Jagat

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...