Jagat

I have been watching a lot of strange videos over the past few days. A rather abrupt and inexplicable detour from the few days of more intense bhajan in the association of Bengali Babajis in Barsana. While in Barsana, I was standing in the Ladli temple on the outside terrace portion and someone appeared to have fainted. An elderly Brijbasi Gosai, with a bushy white moustache, a colorful turban and yellow silk dhoti, a stick in his hand, was walking toward me. For some reason I was impelled to say something stupid and started to speak, but my Hindi tongue was tied and could not express, "We must all pass by that." At the Brajvasi's insistence I repeated myself again without success and ended up stuttering out the words andham tamah . Which I knew the instant they came out of my mouth that they did not fit at all what I really wanted to say, pointless as it was. The Gusai responded vehemently in a tone of chastisement, but even singing a Brijbhasha song, glorifying B...

I am still not finished thinking about language and the way that it shapes the brain. I think that the way the brain is shaped in early life by language is practically impossible to really change. Even though we have some power to control the way our brains develop as we grow older, there are too many things, practically hard-wired, to completely change. The only hope we really have is that there are common features to humanity itself, and that the archetypal forces that govern humanity are universal. This means that the kind of aspirations that lead to a life of spiritual culture, of interiority and faith in love as a guiding principle of life, are not the property of one civilization or another, but lie in the pre-linguistic fabric of our being. Yesterday when I wrote about "American testosterone" and an Anglophone sense of universal cultural superiority, which is not without its racist undertones, I was talking about certain ego givens of the first disciples in this H...

I am currently working on an editing project for Isabelle Quentin here in Montreal, revising a translation of a work on "listening reeducation," Mieux écouter pour mieux se réaliser by Lise Christophe Laverdière. One of the interesting things about being a translator is that you are often challenged by texts that are in domains with which you have little familiarity or expertise, and often deal with fields that one would have little cause to learn about if the job did not make it obligatory. This can be quite demanding and difficult, as one has to learn the terminology of a particular specialized field from scratch, even when the book is, as in this case, intended to be a popularization meant for a more general audience. People tend to develop idiosyncratic vocabulary based on their own specialization. Just look at me! I am always being told I am incomprehensible to the "layman." Anyway, even at the risk of making an idiot of myself, I will post this. This b...