The first thing I would like to point out, which James discusses with great eloquence, is the malleability of reality in relation to the lens or filter through which we interpret and comprehend. The importance of James’ fifth ‘character in thought’ cannot be stressed enough, especially in contemporary society in which we often confuse our thoughts to be fundamentally real. I realize this sentence requires some elaboration because the term real- like most of the abstracted symbols and words- is a slippery concept that isn’t yet fully understood by mainstream academia. It’s actually quite a paradox because our thoughts are so real that we forget how much of an influence they have on the so-called ‘external reality’; the pliability/manipulability of our thoughts is quite extraordinary. What I mean to say by ‘confusing our thoughts to be fundamentally real’ is that we continually mistake the exceptional power of our thoughts/beliefs/prejudices to be fixed or intractable, and to have little to do with what is happening ‘outside’ the skin-encapsulated ego. Much of today’s suffering is a result of not being able to reveal the illusory nature of thought, judgment, and assessment. How often do we label things ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘this’, or ‘that’, when the essential beingness of events is, in a certain sense, immune to such limitations of language? The nexus of being is found within the felt experience of raw tactile awareness which, when accessed, enables us to experience the world as a child, free from preconceived notions and culturally programmed beliefs about what it is. In another sense, however, the logos plays an instrumental role in manifesting the belief systems we enact to understand the world. For example, from what I understand, most indigenous groups don’t have words for “should” and “mine”; similarly, while the Inuit have a variety of different terms for snow, tribal societies in the Amazon don’t have any. Going still further, the Piraha of the Brazilian Amazon communicate through language “… unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels. Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations.” (Eisenstein; The Ascent of Humanity) Through this ‘original language,’ there is no symbolic abstraction of the universe… the language consists of mainly primal, onomatopoetic sounds that distinguish situations/things/events without quantifying/qualifying them into limiting categories- there is no fragmentation or compartmentalization of the universe. In this way, language comes to define, explain, and manufacture our relationship to the world: implicit in the omission of “should” and “mine” from a language system is the lack of importance placed on ownership (which is simply incomprehensible to most indigenous groups) and expectations (of oneself, of the universe, etc.). Consciousness, as James asserts, is indeed a ‘teeming multiplicity of relations… which is a result of discriminative attention,’ regardless of whether that attention is “conscious” or not. His statement that “no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before” dovetails beautifully with recent investigations in quantum mechanics- scientifically-derived realizations about the nature of reality are now converging with those of Eastern spirituality and indigenous awareness… despite its unassailable rationality and logic-based knowledge, science is just now catching up to what shamans and monks have been saying for thousands (if not millions) of years. Each moment is a unique happening in time and space and our experiences are remolding us in each of these moments. Accordingly, there are no separate events because the entirety of existence is an endless flow of the same phenomenon.
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