Real,

 

During your usual way of talking – which has set the stage for how you deal with your language and determines how you behave – you cannot be real, because you don’t listen to yourself while you speak. Your Disembodied Language (DL) doesn’t allow you to be in touch with your feelings, let alone express them in a satisfying manner. The fact, that you don’t know how to talk about your emotions with DL, makes you do many neurotic things, because you try in vain to find relief from your negative feelings.

 

The only way in which you can talk about your feelings in a positive manner, is if you listen to yourself while you speak and, thus, engage in Embodied Language (EL). Although you may still be processing the negative feelings, which you weren’t able to express and dissolve with your DL, with ongoing EL, you can talk about these familiar negative feelings, without getting again carried away. Your EL invites and allows you to address everything you weren’t able to address with DL. It is very moving to heal from your DL.

 

In DL – which, I repeat, is our common way of talking – it is not only impossible to express your feelings sensitively and calmly, but if you try, you are always made to feel, as if you are doing something wrong, which, ironically, is true. However, it is only true, from an EL point of view, but not from a DL point of view. With DL, we viciously judge our own and each other’s feelings. Moreover, since we all fail to express our emotions and our experiences correctly, in DL, we are made to feel, as if we should keep our negative as well as our positive feelings to ourselves and always speak in a non-emotional, supposedly, rational manner. Surely, in DL, we are incapable of being rational, as our negative feelings get in the way. We can only be rational, when we have positive emotions, but we need to have EL to maintain and express our positive feelings.

 

During DL, you either hear people apologizing for their feelings – but they never really mean it, because they have been made to feel guilty about what they are feeling – or you will hear people say, you should never apologize for how you feel. For people, who only know DL, being real, means the irresponsible, blunt, forceful expression of their negative emotions, without considering how this affects others. Surely, we should never apologize for being real, but being real has nothing to do, with the unconscious unloading of our negative hyped-up emotions.

 

When we finally express the inevitably negative feelings and experiences of our DL – with EL – we are mourning the great trauma, that was endured by all of mankind, since the beginning of time. When I first discovered that I could talk out loud with myself and listen to the sound of my own voice and effortlessly produce my own EL, I was overcome by a deep sense of sorrow. Each time, I took time, to talk with myself and listen to myself, I was in tears. EL makes crying easy. In EL, my tears became my biggest friends.

 

I once talked about the DL/EL distinction with someone, who taught acting. He seemed very interested, initially, but when I told him, all acting is DL, he began to argue with me. In EL, we don’t act, because we are real. While I could understand, why he would say, that acting is about being real and being honest, I would say, with my EL, that acting is a failed attempt at EL.

 

Our infatuation with acting, movies, TV, social media, amusement, books or anything we can read – which always distracts us from our own language – keeps us stuck and busy with DL, in which others, supposedly, are more important, that is, more real or, presumably, more capable or special, than we ourselves. However, those, in DL, who manage to get the attention are those who demand it and struggle for it. In EL, speakers never demand the listener’s attention, as each speaker is his or her own listener.

 

In DL, we say: seeing is believing. However, EL has nothing to do with believing, because it is about being real. Moreover, in DL, something is considered to be real, because, supposedly, it has objective independent existence. Yet, in EL, we recognize, with our novel use of language, that everything, which, presumably, exists independently from us, is, in fact, neurally-behaved by us. In other words, there is no reality and there cannot be any reality, separate from our own experience. However, we will crash to the ground, if we believe, we can fly and jump from a roof.  

After students leave school, to get a job, they are said to go and live in the real world. It is interesting, to take note of the fact, that the somewhat protected college or university environment, is, by default, depicted as unreal, while having a real job in the real world is real. Certainly, the real world, isn’t the supportive environment, contrasted with a student’s life. In other words, the real is, basically, described as if it is difficult, serious, unprotected and having nothing to do with the experience of comfort. Our notion of what is real is different whether it derives from our DL or our EL. With our dumb, unconscious DL, we falsely believe, we live in hell, but with our EL, we really live the good life.