By now you may have realized I kind of have this thing for jargon... I hate it! Wait no, we're spiritual so I'm not surpassed to hate. Ok, I don't like it (You may have also noticed I can be slightly sarcastic 😬). But in all seriousness, I find jargon to be very misleading and a bit exclusive. I believe the intention behind this common vernacular we call jargon is to bring everyone within a certain group onto the same page with a new vocabulary unique to their group experience. As a by-product of this, and one that I will proceed to poke an extraordinary amount of fun at (the by-product, not the people), we are often left excluding those who are not "in the know," and we find ourselves in an experience that waters down our communication skills. Instead of using language that comes naturally as an individual, we are often left using the language of the group, and words begin to take on very different meanings for different people.
In the new thought world, our language is riddled with jargon, I would say, to the extent that even the person using the jargon doesn't necessarily know what they mean. This is not all the time, but there are many words that have become so familiar to us that don't think twice about tossing them into our conversations. For a theology that is so dependent on our word, this almost sounds like blasphemy.
I am not suggesting that we eliminate jargon from New Thought. In many ways our common vocabulary is necessary, as it is in any field that ventures out into new territory. There needs to be new vocabulary to express these experiences. We need to be able to name it, however, it is also necessary that we are able to accurately express these new experiences. Without this accuracy in our language we are left with empty meaning.
Our experience with language is a funny thing. As humans we have a tendency to believe that things exist because we have words for them. Yet, that is not how we learn language. At a very young age we begin to form a relationship with the things around us and at some point we begin to associate those things with a word. Our experience and relationship to that thing was already present before we had the language for it. As we grow, this relationship between thing, experience, and word begin to meld together, and there is a tendency to forget that there was ever a separation between them to begin with. We don't think about these things as kids. Most of us don't take the time to regularly think about these things as adults!
As we continue to grow older, we begin witnessing more abstract events where we are labeling an experience, a thought, or an emotion with a word. Here there is a tendency again for the word to become that thing. In our minds, we represent that "thing" - the experience, thought, or emotion - with a single word. It is easier to recall that way. The separation between the memory and the experience disappears as the word begins to replace the initial event.
I am sure we could continue on for volumes describing the complicated process of labeling our experiences and learning language. What has hopefully become clear already is that our experiences at a young age shaped our vocabulary and not the other way around, yet as adults, we tend to view our words as if they are definitive. Our default wiring is to think that everyone is like us. Our brains likes it that way (which could be a whole other post). "Everyone clearly means the same thing that I do when I use these words." Not that we are constantly reminding ourselves of this but our brain is programed to some extent with that message. In short, we have it all backwards when it comes to language.
"Everyone is just like me!"
Most of us approach regular conversation not realizing we are predisposed to this assumption that handicaps our communication skills. We expect that others should understand our experiences because the language we are using is what we individually associate with that given experience. Except the problem is that everyone thinks that. So, you have an expectation that I have had the same experience with your words that you have, and I have the expectation that you have had the same experience with words that I have. We all grow up with different stories and baggage around our language. Even twins would have varying experiences and language. All of this tends to collide mid conversation without and clarity around what is really happening. If I mean one thing when using a word and you mean something else but we are both assuming that the other means the same thing that we do, there is immediately a communication break down that we are completely unaware of. We think we are being so incredibly clear. "I couldn't have been more clear!" (I can't count how many times I've found myself saying that) But, the other person's experience may be so different that what you are saying doesn't make any sense at all from their perspective. All of this is just around common language. We haven't even gotten to the jargon yet!
In everyday conversations we are, at best, guessing that we understand what another is saying. We are constantly interpreting what is being said through our own experience and definition behind that words being used. Imagine what happens when we begin to throw jargon into the mix.
Most often, jargon tends to be made-up or borrowed words. Words that are either common words with a new meaning or vernacular of another field that gets loosely defined in a way that is convenient for the current group. This happens in New Thought all the time. Things like consciousness and enlightenment. For those in New Thought these are such common words we tend not to think twice about it, which is actually the problem. For most of us, we have not thought twice about what we mean when we use these new words which we so often heard others using and have now adopted for our own. Not only do we all have our own past experience with these words, we are also being asked to create a new, and possibility conflicting definition for this new context (Which is an almost impossible task). Just to recap for a moment. We already have a tendency to suck at communicating with language because of the way we are wired, so now we want to introduce an entirely new element that puts everybody on a totally different page to begin with. Sounds like a good plan.
Let's look at one of the most common jargon words in the movement for a sec... the word consciousness. It is actually one of the most unclear words we could adopt as a movement. Sometimes it refers to whether something is conscious or not. This seems simple, but even this I don't know what it means. Do we mean conscious versus unconscious - like medically? Or do we mean more like aware versus unaware? Can you be aware and unconscious? Or conscious and unaware? Other times consciousness refers to our ability to process experience, as in a rock has no consciousness but humans do. Here, we can get into some crazy debates. "Well, the molecules that make up rocks create a rock consciousness, which is different from human consciousness: heaps and wholes. Rocks have "heap" consciousness and humans have "whole" consciousness." And, at some point we introduce the general concept of consciousness that is most often meant in the New Thought world were consciousness is really Consciousness, with a capital C, referring to God.
This opens a whole other can of worms, but let's go for it. Ok, Consciousness with a big C, means God, but history tells us we won't all agree on what God is (which is probably why we coined the term Consciousness in the first place, because it has less baggage than the word God). Let's for a moment pretend to agree that God, in this case Consciousness (with a big C), is everything that could ever possibly be, including whatever created that "everything," and that "everything," and that "everything...." Its infinite, get it? It is the creativeness behind everything. If you can imagine it then there is something else behind that which you are imagining, which created it. In other words, we quickly realize it is impossible to imagine, let alone define, what C/consciousness is. It is, however, possible to define elements or attributes of God/Consciousness. One of these attributes is that Consciousness, in any definition, cannot be physical. Physical things may be conscious, but they are not Consciousness itself. For those who follow quantum physics or those who are up on their philosophical theology, Consciousness/consciousness is nonlocal and non-located. It is a nonphysical force with out any physical location.
In contrast, step into any New Thought community or spiritual center and you are almost guaranteed to hear someone talking about creating a shift in Consciousness or how we all exist in Consciousness. Sounds great. I'm in! This makes a lot of sense from the perspective of using Consciousness as a synonym for God, at least for what most of us meant by the old definition of God, where we comprehend God as some physical being. But there is a major snag here. First, the whole point of creating new vernacular is to create new forms of expression for ideas that didn't exist before, as they do now. One might say that Consciousness was initially coined as an alternative for those who viewed God as a dude in a thrown in the clouds doling out gifts and punishments. There is great progress in this sense, but as we have just seen, without further exploration or discussion, this new alternative can be just as limiting as the old. Second, you cannot exist within a nonphysical.... whatever it is. There isn't even a word for it! Its not a thing, its not a being, its... well... Consciousness. You, a physical being, cannot exist within a nonphysical Consciousness. And now we come full circle back to the beginning of the issue where we discover how limiting language really can be. It is very hard, nearly impossible really, for us to imagine an intangible, truly abstract God. No matter what the word we use, at some point the correlation between it and the infinite is limited.
Similarly, we are never creating a shift in Consciousness. If Consciousness is the-all-that-there-is, for lack of a better term for describing something that is infinitely indescribable, it is not possible for there to be a shift in it. A shift would require a point of reference, which would imply a separation from one thing to another in order to measure said shift. Mainly, once again it is not physical, so there is nothing to shift. What is infinite cannot shift. More importantly, We talk about a shift in Consciousness as if we are influencing God, which implies a complete separation for it. Well, that idea quickly breaks down too. If it is all-that-there-is then we cannot be separate from it. We must exist as this indescribable all-that-there-is. The only shift that can happen is with our own awareness. Everything already exists with Consciousness; all possibilities. It is our own awareness of these possibilities that would need to shift in order to achieve a new experience.
In a similar vain, we talk about our Consciousness, or my consciousness, as if we each have our own Consciousness. Maybe one could say that we each have our own consciousness (little c), but then we are removing ourselves from the vernacular of New Thought and placing ourselves into some other field of study. Honestly, I don't think that is most often the intention. We, myself included, talk about a shift in "your consciousness" or "my consciousness" as if we were each given a little piece of Divine Consciousness (There's another one! What the hell does that mean? 😉). So, is there Divine Consciousness and human Consciousness? Or it is Divine Consciousness from the human conscious (notice the little c?) perspective? Whatever is meant is certainly is not clear without further explanation, yet we/I say it all the time. Either way, it sure seems to imply a level of separation. We might say that, just as we cannot fully describe infinity, we cannot fully describe God so we must settle for language that best describes the attributes of God we are discussing in any given context. With this I would agree, and at the same time this does not negate the potential for my haphazard use of an empty word. While we may not be able to accurately describe this infinite-whatever-it-is, the words must be intentional.
The conversation can go on and on. I think you get the idea at this point. I do not say any of this to knock the New Thought culture, our language, or anyone using it. As critical as this sounds, I hope you find as much humor in it as I do. In many instances it is incredibly necessary for us to venture out onto very thin limbs only to come back with piss poor language to describe the experience of being out there. Through this process we ultimately grow in our understanding, and more importantly, we grow in our connection to each other and this non-Thing that we keep trying to describe and relate to. As clumsy and unclear as our language can be, it is all needed, individually and culturally, in finding our way. I simply intend on pointing out the necessity for each of us individually, as well as culturally as the larger New Thought community, to spend some time and really dig-in to the words that we claim as our own which help us on our journey. Let these words be stepping stones to a deeper connection and not limitations. At our stage in human evolution it would be impossible to understand the fullness of this Thing we are each grasping for, yet it is imperative that we continue to try. The more we explore the boundaries that are in front of us the further we push what is possible right now. Just like our experience shaped our words as children, with the awareness that is available to us now, let our words shape our new experience as mature conscious adults.
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