Wordals – as word-portals – evolved in my writing practice as mind-unlocking gateways into higher/deeper states of awareness. Unlocking the traps of words frees the mind into a more vast experience of being alive.
All around us now is talk of potential new universal languages, decryption of recently discovered ancient languages, possibly extraterrestrial symbolic and geometrical languages, old and new pictorial languages, vibrational and light languages, re-translation of ancient languages we thought we understood, and on and on. And yet the language we learned the world by (e.g., English, as here) still carries a formative vibration, linking visual, tactile, sonic, cell-encoded and subtle experience into a unified, conditioned self-sense that usually remains hidden, pretending to be our “self.” “Reality” is different in each different language, even in different meanings of a single word in one language. Getting inside the surface meanings brings us closer to the universals.
Gratitude, for example. In a long-ago Thanksgiving meditation circle, each in turn shared what we were most thankful for. There were expressions of thanks for personal emotional experiences or material abundance, or cosmic thanks-for-everything. Most looked puzzled and alone as the others spoke, since each seemed to be speaking “gratitude” in a fundamentally different language. The word “gratitude” meant radically different experiences, depending on the density of vibration, from the material to the etheric. The word-root means “fullness,” a sensation that each person experiences uniquely.
And sometimes, on the web, hopeless “conversations” arise with everyone using different vibrational meanings of mind, karma, love, will, truth, sin, grace, etc. I started to feel bereft, in sensing people missing connection in these forums.
So I began to write a book about this, as an intercultural translation dictionary. When I started unpacking English words, I became amazed at the power of their raw uncompromised selves, feeling the human experiences that gave rise to them – and thus shaped us, before the words were tattered and flattened by overexposure in dehumanized contexts.
Starting with the concept of oneness, for example, an array of insights can come from looking at the sem root. It signifies unity, whether of substance or time. This is the SAME as that. The two events happened SIMultaneously. To asSEMble is to move toward a unity, creating a single something. To disSEMble is to take a story apart and show only part of it, thus creating a lie out of a fraction of truth. To reSEMble is to be somewhat the same as something else. To be One is to be SIMple. SEMper (always, only a single time acknowledged as existing) Fi. So we used to have a feeling for unity, before it got broken apart in our minds and languages.
This curiosity about “assembly” arose while looking at the wrongly named “ego” as actually a temporary construction (assembly) of energies amplified, intersected, and replicated by the bodymind for its self-preservation. Tremendous energies operate in the subatomic bonds between the cobbled-together elements of a personal (egoic) assembly, which orients us to our physical world, which declares our self to be a unity, all happening at the same time. I love the image of a newborn wearing a satin banner imprinted with “Some Assembly Required” (to function). It’s also entertaining to invoke the “assembly” (committee) of personalities residing in all of us – our inner judges, victims, avengers, geniuses, etc.; practitioners of psychosynthesis, integral shadow work, and all kinds of archetype analysis (e.g., Michael Brown’s “CAST” of supporting characters) will recognize these committees. Readers with a Sanskrit background will recognize the root of “SAMskara” (assembly) here, actually meaning egoic energetic construction.
As meditation is helping to disassemble the egoic assemblies of my conditioned experience – the concepts and assumptions of a lifetime – I’m having a wonderful time disassembling some of the most explosive and cringe-inducing words in English, and allowing their pure raw alive energy to be liberated. The Category “Wordals” will bring most of them up.