Verbal and Nonverbal Awareness
P1 – I wrote the following in 1987. Do you understand it? Do you agree with it? How would you say it today?
Verbal awareness is not just the awareness of words but the organization of awareness by images, symbols, and words. Nonverbal awareness is not just the non-awareness of words but the non-word-symbol-image nature of awareness. One is relatively content-oriented, the other process-oriented, but both are meaning-oriented. Meaning, in this case, is the result of discernment.
To further ground the importance of such thinking, consider the relationship each different basis of discernment yields with respect to meaning. What is non-verbal meaning? It can be articulated in words, but can it be experienced in words? As children, we non-verbally experience meaning in relation to learning to walk, but while we can describe that meaning, we, as consummate walkers, no longer experience it. In contrast, what do we mean by verbal meaning? The meanings associated with words? As the semanticists are fond of pointing out, words do not have meanings. They are vague and ambiguous and are given meaning by the context of the perceiver.
The common denominator of this circular problem about meaning is that meaning is an interplay between the object, subject, or event and the verbal and nonverbal context of its perception. This is difficult to grasp because the process of non-verbal awareness is no longer entirely within the direct experience of the adult self. We do have non-verbal experiences, but we no longer have a non-verbal orientation with the world. In the adult, the experience of awareness is dominated by the verbal and by the self, both of which are relative abstractions of the more direct relationship with “energy” or “attention,” which is non-verbal. The point here is that the verbal-minded orientation has a different reference basis or contextual ground from the non-verbal orientation. Consequently, the nature of non-verbal awareness is an entirely different “self-world view”. https://g.co/gemini/share/6dba5f1dca5f
P2 – I rewrote parts of the above. Same questions, do you understand, agree, how would you write it?
We evolved to be and remain deep in our core, non-verbally learning-oriented beings. Our innate non-verbal being-learning learns to extend bonding and belonging through shared verbal representations of socially conventionalized meanings. At some threshold of facility, the verbal, initially about social sync, inverses to voice the non-verbal and learns to become the “I am”/“self-talk” that occupies so much of the stream of our kind of consciousness.
Verbal learning is an activity of non-verbal learning that conscripts, organizes, and orders the support of non-verbal learning according to learned verbal representations and their conventionalized meanings. Verbal learning is a like a virtual machine operating inside the actual machine of non-verbal learning. https://g.co/gemini/share/ed7eada8860e
P3- Finally, one more related piece, same questions: verbal learning can lead to verbal associations that only provide label like meanings and only in the context of the verbal associations they were learned in. Yet verbal learning can also lead to verbal representations of non-verbal meanings. In the former, the verbal meaning is fused into associations with other verbal meanings and is only available to support subsequent learning that evokes those associations (the context must be present for the meaning to participate). In the later, the verbal meaning is grounded in the non-verbal – rather than associational memory – it is integrated deeply-implicate into being and its meaning can participate in any non-verbal learning that its meaning is relevant to regardless of its initially learned context. https://g.co/gemini/share/bbe8c526c47dIndex of other dAilogues
P4 – You just said “while grounded representations are integrated with our broader understanding of the world”. Its important to note that where as the more superficial associational learning depends on evoking its original context to or an abstract map of relations in order to relevate its meanings into supporting ongoing learning. deeper nonverbal essence level learning isn’t so much integrated as a separate component but rather is part of the whole mind available to participate in learning anywhere its meanings are relevant independent of the context they were encountered in. https://g.co/gemini/share/d9d405eeb281