Parting,

 

Embodied Language (EL) is making yourself audible – to yourself – in your own language. You can hear exactly whether you feel positive or negative. In both cases, you just allow it. When you feel positive, you sound like this and when you feel negative, you sound different. Because of our habitual way of handling our language, which I therefore call Disembodied Language (DL), we say that we are not really ourselves as long as we still feel negative and are only ourselves when we feel positive. Of course we are ourselves in DL as well as in EL, but the big difference is that we can only talk about this with EL and are therefore stuck in DL with a totally wrong verbal self-image.

 

Whether we can verbalize it, admit it and know it or not, everyone unconsciously tries to be and stay positive, when we actually experience negativity. This is a main characteristic of DL. However, from our EL, we are able to represent our emotional experience, our feelings, in a sincere and therefore correct way. So if you feel negative, you just say that to yourself and then, you can really hear it and then there is basically nothing wrong with that, because that's simply how you feel. You don't try to change it while you talk with yourself about it and you just let it be. You know because of EL when it changes. It is not because of a decision, but because you are aware of what you are actually experiencing.

 

Your ability to realize whether your experience is positive or negative has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to be positive or trying not to be negative. You are who you are and you sound the way you sound. You don't do anything to sound different than how you sound, that's why you can really feel the way you feel. In EL, whether you feel positive or negative, you know you really are you. Because you can allow all your feelings, everything transforms and everything becomes positive.

  

I too was busy with anything and everything.

I admit, that despite all my well-intentioned 

efforts, nothing came of what I wanted and 

pursued. Still, I feel positive, because all of

 this is now behind me and I will never have

 to worry about it again. I hear something 

has changed, but can't say exactly what it is 

yet. Have I suddenly become older and wiser? 

Is it because I quit DL forever? I don't care 

what kind of explanation I give and that feels

 very pleasant. My connection with the Dutch

 language is, of course, because of my 

emigration to the Americas in 1999, mainly

 an increasingly vague memory, because 

here I speak, read, hear and write in English. 

These words are a grateful farewell to the 

Dutch language, which could not have 

happened before with my EL.

 

It's been great, but I'll probably continue in English from now on, because there's no reason to say anything in Dutch anymore. There is no one left in the Netherlands with whom I am still in contact. As I write this, I also realize that apart from my wife Bonnie, there is no one here I can talk to about EL. It's not sad or negative, because it is what it is. I feel excited about what is to come, now that the past has been resolved with my language. I know that my  emphasis has shifted from being focused on EL to my Language Enlightenment (LE). It's amazing how that started to manifest itself. The realization that it was always my LE that made me want to have EL, is unimaginable.

 

LE is beyond our imagination, because it implies the end of language. So beautiful that, like everything else in life, we only borrow our language for a while and then, when we die, we give it back to those who live with it. Also that whole learning process of being born without language, experiencing EL, in the form of love, attention and care, but also the harsh reality, that soulful, innocent, felt, sincere, living language was just a childhood memory, which became more and more painful with adulthood, because the major difference between EL and DL was not yet clear. It was only when DL came to an end that EL could continue and that impermanence, did not come into the picture, but – inevitably – into my ears. It is because of DL, that we focus more on written than on spoken language and thus give more attention to visual than auditory stimuli.

 

During DL we are not only obsessed with, fixated on and seemingly imprisoned by the verbal aspect of our language, but we have also hung almost all of our belongings on what we can see. The old adage, seeing is believing, has taken us by the nose, as the real meaning of language cannot be written, read, and seen, since it can only be spoken and heard.

 

When we finally hear what we say and by listening to ourselves can begin to say what could not have come to our attention before, it turns out, there is nothing to say about death than that disembodying has already taken place during EL. This is EL's most amazing conclusion: although DL's suffering has lost its grip and we were happily able to continue with EL, what we were, before we acquired language and what we will have disappeared into, after we die, has come above the table because of our LE. It is so wonderful to be able to say this and to say goodbye to language as such. Only now my LE fully reveals itself, now that I have said and heard it.