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Rebecca and I watched a movie last night. It was rated PG-13, and as it opened, it had that little screen that tells you why you shouldn’t watch this particular film. In this case, we were warned of the dire dangers of ‘Violence, Some Sensuality, and Language’.

Note that it didn’t say ‘Strong Language’ or ‘Adult Language’, but simply ‘Language.’

Just lazy word-play on the part of the movie police, but it leads one to wondering if we should be a little wary of language. Perhaps warn all children 13 and under about the dangers of words.

We don’t usually do this. We teach our children language and forget to tell them that they’re only learning a set of symbols – a set of symbols that stand for approximate representations of things. When we teach language as if it is referencing Reality itself, we set our children up for a lifetime of confusion and frustration.

Here’s what we do. We point toward a portion of the world, we give it a name, and that portion of the world crystallizes into the child’s mind. It becomes a ‘thing’ — a firm division in a Reality which doesn’t actually have any divisions. We’re all human beings, for instance, but we can start to put all sorts of words onto different humans – rich, poor, black, white, Arab, Christian, Pagan, evil, good, gay, straight, left, right. The problem with these words is that we can forget that all of these ‘different’ humans are still human beings. And many of us will treat people completely differently depending on which words we attach to them — regardless of what the person is actually like. We often don’t give Reality a chance to peek through and show us what’s really going on, because we’re too busy affixing our labels to everything.

Don’t get me wrong. Language is marvelous. With it, we can play all sorts of symbol-games, and do some pretty amazing things, such as communicate across the world with electron-forged letters on a computer screen. But when we confuse our symbols with reality, we become frustrated creatures. We start to experience problems that seem to make sense, but really don’t, such as – ‘why did the person I married change so much?’ – ‘why can’t I control my emotions?’ – ‘why is the world so full of problems and hatred and evil?’. Our lives become a constant battle to improve ourselves and the world. The result is that we come to the end of our lives and realize that we’ve missed out on most of our life because we were so eager to get somewhere else.

What would happen if we taught our children that language was just a set of symbols? Better yet, what would happen if each of us took a good look at language, and asked ourselves how closely our words (and thus our viewpoint of the world) match up with actual reality? Could it be that our words cause us more problems than benefits? That our chopped-up, language-based method of encountering the world creates a situation where we spend most of our life energy trying to work out the problems with our method, rather than the problems of actual reality?

The solution isn’t to get rid of words. It’s simply to see them for what they are. After all, humans are supposed to be famous for their intelligence. Let’s use it, and take a few moments to ask ourselves what we really mean when we say ‘car’, ‘tree’, ‘sun’, or ‘me’. If we examine these things carefully, we might be pretty surprised by the answers. And if we keep examining until we get to the heart of ‘what these things really are’, we find that the answer points us to something truly amazing. With this answer, we see that even the most persistent human problems – ‘Why are we here?’ – ‘Why is there death?’ – ‘What is the meaning of it all?’ – that these problems are created because we’ve forgotten that our words are just artificial cover-ups, blinding us from the real world that’s right in front of us all the time.

Beliefs are fine when we know they are beliefs. But when we think they are real, we become fanatics, and would rather create immense suffering for ourselves and others instead of simply examining our beliefs and discovering what’s behind them.

Truly examining our beliefs – especially our most foundational ones, such as language – can get us out of the game. The game of spending our whole lives trying to tackle one problem after another. We discover that our foundational beliefs create all of the problems we experience, and discover what is meant by ‘awakening from the dream’.

Then maybe we’ll start putting ‘language’ warnings on all our movies – just to remind us that this marvelous human invention can cause us a lot of suffering if it’s not used wisely.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 2:12 am and is filed under Language. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.