Video » The Unspeakable World

But you know, if you talk all the time,
You will never hear what anybody else has to say,
And therefore, all you’ll have to talk about is your own conversation
The same is true for people who think all the time.
That means, when I use the word ‘think, ‘ talking to yourself,
Subvocal conversation,
The constant chit-chat of symbols and
Images and talk and words inside your skull
Now, if you do that all the time,
You’ll find that you’ve nothing to think about except thinking,

And just as you have to stop talking to hear what I have to
Say, you have to stop thinking to find out what life is about
And the moment you stop thinking,
You come into immediate contact with what
Korzybski called, so delightfully, ‘the unspeakable world’
The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells,
The texture of shadows on the floor in front of you.
All these things, without being named,
And saying ‘that’s a shadow, that’s red,
That’s brown, that’s somebody’s foot.’
When you don’t name things anymore, you start seeing them.
Because say when a person says ‘
I see a leaf, ‘ immediately,
One thinks of a spearhead-shaped thing
Outlined in black and filled in with flat green
No leaf looks like that.
No leaves–leaves are not green.
That’s why Lao-Tzu said ‘the five colors make a man blind,
The five tones make a man deaf,
‘ Because if you can only see five colors, you’re blind,
And if you can only hear five tones in music, you’re deaf
You see, if you force sound into five tones,
You force color into five colors, you’re blind and deaf.
The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound
And it is only by stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color
And the world of sound that you really begin to hear it and see it.