Words:
Creation, Solidification and Stagnation
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Armand Kruger, MA
Overview: We cannot not use
words to organize our thinking. In this process of organizing
we create new maps and understandings by "informing"
our minds. Words is how we confirm and create our beliefs,
another way of organizing. But, for all this organizing, words
can be the tool with we can become estranged from the reality
of our experience where we live. Sentences becoming condensed
into words, and words becoming labels, things (nominalizations),
attributes, unspecified verbs, etc. Words setting unknowable
ideals for living, under the pretense of familiarity.
What we Say Count.
"Words are powerful,
important, significant. It was meant to be that way. When
we speak, it must be with the realization that God has given
our words significance. He has ordained for them to be important.
Words were significant at Creation and at the Fall. They
are significant to redemption. God has given words value.
"You do not really understand
the significance of words until you realize that the first
words that human ears ever heard were not the words of another
human being, but the words of God! The value of every piece
of human communication is rooted in the fact that God speaks.
Into the sights and sounds of the newly created world came
the voice of God, speaking words of human language to Adam
and Eve. When God chose to reveal himself that way, he raised
talk to a place of highest significance as his primary vehicle
of truth. Through words, we would come to know the most
important truths that could be known― truths that
reveal God's existence and glory, truths that give life.
(Tripp, p.7; cursive mine)1
"God's words not only
define him, they define his creation as well. They give
identity, meaning and purpose to all God has created.
We only know ourselves when we listen to the words he has
spoken about us. God tells us who we are, defines what we
are to do and the way we are to do it. None of these things
could we discover on our own! The only hope for Adam and
Eve was that God would speak to them, giving them identity
and purpose, and making sense out of the world in which
they had been placed. God's words set boundaries and give
freedom. His words create life and bring death. God created
talk and his first words to Adam and Eve demonstrate its
significance. Words are not cheap. Words reveal, define,
explain, and shape. (Tripp, p.12; cursive mine).
"Words direct our existence
and our relationships. They shape our observations and
define our experiences. We really come to know other
people through conversation. We want to be alone when we
have heard too many words and we feel alone when it has
been a while since anyone has spoken to us. (Tripp, 12;
cursive mine)
"There is one more thing
we can learn from Genesis 1 about words. Words define, explain,
and interpret. Even though Adam and Eve were perfect people
living in a perfect world in a perfect relationship with
God, they still needed God to talk to them. Their world
needed definition. They needed to understand themselves
and to understand life. Everything needed to be interpreted,
and for this Adam and Eve were dependent on God. They could
not figure things out on their own. Whatever discoveries
they would make about the world and their lives would need
to be explained and defined by the words of God. Words interpret.
Human communication, like God's, is all about organizing,
interpreting, and explaining the world around us."
(Tripp, p.13; cursive mine).
In the above quotes Tripp spells
out some of the functions of words: they have significance;
they are vessels for truth; they reveal, define, explain,
and shape; and words interpret. To use a NLP-frame of mind
one can say the same thing using the words: Our words are
how we language the distinctions and comparisons we make in
our experience.
Tap dancing between three
Realities.
As human beings we tap dance
between three "realities". The first "reality"
is where our brains (the same as mind?) organize the information
we are exposed to through our senses. At an incredibly rapid
rate2 our brains use it's existing
data basis to recognize, interpret, prioritize and "present"
to our conscious awareness. We are at the same time creators
of the worlds we live in, as well as recipients of the worlds
our brains have created outside of our awareness.
Our awareness ("screen
of the mind" as Michael Hall refers to it) is where we
can pay first/primary attention to the world that we have
familiarized and organized. Here we can become aware of the
first set of distinctions we have made about the world, namely,
through the coding of our world in picture, sound, feeling,
smell and taste terms (the domain of NLP describing the structure
of our representational awareness and the processes which
results from that). Our first awareness of having made comparisons
at this level presents itself to us in the qualities of the
pictures, sound and feelings called the submodalities. At
this level our words have a strong expressive quality which
is intimately related to what we pay attention to. For example,
as you pay attention to pictures your language will express
this preference in that you will use picture words to say
the content "in your mind". (The preferred modalities
as described in NLP.)
The third reality we dance
in is the reality of meaning. These are the higher levels
of our mind where we roam conceptually as we interpret, understand,
belief, prioritize. The ability to think about our experience
by asking questions about any and all components of our experience,
this ability to "self-reflect" (the domain of Neuro-Semantics)
is where are words have the double function of saying as well
as organizing. This is where words are vessels for truth;
where they reveal, define, explain, and shape; words that
interpret.
Words Create.
Words allow us at the level
of meaning, at the meta-levels of our mind, to be aware how
any content in our mind has more than one layer of meaning.
Every question you ask about your experienced reality has
an answer at one layer, the next question about that
answer moves to the next higher level, etc. Higher levels
of understanding, and learning, are the ways through which
we "in-form" our minds with more distinctions and
even more sophisticated comparisons at a conceptual level.
We understand better, or differently or totally new as we
explore experiences from different levels of the mind through
the medium of our language with our ability to self-reflect.
Words Solidify.
It is not unknown that the
more one argues with a person about their convictions the
more one entrenches it. One of the reasons is that the more
they get to think about it, the more arguments they
come up with, the more they language/conceptualize central
and peripheral content about their convictions, the more they
solidify it with more concepts. Talking about an experiential
content by "moving through" (up or down) the different
levels of distinctions one makes about it, has exactly the
same effect of solidifying the structure and content of the
experience. Another way of saying this solidification is "having
a conviction about a conviction, or believing a belief."
Your highest beliefs determine what you actually believe;
high level beliefs can outweigh things which you would
like to believe simply because they would be at a lower level
of the mind, subservient to the highest "real" belief.
To change that "real" belief you would have to go
even higher, explore and discover what is even more true
than the existing highest belief3
and by languaging enough truths about that belief will give
it the place of honor as the truth. This is how one
can know about God, but live as if the world is more real,
and more compelling. God as information is not known yet
as the One who is the Alpha and the Omega. God is not the
highest frame for understanding or believing yet4,
is not solidified in the highest level of our mind.
Words Stagnate
Words can stagnate from two
things the mind does: one, in the process of languaging experienced
realities, some of the information of experience gets lost.
This loss is due to the deletions, distortions and generalizations
that goes with translating "experience" into the
medium of "language" (the stuff and principle of
the meta-model). In an everyday conversation one says a portion
of the lived experience depending on audience and outcome
of communication, one "cuts out the detail of the map
of the experience". The more you tell it the higher the
risk that the mind takes more "short cuts", and
the words become more removed from the actual experience.
The word now stands for the meaning of the experience and
the experience in the "mind of the beholder" becomes
the word.
Two, when we use metaphors
or comparative expressions to language an experience, there
is a time when we forget that it was a comparison, and the
original experience becomes the content with which it has
been compared. For example, comparing certain mental-emotional
states with the disease model ("like a disease")
has now become "it is a disease". The word now gives
the new meaning to the experience and the experience in the
"mind of the beholder" becomes the word.
The result of this "de-experiencing"
of words leads to words being used as answers, rather than
as pointers to answers or processes. This typically
happens because the words have importance. We can get carried
away by how joy, happiness, honesty, openness, etc. becomes
the answer to life, or to marriage, or how to be a post-modern
person, etc. they become "it". These words not only
are de-experienced, they have been nominalized (a process
has been "thingified" and made into a fixed, static
thing)5 and tuned into universal
quantifiers (as if they are always true, with sayings like
always, every time, etc.). Now it is easy for them to be turned
into the next step: standards for judgments or comparisons
where they really take on a life of their own. Now they are
not only the answer, but they also become the
prerequisite for the right way of talking about the
topic.
I hear this amongst my fellow
believers when they use words as the gospel, rather than as
pointers to the Gospel. It is when the truth which will set
one free has been reduced to the right words of wisdom
(and wisdom has been nominalized, contrary to James 3:13-17)
and conceptually locked in. We are forgetting that our words
are rooted/referenced to the experience from which they come.
Jesus is not a religion, He is a person; Christianity is not
a conceptual map of the world, it is a life style aimed
at a future; living in grace is a verb, like faith
being a verb.
Apart from the fact that the
users of these de-experienced words not only go a bit trancy
when they use it, they also spread the thought-virus that
you either have it or you don't; you are in or out.
Conclusion
Therapists or counselors have
language as the main medium through which we influence and
invite to change. Having discovered the answer in certain
states or mindsets, it is very seductive to to carry that
over without thinking or doing sufficient ecology checks.
Well, why should we bother to do an ecology check since we
have the answer and the words says it all! Because: words
mean different things to different people; words refer to
maps they are not the maps. How do you do a string of words,
like, being joyfully optimistic and enervated? No wonder they
trance the listener out. I wonder if this is why the quote
from Milton Ericson, who is claimed to have said that "we
are more in trance than out of trance. The challenge is not
so much to put people into trance as catching them out of
one".
It is about words taking on
a life of their own. It me not remembering that
"First, our words belong
to the Lord. He is the Great Speaker. The wonder, the significance,
the glory of human communication has its roots in his
glory and in his decision to talk with us and allow us to
talk with him and others. God has unlocked the doors of
truth to us, using words as his key. The only reason we
understand anything is that he has spoken. Words belong
to God, but he has lent them to us so that we might know
him and be used by him. This means that words do not belong
to us. Every word we speak must be up to God's standard
and according to his design. They should echo the Great
Speaker and reflect his glory. When we lose sight of this,
our words lose their only shelter from difficulty. Talk
was created by God for his purpose. Our words belong to
him." (Tripp, p. 15).
1. Tripp,
Paul David (2000) War of Words. P&R Publications,
Phillipsburg, New Jersey
2. Kruger,
Armand (1999) "Denominalising the Emotions, Part 2."
Anchor Point, April 1999, p.45ff; at www.anchorpoint.com
3. Hall,
Michael (2000) "Belief Change Pattern" at
www.neurosemantics.com.
4. Kruger
and Bodenhamer (2000): "Biblical
Frames: Key to Spirituality" at
www.neurosemantics.com.
5. Any handbook
on NLP which explains the meta-model: Joseph O'Connor(2001)
NLP Workbook. Thorsons, or the exquisite complete book
by Michael Hall (2001) Communication
Magic by Crown Publications.
Contact information for
Armand Kruger:
South Africa's Institute
of Neuro - Semantics
Armand Kruger
PO Box 494
Meyerton
South Africa, 1960
Fax: 2716-362-1559
armandk@lantic.net
http://www.neurosemantics.co.za
©2002 Armand Kruger All rights reserved.
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