Some Very Big Laws and World Six

First of all I would like to do some thinking with you. Not thinking in language, although I will have to phrase my thinking in language which I hope you can understand, although through this language I am hoping to arrive at a different kind of thinking with you, which I will call "first thinking". Let me describe the three types of "thinking" that an infant born into this world goes through:

First, upon birth, the newborn thinks in pure sensation, it is awash in absolutely fundamental and pure sensation. All of its senses are a kind of touch -- its eyes do not focus well but what it sees is considered as a sensation -- what it has been hearing even in the womb albiet muffled, and now louder and more differentiated, is still sensation. It is the same thing with taste and smell, which are much closer to the infants physical body which it does not differentiate very much. This pure sensation does not include a differentiation between fingers and toes or anything else for that matter, but is a global sense of tremendous fullness.

As the brain begins to grow and form new neurons and synapses and dendrites, somewhere between the ages of three and nine months, the infant begins to enjoy what I call "first thinking", which is thinking in entire images and pictures. This is the kind of thinking that I call "real" thinking, and is the kind of thinking that Albert Einstein used in what he called his "thought experiments." He once told a psychologist "I rarely think in words but rather in images, which I then have to translate into words."

He also didn't start talking until he was four or five years old and because he was delayed in his linguistic development, he still thought like a child when he was an adult, and Einstein claims that that is the reason why he was able to make the discoveries that he did. And when he was between the ages of five and ten, he used to have to practice saying the sentences to himself sub-vocally or even by moving his lips to practice before he could speak out loud. He said that it was because he couldn't fit his main thinking into the little window which was words, and so he would stutter and practice before talking, much to the chagrin of his parents.

An infant has been hearing language even while in the womb, and somewhere between six months and a year the child can understand most of the things that the adults say, even if the child can only say goo goo, because it has not mastered the use of its vocal apparatus. Let's not forget, a child of that age hasn't even been breathing for very long, and it's breathing has not even settled into a habit, so that some babies just leave, by turning off the breathing and not being able to get it started again --SIDS. But this is a sidetrack. Let's get back to the subject at hand, which is what thinking consists of.

The child sees that the adults communicate through language (as well as through body language, gesture and emotional expression), so it begins to learn language. This is the lowest or grossest form of thinking, because thinking in language is linear and can only contain surface meaning -- it cannot contain depth and meaning or experiential meaning. This is why children enjoy fairy tales, myths, legends, metaphor, allegory, fables, speech in parable, etc., because these linguistic formats lend themselves to image creation or first thinking. It is also the motive for poetry.

In any case, the young child is soon taught the alphabet and how to read written language and to write it. Slowly through the educational process and the socialization of the child, language thinking takes over, and even while learning the language at a very early age, the child begins talking to itself in order to practice language. That talking to oneself in most people usually becomes a habit which never ends, and slowly but surely first thinking and sensation take a back seat to language skills and they atrophy. After the child puts away his fairy tales and his childhood toys, he is more than likely well on his way to the cul-de-sac or dead end which is language without images or pictures or sensation. Depth meaning dries up, and first thinking dies.

But image or picture thinking is harmonious, multivalent, and cannot fit into the linear structure of language. First thinking as I call it is like musical chords, whereas language is like single notes played one at a time. If I say "I went to the store," you know barely anything -- you don't know when, where, how, which, and you don't know what happened to me there or even if I bought anything. So how can I explain anything to you with language? And what is this sort of preface going to lead us to?

The title of this post is Some Very Big Laws and World Six. What on earth could I be planning on talking about?

Well, first I should tell you that in my common presence, I have never let first thinking atrophy, nor have I let go of sensation, and I have put myself through almost unbelievable sufferings in order to achieve certain of my aims. Having achieved many of my aims and having developed incredible strengths in particular areas, I now have an obligation and a debt to pay while my carcass is on planet Earth; such obligation and debt being to explain certain ideas while acting like a down voltage transformer, and also acting as a chemical enzyme and catalyst for my readers potential to reawaken real thinking, even while we rely on that which ruins thinking, namely, language.

So now we shall begin:

But please review this post, because you will have to practice delayed gratification or patience, because I am leaving off here, and will resume next "time".