I’ve read a bunch of Krishnamurti in my time and he always focused on the implication that his listeners were ‘trapped in words’.
Is it possible that the conceptions we try to convey are really the same and that our disagreement is based on the fact that we attach different meanings to the same words, so our agreement is disrupted between the speaker and the listener?
Certainly, when we’re careful to define ourselves explicitly we more often find ourselves in agreement than when we don’t.
I think we can never agree, and the reason is that language, or the nature of language, or alternatively perhaps the psychology or physiology of our language perception, is fundamentally flawed.
For example language communicates by means of “temporarlly sequential” symbols, ie one symbol following after another in time, building a “picture” up in symbol-sized bits. But not everything can be linearly constructed so, can it?
Another flaw is that we could both use the same word for different objects without ever realising it. The words are ‘public’ in the sense that it is accessible by the ‘other’, but the objects referred by the words are private, entirely inaccessible but by the speaker alone.
And thus we miscommunicate because we think we are all talking about the same object but are not. Potentially more dangerous we may never realise we have not understood another, and live and go to our graves, thinking we knew what somebody meant.
So sometimes it is better if we have different tongues, where we used different words for the same thing, and because we do not understand the other word, we asked and clarified and thus we know.
Yes, but conception, the light of understanding, is not temporally sequential. It’s perhaps instantanious. So my question is: Is that light of understanding the same in everybody, and then simply lost when communication is attempted?
‘conceptions we try to convey are really the same and that our disagreement is based on the fact that we attach different meanings to words, so our agreement is disrupted between the speaker and listener’.
It is, to be candid, utterly implausible.
‘conceptions we try to convey’ are often at odds with the conceptions of others for no other reason than that we may completely disagree on an issue.
We may define and isolate that issue- so that ‘different meanings to words’ ceases to be a problem.
This process of definition for clarity PREVENTS our agreements or disagreements on issues from being ‘disrupted between the speaker and listener’.
everyone has different perceptions of reality, so everyone has different conceptions. One trying to convey his conceptions to another be may difficult because of lingual limitations, but his conceptions are different, sometimes contrary, to the conceptions of others.
