Behold the eye-popping view down on the Lang courtyard maples, through a gap in the window from my classroom on the 6th floor. I swooned Most of my pictures, like this one at left, are taken from the fourth floor. Since the leaves' undersides are pale, the deep red is diluted a bit. Down in the courtyard below, the light is golden but the flaming colors are visible only among the fallen leaves.
But that was enough today to allow for a charmed conversation with a
Chinese student I'm doing an independent study with. (We're reading
around James' Varieties of Religious Experience, and have moved into David Yaden and Andrew Newberg's Varieties of Spiritual Experience which
- how to put it? - lacks James' existential urgency. More about that
another time (for me this is prep for one of my spring 2025 classes, a
course around James' Varieties).
After lamenting that the studies Yaden and Newberg synthesized offered at best correlations - areas of the brain or surveys that light up during particular kinds of reported or live experience, but what causes what? - we found ourselves talking about what they call the "circumstances" in which spiritual experiences seem more likely to arise. This is a useful complement to James, who rather too quickly privileges experience in "solitude." Contemplative practices, repetitive rituals, nature, etc. are discussed, but we wound up talking together about language, and why it's often said (sic!) that spiritual experiences are ineffable, beyond language. Don't you need a name or category for certain kinds of experience even to recognize what they are - even if that word is "ineffable"? or 道可道 非常道 名可名 非常名?
We were thinking of the subjects of Tonya Luhrmann's studies, who are attentive to the possibility that something in their own inner monologue - an attempted dialogue with God - didn't just come from themselves. If there are such things, knowing of their possibility - having names for them - would make all the difference. What other linguistic things might change people's experience - either make them aware of otherwise unrecognized realms of experience or make them think such realms exist? I suggested the habitual use by a whole society of a phrase like inshallah (God willing) could make a person aware of every juncture as potentially one in which the divine intervenes, make any event an occasion for gratitude.
But perhaps even more was given to those who knew more than one language (as James did, fluent in German and French), allowing them to experience everything as something linguistically modulated... My student was thinking Sapir-Whorff, and told me the English language makes him, he thinks, more open to spiritual experience (and God). Were there any realities Mandarin alone offered him awareness of, I asked? He mentioned count nouns (counters, classifiers), something which to a non-native seems pretty arbitrary, but he was thinking especially about the ways human lives are counted: 一百条命. That this was the same counter used for other long things, like ribbons, roads and rivers, made it seem obvious that lives were something of which one would have many.
Is English, which renders everything an object or a subject, better, as it insists on linear causality, I wondered? We considered western languages which gender all nouns, as English doesn't. Or pronouns English has shed, like the intimate thou (as in the inshallah-like "thy will be done"), not to mention the long lost dual (which Chinese has analogs, I think, in 俩 or even 咱们), or the middle voice. The student mentioned ki, the new pronoun Robin Wall Kimmerer proposed for living things, which made the whole space light up a little more. Spirit was flowing, though don't ask me to tell you what caused what! And kin were part of it all along, it seemed!
