If you were alone in the universe, you would still have to…

Mark Knopfler wrote in Brothers In Arms: “we have just one world, but we live in different ones” – There is only one reality, but as many interpretations of it as the number of living and conscious human beings. If you were alone in the universe, you would still have to deal with two ‘worlds’. The first is the extensional world: the stuff out there that you can touch and see and hear and otherwise perceive through your physical sensory modalities. The actual building you’re in, the actual plane that is flying above, they are part of the extensional world we all share. 

The second world is your language, the verbal constructions that you use to interpret what is or is not out there in the shared extensional world. You can pass the salt across the table and it is still the same physical salt, but you cannot transmit an experience as an experience. When you hear the words “I love you”, you do not receive the actual experience your lover is experiencing inside their CNS. You receive the translation of their subjective experience into words, which is then perceived by your auditory sensory modality (normally, your ears), and then it is further filtered and translated by your brain to a certain meaning that resembles the experience. 

Why is this important? Think about it this way: 

What if your spouse said the words “I love you” very fast, 50,000 times, non stop? Would it mean the same thing to you as if they expressed it slowly, emphasizing every word, while looking into your eyes, and leaning towards you? 

Think about the body language as a symbol: when someone leans towards you when you speak to them, it gives you a certain feeling: they are interested in what you say. 

When someone emphasizes a certain word in a sentence, the whole phrase could have a different meaning. 

“I love it when you clean the dishes” 

What is the difference in meaning between emphasizing the word “love” and the word “clean” and the word “dishes”? 

Unless you’re a fan of General Semantics, you probably were never conscious of how strongly, and how, specifically, the structure of language affects your mood and your relationships with others. Words are verbal crystallizations of our inner experience, and inside our heads, we are constantly building models of what it is or isn’t out there in the extensional world and we use words to give meaning to these models. The words you use are not the actual object or experience that they represent. Only the structure of language is the connection between the facts of the matter and our verbal processing of it. This is a major point that we will repeat over and over in this training, in many different ways and from any possible angle, because it is the most crucial to your well being and harmonious relationship with others. The models you build in your mind, using the words you automatically and unconsciously structure, are used by your brain as a map to guide you in life. The verbal constructions stored in your nervous system are components of your mental map of the extensional world. The actual experience of “love” cannot be transmitted because it is not a physical object. The translated meaning is delivered and accepted, and as such, the loving feeling you have depends on how Love is represented in your own subjective internal map. 

You can share the same construction of words about Love with others, “love is all we need”, “love is in the air”, “can’t buy me love”, etc., but the actual experience of Love is created internally and subjectively by you alone. You feel Love not because someone else said “I love you” but because the feeling was generated inside of you, based on the rules stored in your map of reality. 

If you have a neural connection between noticing a smiling face (extensional) and feeling unconditional love (interpretation), how will you behave in your day to day? 

If you have a neural connection between an unfavorable event (for example, someone forgets your birthday) and feeling inadequate or depressed, how will your experience of life be?