A Few Words On Words

Trust The Universe

A Few Words On Words

Trust The Universe

When last we met I realized that emphasis on ACTING, as such, informed by the ways I’ve taught live in studio, misleads us. 

Let’s revisit the essence of ACTING HUMAN. We practice to clearly envision our dynamic connection to ourselves, and each other, continuous with the WHOLE UNIVERSE. All emerges as new in each new moment.

The language spoken in live classes differs radically from how we customarily communicate here in digital media, where writing in pixelated words for reading on screens forms the norm. 

Words constitute a minuscule part of the learning process in live classes. They do not stand alone as read text. In living classes we ‘read’ them as living sounds that resonate in an integrated group, in the context of doing, interactively. 

We do not obscure ourselves behind screens as secreted actors in separate spaces.

“The medium is the message.” ~Marshall McLuhan

We learn to act by doing. By storying in action. We embody and share generously by means of intention expressed in energetic form. We vibrate as if musical. One singular sensation.

Acting is doing truthfully with purpose in relationship to created circumstances. We create the Universe as simultaneously the Universe creates us. 

In studio together, this is palpable.

We live as ONE in an exquisite, artistic, and generous Universe.

Trust the Universe

I suspect we can create a living studio experience together. As our imaginations heighten sufficiently, we can practice truthful doing in a medium that threatens vital living. We can live revolutionary lives. To live life alive in this age, a time engulfed in rampant commercial media and burgeoning artificial intelligence, constitutes an act of rebellion.

We may’ve stumbled upon a valuable obstacle. Obstacles are a source of strength when we use them well to story. To reveal ourselves truly, especially when thwarted, expands and amplifies our courage and imagination. We can more fully expose humanity to the warm and life giving light of a naturally wholesome Universe. 

“Media representations, especially on screens, are abstractions, or virtual "extensions" of what our sensory channels, bodies, thinking and feeling do for us in real life.”  ~McLuhan

Our experience of life grows as we enlarge how we see our lives. 

Words limit vision. 

Words render us senseless. 

Words substitute concepts for living experience.

Spoken language, as we know it, comes lately. Written language much later. 

I have it on good advice that there were grunts, groans, and more than a few oy-veys in ancient times. 

Primitive ‘speech’ shows up circa 100,000 BCE. The distance between grunting sounds and symbolic cave paintings stretches something like 70,000 years. More sophisticated symbolic systems like cuneiform and hieroglyphs, appear around 5000BCE. If my arithmetic is copaetic, that’s 65,000 years ago.

Early (not ancient) ‘man’ used verbal communication, mostly songs and chants. Oral storytelling came into use when nomadic tribes, with no material history to share, needed verbal tools to maintain generational continuity.

I wasn’t until 1250CE that a quill was used for writing, and it wasn’t until 1888 that the ballpoint pen was invented by John Loud, who sadly didn’t score even a lonesome buck.

Laszlo Biro hid out until 1938, then fashioned a commercially-successful version. Assuming Biro had a sober patent lawyer, the cash register tolled for him.

Gutenberg invents the printing press in 1440CE. Less than 200 years after the quill. We’re on the fast track now. Right?

Symbolic writing evolved slowly. Words used commonly, and accepted readily, as indices of real things and real experiences had been a long time coming. 

We, contemporary humans, are like proverbial frogs in water slowly heated until boiled. We didn’t notice the incremental change between life and death. Our direct experience of life had been, and continues to be, slargely usurped by symbols. We’ve been cooked in a pot of conceptual maps that only represent sensational life. Oops!

“The map is NOT the territory.”

Korzybski, a Polish-American scholar (1879–1950), developed General Semantics, a philosophy of language-meaning, a study of language as a representation of reality. 

General Semantics is intended to improve our habits of response to environments, urging more acute understanding of reality maps as distinct from experienced reality, thereby making it less likely we get boiled.

Korzybski differentiates between symbol (word) and reality (referent) and shows the ways in which words themselves can influence (or manipulate) and limit human ability to think, feel, and see. 

Words, taken for what they represent, tend to separate us from ourselves, each other, and a living experience of the WHOLE. They are dangerous. 

“By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.” ~George Carlin

Separation Scares Us 

We have come to mistake, through intense and persistent conditioning, words and symbols for absolutely real phenomena. 

Words and symbols delivered fully prepared are designed to embed what Karen Langer, a nice girl from Brooklyn, calls ‘preconceived cognitive commitments.” Prepackaged beliefs.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief the new evidence cannot be accepted. It creates a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with that core belief.” ~Franz Fanon

Words and symbols are ubiquitous and sticky. Only keen awareness vitiates the inherent treachery of symbolic seeing. The first principles of ACTING HUMAN - Relax. Pay Attention. Smile. 

Words and symbols are the currency of so-called education, and education is the gauntlet we’ve been bamboozled to run if we want to find our way to traditional success. 

Words and symbols are at the center of all media. We are increasingly awash in ever more pervasive and manipulated media.

On some level we are aware of what’s happening.

Nevertheless, words and symbols form a map of reality that we prefer to freedom. We fear exploration in an unknown and mysterious world; one fraught with uncertainty.

Perhaps the greatest uncertainty we face is threat to our identity. Who are we if we hold less tightly to words and symbols that define us by roles, shapes, clothing, cars, status, and perceived relationships as opposed to actual relationships lived here and now?  The risk is too great. We may come undone.

“Once you label me you negate me.” ~Soren Kierkegaard

Words and symbols place humans in roles and categories that separate us from ourselves and us from each other; when we reflexively use them we obliterate interdependence and mutual arising; we leave ourselves for dead, carved to pieces in an arid world “signifying nothing.”

A fearsome scenario. 

Fear calls upon our courage to create. A reread of the COURAGE dispatch might not help, but it couldn’t hurt. Actually, I think it will help a bunch. Remember rudiments and reiteration?

"Words can introduce you to an idea but it takes an experience to transform you." ~Alan Alda

ACTING HUMAN is the art of experiential transformation. In doing truthfully we actively story ourselves alive. With practiced intention, we see that tiny stories are to life what mitochondria are to cells. Remember?

We must have the courage to behave in sensational ways. To ignite life force. To energize our souls, to take action. 

"An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words." ~Meisner

We must live a protean life. Remember, that which changes remains alive. Stasis kills. When we ACT HUMAN we change naturally with ease rooted in practice and skill. 

We can live life alive. We get to live life alive the same way we get to Carnegie Hall. Practice. Practice. Practice.

“A different language is a different vision of life.” ~Federico Fellini

When we live in the language of ACTING HUMAN we play in concert with the WHOLE UNIVERSE, we live alive as TRUE SELF.

We cease to see primarily through the lens of ordinary, conditioned language, instead we talk to our WHOLE selves creatively.

Imagination

Change is created by creating imaginations bigger than our limited circumstances, which are illusory. Yet, most of us would rather hold tightly to our imprisoned identities than transform fear into vibrant life lived alive.

We fear loss of our identities. We falsely imagine that we’ll have no protagonist to drive our story. We are tragically confused. Out of this egoistic confusion, spread widely, all worldly ills erupt. All the harm and destruction we’ve seen through the ages; powerful ills that now threaten all life and humanity with greater ferocity than ever before. 

We can recognize and use the immediacy and urgency of fierce threats. Like obstacles, urgency when used with creative skill can enhance our story making. We remake story to remake our world.

Identity Crisis or Circus?

Language is a trickster. There is no identity crisis. We’ve misspelled our actual dilemma. We’ve lied to ourselves.

The letters got mixed up. U was left out. R slid ahead of I, and S stuttered into an extra spot, leaving us in static ‘is-ness.’ 

We’ve created R IS substituting for a helix of US. 

A true Universal US, one singular sensation that spins in fractal wonder, a spontaneous revelation, a circus of kaleidoscopic visions. 

WE, as Universal US, live life alive. WE birth dynamic humanity through art. 

To be continued - Wednesday 

Until then,

Lights Up!