The Trouble With Words

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Welcome to Alive and Free Origins.

The podcast where we continue to discuss common misconceptions, practices, and sometimes even

outright lies that make things like anxiety, depression, trauma, and addictions of all

kinds extremely hard if not impossible to get rid of.

We'll keep sharing what has worked in thousands of cases to change that and make freedom a reality.

Only now we'll be going even deeper.

So bringing back to the table the one thing that is the source of any and all healing.

God.

So stick around for some bite-sized ideas that might unmask any falsehood preventing the

truth from finally setting you free.

And if it feels helpful, don't forget to share it with others.

Okay, so in keeping with yesterday's, we're going to go a little bit further, okay?

And what we're going to do, like, okay, so yesterday I talked about the power of being

invalidated.

And of looking for like, what if I'm wrong about this?

And I wanted to go a little bit further with this.

We discussed the power of doing it when you seek out being wrong and you're the one that's

doing it.

There's this tremendous power of change that occurs.

And there's this reward system that comes in your own system because you made a guess

and you discovered something that nobody else discovered for you.

It's one thing to discover your own errors and fix them.

It's something else for you to not know they were there and to have somebody else find

out.

Someone could lead to death and the other one can lead to a cool invention.

And so there's a tremendous power of it.

And you don't have to be an inventor.

You don't have to be a scientist.

You don't even have to be anything besides like a normal person on the planet with any kind

of job to be able to do this.

So I'm going to give you a place to start.

And the arena and the place to start is with the W word.

Otherwise known as word, W-O-R-D, okay?

And we're going to talk about the trouble with words.

Here's the thing.

I learned this in an interview that I did on television a while back.

It was pretty remarkable.

If you go to the store and you look at a pickle jar, you go in and there's a jar of pickles

and I really loved a closs in pickles.

And so when I was a kid, it was just the ones we grew up on, these kosher dills, whatever

you want to call them.

So I go in and you go in, you look at the jar and what you'll see on the jar is a label.

And the label is made of ink and paper and stick them, some kind of glue, all slashed

together.

And then on top of it are shapes that we look at and we make words at it.

And those words are not on the paper in a weird way.

I mean, they are in the sense that the shapes are there.

But we look at them and then our mind takes that visual stuff, information, as little

electrical puzzles and then it goes, oh, pickles, right?

I got it, pickles.

And then you, and this is not what I learned on the television show.

I'll tell you what I learned on the television show.

So then your brain goes pickles and then it like four and then it like sort of recreates

this like, oh yeah, if there's a pickle, this is the experience I'm going to have a pickle,

this was the last experience I'm going to have it.

It's like calling up its database around pickles, just like if you asked Chad GPT a question

or something, you know, like tell me about this.

And then it pulls up all this stuff and what, what your past experiences were be in case,

in your case, you know, and you, you have this sense of like, oh, that's what this is.

And if the word is a brand name, not Colossan, but I don't know what other pickle brands

there are.

Helmens, maybe Helmens.

Does a pickle brand?

I know the Dumannes.

Anyway, so if you have another, another word there, your mind might be like, well, but

that's not as good as the other one.

And then it creates this experience.

And that's the experience that sends down to your nerves and then you have this moment

of experiencing your imagination.

You're not actually experiencing the pickle, not at all.

Your tongue might water, you know, like your saliva might get going and all these other

things are happening and you're not even tasting the pickle at all.

You're actually only looking, you're only experiencing the label, not even the pickle.

The real thing is the pickle in the jar.

And in order to really know what a pickle is, you have to open the jar and you have to

pull it out and you have to bite into it and then you have to have that experience of

it.

And that's how you're going to know what's real.

But most of the time as humans, we operate with our imagination and not with the real

world.

Babies, on the other hand, are only engaged with the real world, sticking most of it in

their mouth at first because they want to like, they're exploring, they don't know what

it is.

They don't have words, they don't have concepts, they don't have a thought about who

am I like self and all this other stuff.

They just know that those are sounds in the air.

They don't know what they mean, they don't have any meaning associated with them, but

they can see that these sounds are attached to different things.

They don't have for a long time, they sort of like mental representations and the distractions

of stuff, you know, they learn quick, but they're just engaging with the world as it is.

And the world as it is, is the most powerful place to engage.

So what I'll tell people is only deal with what's real when you're having a negative experience,

when you're having trouble with something, you need to only deal with what's real.

Most of us are dealing with what we imagine.

And as much as I would like to say I'm free of this, I have emotions too, folks.

And right now I'm making noises, I'm pushing air from my lungs up through some vocal cords

that are kept at taught at different places, and then I'm making my tongue in different

shapes and moving my mouth and my jaw in such a way that sounds come out.

And those sounds then are being formed in your mind, into words, you're just hearing

vibrations, that's all you're hearing.

And if I were speaking in Japanese and you didn't speak Japanese or Swahili or San

Skrit or Latin or ancient Greek or something, you might not know what those sounds meant.

And so all you would get is sound.

And that's all it would be, just sort of noise that's filtered out.

The fun fact about babies, they are capable of like distinguishing the sounds in lots of

languages and that at a certain point, like all these neuro pathways get shed from the

brain for efficiency's sake.

And they only, they then the brain starts to treat all other languages than their native

language as noise, as just sort of background noise that is hard to distinguish.

And then their native language, they're able to focus more on really distinguishing.

Fun fact, back to the topic at hand.

So all that's happening is that, and then your brain is using its imagination in order

to craft a meaning, and some people visualize or they have images in their head about what

things mean when somebody's talking, often it's just a feeling or a vibe, but that feeling

you get when somebody says something that you like or dislike, that feeling is the result

not of the real world.

It's a result of your imagination predominantly.

I mean, there's probably an aspect of the fact that the sound waves are hitting your

body and whatnot, that there is some level of real world interaction.

But the cause of it is not the sound, the cause of it is the meaning that we made, that

we imagined into the sound, which is why we can feel all kinds of negative things about

something somebody said, and then discover that that's not what they meant, even with

the same words, and then all of a sudden that meaning changes, and that experience changes.

It's remarkable, it's amazing.

So the trouble with words is that they are imagination, they are our creation, they are

our concepts, that stuff, right?

So it's not that the world doesn't have some inherent meaning, meaning given to it by

the Creator, but our meaning, that we add to it, that's our creation, that's our imagination,

maybe I'll go into that in a different episode, and that's not the real thing.

And so what we're doing is we're imagining something and then having reactions to our

own imagination, and it isn't the other person's fault.

Now what they did, yep, they did that, and if it's unsafe, then yeah, we got to deal

with that.

But it's hard to deal with, it's hard to even know what they actually did if we're busy

lost in our own imagination.

So the trouble with words, the trouble with concepts, the trouble with ideas is that

they're imagined, they're not real, that when somebody's talking to you about their

experience, you're imagining what they mean, and they're reimagining what they experienced,

and they're producing an experience right then and they're on the spot that is unnecessary.

But they're trying to produce an experience by telling you something, they feel one way

and then they're sharing something with you, maybe they're excited, and they want to

share that excitement.

But excitement is uncomfortable to the body.

It really is, because your body's being forced to produce hormones, it doesn't need to produce.

It's being forced to do a bunch of things, it doesn't need to, buy our imagination.

And so excitement is not useful, your body wants to go back to a home of your stasis,

so what does it want to do?

It wants to get rid of the excitement, how does it get rid of excitement?

Well, let me share it with somebody else, and then they can laugh, and I can laugh, and

there can be some level of camaraderie, and then different chemicals are produced, and

so on and so forth.

It starts to wane, and it's too big, and there's a negative feeling, and then we're like,

I want to feel better again, and we get on this like sea saw, teeter taught, or back

and forth on both sides of our homeostasis, our home base.

And so if I'm excited, I come in, and I want to share it with somebody, and so I make

words, and I'm reimagining the thing, in order to either I've been feeling the excitement

go down, and I want to share it, and I want to boost it up so that I still have that

experience, or I want somebody else to know, so that I can see if I can get an experience

of them laughing, because I also like that.

Let's say I'm feeling negative, well, I don't like that experience, so what am I doing?

I'm making sounds and noises, I'm reimagining things, and I'm engaging with you so that there

can be some change in my environment with you, and then I can have a different experience,

and then I can feel comfort, or whatever else.

So we're using our imagination to manipulate our experience.

All of this is a lot of extra work that is totally unneeded, if we deal with what's

real.

And so words are super helpful, and they're amazing and incredible things, and I love them,

and when we get confused about our imagination being reality, and we don't see the difference,

then we start to treat our imagination and our words as if they are reality, tangible,

three-world reality, three-dimensional reality here, and not a creation of our own.

And so the trouble with words is they give us plenty of experiences, and they're wonderful

and useful, but used too often, used in ways that are not helpful, they also have been

producing this epidemic, or pandemic, whatever you want to call it, of mental health problems

that we live within the world of the day.

Yes, there are chemical imbalances, yes, there are things that other people have got,

yes, people have been through some traumatic events and stuff, but if you didn't make

words and concepts and ideas about these events of our life, if it didn't feel negative

to you, then you wouldn't be traumatized by it, case in point.

This is in James Nester's book on breath, The New Science of a Lost Art.

I think it's a fantastic read.

Definitely reduces a lot of things, even religious practices down to some sort of like, well,

the reason this works is because of breath, which I think is disingenuous toward religion,

but it basically comes from this sort of materialist worldview that says, well, the only thing that

we need a naturalistic explanation and nothing else works.

So he sort of talks God out of the picture of some of these prayer practices, but there

is some insight when it comes to prayer.

But there was an interesting part where he's talking about the chemo receptors in the

brain, particularly the ones that determine, you know, how fear responses in relation

to how much carbon dioxide is in the blood.

And he discovered something, or he or scientists have discovered something, he reported something,

which is that fear can be experienced in a couple of different ways.

And there was a patient, I don't remember her name, and I think they just label her

as M, but it could be a different letter, or they could have her name, I don't remember.

But she didn't have a certain faculty in her brain that allowed her to feel fear.

She'd never felt fear in her entire life, ever, at all.

And so they took her, like they took her to kind of like experiment with this and see

what was going on, but she had been through all kinds of stuff.

She had been almost raped at one point, and then, you know, cops had come by or something,

somebody spooked the attacker, and he started to get up to go, and then she got up, and

she, like, she had been like kidnapped, taken some place to be accosted, and, you know,

he got spooked and was taken off, and she went up, and she like knocked on his car door,

and was like, hey, can I get a ride?

No fear.

She didn't make any words or concepts or ideas about what was going on, because she didn't

have, she hadn't like left her homeostatic sense of things.

She was probably confused about what was happening, but there wasn't any sense of fear.

And I don't remember the why, why that's the case.

And the only thing that got her to do that, to experience fear at all, was simply that

they pumped a certain concentration of carbon dioxide into like an oxygen mask for her.

And then this area of the brain just went wild, and she experienced this sort of existential

fear of dying, but she had never experienced before.

And never wanted to do it again, because of course, like if you'd never experienced

fear before you experienced the first time, nobody wants to feel that way.

But like this is a person who's been to haunted houses, scary movies, like nothing, nothing

affects her.

And then once it affects her, boom, and now she's got this idea about what it is, and

what carbon dioxide is stuff, and she has this thing in her brain that is forcing her

into this state of total aversion of the situation, if you bring it up.

But before then, nothing.

She didn't have words, she didn't have ideas, like because her body was not in some emotional

state about it, she'd never experienced that.

Then she didn't have to have all of this extra stuff around that's good, that's bad,

all these judgments and stuff.

She's like, yeah, that happened, you know, I prefer it not happen.

But whatever.

And she was only dealing with what's real, because of this other faculty.

Now, that's dangerous, as you probably have been thinking, like that's not a healthy

situation.

You're right.

What we want to be able to do is turn off this meaning-making machine, or sometimes

just misery-making machine, when it isn't needed and isn't useful, and turn it on when

it is useful.

Because our ability to imagine, for instance, a future, and to sort of simulate with

our own feeling, oh, that's not going to feel good, allows us to make course corrections

and plan and adapt before we have the experience.

It's a really powerful tool.

So we want to be able to use it, we just have to know how to turn it off, and most of

the day, you don't need that faculty.

Most of the day, in most of your activities, all you need to do is enjoy your life, enjoy

what's happening, not require that it be different, not judge it, not have opinions about

it, not have reactions to it.

But just like, notice what's happening and only deal with what's real.

So today, in concert with this, like, invalidate yourself thing, the place to start might

be the words that you use, and we're going to explore one next time.

And that's enough to chew on for now.

To dive deeper into any of this and experience what it's like to build an automatic muscle

memory that produces joy and freedom, even in difficult circumstances, visit findtheorigin.com.

And don't forget, God, the real origin of both life and happiness is closer even

than your heartbeat and the very reason you and I still have one, despite everything

we keep doing to push him away.