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106 Prosody and peak experiences
Manage episode 468707133 series 2964320
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Have you ever had a peak experience? Did you ever try to tell someone about it? Also, how good is your singing voice?
If you’re a native speaker of a tonal language like Mandarin, you may have an excellent singing voice (or at least, you’re more likely to pass a test for perfect pitch, according to a study reported in Scientific American). But in a language like English requires you only to grasp the difference between rising and falling tones—and these only in relation to each other—and this only for paralinguistic information (like whether someone’s being sarcastic).
If human language had evolved differently, we might all be amazing singers. Or so we might glean from Steven Mithen’s book, The singing Neanderthals (which I also discussed in Episode 78 of Structured Visions). Mithen proposes that human language evolved from music. All that remains that’s vaguely musical in language now is prosody. But what a diminished form of music it is!
In this episode we explore the quality of human language to reduce, constrict and thereby oppress, especially in relation to trying to put peak experiences into words. One of the features of a peak experience, according to Abraham Maslow in Religions, values and peak-experiences, is that ‘the whole universe is perceived as an integrated and unified whole.’ One of the reasons, I suggest, that it’s hard to express these mystical experiences is that language is structured around the principle of the self. Peak experiences refuse to be contained within the membrane of self.
And yet, when you look for it, it’s there. Within your self, somehow.
That’s the contradiction: the you that dissolves in a peak experience remains present by its inability communicate it.
What if we think of human language as developed by the Earth itself, as part of the Earth’s agentive evolution? What if the Earth produced selfhood to experience mystery?
Entertaining that possibility offers us the opportunity to explore the mysteries within us, and to keep sacred the mysteries of others.
Have you ever had a peak experience? Tell me all about it.
The story I read in this episode is ‘The luthier.’
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