Replying to LO24285 --
Dear Organlearners,
Jan Lelie <janlelie@wxs.nl> writes:
>Although i think it is far from me to say what people should
>manifest, i know from experience that one or two people were
>able to cause me to have deep compassion just by saying it.
Greetings Jan,
Please write more on this couple of experiences. I am extremely interested
in knowing how they caused the deep compassion. Did these sayings
triggered it? Did the sayings guide its emergence? Did the sayings
catalysed it? How "exactly" did the sayings caused it to happen?
Yes, language can have an immense contribution. But as Jesus told us in
the parable of the sower, not all the seed (words which we speak) fall on
fertile ground. This is also what you add to your remark with:
>But, i must admit, it had taken me years of preparation and a
>final five days training. And also these persons were deeply
>compassionate themselves.
What I am deeply interested in is, when language contributes to the
manifestation of deep compassion, what things are essential to the
language in this case? Please, try to keep "body language" out of it
because we cannot comprehend "body language" in cyberspace -- we merely
have printed words to work with. Body language is very impoartant, but it
requires physical presence.
>I agree on the worth of studying the language as one of the
>ways to prepare. I suspect that the meaning of words and
>their roots is far from superficial and that the meaning of these
>former animal sounds has been shaped, distilled, formed, over
>many generations of use.
Jan, yes, we can not keep these paleontological animal precursors out of
the whole picture. But let us think just how little we know (how many
"missing links") there are in the family Hominidae to which humankind, the
species Homo sapiens, belong. We know absolutely nothing about the
language/sounds which the other species of the genus Homo, namely H
erectus, made. The family Hominidae also has the genus Australopitechus.
Believe it not, but four species of this extinct genus has been found
within a radius of 250 km from Preoria! We also know nothing about the
language/sounds which species of this genus made. As for our own species H
sapiens, very few records of language go back furher than 6000 years ago.
So, when we want to trace the evolution of the "articulation of meaning"
so as to help us understand how to express meaning and our tacit knowledge
with our present languages, we have but a few millenia of evolution which
we can make use of.
I liked your reference to "meedelijden" = "deernis" for "deep
compassion". We also have this word as "medelye" in Afrikaans. The prifix
"mede-"="mit-" does for Germanic words what "com-"="con-"="cor-" in
English for Latin words do. The root word "ly" (pronounced as "lay" in
English) cariies with it an important cultural value of a thousand an more
years ago. The word "ly" means "suffer". It is pronounced exactly as "lei"
which means "lead". In those days of the ancient germanic cultures,
leaders went in front of any struggle or battle for something of value.
Thus they were leading and suffering simultaneously.
The battle or struggle usually ended when the leader/sufferer died as a
result of it. It is so different from today where the leaders keep to the
back, pushing others to do the job at the front while posing as leaders to
the rest of their people. In those days leaders knew what both "lei"
(lead) and "ly" (suffer) meant so that they could express "medelye"
(compassion) with somebody else who also struggles against destructive
immergences and longing for constructive emergences.
It was very much the same with the Banthu cultures of Southern Africa
before the coming of first the Arab traders and then the European
settlers. But somehow this cultural value immerged also here in Africa the
past 100 years. A remarkable exception is Nelson Mandela who knows by
experiences that "ly" and "lei" are two sides of one and the same thing.
That is why he has such "deep compassion" or "deernis" for fellow humans
irrespective of race, creed or sex.
Can someone who manage by pulling the strings and pushing
the buttons in the backroom have compassion for fellow humans?
What do languages say?
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>
"Learning-org" and the format of our message identifiers (LO1234, etc.) are trademarks of Richard Karash.