Imagine experiencing nature and the whole of life without words. Just as you walk, paint, feel or swim without words. Look around your room and just perceive it. Now look around again and try to name things as you seem them.

Wordlessness is Wholeness

Your mind can perceive instantly while it has to work hard to think of words. Living animals are virtual perfect mirrors of our surroundings. Even though we humans are nature, words spoken and unspoken separate us from nature and each “others.” We are capable of acquiring language, but we are not designed to experience the world through language.

Wordlessness allows us to experience life in its full exquisiteness—lovers need no words. As soon as we speak, we begin the separation. Development of symbolic language is the moment of rupture of the original unity of humanity and nature.

“The Fall” and Language

The Fall in Genesis is the fall into language and time, Adam created language when he ate from the God’s own tree of knowledge. Man became master of things by naming them, “and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” The beginning of humanity’s separation from the world is located at the naming of the world. We are told in the Gospel of John that God did the first naming, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The myth of the Tower of Babel is also an attempt to come to terms with the separation of humanity from the Garden of Eden—nature. The splintering of an “original language” may best be understood as the emergence of symbolic language.

Creation of symbolic language was a precondition of the creation of time. Before symbolic language, Paleolithic language did not have tenses. Before the agricultural revolution, there was no past, present, or future—there was just now.

For almost all of human existence we have experienced life in its wholeness and grace—for 99.7 percent of our history. There was a vast epoch for three or four million of years that humanity lived well-nourished lives with abundant leisure time. See Marshal Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics. The question is not, “why agriculture and language were not developed sooner, but why were they developed at all?”

Development of Symbolic Language

This revolution in communication occurred 10,000 years ago with the invention of symbolic language. New technology caused an expansion in language. Neolithic man did not search a farm supply catalog for tools, Neolithic man invented a wedge that could be pulled through the ground to till the soil and then called the invention a “plow.” As with our internet today, technology creates new words—you are reading a “blog”.

You could almost call it the “language revolution” instead of the “agricultural revolution”. Modern Neolithic language moved humanity from “active” to “passive”—from “unity with nature” to “separation”.

eolithic farmers imposed work–division of labor, property, and civilization on Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Specialization further manifests new words. Each new specialty needs additional vocabulary. Farmers, chemists, lawyers, warehousemen, sportscasters, truckers all seem to use their own subset of our language. Each specialization and its ensuing language takes us further from our original unity with nature.

Julian Jaynes in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind suggests that the ancients did not posses a conscious mind space or ego until about 3,000 years ago when symbolic language and the written word were developed.

Numbers maybe older than words. In Sumer the first mathematical computations appeared, between 3500 and 3000 B.C., in the form of inventories, deeds of sale, contracts, unit prices, units purchased, interest payments, etc. The Code of Ur-Nammu did not appear until 2050 B.C. and the more famous Code of Hammurabi appeared until 1760 B.C. Which ever date you accept for the development of symbolic or written language, this is the moment our mode of consciousness changed.

This decay of sensual active hunter-gatherer language is reflected in the decline of the verb. Verbs comprised approximately half of all Paleolithic hunter-gatherer words. In modern English, verbs account for less than 10 percent of words.

The Navajo language has far more words for touching, sensing, and seeing life. Navajo has an amazing wealth of verb inflections to change the tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender of a verb. Hunter-gatherer languages have far fewer nouns and almost no numbers. Numbers were frequently limited to one, two, or many.

Where I live in Telluride, CO almost every peak is named in modern English. Before European settlers however, only one peak was named, Shandoka. In Ute the language Shandoka means “weather maker”. It was named only because it is high enough and in the right location that it literally makes its own weather; clouds frequently form around Shandoka before a storm.

Language Alienates us from Nature

By dividing and deconstructing the world with our language we created a form of knowing that is so totally wrong about how the world really works that it cannot be used to develop a sustainable lifestyle. We no longer look at the big picture of how the world works nor do we see our selves as a member of a family of species. We now see our selves above and apart from all other species. Our language has also broken the world down into pieces—many of which we have lost. A forest is no longer a unified life force, it is a tree, trunk, bark, leaves, and roots. We are learning that everything is connected to everything else and most of our “solutions” have brought unintended consequences.

Numbers further alienate humanity from nature by reducing irreplaceable variant “things” to numbers. No one has ever seen identical snowflakes, leaves, clouds, or animals, but numbers assume they are all the same. An entire forest ecosystem, home to millions of living organisms, is reduced to board feet and dollars. Dead inanimate money has been substituted for living animate nature. Numbers are the ultimate tool to diminish all value of life and externalize all costs such as pollutants and social injustices.

Uncivilized Native Americans wondered why early Europeans destroyed nature with detachment; Native Americans felt a repugnance to intellectual effort and especially arithmetic. All that can come from scientific analysis of the world and our artificial economy is numbers. Today’s industrial capitalism sits at the very pinnacle of focus on abstract measurement—see the Financial Crisis essay. Language and especially mathematics has allowed civilized humanity to take everything with detachment and leave nothing. Daniel Quinn calls us Takers and native cultures Leavers.

Language substitutes the perceptual order of real life experience with empty concepts. Humanity resisted civilization and all of its injustices for a very long time. British archeologist Clive Gamble noted that recent studies have revealed the existence, some 300,000 years ago, of mental ability equivalent to modern man. Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion, “that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means of power and coercion.”

Our government has to enact programs such as “No Child Left Behind” to keep us reading. Reading equals laws and laws along with private property and locking up the food forcing people to work within the system equals control.

Modern languages have evolved to become non-sacred “dominate and survive” languages in which we have to “get it right” or be dominated by others. To maintain our well being, to be safe, and ultimately to survive we are forced to compete within this duality of “smart” vs. “stupid” or “success” vs. “Failure.” This is not to say that English could be used as sacred language. It has to be to begin the study of Sanskrit or Navajo.

Everyday the global communication revolution moves us even further away from nature. We have sacrificed a deep intimate experience with nature, a household level of knowledge of plants and animals, the landscape, and a rich hunter-gatherer language. We have gained something with no intrinsic value—information and data experienced in isolation.

Preserve and Learn from Native Languages

By literally an act of nature, Native Americans were trapped here 10,000 years ago when the most recent ice age came to an end. This froze in time their largely Paleolithic language and culture. Isolated here in the Americas, the agricultural revolution never happened. Native American and any other remaining Amazonian, New Guinea or other remaining native culture and language should be declared the greatest world heritage sites. Every effort possible should be made to preserve, study, and expand these cultures and languages as something our modern symbolic language based culture will never be able to recreate. Native peoples offer us something irreplaceable.

Something we can never achieve in several lifetimes of prayer or meditation. A richer, fuller, more complete experience of life here on earth—of deeper seeing, touching, and sensing—a truer union with nature. Animals can reach and heal autistic children in a way no words can. Our symbolic language simply cannot get us where we yearn to be and even pulls us further away day by day.

Where we have arrived today demands a deep evaluation and reconsideration. John Zerzan wrote, “We couldn’t live in this world without language and that is just how profoundly we must transform this world.” Once we realize how poor we are in our detachment from nature—the Garden of Eden, we may well yearn for a way back to a deep, whole, connected, wordless experience of life.

Personal note—as an experiment we are considering dividing our permaculture farm in into halves: word and a wordless.

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Visit www.culturequake.org to read the most updated version of this essay and to read the blog as a whole work, visit the Culturequake amazon.com book store, and learn more about the book Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture. Visit www.restorationfarm.org to learn what we are doing to grow new stories and cultures. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC.

Notes:

Marshal Sahlins
Stone Age Economics

Julian Janyes
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Chuck Burr
Financial Crisis—Call for a Steady-State Economy

Daniel Quinn
Ishmael
Beyond Civilization

Code of Ur-Nammu
www.wikipedia.org

Code of Hammurabi
www.wikipedia.org

Clive Gamble
www.amazon.com

Sigmund Freud
The Future of an Illusion

Vyaas Houston
Sanskrit, a Sacred Model of Language

Recent Ice Age
www.wikipedia.org

John Zerzan
www.amazon.com