015_The way of knowing
Perceptions in harmony with reality, chiming hearts, the ring of truth. It sounds like we’re ready to revisit sound.
We saw in #007 that 心 heart engages with 音 sound to create 意 mind. And then 心 heart engages with 意 mind to create 憶 memory.
First, let’s assign shapes to these Canjeez:
Sound is the focus of our attention, so that goes in the triangle. It is in this triangulation space that the baby sees the moon, sees someone pointing at the moon, and hears a sound that is intended to represent the moon.
That intended representation takes shape in the square, where the baby puts two and two together and becomes mindful that the sound “moon” is significant. “Moon”, in fact, signifies the bright shiny object that the baby sees in the night sky.
The circle is the circle around the campfire of the wandering tribe to which our ancestors belonged. It is the family circle, the social circle. Reproduction of memorized significant sounds in appropriate social circumstances demonstrates the baby’s emerging cultural credentials.
Social standing rests on mutual understanding, mutual understanding rests on shared memories, and memories can be shared in the form of language. Appropriate speech (or writing) has the effect of securing social standing. This is a virtuous circle.
The biggest social circle of all is the human race. Whether we memorize the name of the night-sky object as mwezi or 月 (tsuki), people everywhere use the same language acquisition process to master the ability to share memories encoded as speech.
So once again, let’s assign an icon to each of the three shapes.
An ear seems an obvious choice for sound, in the triangle. The expression “prick up your ears” is, after all, a quintessential metaphor for focusing attention. It’s worth repeating that in this context, “sound” is representing two sets of sensory inputs (sound and vision, for example) that we will bring together in the square to generate a linguistically significant output: “moon”.
The square is the space where sound acquires significance. The mouth is the source of the most significant type of sound to humans: Speech is the output channel of the mind. So a mouth makes sense as an icon of meaningful representation.
Moreover, in Canjeez, this source of speech, the mouth, is actually written as a square: 口 mouth. The square is where we “taste” the significance of the cooked-up sensory inputs. “Mind-taste” is the literal meaning of the Canjeez glom 意味 (imi) meaning. (Note that in the second Canjeez, 味 taste, the left bit is a mouth.)
On to the circle, with its mirror icon. Memorization entails various forms of reflection: What sound was it that names the object in the night sky? Does the sound that I’m producing accurately reflect the sound that I heard? Does the sound that I’m producing prompt people around me to mirror what I myself did and turn to look at the moon?
If you don’t speak any Swahili, you may think that you don’t know the Swahili word for moon. But with a little reflection, I think you’ll realise that in fact you do. What I’m asking you to do there is use your mind as a baby might, to search back in the rear-view mirror of memory for an item that seems to match.
In this case, the item is mwezi, mentioned just before the three-icon image above. For how long will your heart’s tentacles keep their suckers attached to that information?
The answer will depend on how valuable the information is to you. How often will you look at “mwezi” again in the mirror of your mind? How much do you care about remembering it? Enough to make the effort to inscribe it in memory? Will you face any bad consequences if you forget the word? Will you feel bad about yourself if you forget it? Or is the information so intrinsically impactful that it sticks immediately? Will you find that next week it’s still there in the mirror because you’ve (almost involuntarily) reviewed it so often?
Ultimately, there’s more to memorization than just a repeated glance in the mind’s rear-view mirror. Many new items entering the realm of the tentacles never get stuck to suckers. Information slips out of your heart’s grip. A word may be on the tip of your tongue, its meaning so clear you can taste it, while the linguistic form in which that meaning was encoded remains lost in inner space.
But when words stick, they become available for use by the inner voice. Language is the medium that I use to speak to myself. My inner voice speaks mostly in English, sometimes in Japanese, but always in words that I know. And that inner voice always seems to speak so clearly! I don’t think I’ve ever had to ask my inner voice to repeat itself because it was mumbling and I failed to understand it first time around.
That completes my introduction to three “ways”: the way of doing (map, path, compass), the way of being (tree, eye, heart), and the way of knowing (mouth, ear, mirror).
Together, these three “ways” form what I refer to as the Mindfield, a subject that I will explore in more detail at a later date.
These embossed symbols spell out the word “moon” in “Moon Type” (named for its inventor, not the celestial body), one of the reading systems for the blind that Helen Keller learned and used along with the better-known Braille system. She herself described Moon Type as “a very large and distinct print adapted to the fingers of the adult blind, who need something to practise their touch on before they learn Braille.” For Helen Keller, “sound” came from her fingertips.