Ectoplasm

On Spiritual Linguistics

Here's an article from Salon (so you'll need to sit through an ad for Audi or Mastercard or some other overly workshopped aesthetically pleasing consumer good) that deals with something I'll happily admit to: Linguistic elitism in spiritual conversations.

Now, it's one thing to use eastern language, you get a free pass if you say Satori or Kensho or whatever, but there's a certain distance that reduces them to nothing but aesthetics; witness the overuse of the word Zen to describe anything vaguely focused or minimalist, or that a fragrance called 'Samsara' was released (because I want to smell like I'm suffering) or that a hair salon might be called Satori.

Christian terminology is a little more fixed in the Western mind, but it can be problematic for the cynical: Mysticism isn't the greatest word ever, Divine gets overused, so the tendency is to rely on words with a similar distance: Kenosis, Rapture et al.

I'm not saying this as a hardened science nut, just as someone with a certain embarassment level about this kind of thing (rightly or wrongly, more likely wrongly on my behalf, but you could make the argument that more 'literate' - not necessarily secular - language would go a long way to solving the image problem of certain contemplative practises. Or maybe it would just make me feel better).

Well, it looks like I'm not alone. Mary Roach has written a book, Spook, looking at scientific attempts to prove the paranormal (including those conducted by I-I associate Gary Schwartz). She comes to some interesting conclusions, particularly about the type of research that is needed and the conclusions that can be drawn, but more imporantly for this post, she has this to say about the paranormal vernacular:

Salon: Something else that struck a chord with me: When you're at Arthur Findlay College doing a three-day course in mediumship, you write, "There are moments, listening to the conversations going on around me, when I feel I am going to lose my mind. Earlier today, I heard someone say the words, 'I felt at one with the divine source of creation.'" I have the same problem with spiritual talk. Do you think it would be easier to believe if the language of belief were more sophisticated?

Roach: Yes! I am so put off by the way people write first-person experiential pieces about trips to the afterlife, or angels. The way that they write about it makes them sound so naive. Sometimes when I'm talking about this book I'll have to use a term like "energy field," and I feel really embarrassed. I'm much more comfortable with the language of quantum mechanics. Negentropy, I don't even understand what that is, but I'm comfortable saying "negentropy" and I'm not comfortable saying "energy fields." It's very much tied up with language.

So there you go. Not that this critique is necessarily valid or what have you, but I imagine that it's a fairly common concern.