“How Do You Define Reality?” Or: Language As A Mind-Control Device
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
In
order to accept the world as it is, we must first discover the true nature
of the world. It won’t do us any good to cheerfully accept a set
of conditions that do not actually apply to us. This would be like running
away from a toothless dog, or wasting our money on something we don’t
need. A positive attitude won’t help us discover the errors in our
thinking. In fact it might make us more susceptible to the lies of those
who only wish to take advantage of our good nature.
The
appropriate attitude, as we stated before, must correspond to the actual
situation we face at the present time. Situations change constantly,
and our attitudes must also change in response to these fluctuations
in circumstance. Words can help us make sense of our own minds, but they
cannot accurately reflect the world in all its intricate complexity.
No set of thoughts inscribed on paper can ever describe the world of
experience in its entirety. The world will always remain a mystery to
us. In fact, we may not be able to make one correct statement about the
nature of the world that we perceive.
Nevertheless,
we do perceive the world and we do experience something in our daily
lives. This direct experience must become our guide through the maze
of concepts that try to explain, but can only succeed in limiting,
our perceptions. When we trust words more than our own experience,
we fall into the trap of being controlled by language. According to
author Robert Anton Wilson and others, language has long been used
as a device for controlling the minds of the masses. In Wilson’s
book Everything Is Under
Control (1998) we read, “Language as a mind-control
device has been discussed by such philosophers as Vico (18th century),
Stirner and Nietzsche (19th century), and Wittgenstein (20th century).
The most radical scientific critics of language in our time include
Count Alfred Korzybski and Dr. Richard Bandler.” A complete
discussion of the linguistic theories expounded upon by these authors
would be beyond the scope of the present work. However, the most
contemporary of these authors, Korzybski and Bandler, deserve a
closer examination for the purpose of this course.
On
the subject of Korzybski in Everything Is Under Control (1998)
Robert Anton Wilson says, “Korzybski, who grew up in a house
where four languages were spoken (Polish, Russian, French, German)
and learned English much later, observed that the words we use influence
our perceptions and conceptions of the world—e.g., even in
the same language, a book may be called ‘realistic’ by
one reader and ‘pornographic’ by
another, and each will tend to perceive/conceive the book that way
more and more automatically if they use their label (‘realistic’ or ‘pornographic’)
over and over. This underlies the mechanism of hypnosis, as Dr. Bandler
discovered later. It also explains why you won’t make much
progress preaching radical equality to someone who continually uses
the word ‘nigger,’ or
defending the first amendment to somebody who keeps saying ‘smut’ (or ‘sexism’).”
Politicians
and their speech writers have long since discovered Dr. Bandler’s
method of hypnosis, and use it to influence our perception of the
world for their own ends. This is why words like “terrorists,” “WMD,” “national
security,” and others tend to be repeated on television ad
nauseam. Mind control through hypnosis results from the interminable
repetition of these loaded words and phrases. A loaded word is one,
like the previously mentioned “sexism,” that provokes
a strong emotional reaction in a certain set of listeners. Repeat
this word often enough in association with a certain person or book,
and pretty soon those listening with a sympathetic ear will begin
to feel hostile towards the “sexist” who has
been denounced. The words “witch” and “communist” once
had a similar power to inspire the masses with homicidal rage.
As we shall
see in the next section, terms such as “mentally ill” and
the pseudoscientific acronyms associated with mental “illness” have
now attained the hypnotic status that the word “witch” enjoyed
in the Dark Ages. Even words only loosely associated with mental
problems, such as “counseling” and “therapy,” have
become terms of abuse implying that those who go in for such things
must be “nuts.” Just
as any accused witch could be condemned to torture and execution
in past centuries, so the simple act of labeling someone “crazy” in
today’s world gives any psychiatrist sufficient justification
to lock a person away in a cell and force them to take drugs. This
kind of institutionalized insanity is just one example of the extent
to which linguistic mind control still predominates in the modern
society which we would like to think of as being more enlightened
and just than that of past ages.
Luckily,
the antidote for mind control has been developed, and anyone can
use it. This means that we don’t have to remain hypnotized and deceived by
the loaded words and phrases that the power mongers of our age use to control
us. Instead, we can deprogram ourselves and learn to see things without
the distortion of preconceived judgments imposed on us by others. The concept
of reality creation through the use of words suddenly becomes more clear.
We live in a world created by verbal structures. This verbal illusion that
we call the world actually exists inside our heads. Like submarine drivers
looking out through periscopes at the surface above, we can only see what
is reflected in the “mirrors” of our minds. This explains
why a change of attitude, or a different way of thinking, can change
the nature of the world we experience. Our perceptions limit and
define our experience. Words and concepts can modify and change our
perceptions. Therefore words can affect and even create, at least
to a certain extent, our experiences.
Our thinking can help us to recover from any trauma we may have experienced
in life by changing the way we view the world. By programming our own minds
with more positive, life-affirming verbal structures, we might even be
able to discover new and more exciting realities, the existence of which
we never dared to suspect. (The subject of Neuro-Linguistic Programming
and reality selection should be studied further by anyone wishing to heal
from trauma. Interested students ought to read the authors mentioned in
the bibliography and pursue their own lines of research.)
Note
that words cannot actually contain the external world next to which
our own perceptions are only a poorly reproduced image. The “reality” that
we perceive actually exists inside, not outside of our minds. External
reality cannot be directly perceived. The outside world can only
affect us through the medium of our senses. Our minds must then organize
our sense impressions into an orderly pattern that can be understood
and used for our benefit. This process of organizing sense data goes
on without our being aware of it. Often, our minds will simply reduce
an image of something we perceive into a word-concept. By naming a thing,
we can put it away in our minds where we think it belongs and go on to
the next item of perception. All too often, however, the name we assign
to the “thing” that
we see doesn’t exactly fit. By reducing things to words, we
fool ourselves into believing that our verbal structures are the “real
thing,” In the process, we forget that the world outside our
heads doesn’t fit into the mental file cabinet we use to organize
our impressions.
Since everyone’s mind works differently, no one “sees” the
same reality that another person “sees.” We don’t really “look.” Mike & Nancy
Samuels in Seeing With The Mind’s Eye (1990) tell
us, “What
people ‘see’ when they look at an external object is dependent
upon who they are and what they are interested in at that moment. For example,
a butcher might look at a bull and see beef steaks, a county judge might
see the bull’s good or bad lines, and a city dweller might
see the bull as an object of sheer terror.”
People
who have been traumatized will often see certain things as objects
of terror, and this automatic fear reaction keeps them from experiencing
the potentially positive aspects of the thing they fear. For example,
a person raised by abusive “alcoholic” parents may be
unable to enjoy a drink with friends. In this case, the alcohol has
become an object of terror. Alcohol cannot harm anyone all by itself.
In order for alcohol to become harmful, a person must choose to “abuse” it
by drinking too much. Therefore the person who drinks too much ought
to be feared, not the alcohol itself.
This applies
to many potentially dangerous objects associated with traumatic experiences,
including fast cars, weapons, drugs, poor neighborhoods, “pornographic” literature,
and so on. None of the things to which these words refer are inherently
terrifying. Nevertheless, the traumatized person feels a twinge of fear
when such “things” are mentioned aloud. This shows how
words can be used to inspire a fear of things or people that are
not necessarily harmful in and of themselves. By the same token,
our own verbal structures can make us fear and avoid experiences
which would actually be good for us, judge and condemn people who
are actually innocent, or believe that we cannot be healed when more
exercise, better food, and loving companions are all we need in order
to recover full health and happiness.
Now
that we’ve started exploring this concept of “inner” and “outer” reality,
just how far can we go? The way becomes a bit more tangled when we begin
to question the idea of “reality” itself. Just what is “real,” anyway?
Are our thoughts real? Is there any such thing as the “outside world,” or
are we making it all up as we go along? These questions cannot be conclusively
answered. Modern science, with its development of quantum theory, has discovered
that the observer and the thing observed cannot be strictly separated,
even under controlled conditions. The observer always participates in the
creation of the thing observed. Mike & Nancy Samuels in Seeing
With The Mind’s Eye (1990) say that, “For the physicist,
the difference between external reality and the inner reality of his own
images has become difficult to distinguish. Whereas the layman ‘sees’ a
metal cube as a solid object, a physicist has an image in his mind of a
cube as something like the nighttime sky—being made up mostly of
space between atoms. And whereas the layman ‘sees’ the cube
as stationary, the physicist ‘sees’ the cube as so many rapidly
moving electrons whose position in space can only be fixed as a matter
of mathematical probability.” Which cube is the “real” one?
Or perhaps we should ask, what is the actual nature of the thing that both
physicist and layman agree to call a “cube?”
Once again,
such questions can only be answered by pointing out that the true
nature of things will always remain a mystery to us. As we discover
from Mike & Nancy
Samuels in Seeing With The Minds Eye (1990),
scientists do not even know how to define the nature of light: “...for
the physicist, the whole question of the structure of matter is studded
with paradoxes. Light, the very substance that allows people to perceive
external objects, is believed to behave both as a wave and as a particle—as
both energy and matter. Also, the physicist now believes that time is relative
to the speed at which an observer is moving. He no longer recognizes one
fixed external reality; he believes that a perceived reality is inseparable
from the mind of the observer.” In light of the state of ignorance
in which we exist, we can only observe the workings of our own minds,
and decide for ourselves what to believe. This is why thoughts and
attitudes have so much power.
According
to psychologist Carl Jung, thoughts are just as real as so-called
physical objects. Quoted by Mike & Nancy Samuels in Seeing With
The Mind’s
Eye (1990), Jung tells us that “If a fire burns me,
I do not question the reality of the fire, whereas if I am beset
by the fear that a ghost will appear, I take refuge behind the
thought that it is only an illusion. But just as the fire is the
psychic image of a physical process whose nature is unknown, so
my fear of the ghost is a psychic image from a mental source; it
is just as real as the fire, for my fear is as real as the pain
caused by the fire.” The mind really does create a world
for itself out of the perceptions that enter it. Where these perceptions
come from does not matter. Nor does it matter if such perceptions
are objectively real, since thoughts cannot be separated from perceived
reality. All that matters, if we accept Jung’s thesis, is
that the world-view we create helps us to find more satisfying
experiences in life. Recovery entails the creation of an inner
world that assists us in fulfilling our desires and dreams.
Perhaps the most radical viewpoint concerning the power of words to create
reality has been developed by science fiction novelist William S. Burroughs.
In Everything Is Under Control (1998) Robert Anton Wilson
says, “Novelist
William S. Burroughs, who studied general semantics with Korzybski, has
developed these notions into the surrealist theme of language as an invading
virus, found in most of his novels. This virus, according to Burroughs,
creates our thoughts, feelings, and sense impressions.” If
Burroughs is right, what we think of as the world might be nothing
more than a product of our diseased imaginations. Such a viewpoint
opens up the kind of possibilities explored in movies like The Matrix
series, where the world we live in is actually an illusory construct
implanted in our brains by an Artificial Intelligence computer system.
Complete recovery in such a world would entail a disconnection from
this illusion. Once we see the real world behind the illusion, we
gain the power to enter the illusory world again and bend or break
the rules of this illusory world by an act of will.
A
more conservative viewpoint might hold that some sort of reality
does exist, and that our thoughts both help us and hinder us from perceiving
it accurately. This viewpoint is expressed by Jamie Sams in Dancing
The Dream (1999): “Our
understanding is limited by the tiny range of human perception offered
through the use of human eyes, ears, noses, mouths, thoughts, and
feelings. The veils are composed of the data we gather from our perceptions
while we experience life and the assumptions, decisions, and determinations
we make about how life works. These preconceptions distort our view
of reality even as they allow us to make sense of it all, and even
cause us to omit details that don’t match our assumptions.”
In accord with this philosophy, a mind free of assumptions and preconceptions will be better able to create an accurate picture of reality. This means that we must let go of our own opinions and beliefs to a certain extent, and cultivate an attitude of neutrality, if we wish to be free of misconceptions and illusions. Jamie Sams further states in Dancing The Dream (1999), “Our personal viewpoints tend to anchor us in one level of experience, keeping us attached to ideas and feelings that disallow expansion. There are millions of valid truths in our world. We will eventually gain the skill needed to recognize and assimilate the validity in all human viewpoints while maintaining our uniqueness as well as detached neutrality.” Recovery entails being fully present in the moment, and full presence can only be achieved in the absence of thoughts that limit our perceptions. Such limiting thoughts can be discovered and eliminated through meditation, as we will see later. But first, we must explore the nature of the preconceptions that already limit and distort our collective perception of the process of recovery.