g., I am not now consciously selecting the words (still less the letters) that my individual keystrokes engender (or consciously governing the motor behavior behind the production of the individual keystrokes for that matter)  nor will you be consciously reconstructing the phonemes and morphemes of which these written utterences are comprised.  All very automatically and unconsciously, your organism will serve up the "meaning" of this writing (these symbols for phonetic events).  What if, instead of a metaphorical "I" embedded in the lexical field of subjective speech, (our nothingness) we instead had a system based on the direct apprehension of a material something; (that indefinable something that self-remembering helps us to sense and develop) Could it be that by radically
changing the lexical field upon which the automatic processes of  language formation (illusory consciousness - sleep) occur, that the goal of metanoia could - at least in part - be obtained? Isn't this really what the "psychological" focus of the work is intended to accomplish?
 

In his "law of three: and "the law of seven" (and by extension and application the table of the hydrogens) G.I. Gurdjieff presented the lexical field on which pharaonic Egypt (Khemit) based its "vocabulary" of objective construction.   Kind of an inversion of Chomsky's premise that "language is culture and culture is language".  At its heart, the core epistimology (lexical field) of Pharaonic mentality was based on a simple numerical progression beginning with the number 1 and elements that are all natural and real.  In other words the direct response to the proportional laws of sound and form was the epistmological basis of the entire pharaonic cultural ouevre. Hearing goes directly to the emotional centre whose intelligence directly apprehends (and organizes) reality via harmony. It was by means of this mentality, this alien epistemology (lexical field) that the Egyptians constructed their cultural and technological complex (language-culture-technology)

Gurdjieff  - As Memetic Engineer: A grammar (lexical field) is a mathematical system, with grammatical utterances being derived (i.e., "generated") from the axioms and postulates of the system.   Consciousness is a grammatical utterance.   According to Gurdjieff, there are multiple lexical fields (centers, both higher and lower) on which consciousness can be based. One of Gurdjieff's primary goals was to "infect" the increasingly attenuated grammar (lexical field)
underlying contemporary subjective speech (consciousness) with axioms and postulates drawn from an archaic lexical field (law of three (arithemetic-geometric-harmonic (law of seven))) (pharaonic Egypt) that might potentially lead to the recovery of archaic consciousness and the possibility for man's "harmonious development".

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