The surprising reality hidden beneath language and thought

The surprising reality hidden beneath language and thought

Steven Pashko, PhD 

In our quest for meaning and self-understanding, language remains a valuable tool, but we must recognize its limitations. By balancing our conceptual and perceptual selves, we can live more fully, appreciating life beyond the distortions of thoughts and words. In doing so, we reconnect with the dimension of existence we have long suspected: one that’s whole and prior to the concepts of time and location, argues Steven Pashko.

Language, for all its power, cannot capture reality; it only offers an abstracted representation of what is. This limitation originates from the fact that words and concepts transform what they describe. Though indispensable in structured systems—like logic, science, and mathematics—concepts simplify and distort essential details that are crucial to understanding reality in its entirety. The moment we label, name, or define something, we reduce it to a manageable mental symbol, changing what it is. This change may help us communicate, but it fails to convey what can be directly experienced. For a few examples of these alterations, let’s recall that words cannot express:

1. The uniqueness of individual things, like a particular squirrel;
   
2. A unified whole, something without segmentation or background, where no ‘parts’ exist;
   
3. Direct sensory experiences, such as the sweetness of honey or the scent of a rose.
   

The perspectives of Epstein, Kahneman, and Sankara reveal two parallel ways of knowing:

1. Conceptual reality, which arises from the abstractions of conceptual thought, creates a materialistic understanding of self and world.
   
2. Perceptual reality, which is direct, timeless, and beyond language, offers a seamless experience of existence that exists prior to labels and categories.
   

The non-dual, perceptual view enables us to glimpse a stable sense of self that transcends any particular role or identity. Philosopher René Descartes [8] famously wrote, “I think, therefore I am,” defining selfhood through thought. But our identities, shaped by roles like ‘parent,’ ‘activist,’ or ‘executive,’ are ever-changing and provisional. Are we truly different people in each role, or is there a more fundamental, enduring self? The answer lies in the non-verbal perceptual self, which remains consistent amid life’s changes. This deeper self, overshadowed by our conceptual identities, holds the key to a stable understanding of who we are.

The surprising reality hidden beneath language and thought
Steven Pashko, PhD 

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".....our identities, shaped by roles like ‘parent,’ ‘activist,’ or ‘executive,’ are ever-changing and provisional. Are we truly different people in each role, or is there a more fundamental, enduring self? The answer lies in the non-verbal perceptual self, which remains consistent amid life’s changes. This deeper self, overshadowed by our conceptual identities, holds the key to a stable understanding of who we are."
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I think there is a lot of wisdom in Pashko's ideas and insights, though they don't go far enough in the implications. By means of an unrelated train of reasoning he arrives at a similar conclusion to the limited understanding I have hitherto developed about the issue of what is the person as compared to the soul, and considering the vast differences between them, how can a person literally be their soul? And this thinking borders on posing an excellent analogy for supposedly how the soul, the repository of memories of countless past lives and higher transcendental experiences, and being therefore an entirely different and vastly greater being with different personality, could really be the human in some important sense. 

As Pashko mentions, our identities are ever-changing and provisional; this especially marked in the process of growing up though childhood, adolescence, maturity and old age. This identity is mainly made up of the person's personality, memories, likes and dislikes. Nearly everything making up the person is greatly different and expanded when comparing the infant for instance with the person in old age. 

But in old age there still remains a unique core of the essence of the individuality or personality, a deeper self, constant through all these changes and growings. That is evidently a good analogy for the only way in which the human person can know himself as his soul. It is through an analogy. This is of the constance of the inner sense of self despite all the changes of human life (so that the old person can still feel his childhood self as being his present self in some very important sense), with the vastly expanded soul being with its composition of countless different past life human personalities. This may actually be a poor analogy, but it appears to be the only way or sense in which a human person can console himself that he the human being is really his soul, and therefore physical death is not the end - there is a sort of afterlife. This may be humanly unsatisfactory, but it is what it is.

Reincarnation and NDEs do at times indicate that, at least in some cases, the connections we make in this life do have meaning for us even in the afterlife.

I recall an old mission trip in college to an area that was the historical home of the Lumbee tribe. The last night we were there one of the Lumbee women said we might worry that the bonds we made would fade but we should be reassured that "Everywhere you go, you leave Spirit".

The passage of millennia would surely change anyone, and it may seem that a single life in so many incarnations - "swelling the cemeteries" as Buddha once put it - would seem to be little more than a vivid dream...OTOH consider chaotic systems where a small change can have massive effects in the trajectory of how a system behaves.

As I've noted in the past it *feels* to me that William James had the right of it ->

"If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight,—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild half-saved universe our nature is adapted."