My experience with a forgotten language
By Jon Rappoport
I have great respect for any well-formed language---for its ability to engender the use of logic, for its capacity to embody grand leaps of poetry and imagination.
I've also had experiences with what could be called forgotten languages of vastly different kinds.
In 1995, I was living and painting in a small studio in Los Angeles. I was painting rows of black shapes on large pieces of board (4 feet by 2 feet). I was improvising these shapes. I had no plan or system in mind.
One day, I was lying on my bed looking at several of the boards leaning against the opposite wall. Suddenly, and for a few moments, the shapes spoke to me. The effect was tremendous.
They didn't speak in words. They conveyed immediate sensations of flying. Flying in upper reaches.
Afterwards, I gave the experience some thought.
A language which communicates direct feelings and sensations. No intermediary translation necessary or possible. Not words into feelings, but feelings without filtering...
Suppose there are languages which---if a person can deal with them---keep pumping through DIFFERENT AND CHANGING sensations and feelings. But each burst is undeniable and vivid.
Each "painted shape" is a changeling. It never broadcasts the same thing twice.
But at every moment, it's powerful and clear.
The shape doesn't give you literal or metaphorical meaning. It gives you experience.
You're flying. You're running through a desert. You're swimming in a boundless ocean. These experiences are somehow transmitted.
This makes no sense, in terms of languages with which we are familiar.
How is this possible?
Perhaps, in my case, as the painter, it's because I was spontaneously improvising the shapes. The "in the moment" factor was outside any system. Outside any consensus.
In certain types of Zen painting (black and white) where the artist delivers "abstract" lines and strokes and shapes to the paper, something about these brush strokes is alive. You don't need to know what "they represent." They don't represent anything. They don't refer. They don't symbolize. They ARE.
Is this mystical? No. It's more real than real.
Why were certain Zen painters engaged in improvisation? Because their whole effort involved offloading preconceptions and metaphysical baggage. They had a philosophy of "no philosophy." And yet they were very much about action. There was no passivity in them.
Most "civilized" people would reject this kind of painting, because they find no obvious meaning in it. These civilized ones would say, "I have stacks of ideas and thoughts and systems and meanings and references in my mind. I want what I look at to engage with these meanings in some way. If not, I conclude I'm looking at something senseless."
Is the direct experience of love senseless because it can't be accurately described in words? Judging by people's reactions, it wouldn't seem so.
My experiences with "forgotten languages" suggests, to me, that we have untapped areas of potential connection and understanding which go beyond all conventional expectations.
This has nothing to do with brains or computers. It has to do with innate dormant faculties.
For me, a faculty was awakened for a few moments, by paintings I'd made.
The closest analogy I can think of is the "language" of music. I listen to the same symphony a dozen times. Each time my experience is different. And vivid and immediate. If I'm in the moment, I'm not making all sorts of references to the English language in order to interpret what I'm hearing. The meaning is coming through directly.
This kind of musical experience happens to untold numbers of people every day. No one doubts its power. And yet, there are no words to define it.
We accept the unexplained when we are hearing it. But we're reluctant to accept it when we see it (painting). Why? Because we're conditioned to believe seeing is all about "the ordinary" and "realism."
It isn't. It doesn't have to be.
Seeing doesn't have to be a shackle that binds us permanently to "things as they are."
"Things as they are and must be" is a program of the reality machine.
"Things as they are" is a platform we can all share. We can remain grounded in it and yet also experience fantastically exhilarating "exits" into other realms.
Many other experiences await us.
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Your comments are always welcome and there is always an open invitation to follow along in my journey....
