Meeting,

 

In the encounter with myself, with my own language, I reinterpret my current experience and everything I have experienced. It's such a beautiful thing. Everywhere it is pretended, that we are all doing very well, with our so-called communication, but no one pays attention to the encounter with themselves, in Embodied Language (EL). To the extent that there is room for change, let alone for improvement, it is always the other person – but never ourselves – who needs to change or who urgently needs to stop their vile behavior.

 

In my experience, people who supposedly work on themselves, have the harshest judgments about others. Actually, they don't give a damn about others, because it is always only about their saintly, supposedly better, but arrogant behavior and never about a healthy, pleasant manner. When one talks about the problems in the world and what could or should be done about them, one involuntarily engages in group behavior that disregards any form of individuality.

 

Because of my encounter with myself, I do not feel the need to participate in Disembodied Language (DL), which almost everyone is involved in, because it is clear to me, the only solution to what we - as individuals - face as a problem, lies in talking to ourselves, listening to ourselves, writing to ourselves and reading and carrying out what we have written about ourselves. No one can do EL for me and that's why I'm okay with doing it for myself.

 

As long as I was busy with others with my language, I was engaging, without realizing it, like everyone else, in DL. However, my ability, in the encounter with myself, to take and keep my EL all to myself, showed me my Language Enlightenment (LE). Even while this was true, I was still trying, in vain, for a long time, to share my EL with others and to teach it to others, so to speak, but that has come to an end, now that my EL – the language that creates space – has become my way to celebrate my LE every day.

 

My LE is something very down-to-earth and very ordinary, but others, who are still under the spell of their DL, are inclined, because of that conditioning, to regard it as something spiritual. I discovered that what is described as religious, is always about our inability to encounter ourselves in our own language. Even though we imagine this, we never talk to God or to a higher power. And, although we  tell this to ourselves, we never talk to others, who, so to speak, take the place of that higher power. During EL, we talk to ourselves because that is the only basis on which we can really talk to others.

 

So in EL, we don't talk to others, as if we were talking to ourselves, but we talk to others in exactly the same way as we talk to ourselves. There is a reason why this has not yet happened, because everyone - due to modern conditioning with science, technology and the inevitable decline of the  belief in a higher power - continues to consider talking to others, also due to conditioning, to be more important than talking to ourselves. However, this inescapable, undeniable, mechanical habit can only be broken, if we start talking to ourselves and writing to ourselves more often, so that, listening to ourselves, reading & instructing ourselves, we start to appropriate our own language, that is, our EL.

 

I am suddenly reminded of how difficult it was for me to write a letter to my parents, when I left the Netherlands for the first time, hitchhiking, in the middle of a cold, snowy winter and had traveled to Israel via Luxembourg, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece. Every time I finished writing a paragraph, I was dissatisfied with the result. Most letters were never sent and torn up again, because I could not put into words the enormous changes I was going through. I was, time and time again, overwhelmed, deeply moved, speechless, impressed by what I experienced, in all those new environments and circumstances, to which I had exposed myself, sometimes at great risk.

 

In the many wonderful encounters with unknown people, who suddenly wanted to share their lives, their culture and wealth with me, there was of course also a meeting with myself. Because I left them every time and traveled further, I began to break free from my own conditioning, that had led to the journey I was on. And, even though I continued traveling for years to come, my spiritual search for my so-called roots was actually over after that very first trip, in which I walked through Maastricht, Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. I knew my spirituality was over for good.

 

I grew up as the eldest son in a Catholic family and for me that meant that, despite the good aspects it had, I would continue to suffer from all kinds of guilt-feelings for many years. I actually did not want to believe, that what I had experienced was true and so I continued searching for years, even though I already knew, that my own experiences were more important than any of the spiritual, psychological, philosophical, artistic, freebooters, explorers, social, scientific, political, jacket, which I gave it.

 

When I discovered my EL, at the age of twenty-one – it could have been twenty-two or twenty-three – it really was just too good to be true. Even though I had already had years behind me, in which I had personally experienced and enjoyed, that I had enriched myself by indulging in all kinds of different cultures, climates, people and circumstances, my ability to recognize all this and to witness this in my language, only now seems to dawn on me. I really did all this and that is why I can now, while I have lived in America for more than twenty-four years, write about my LE with my EL, in Dutch (this text was first written in Dutch).

 

It is truly true that I am enlightened. I couldn't admit it or believe it until I had said it, heard it, written it or read it in the language I grew up in. My LE is not something spiritual, but something intellectual and emotional, because the rational aspect of my EL recognizes all my emotions. With my EL, I witness a beauty, naturalness and love that completely satisfies me. I am so happy and content, even though nothing is as I ever imagined it to be. My EL is not about my expectations, but about what is possible and that is why I can enjoy my LE with my EL. The weekend is just around the corner and I'm looking forward to having more time to celebrate even more with my language. In the encounter with myself, I let go of my language, as I have said and written everything, but also heard and read everything, what I wanted to say and write and what I wanted to hear and read.