The Moment Before We Name It: The Limits of Language

Experience itself deserves more attention

A lot of us often feel the need to make sense of our life, when explaining life we try to fit everything we do into some rational theory and align it with some framework about life. Why do we do this and does it actually improve our lives?

Humans evolved to want control, control about our food, threats and life. This was of course in order to ensure our survival. This desire has stretched out over millennia and is now the most dominant reason responsible for our need to control our lives and behaviour such as tracking every calorie going in and outside our body.

When trying to put life in a theoretical framework or create a worldview there are 2 desires, one is conscious and the other one mostly unconscious. The rational desire: attempting to find out the truth about life and the evolutionary desire: trying to get a sense of control about life. These two can easily conflict and can result into a theory of life that mostly produces a feeling of safety, without being necessarily true.

In my opinion, life is too much to put into one single theory. Every sensory experience, every mental experience and every social interaction has so much depth and context needed in order to understand what it is and even then its description will inevitably miss nuances. These experiences are so rich and by trying to fit them into a framework it can lead to us neglecting the complexity of that experience.

Language plays a big part in this too I believe. For instance, you listen to Bach and a stream full of emotions overwhelm you, you forget about all your worries and for a small moment your soul is one with the music. The song ends and you get asked what you were doing, “just listening music” you answer.

By using the word “music” you gain control over what you just experienced, it results in a more comfortable feeling, however it also reduces its beauty and mystery. We use words in order to communicate to others, which is fine, it is a perfect way in order to convey the experience of certain phenomena. However, we don’t have to use words in order to understand what we feel or see, as individuals we have the pleasure of letting the experience itself speak to us.

We don’t need our experience to go through a filter of words in order to get it, words can water down the richness of phenomenons and by refusing to make sense of life by using words you get more of the pleasure and richness out of the experience. I’m not saying we should completely neglect language of course, it is a very functional tool in order to structure certain abstract concepts. However, language is inevitably descriptive and we shouldn’t confuse the map of the world for the actual world.

People often complain about the lack of mystic or beautiful experiences in life. We often act like we already understand everything and like our physical world can’t offer anything interesting experiences. However, we don’t understand the world, we can explain certain things, but the world in its entirety is completely incomprehensible to us. The most accurate indication we have of what it is, lies not in our linguistic theories, but in our direct experience.

This is why trying to fit life into a linguistic theory can be so reductive of its richness. My advice would be that the next time you encounter something beautiful: a flower, the sea, a work of art not to think of the word associated with what you say, but to just let the experience itself captivate you.

Perhaps then, by letting go of our intellectual defense mechanisms, then we can truly appreciate its truly mystical beauty and richness.