April 16, 2016

April 16, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

In “Religion as Schedule-Induced Behavior” (2009) Strand writes that it would be good “to expand the response class to include topographically diverse phenomena” and “supports the idea that religious behavior transcends topography.” Rather than describing the goings on of Mother Teresa and her Sisters, this writer suggests we include how we sound while we speak about religious behavior. This gives us the Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB)/ Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB) distinction, which makes clear that there is no need to transcend topography if we understand each other. 

Furthermore, our lack of understanding was based on a lack of attention in our spoken communication for how we sound. Our lack of understanding always involved a lack of experience, but once we begin to listen to ourselves while we speak, we embody our sound again because we ourselves stimulate the speaker-as-own-listener. Of course, this needs to be pointed to us by someone who knows about this and who can correct us if we stop listening to ourselves while we speak and become more concerned again with making others listen to us or with listening to others. As we will find out: listing to ourselves while we speak is an effortless, genuine religious experience.

Unlike what we pretend in NVB, we don’t try to sound good. In SVB, we simply sound good and the listener, who hears this, agrees with us. We sound good as we don’t need to try to sound good. We sound good as we can sound good because we are not aversively stimulated. The religious issue of transcendence doesn’t even arise as we are attuned with ourselves and each other. What has always been possible in ordinary conversation, due to its failure, became an imaginary conversation with a non-existing God and has given rise to negative public and private speech. Words like transcendence or self-as-infinite derive from our failed attempts to escape from and ideally avoid NVB. This view can be listened to due to the SVB/NVB distinction.