Leonard Shlain: Imagery and the Alphabet (excerpt) -- A Thinking Allowed DVD w/ Jeffrey Mishlove

[@wwjd777maf]

So interesting! I wonder if the declining use of the physical medium of pen and paper has an effect on the blurred gender lines of today's culture. The feminine is finally able to be expressed in a new form! This would certainly make for interesting research.

[@MarmaladeINFP]

Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with linguistic relativity research knows how profoundly languages shape thought, perception, and behavior.

[@intermatrixnaut1]

Just because language and history was after the fact, and 'Goddess cultures' may not have had 'writing' doesn't mean that writing something down made anything that much more important. I've come across the idea that language could be a reflection/projection of the very DNA within us all, and that early childhood development, that a baby goes through the syllables of all cultures. I find the idea of 'herstory' being negligible isn't associating the importance of 'pre-history'.

[@intermatrixnaut1]

The alphabet may have changed the way people 'describe' reality, not view it, as viewing is living, and experience isn't analytical... but in the moment. The ever present 'now' is just is, retrospective analysis using the alphabet changes the descriptors. "Pre-history"/"Goddess Societies" may have had so many 'non-verbals' as commonplace, that it wouldn't need a 'descriptoric alphabet' to convey the import.

[@christiansather8438]

This is such a nuanced, deeeeeeeep and interesting topic. Our mode of writing overexcites the left hemisphere (which can be thought of as masculine/linear/sequential/unfeeling…even before typewriters and computers one was generally using their right hand[left brain] to express themselves in the written mode) leaving us out of touch with the intuitive/gestalt/feeling/apositioned mode of being which could care less about closure… to make a musical analogy it’s like we see the best way to experience music is to program a machine to do it or just stick to rules and read linearly… instead of totally feeling it and expressing oneself without developing a theory as to why you did what you did… Nietzsche said ‘reason brings relief’… but making reasons is just a left brain function and it can totally be missing the mark as you comfort yourself with illusions. There is something inherently paradoxical about this area of research because it’s using the machinations of a left brain laden culture to show what a sham most of it is.

[@christiansather8438]

Also I feel like if one examines and comes to a sense of the nature of the phonetic alphabet you can see how it is tyrannical and has many built in assumptions that in turn affect how we practice science, feel the need to colonize and it even affects the structure our worlds, inner and outer. It looks at any other language and, like some science fiction monster, consumes it and forces it to conform to its rules. Using it as a tool in an unreflective way (as we’ve been doing for millennia but only more intensely science the gutenburg press) leads to tumorous expansion. The phonetic alphabet is the defining aspect of the west. When you understand how it operates, you understand how the western world functions. We slice and dice everything up into meaningless disconnected bits and call it logic and reason… when it is anything but