“But His Command, when He Intendeth a thing, is only that He Saith unto it: Be! and it is.” [Quran, 36 : 82]
I am going to show you something utterly bizarre, yet critically important.
It is the bedrock of our reality, yet it is also a gaping hole in the very fabric of that reality — or rather, what we refer to as reality.
This hole, however, will not look like a hole. You simply have to trust me.
This is it.
One of the most important shapes you will ever see.
It is the number 6. I am fairly certain you have seen it before, or else you would be required to return to the earliest stages of your schooling and I doubt you would be reading this.
At any rate, this number is a key. What happens when you turn it 180 degrees?
You unlock a hidden doorway. Now it is a different number, 9, with a different value, three more than 6.
So, which one is it?
It is a silly question, yet one often asked when playing cards.
Now imagine this shape rotating clockwise. What you will notice is that the number never stops being one or the other. There is no blurring in between: it is always either 6 or 9. And it flips instantly.
Once you notice this, you can control it consciously — I can always force myself to see the number 9 even after 180 degrees of rotation, albeit I must fight against myself.
A similar case would be the last letter of the alphabet.
This is the letter Z. Again, I doubt that this revelation will come as a surprise to you, but now turn it by 90 degrees. What happens?
You get a different letter, N, although a somewhat strange iteration of it in this example (we will get to that in a moment).
Now, assume I make one end of the letter Z the ‘top’ and the other end the ‘bottom’.
Rotate this by 180 degrees. Do you see this…
Or this again?
If you were to imagine the shape rotating in front of you, you would notice that as soon as the rotation reaches 90 degrees, the halfway point, your mind would involuntarily switch the top and bottom sides.
Now look at this.
Which one of the two is it? An N? A Z?
The truth is that it is both at the same time.
But “both at the same time” is not something you ever have to see in reality, so you do not, because you cannot. It simply registers as one or the other, because you are always seeing one or the other.
Let us focus on the letter N.
You recognise it instantly. And you did not have to think about it. You recognised it as soon as you saw it. In fact, the act of seeing it was the act of recognising it.
But all of these are also the letter N.
Why? I am really not sure.
When you analyse them deeply, these glyphs have surprisingly little in common, besides the fact that they represent the same thing.
You may think this discovery (and in fact this article) rather mundane and unremarkable up until this point. It may even be a bit confusing. But trust me, it will all make sense soon. Many of the greatest mysteries of life are hidden in plain sight, in the things we take for granted every day.
What we learn from the above is that a tremendous portion of the letter N — and, indeed, most letters — is just noise, with a tiny fraction that is not easily located being signal.
All three lines that make up the letter could be straight. Or only two, as in the middle letter in the bottom row, or one, as in the letter above it, or none, as in the one to the right of that.
The letter can be as narrow (top left) or as wide (bottom right) as you want.
It can be two vertical lines and one diagonal, two diagonal lines and one vertical, or three diagonal lines. The line connecting the other two could even extend beyond their boundaries.
Remove the connecting line and it becomes something different that is not an N.
Except it can be an N if I want it to.
And although these iterations are a stretch, they work just fine.
The essential point is that you can subject the letter to a host of distortions without any tangible loss of meaning. The letter has an elasticity which can be played with.
If you instruct ten people to write the letter N, no two will be exactly the same.
But they will all share something in common with this <N>.
Why is this the case? Why does this plasticity exist?
Pareidolia
Pareidolia is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one sees an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none. It is what causes you to see a face in a tree or a rock.
This, for example, is not a human face. It is a piece of stone.
But it is not that either. It’s a series of pixels on your screen.
You see the left in the right…
…for the same reason you see the left in the right.
Both are examples of the sme effect: pareidolia.
The cognitive flexibility which allows the right examples in the images above to be the left examples is what allows stones to be faces.
It is also what allows colours to evoke certain emotions (more on that later).
The fact of the matter is that every time you experience a certain stimulus, be it a colour, an image or a sound, it makes a subtle impression on your perception.
Some smells may take you back to childhood. Certain sounds may remind you of a particular memory.
Sensation is memory, be they your own memories or someone else’s.
Our perceptions are made up of these compound super-memories: they are responsible for the feelings certain stimuli evoke.
These are called emanations.
Carl Jung would say that these super-memories, or emanations, are projected onto the objects. This is half-true, and the idea of a projector displaying the contents of the human psyche works — this bears resemblance to Plato’s allegory of the cave. The problem is that it implies that this is a voluntary process: you cannot accidentally project a film reel onto a screen and a literal projector can be turned off.
The idea that you can turn your ‘projections’ off and observe the world as it really appears is a misleading one.
If you could not project an emanation onto the smiley face, you would not be able to liken it to the image of a person smiling. Two dots with a curved line underneath in and of itself does not mean anything. The emanation is the perceived meaning. Perception without ‘projection’ is meaningless.
Logos
“Let there be light” is the first utterance of God in the Bible at the creation of the universe. Here are a few examples below:
let there be light
LET THERE BE LIGHT
Let there be light
Lt thr b lght
Let there be light
Let tehre be lgiht
The same pareidolia mentioned above is what allos you to see the same meaning in all of these slightly different examples.
Even the ones where the letters are mixed up or the vowels are removed.
An almost-visible shining thread cuts through the letters as you read them. And although the thread is in the letters, it is not the letters themselves. It simply wears them like clothing. Like how the meaning of the letter N ears many different shapes.
Let’s call this shining thread Logos (Λόγος), which means ‘word’ in Koine Greek, and the shining thread seems to be made of words.
Language was invented — or, rather, discovered — when humans realised that they could use their cognitive facilities consciously and intentionally, not accidentally. We learnt that, if we could be conditioned to perceive a concept in a vocalisation — if we could name things — then we could use those names to string meanings together into more complex meanings and make things happen.
It is exactly the same discovery as that of tools and technology, and the two probably coincided.
But if perception is pareidolic, then that would mean that meaning is, itself, a hallucination. This string of thought could easily pave the way to solipsism and nihilism.
Here is the key that gives meaning its meaning, almost: hallucinations are not illusions. They aren’t simply tricks our minds play on us, or else ho would we all share them?
Here is how perception works: your unconscious mind receives the mass of information flowing in from sensory stimuli. It then grafts this information together by painting a picture of the world. We may say that the paint it uses to draw these pictures are feelings and ideas drawn from past experiences. These paints are what we have called emanations.
By far the easiest way to observe this phenomenon is in language.
Only in language are emanations fully differentiated, as opposed to colour, for example, where there are so many associations with every colour that it is difficult for one or the other to stand out. A colour can mean anything to anyone. If someone’s favourite colour was yellow, but they were locked up in a grey prison where the prison guard who beat them every day wore a yellow uniform, they wouldn’t like the colour very much anymore, would they?
The colour red could be lipstick, a strawberry or a bloodstain. It could be a rose or a stop sign. The colour is only meaningful because it reminds us of other red things, and it evokes the emotion that all red things seem to have in common, which, in essence, is this ‘!’. This is something, but not something well defined.
Take these examples, though: Pleasure, Pain, Joy, Grief, Love, Apathy, Hot, Cold, Peace, War, Death, Life. You begin to feel the connections. They are well defined with clear meanings, which allows you to feel the essences of the words, because they are distinct.
If I say, for example:
Flowers and fruits, smiles and songs and friends dancing in the summer sun.
Compare that to:
Storm clouds and darkness, fire and ashes, strangers, demonic gazes, and dogs snarling.
You did not think about these sentences. You just felt them. Perhaps you even visualised them.
If I asked you to, you could probably describe the scenery in great detail, even though there is not much to go off of in the sentences themselves.
Furthermore, what is a demonic gaze? Why did you know what that meant? Neither you nor I have ever seen a demon. So how do we know?
You cannot think about these things, because it would take too long. You must connect everything to everything else in your mind so that you see and feel the connection, or else you won’t make sense of the world quickly enough.
What language reveals to us is exactly the psychic process I have already described, but streamlined with sophisticated precision and exactitude. It takes a very, very specific meaning and binds it to a very, very specific sound.
:) = smile
It uses the same mechanism as perception itself, but refined, distilled and weaponised.
This is the culmination of everything we’ve discussed thus far: You’re not seeing the world, you’re reading it.
The colour above reminds me of the sky, because the sky is that colour.
The song “Batwanes beek” reminds me of someone very dear to me, because I thought of that person when I heard the song.
The symbols “C A T” remind me of a sound, ‘cat’, which reminds me of an animal.
In that last case, the connection is much more powerful, because the three symbols C A T, when put together, only mean the thing pictured above, and always mean the thing pictured above. The symbols, the sound and the meaning behind them are so thoroughly intertwined that the connection between the three, although somewhat stacked and abstract, is instant.
Language had to use the same mechanism as perception, because it uses the same sensory channels. How could be otherwise?
The Psychopomp
In the mythic cosmology of the ancients, the psychopomp was an archetypal deity who acted as both a messenger of the gods of the pantheon and a guide of souls (which is what psychopomp means).
This deity — Hermes to the Greeks, Mercury to the Romans, Morana to the Slavs and Vanth to the Etruscans, was the connection between the celestial realm above and the chthonic realm below.
Mind you, I have no relation to paganism nor do I have any fondness towards it. But it is worth noting that the psychopomp was also always the patron of magicians and the inventor of writing.
Hermes, or Mercury, was said to be the inventor of the alphabet. He was also a god of magic.
The Egyptian deity Thoth was the inventor of writing, which the Egyptians called Medu Netjer, or ‘speech of the gods’. He was also a god of magic.
The Norse god Odin, father of Thor and Loki, was said to be the discoverer of the Nordic runes and was a wanderer of realms and a powerful magician.
This is why we ‘spell’.
It is why we call bad words ‘curses’.
It is also why someone who can talk you into things is ‘charming’.
The word ‘charisma’ means a divinely conferred power or talent. “Charis” in Greek means grace or favour.
Supposedly, the magic word Abracadabra is derived from the the Hebrew phrase “Avre kehdabra אברא כדברא,” or “I will create as I speak.”
Genesis 1 in the Bible mentions God as speaking the world into existence, where it says the following:
“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”
We know from the Quran that Allah simply Commanded the world into creation, as the verse in the very beginning of this entry describes, Saying unto it:
“But His Command, when He Intendeth a thing, is only that He Saith unto it: Be! and it is.” [Quran, 36:82]
Language As Creation
There seems to be something to the idea that the world has a linguistic structure. It may even be better to say that the world has a symbolic structure, just as long as we remember that language is symbolism and symbolism is a language.
Language shapes our perception, but this is only so because our perception already took the shape of a language. Likewise the structure of language is derived from that of perception. We project meaning onto the symbols of the alphabet. We hear what they have meant before, and we do not eve have to try anymore: the association just happens.
Every letter is an emanation, which amalgamates with other letters to form more complex emanations in the form of words. You are doing it right now.
Indeed, it seems, language is what makes us human.
After Adam (which means human in Hebrew) is created, God Teaches him the names of all things and Tasks him with naming them all to the angels.
“And He Taught Adam all the names, then Showed them to the angels, Saying: Inform Me of the names of these if ye are truthful.
They said: Be Glorified! We have no knowledge save that which Thou Hast Taught us. Verily Thou, only Thou, Art the Knower, the Wise.
He Said: O Adam! Inform them of their names, and when he had informed them of their names, He Said, did I not Tell you that I Know the secret of the heavens and the earth? And I Know that which ye disclose and that which ye hide.” — [Quran, 2 : 32–34]
This is important, as it is the first thing Allah commands Adam to do.
A name is a magnet for meaning. It is names which illuminate perception. Names map the world, which create contrast, divide this from that. We ought to note that in the verses above, the first two things that Allah Names as distinct are the heavens and the earth: the creation of opposites and duality.
When we name something, we program our perception.
Look at the image below.
We can identify all of these as shades of the colour green.
Just as we identified all the letters as N earlier in this entry.
The name gathers these things together, allowing them to converge around a centre. That is, it con-centrates them.
To concentrate is to focus, and that is what words allow to you to: to focus on a particular meaning. Without words, the world is out of focus and everything blurs into everything else.
We now understand that the intellect is verbal.
It is the capacity to think logically.
Logic = Logos = Word
Language cuts the world into pieces. It sharpens our perception. It points things out and gives them distinct edges. In that way, the pen is mightier than the sword.
Think of the name as the capstone of a pyramid, the concentration and peak of a much larger underlying structure, the emanation.
The name is the conscious part of the structure, the emanation, the rest of the structure, is submerged in our unconscious.
This structure organises and unifies a complex system of ideas, thoughts, memories and feelings. It is an organ of perception which manages the interactions between the senses and the mind. This structure exists alongside, and sometimes overlapping with, other structures, and is contained inside of larger structures. Pyramids alongside and overlapping with pyramids inside of larger pyramids.
All of that is to say your perception is organised using a complex system of symbolic connections. The language we speak and the connections it contains are a sort of low-resolution, miniature model of this system. A collective psychological operating system.
This is what makes metaphors work. This is why you know what a demonic gaze is, even though you’ve never seen a demon.
A demonic gaze is simply a gaze that feels dark, frightening and otherworldly. It’s what you imagine a demon’s gaze would look like.
If perception really does operate in this system, one that is symbolic with meaning converging around centres, this would make the idea of dream reading credible. If every image that the mind could conjure, along with every idea or emotion all relate and interlink in a meaningful way like words in an extremely convoluted and esoteric language, we can infer that every image or sequence of images the mind conjures up, no matter how abstract or accidental it may be, is intelligible.
If this model is correct (and it does seem to be), then there is no qualitative difference between symbolic and verbal communication. Language, in that sense, is a very simple and straightforward form of symbolism and symbolism is a complex and esoteric form of language.
The word ‘if’ is not really appropriate. Because perception works this way, we should expect even the most elementary phenomena, be they patterns or even sounds, to be meaningful and evocative. Even something as frivolous as music would evoke strong emotions, just as the one below will.
You would not like music, it would not provoke strong emotions, if this was not your mode of perception.
But you do, and it is.
