Through language, humans bring out the total potentiality hidden in thing, advance the building of bird nests and beaver dams to compages and applied science, the gathering of nuts to farming, squawks and barks to music, and express animal perception to the intellectual jewels of modern Western culture…

In the history of scientific discipline, the merely event remotely alike to the philosophical concept of a person living in a state of nature, untainted by civilization was the discovery, in 1801, of the feral boy of Aveyron, an xi-year-one-time plant running naked and wild in a woods.[1] Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, a French surgeon, thought the wild boy of Aveyron was the Rosetta stone for deciphering human nature. He spent five years trying to railroad train and brainwash the male child, before last that the boy's prolonged isolation from humanity rendered him incapable of linguistic communication and consequently incapable of living a 18-carat human life. Itard'southward answer to "What makes the states human?" is language.

Animals have the shadow of language. Ants communicate through scent, bees through dance, and chimpanzees through audio and gesture, but creature advice is non a diminished version of homo language. The numerous attempts to teach chimpanzees American Sign Language ended in failure; the signing of the chimps lacked syntax and their lengthy strings of signs were redundant and did not convey more pregnant. Robert Sapolsky, a primatologist and neuroscientist, gives the reason why nonhuman primates cannot learn whatever language. Only the encephalon of Man sapienshas Broca and Wernicke areas, the regions needed for language production and comprehension, respectively. The brains of the other primates, including chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, orangutans, and rhesus monkeys, take only the beginning of these structures, a mere cortical thickening.[two]

Through language, humans bring out the full potentiality hidden in matter, advance the building of bird nests and beaver dams to architecture and engineering, the gathering of nuts to farming, squawks and barks to music, sexual reproduction to dear and compassion, and limited animate being perception to the intellectual jewels of mod Western culture, Newtonian physics, Maxwell's electrodynamics, special and general relativity, quantum physics, and the biological science of the physical basis of life, including the genetic code.

Helen Keller: Without Language a Dense Fog

Language is so much a role of our lives that nosotros discover information technology incommunicable to recall our early childhood when we could not communicate through words. Helen Keller gives u.s. a glimpse of how the world is experienced in the absence of language. When she was 19 months old, an acute disease, mayhap scarlet fever or meningitis, left her bullheaded and deaf. She presently "felt the demand of some communication with others and began to make rough signs. A milk shake of the head meant 'No' and a nod, 'Aye,' a pull meant 'Come' and a push 'Go.' Was information technology bread [she] wanted? Then [she] would imitate the acts of cutting the slices and buttering them."[three]

The few signs Helen used became less and less adequate to limited herself, and her failures to make herself understood were invariably followed by outbursts of anger. She had observed that her friends and her mother did not utilise signs every bit she did. She remembers that "sometimes I stood between two persons who were conversing and touched their lips. I could not sympathize and was vexed. I moved my lips and gesticulated aimlessly without consequence. This made me and so angry at times that I kicked and screamed until I was wearied."

Iv months before she was vii years old, Anne Mansfield Sullivan arrived from the Perkins Institution for the Bullheaded, in Watertown, Massachusetts, to teach manual sign linguistic communication to Helen, who after described her interior country and so as a "dense fog."

Miss Sullivan brought a doll from the blind children of the Perkins Institution. Subsequently Helen played with the doll for a curt fourth dimension, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into her hand the discussion "d-o-50-l." Helen was interested in this "finger-play . . . [and] finally succeeded in making the letters correctly," although she was "simply making [her] fingers go in monkey-like style."

One day, angered by Miss Sullivan'south repeated attempts to teach her that a signing was a word that stood for an object, Helen threw her new doll on the floor, breaking it into pieces. She recollects that "I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate burst. I had not loved the doll. In the notwithstanding, nighttime earth in which I lived in that location was no strong sentiment or tenderness."

Later that day, Miss Sullivan and Helen walked to the well-house. Some i was drawing water, and Miss Sullivan held Helen'due south mitt under the spout. Helen reports that "equally the absurd stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word h2o, first slowly, then chop-chop. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers." Suddenly, "the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful absurd something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it low-cal, hope, joy, set it costless!" Helen made the leap from sensation to linguistic communication, a leap that every human being experiences, but no 1 can explain.

Helen left the well-house eager to larn. "Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought." Miss Sullivan and she returned to the house, and every object Helen "touched seemed to quiver with life." She picked upwardly the pieces of the broken doll and remembers, "I tried vainly to put them together. So my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow."

A 24-hour interval or two later, Miss Sullivan directed Helen to string beads of different sizes in symmetrical groups. Helen made obvious errors and recalls that "Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided emphasis, 'Recall.' In a flash I knew that the discussion was the name of the process that was going on in my head. This was my commencement conscious perception of an abstract idea."

Without language, Helen'south interior life had been limited to sense perception, motor skills, tactual memory, and associations. She had neither volition nor intellect and had been "carried along to objects and acts by a certain bullheaded natural impetus." She had felt anger, want, and satisfaction; nevertheless, she had never "loved or cared for anything." She describes her inner life and then equally "a blank without past, nowadays, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy."[4]

She remembers, through tactual memory, that she did have a power of association. She recalls that "I felt tactual jars like the stamp of a foot, the opening of a window or its endmost, the slam of a door. After repeatedly smelling pelting and feeling the discomfort of wetness, I acted similar those about me: I ran to shut the window. But that was not thought in whatsoever sense. It was the same kind of clan that makes animals have shelter from the pelting."

Through the instinct of aping others, she established motor habits: "I folded the clothes that came from the laundry, and put mine abroad, fed the turkeys, sewed bead-eyes on my doll's face, and did many other things of which I have the tactual remembrance."

Ms. Keller concludes that "it was not the sense of touch on that brought me knowledge. . . . Thought made me conscious of dear, joy, and all the emotions. I was eager to know, then to sympathise, afterward to reflect on what I knew and understood, and the blind impetus, which had before driven me hither and thither at the dictates of my sensations, vanished forever." She no longer lived an beast life; language freed her to be human.

Language Acquisition

Similar Helen Keller, we began life without language. When our desires were not immediately met, nosotros, too, grew angry, cried, and kicked our anxiety. Unlike Helen, near of u.s.a. are non deaf and learned language past listening to siblings, caregivers, and parents.

Children learn language at different rates, only they all become through the same stages. At twelve months, we most likely said one word, at xx months spoke two-word sentences like "Doggy bark," and at twenty-six months uttered telegraphic sentences, such every bit "Babe doll ride truck." We participated in social spoken language, when we begged, threatened, and asked questions.

From ii to seven years of age, children engage in private speech, spoken aloud to oneself and non intended for or directed to others. They give a running soapbox on what they are doing. A girl may say, "At present, I am going into the house," referring to her playhouse, or she may tell her doll, "Mommy wants us to play overnice," or while drawing, she may say out loud to herself, "I need a bluish pencil." Such private speech regulates her behave and raises her action to purposeful behavior.

The term "individual speech" is somewhat misleading. Lev Vygotsky, a psychologist and the recognized genius who greatly avant-garde the scientific written report of how language and mental powers develop, observed that private speech of a child occurs only in the presence of adults or in the presence of other children engaged in the same action, not when the child is solitary. He and his colleagues thought of a clever experiment. They placed a child either with deaf-mute children or with children speaking a foreign linguistic communication and discovered the child's private speech ceased in most cases. Vygotsky concluded that private voice communication "is dissimilar from social oral communication but again not entirely, considering information technology functions only within social situations."[five]

When the child is around 7-years-old, private speech "goes clandestine" and becomes inner speech.[6] As adults, we talk to ourselves to solve problems, decide what we will exercise in a future situation, and set firsthand and afar goals. Here are two trivial, mutual examples. Yesterday, while driving my motorcar, I mentally adamant the quickest road from Trader Joe's to Office Depot. Midcourse, I encountered road structure; through inner voice communication, I adamant and chose a new route. I once lost my driver'southward license, and earlier hassling with the clerk at the Section of Motor Vehicles, I mentally rehearsed my story about why my license went missing.

Inner speech communication tin be dysfunctional. Many of us have learned to see ourselves through the eyes of ever-critical onlookers, whether they are at that place or not. Before we act or speak, nosotros kickoff have to estimate our actions or speech every bit we think others will. Some of us rehearse everything we say, for our words accept to be perfect; under such circumstances, nosotros cannot act naturally or spontaneously. All of usa accept in our inner voice communication been ever-critical onlookers, smugly demoting others in our scale of values, ordinarily received from civilisation without reflection. At once, about of us take engaged in ruminative inner spoken language, where we go over and over in our minds the fearfulness of an upcoming examination or a meeting with the boss. Such ruminative speech communication distorts the by, creates a dreadful imaginary future, and amplifies anxiety, guilt, and shame.

When nosotros engage in talk-for-oneself, nosotros "recall words" instead of pronouncing them; however, inner voice communication generally is non an interior copy of external speech without sounds.[7] Frequently we omit "the subject of a judgement and all words connected with information technology, while preserving the predicate."[eight] Unlike a listener of our social voice communication, we know the subject and all its characteristics. In the example of driving my car, I did not inquire myself "What is the quickest route from Trader Joe'southward to Function Depot?" Probably, I did not even tell myself "quickest route;" most likely, I said, "quickest," a mere predicate. Such speech if heard past an external listener would be incomplete and incoherent.

Sometimes our inner speech takes the form of a dialogue, usually between speaker and listener, with total-diddled complete sentences. We may rehash an argument with a colleague or construct a scenario with the boss to ask her for a raise. More often our inner voice communication is unfocused, asunder, and seldom arrives anywhere. Like a monkey swinging from ane tree to the next in a tropical wood, our minds leap insanely from one topic to some other. Although such inner monologue is pointless, its fragmentary content reveals whether we are chronically angry, complaining, self-pitying, righteous, or argumentative.

Our inner speech tin can take multiple voices, peculiarly when torn between two courses of activeness or when we endeavor to solve an intellectual problem. Say I am not firmly committed to my goal of losing ten pounds in the new year. Suppose I am at a dinner party and the host serves my favorite dessert, chocolate mousse. One of my inner voices says, "Politely reject the mousse; give some lame, fabricated-upwards excuse, yous're diabetic." Another inner vox disagrees, "Another 300 calories makes no divergence; also you'll make it up tomorrow." When trying to solve a complex problem in mathematics, voice ane tries A; vocalization 2 shortly argues confronting that strategy; voice two attempts B, only to abandon it; finally, if lucky, I realize out of the blue that course Z is the right path.

"With syntax and sound reduced to a minimum, meaning is more than ever in the forefront" in inner speech.[9] Post-obit the atomic number 82 of philosopher Frédéric Paulhan, Vygotsky drew a distinction between the sense of a discussion and its meaning. Dictionaries give the meaning of a give-and-take, which is stable for relatively long periods of time. The sense of a word is "the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness by the word, [and thus is] a dynamic, fluid, complex whole."[10] Nearly every sentence we speak to ourselves or to others has a subtext, a thought hidden backside it.

Vygotsky pointed out that sometimes the title of a literary masterpiece contains the unabridged sense of the work. The mere sound of Don Quixote, Hamlet, or Anna Kareninaevokes the trials, actions, and moral failings of a person nosotros know better than ourselves. In inner speech, nosotros seldom use our proper proper noun, which is meant for social spoken language; "I," "me," and "mine" are a nexus of psychological and social events in our lives; "I" is the story of who we are.

Without inner spoken communication, we have no cocky, a surprising fact Helen Keller discovered on her ain. She said, "Earlier my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am."[xi] After Helen learned manual sign language, she became determined to communicate with others as unremarkably as possible and learned to speak. (See Helen Keller speaking with the help of Anne Sullivan.) Every bit a child, her inner speech was spelling to herself on her fingers, but when she learned to speak, her inner speech did non differ that much from yours or mine.

The Construction of Self

Around 19 months, a child begins to use the words "my," "mine," and "me" and her name with a verb—"Annie eats."[12] By twenty-seven months, self-reference is common, although the child is non telling her parents who she is; that requires a narrative. Between 3 to five years of historic period, autobiographical memory emerges and the evolution of a unique personal history begins.[13]

When a Harvard undergraduate was asked to think of her primeval retentiveness, she reported, "I accept a memory of being at my great aunt and uncle's house. It was some kind of party; I remember I was wearing my purple-flowered political party clothes. At that place was a sort of crib on the floor . . . I don't know if it was meant for me or for one of my younger cousins, but I crawled into information technology and lay there on my back. My feet stuck out, but I fit pretty well. I was trying to get the attention of people passing past. I was having fun and feeling slightly mischievous. When I picture the memory, I am lying downwards in the crib, looking at my party-shoed feet sticking out of the end of the crib." (Retentivity dated at 3 years 6 months.)[14]

A female Chinese college student from Beijing Academy described her earliest retention: "I was 5 years old. Dad taught me aboriginal poems. Information technology was always when he was washing vegetables that he explained a verse form to me. It was very moving. I will never forget the poems such as 'Pi-Ba-Xing,' one of the poems I learned and so."[fifteen]

Even at this young age, the cocky-narrative blueprint that emerges depends upon culture. Qi Wang and her colleague Jens Brockmeier discovered, later on all-encompassing interviews of American and Chinese undergraduates, that the starting time memories of the Americans were earlier and more focused on self than those of the Chinese: "The American memory has the individual highlighted as the leading character of the story. In dissimilarity, the Chinese retentivity shows a heightened sensitivity to data about significant others or most the self in relation to others." [xvi]

Wang and Brockmeier studied conversations between mothers and daughters and concluded that "American parents frequently focus on the child'southward personal attributes, preferences, and judgments, making the kid the primal character of the co-constructed story. In contrast, consonant with Confucian ethics that place a loftier value on social bureaucracy and moral rectitude, Asian parents often accept a leading part during the conversation with their children and often refer to moral rules and behavioral expectations." To their anaesthesia, they found that American children equally young as three oftentimes annotate on "their personal roles, choices, and opinions, [while] their Asian peers brand references to rules, standards, and requirements."[17]

In our inner voice communication, the personal narrative we tell ourselves integrates the events of everyday life into a coherent whole, in which we are both narrator and the main grapheme. We repeatedly tell our personal story, adding layer upon layer of meaning, incorporating new experiences into our narratives, and perhaps embellishing past events to such a degree that they become fictitious. Just like young children, we develop intense attachments to sure personal events, revisiting them over again and over again, for weeks, months, and fifty-fifty years. In this way, our cocky both solidifies and changes.

The "I" we think we are is no more than a nexus of acquired habits of thinking and feeling instilled by the accidents of upbringing and civilisation plusa personal narrative. The persistence of such habits andthe repeated telling of a personal narrative gives the illusion of a permanent self. As children, through language learning, a self emerges with values instilled in that self: in America, independence, assertiveness, and self-expression; in China, interdependence, social obligation, and humility.

The Loss of Self

All of united states have had rare occasions where our inner oral communication is turned off for a moment. A friend of mine told me most her brilliant retention of playing third base in the seventh grade forty years ago. She heard the crack of the bat, and a line bulldoze headed toward her traveling at least sixty miles an hour. To her, yet, the ball moved so slowly that she watched the gradual rotation of the seams with fascination, and, of course, her gloved paw effortlessly caught the ball.

Another woman told me that she thought it impossible for any person to turn off inner speech. Then, ane afternoon while walking in the woods with her married man, of a sudden she was not preoccupied with the usual issues that chaotic upwards her mind. For a moment, she experienced the landscape, the wind, and the rhythm of walking. "It's wonderful!" she exclaimed to her husband, and the inner silence ended.

Several summers ago, I did some extensive mountain running in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I think running down the Tuckerman Ravine Trail, gliding from rock to stone at breakneck speed. One misstep and I could accept broken an ankle or a leg. That thought never entered my mind; I was without fear and totally confident. Entirely focused on what I was doing, the rocks stood out in assuming relief. The varied shapes amazed me, and I marveled at the sea-foam green and vivid yellow lichens on the rocks as they flew by me. I was so immersed in what I was doing that I was not a detached spectator, chattering abroad inside of my usual imaginary bubble. I was a person "lost" in union and in harmony with the rocks. On those rare occasions when inner speech gives manner to silence and the loss of self, we become fully alive and life needs no justification, for to be live is joyful.

My experience of mountain running, of being totally captivated in an activity, is called "in the zone" by athletes and "catamenia" by psychologists. Flow is the experience of performing an action at an optimal level, characterized by effortlessness and intense focus on the nowadays; the cocky disappears, and the person becomes the performance. Rock climbers, surgeons, dancers, musicians, writers, chess players, mathematicians, indeed, actors in any field can lose the self, get the activeness, and thereby experience flow.

Musician Barry Light-green observes that soloists, orchestral players, immature students, and seasoned sessions players, akin, have experienced that "unique suspended moment when you actually get the emotional or sensory quality of the music—the colors, the h2o, the love."[xviii] An expert rock climber describes the aforementioned experience: "You are and then involved in what you are doing [that] you lot aren't thinking of yourself as divide from the firsthand activity. . . . You don't run across yourself as separate from what you are doing."[19] A dancer says at times she becomes the dance: "Your concentration is very complete. Your mind isn't wandering, y'all are not thinking of something else; you are totally involved in what you lot are doing."[20]

Flow is not bars to specialized activities that crave years to chief. Whatsoever person can go lost in an everyday activity. A female parent recounts the flow that takes place when she and her young girl take turns reading to each other. "She reads to me, and I read to her, and that'due south a fourth dimension when I sort of lose touch with the balance of the world, I'm totally absorbed in what I'm doing."[21] Many fiction readers enter into an imaginary world so completely that they become the characters and the world around them recedes. Or even more merely, my friend, mentioned earlier, while walking in the forest with her husband experienced flow; she became one with the wind, rocks, and the trees when her inner speech ceased momentarily.

In catamenia, our usual scattered attention disappears and the mind becomes intensely focused, totally aware of the present. Such a concentration of attention Buddhists phone call "i-pointedness," meaning an interior state where all mental faculties are unified and directed toward one action, say sweeping the pebbles from a shrine, releasing an arrow from a bow, or sitting in meditation. For a tennis histrion, only the brawl and the opponent be; for a chess player, everything is excluded past the strategy of the game. When a person is completely in the present, not reflecting upon the past or worrying about the future, the senses are heightened: Vision is amazingly vivid, and hearing registers the subtlest changes in pitch and intensity. A violinist feels the tiniest movements of her fingers that produce palpable sounds. The music, her hands and fingers, her listen, all move of their own accordance in complete harmony. For rock climber Doug Robinson, "To climb with intense concentration is to shut out the world, which, when it reappears, will be every bit a fresh feel, strange and wonderful in its newness."[22] The corking rock climber Yvon Chouinard describes how on rising up El Capitan's Muir Wall he saw as if for the commencement fourth dimension: "Each individual crystal in the granite stood out in bold relief. The varied shapes of the clouds never ceased to concenter our attention. For the first time, we noticed tiny bugs that were all over the walls, so tiny that they were barely noticeable. While belaying, I stared at i for fifteen minutes, watching him movement and admiring his brilliant cherry-red color."[23] Unlike our habitual looking without seeing, looking with real vision reveals the overwhelming beauty of mundane objects—clouds, snow, and granite.

For virtually every performer, menses is a desirable land to be in. Personal problems vanish, the fear of failure disappears, mental clarity results, effortless functioning happens, and joy ensues. The activity, so, becomes an end in itself. The desire for fame, public adulation, and even victory—in outcome, all distractions from the market and social life—disappear. The basketball slap-up Neb Russell confesses that for him superb play took precedence over the desire for victory. Those perfect moments in basketball game "were sweetness when they came, and the hope that one would come up was one of my strongest motivations for walking out there. Sometimes the feeling would terminal all the mode to the cease of the game, and when that happened, I never cared who won. . . . On the five or ten occasions when the game concluded at that special level, I literallydid not care who had won. If we lost, I'd still exist equally gratuitous and high as a sky hawk."[24]

Into the Smashing Silence

Whether we recognize it or not, flow confirms our spiritual nature. When we become an object or an activeness, comparative-faith scholar Toshihiko Izutsu avows, "Zen may be said to be already realized, whether one calls it Zen or not. Zen, however, requires that one should be in exactly the aforementioned state with regard to everything . . . One should become a bamboo. Ane should become a mountain. Ane should become the audio of a bell. That is what Zen means by the expression: 'seeing into the nature of things.'"[25] A Zen practitioner in the stillness and silence of meditation may glimpse the deep transcendent nature of his or her mind that was hidden past the busyness of daily living and the distraction of inner spoken language.

What music conductor Markand Thakar says of "the about exalted, aesthetic experience" of music is also truthful of the deepest Zen experience. "The stardom between subject area and object is non there. I absorb the sounds, they overcome me, I get the sounds. Within my focused consciousness there is no them, and considering at that place is no them different from me, there is also no me. And without a distinction between me and the external world that is non me, I come to feel my own being in the fullest way. Thus: I am here because I am not here."[26]

Eknath Easwaran, a disciple of Gandhi and the critically acclaimed translator of theBhagavad Gita, theUpanishads, and theDhammapada, concludes after years of meditation and study that "the goal of all spiritual seeking is to alive in a state of self-forgetfulness permanently."[27]

Silence and self-forgetfulness are at the heart of Christian mysticism, too. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite reports, apparently from his own experience, that the college nosotros soar in contemplation "the more than our words are confined to the ideas we are capable of forming; and then that now equally we plunge into that darkness which is beyond the intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words merely actually speechless and unknowing."[28] God transcends all human being language and concepts.

Thomas Aquinas, the virtually rational and clear of theologians, soon before his death, had a mystical experience when celebrating the Mass, and every bit a result, he left his masterpiece, the Summa Theologica, unfinished. When urged by Reginald of Peperino to explain the radical change in his religious perspective, Thomas simply said, "Everything I have written seems like straw by comparison to what I accept seen and now what has been revealed to me."[29]

To enter the mystical presence of God demands silencing interior chatter, the endless commentary spun by the thinking mind. Beyond our thoughts, our daydreams, and our imagination, lies a vast, open, limitless silence.

Human life has a foreign trajectory. All of united states offset off speechless with a world no larger than our female parent'southward artillery and breasts. As toddlers, nosotros lived an beast life; when our desires were not immediately met, we grew angry and cried. Like the bullheaded-and-deaf child Helen Keller, nosotros had no "I," no by or future. Nosotros learned a linguistic communication, engaged in private speech that eventually went underground to get inner speech that regulated our behavior and actions. Through language, we acquired an "I" instilled with cultural values. Our inner oral communication is unremarkably an unceasing commentary on the choices and actions of others and ourselves. A few of us, non necessarily saints, stilled our inner speech communication and egoless in silence experienced the presence of God; those happy few followed a trajectory that began speechless and with an extremely narrow animal life and ended speechless with a vast spiritual life that touches God.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help united states remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of mod discourse? Please consider donating now.

one Run into Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) and François Truffaut, director, Wild Child, Les Artistes Associés, film.

two For a witty, brusque history of the efforts to teach American Sign Language to nonhuman primates, heed to the last 20-five minutes of Robert Sapolsky, Human Behavioral Biology, Lecture 23 On Linguistic communication. Human speech communication likewise requires the right anatomy, encounter Philip Lieberman, "Why Man Speech Is Special," TheScientist(July one, 2018).

iii Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Hellen Keller are from her book The Story of My Life(Mineola, New York: Dover, 1996 [1903]).

4 All quotations in this paragraph and the post-obit two are from Helen Keller, The World I Live In(New York: The Century Co., 1904,1908).

v Lev Vygotsky, Language and Thought, rev. and ed. Alex Kozulin (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Printing, 1986), pp. 232-235.

6 Ibid., p. 33.

7 Ibid., p. 230.

8 Ibid., p. 236.

9 Ibid., p. 244.

10 Ibid., pp. 244-245.

xi Keller, The World I Live In.

12 Jerome Kagan, Unstable Ideas: Temperament, Cognition, and Self(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 233.

13 Qi Wang and Jens Brockmeier, "Autobiographical Remembering as Cultural Practice: Understanding the Interplay between Retention, Cocky and Culture," Civilisation Psychology(2002) viii:52.

14 Ibid., pp. 47-48.

fifteen Ibid., p. 48.

sixteen Ibid., p. 49.

17 Ibid., pp. 56, 57.

xviii Barry Greenish, The Inner Game of Music(New York: Doubleday, 1986), p. 14.

19 Quoted by Mihaly Csilszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975), p. 39.

20 Ibid.

21 Quoted by Mihaly Csilszentmihalyi, Menstruum: The Psychology of Optimal Experience(New York: Harper & Row, 1990), p. 53.

22 Doug Robinson, "The Climber as Visionary," Risenine, (1969): 8.

23 Yvon Chouinard, quoted by Doug Robinson, "The Climber as Visionary," Ascent 9, (1969): 6.

24 Bill Russell and Taylor Co-operative, 2nd Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man(New York: Random Firm, 1979), p. 157. Italics in original.

25 Toshihiko Izutsu, Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism(Boston: Shambhala, 2001), p. 207.

26 Markand Thakar, "Tribute to a Instructor," ( November 10, 1999). Italics in original.

27 Eknath Easwaran, Original Goodness: Eknath Easwaran on the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount (Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 2014), p. 74.

28 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 1033B.

29 Aquinas, quoted by Bernhard Lang, Sacred Games: A History of Christian Worship(New Haven, CT: Yale Academy Press, 1997), p. 323.

Editor's Notation: The featured image is one of seven paintings, each intended to describe i of the 7 liberal arts, by Pieter Isaacsz (1569-1625) for Rosenburg Castle; this particular painting depicts the art of Rhetoric. The image is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email