January 19, 2016

January 19, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

It would be best to read this text out loud so that you can hear the sound of your own voice. These words make you pay attention to how you sound when you as a speaker produce Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB). It may never have occurred to you, but depending on whether you listen to yourself while you are speaking, you are making a different sound. 

Each time that you are not listening to yourself, even while reading this text, you produce Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). The quality of the sound of your speaking voice will improve by listening to it, but it deteriorates when you are no longer listening to it. Similarly, your covert private speech becomes coherent and orderly only when you express it in your public speech. By saying out loud what you are thinking, you bring your private speech into public speech and you can listen to what you are thinking. 

You can, of course, also, as meditators have done, quietly observe what you are thinking, but such quiet observation will not and cannot make you listen to yourself. The practice of quiet self-observation about what one is thinking to oneself without expressing it in public speech will only enhance your NVB as your private speech is never really listened to. Listening is an observing-behavior which can only occur while one is speaking. 

In NVB our private speech is not considered to be functionally related to  public speech, kept out of our public speech and silenced. The so-called quieting down of the mind by means of meditation, by ignoring the relationship between our private speech and our public speech, is an illusion. Private speech, referred to as the mind, is misconstrued as it is no longer considered to be part of public speech that now goes on privately within our own skin. Meditation is useless as only by expressing and by listening to our private speech can we achieve peace and SVB. We cannot meditate towards having better communication and relationship.