The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  Intelligence in humans certainly goes far beyond the intelligence of any known animal and, in the perspective of evolution, has no known limit. Nor has any end been found to human genius or creativity, which is not the same as human intelligence and seems to depend as much, if not more, on such other traits as persistence and caring, not to mention the mysteries of abstraction and divinity which we shall soon encounter in Part Three, where we meet the main theme of this book.

  HUMAN LANGUAGE

  The fact that untrained animals know nothing of verbal symbols is probably the principal reason why man so completely dominates them. It also makes a fundamental distinction between animal and human languages, for, unlike the animal who can voice little more than his mood, a human using words may utter any abstract concept from abatement to zygosis and use mathematical or other symbols to solve problems all the way from the composition of an atom's nucleus to the correction of a rocket's orbit in space.

  The most historic benchmark for man's final commitment to language may have been Confucius' immortal saying that "the beginning of wisdom is calling things by their right names." But even he could hardly yet have realized that language would not only clarify human thinking but also greatly accelerate the advance of knowledge by enabling each generation to record and pass on what it had learned so the youth of the next generation could start farther ahead. This is not the same as saying that language is as new as what we call civilization, for human language is thought to be about as ancient as man himself.

  Moreover, curiously enough, unlike the rest of proliferating evolution, languages and dialects seem to be getting fewer. Evidently they developed very gradually over millions of years, presumably starting in the animal phase with mothers and babies cooing to each other, lovers murmuring, workers grunting, hunters yelling with excitement. Each family or clan developed its own dialect of words - words that were likely to be misunderstood by any outsider - with the result that, even into historic times, there were about as many languages as there were clans or tribes, most estimates running into the thousands. But as tribes combined into city-states and eventually nations and empires, the best-established tongues tended to absorb the local and minor ones, particularly if the latter had no literature or script. And today there are only an estimated 130 significant languages ("significant" meaning spoken by at least a million people), which include many you may never have heard of like Wu in China, Tadzhik in the Soviet Union, Bagn in India, Xhosa in South Africa, Pashto in Afghanistan, Quechua in Peru. And the vast majority of people in the world speak one or more of the top dozen, which, in the order of the numbers using them as their native tongue, are:

  Mandarin - 450 million English - 350 million Hindi - 180 million Spanish - 160 million Russian - 160 million German - 110 million Japanese - 95 million Arabic - 90 million Bengali - 90 million Portuguese - 8o million French - 75 million Italian - 55 million

  Even with the continuing reduction in the number of surviving languages, however, an immeasurable burden of confusion and disaster continues between people who do not have a common speech. An outstanding example was the reply of Japan's Premier Tojo to President Truman's ultimatum of July 26, 1945. When Tojo said Japan would "makusatsu" the ultimatum, he meant that his government would "consider" it. But the translators at Domei quoted him in English as saying the Japanese would "take no notice of" it. So atomic bombs destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - perhaps for nothing! And the same sort of oriental misunderstanding continued through the Korean and Vietnam wars, where the much publicized "peace talks" bogged down for years over the occidentals' assumption that "to negotiate" was "to compromise," while the orientals interpreted it as "to get something by talking."

  Individual injustice through language of course must be even commoner than the more conspicuous bungles in international diplomacy, and I've read that before the Russian Revolution an Assyriologist named Netomeff was exiled to Siberia for life on a charge of blasphemy and treason because he wasn't given a chance to explain that his book about Nebuchadnezzar did not mean "Ne boch ad ne tzar" (Russian for "no God and no tzar"). And such irrationality of language interpretation continues to plague world understanding in the United Nations Assembly, where a translator on one memorable occasion translated "out of sight, out of mind" into an expression the Russians understood as "invisible insanity."

  Even when no translation is involved, most languages have ambiguities that can cause serious misunderstanding. And this made the history books in 1851 during Napoleon III's coup d'etat when one of his officers, Count de Saint-Arnaud, on being informed that a mob was approaching the Imperial Guard, coughed and exclaimed, with his hand across his throat, "Ma sacree toux! (my damned cough)." But his lieutenant, understanding him to say "Massacrez tous! (massacre them all!)," gave the order to fire, killing thousands - needlessly.

  The English language, now beginning to be considered a leading candidate for a universal tongue, is still not only seriously unphonetic but full of illogical idioms. A London house on fire may not only "burn up" and "burn down" at the same time but it itself can "put out" the same flames and smoke that the firemen are simultaneously "putting out" with their hoses. And, speaking of smoke, a Chinese student of English rang a fire alarm at Fort Bragg, California, emptying a big building to which fire engines dashed with sirens screaming, all because he needed a light for his cigarette and had carefully followed the directions printed on a red box: PULL FOR FIRE.

  Up to now the established languages have evolved naturally without conscious guidance or design or with anybody seeming to mind that the English phrase "I assume" translates into French "I deduce" and into Russian "I consider." Yet there is an unobvious mystique about language associated with the fact that it grows by itself, both in individuals and throughout the world, like a sentient being. For, as linguist Noam Chomsky of Massachusetts Institute of Technology has pointed out, all normal children at birth possess an innate capacity and compulsion to acquire speech within their next three or four years, not just by imitating their elders but, more significantly, by comprehending and creating a constant flow of new combinations of words and phrases never expressed in exactly the same way before. Actually this is a very subtle two-way flow, with the young mind both shaping the language and being shaped by it in return, depending greatly on the characteristics of his particular language as well as on how it is used - on whether cautious noun thinking eventually 'achieves success" or instead more aggressive verb thinking simply "succeeds."

  The best-known pioneer in this field was probably Benjamin Lee Whorf, who, in the 1930s, began the first scientific investigation into the way thought is molded by language, noting that the content of thinking directly influences the process of thinking, indeed so much so that all our mental images of the universe literally shift from tongue to tongue. He noticed that people visualize size in the ways language has segmented it: that a few battleships may be 3 while a few molecules may be 300, and that a sentence is to a language what an equation is to mathematics. He pointed out that bare words are essentially individual numbers which acquire their true significance only in combination because no word alone can have an absolute meaning.

  Whorf spent years studying primitive tongues and found the Algonquin languages "marvels of analysis and synthesis." Their pronouns, he discovered, have four "persons." From the European viewpoint, this means two kinds of third person, their difference indicating whether the subject or the object is referred to. Thus, using (s) to denote subject and (o) for object in the sentence "The chief called his(s) son and told him(o) to bring him(s) his(s) bow," the different pronouns distinguish "him(s)" from "him(o)," etc. As a result Algonquin legal documents should never need to adopt cumbersome phrases like "the aforesaid person," "party of the first part," etc.

  Another primitive language is Chichewa, related to Zulu and spoken by a tribe of unlettered blacks in East Africa. It contains an extraordinary perspective on time through its two past tenses: one for the real or objec
tive past (o) that influences the present, the other for the mental or subjective past (s) that does not influence the present. In it one can say "I came(o) here while I went(s) there," meaning "I came here while thinking about there." If a man says in Chichewa, "I ate(o)," he is presumably full and satisfied, but when he says, "I ate(s)," he implies he is hungry because he merely thought about eating. Such syntactic devices might conceivably in time lead their users to rare insights into relativistic physics and philosophy.

  The Hopi Indians of Arizona have a still more remarkable metaphysical language which is intimately related to their view of creation. Instead of a noun for "wave," they have only the participle "walalata" (waving). Instead of a past and future, their temporal concepts embrace only the ideas of things objective or manifested on the one hand and things subjective or unmanifested on the other without specific time comparison. Matters "objective" include everything accessible to the senses, all history and known present factors. Matters "subjective" include the future, the unseen, the mental, the emotional, what's in the hearts of creatures and man, even the spirit of the universe: God. As in the theory of general relativity, there is no universal simultaneity here. What happens beyond the mountain is not of us now, and cannot be discovered until later - maybe. If it doesn't happen here, it doesn't happen now. Things farther away in space must also be farther away in time.

  As remoteness in space-time stretches away to the unfathomable in distance and to the unrememberable in history, the objective and the subjective eventually merge into one all-encircling beginning and ending - the abysm of antiquity, mythland, dreamworld, the nethersphere, the antipodes... indeed, as Ouspensky, the Russian philosopher, once expressed it, "a noumenal world, a world of hyperspace, of higher dimensions, awaits discovery by all the sciences, which it will unite and unify - awaits discovery under its first aspect of a realm of patterned relations, inconceivably manifold, yet bearing a recognizable affinity to the rich and systematic organization of language, including au fond mathematics and music, which are ultimately of the same kind as language."

  CONSCIOUSNESS DIVIDED

  The objective-subjective polarity we have seen expressed in human language is evidence that man, even in his primitive cultures, recognizes that consciousness has multiple aspects. And this, I notice, is often manifest in the not-rare experience of hearing oneself saying something that surprises one. On occasions when I am angry at my wife - bless her - I am apt to hear myself saying things I don't really mean and which the more reasonable part of me immediately realizes I will be sorry for. In fact sometimes the fairer-minded faction of me is already sorry for the behavior of the other faction at the moment that faction acts. It's as if my adrenalin were speaking independently of my mind. Or would it be truer to say my adrenalin commandeers a minor segment of my mind to its ends, seeking thus a kind of release from imperative tension?

  In any case, a different and less natural division of consciousness occurs under the influence of drugs, which may give an animal or a man a life utterly different from that of his normal, undrugged life. Thus a dog trained to respond to a bell while drugged with curare responded a week later when drugged again, but did not respond during intervening periods of being undrugged. Which suggests that both learning and memory must be blocked by some kind of a barrier between the drugged and undrugged states. This hypothesis at least has been supported by some alcoholics who insist that drinking improves their memory of things that happened during earlier periods of drunkenness - something that, I hear, has led a few pioneering therapists to give therapy to alcoholics while they are drunk so it will have more effect the next time they start drinking.

  Amnesia is probably the simplest and most specific possible division of consciousness, and cases are known, though rare, in which loss of memory is so complete a person is mentally reborn, in effect experiencing a second life (sequentially) in the same body, neither life knowing directly of the other. Obviously I am not thinking here of hallucination, although hallucination also can produce a sort of second life, albeit of a different and more morbid nature. As a matter of fact I've heard of a retired English schoolteacher who, shortly after her husband's death, noticed a woman walking beside her on the sidewalk one day and, without thinking, tried to shake hands with her. But although the woman also put out her hand, the two hands went through each other without touching, the "woman" being only an image without flesh or bone. Then the schoolteacher noticed that the "woman" resembled herself. "It's exactly like looking in the mirror," she told a psychiatrist, "except there is no mirror."

  Such phantoms are anything but common but, when they do occur, they can be impossible to shake. When the teacher closed her eyes, she could still see her double with its eyes closed. "In a detached, intellectual way," she explained, "I am fully aware that my double is a hallucination, yet I see it and I hear it. And I always know it is there."

  The doctors admit that so far they know no acceptable therapy for treating such a disorder, which may be brought on by a brain injury but is more often considered to be a natural form of clairvoyance, whatever that turns out to be. There is, however, an equally rare kind of divided consciousness, exemplified in such wide-selling books as The Three Faces of Eve and Sybil, in which a person (usually a young woman) suddenly flips into a new personality as if her body and brain were somehow suddenly taken over and totally possessed by someone else's mind and soul. Then, after years of painstaking psychoanalysis, it turns out in each fully treated case that the new personalities (sometimes numerous and hard to identify) are actually suppressed aspects of the original personality mysteriously created by, yet completely unknown to, that person. Although much remains to be learned about this phenomenon, which seems to require a scientific alternative to the ancient and classic exorcism, it is found to develop out of some sort or another of terrifying experience so unbearable to the small child (who may not yet know how to talk) that she blacks out into amnesia, but then, while temporarily blocked from returning to the same agony, resurfaces in a different personality. If the second personality also suffers beyond endurance, a third consciousness may appear, or more. In the case of Sybil, originally a battered infant, an amazing total of seventeen personalities turned up during 2354 sessions in eleven years conducted by psychiatrist Cornelia B. Wilbur, some of them resembling babies, some adolescent boys, some grown women. But the final personality is described by Dr. Wilbur as a cured, whole and basic woman who alone of them remembers all the feelings and tortures of her former selves. In fact she is now so well balanced that she can get along as a mature, respected artist and teacher, living normally under a different name at a midwestern university, her extraordinary past still unknown (at the present writing) to her neighbors and associates.

  Multiple consciousness is almost certainly more common than is generally realized. This is partly because those who experience it rarely get sufficient professional help to integrate the different consciousnesses, and notice only some of their periods of forgetfulness, which, if long, are regarded simply as amnesia. Dr. Wilder Penfield has said that multiple consciousness occurs unpredictably when the cerebral cortex is stimulated by a mild electric current - which, it may be postulated, can happen naturally whenever the electrochemical nerve impulses are short-circuited under conditions of traumatic shock. This also must be nature's way of diluting agony through subdivision of consciousness, presumably one of the unrecognized manifestations of the Polarity Principle (Chapter 18) under which good and evil and other double-sided qualities form the grit and grain of the Soul School of Earth.

  Surely all of us are plural in a sense. Why therefore need all of you or me be confined to one body or one lifetime? Is not the mind more than the sum of the body's nerve interactions and sensations - just as life is more than the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen in common clay?

  When a fertilized ovum divides into identical twins, its budding consciousness must divide too - a process that seems simple, as when the proverbial fisherman digging
worms asked one of them, "Which way d'you think you're going?" while raising his shovel to cut him in two. To which the worm most appropriately replied, "I think I'll go both ways" - slice - "didn't we?"

  Something similar but opposite happens to people at conception, most of us, however, never becoming aware of anything particularly remarkable in the merging of the potential consciousnesses of a sperm and an ovum or in their ensuing genetic reorganization into an embryo that can twin, both the multiplication and the division being natural functions in life.

  SLEEP

  Sleep is of course another way in which consciousness is divided, in this case temporally and into cycles that are normally (but not necessarily) geared to the motions of Earth. Sleep also seems to be vital, particularly to the functioning of a highly evolved mind. However, animals, especially primitive ones, may live out their entire lives with little or no sleep. Ants, for instance, seem not to sleep although they may do something equivalent in short intervals still unnoticed by man. On the other hand, animals that are preyed upon on the plains cannot afford to relax their vigilance for more than a few seconds, so they take turns sleeping, usually with their eyes open, and some solitary antelopes go to places where they can see without being seen and, after a careful look around, sleep deeply for perhaps a minute or two at a time.

  Creatures with safe refuges, like the mouse in its hole, the hippopotamus in its pool and the bird in its tree, sleep very soundly. As do the large predators, who almost never have anything to fear even when exposed to full view. A few, if they have eyelids, not only close their eyes but cover them with paws or tail or, if they have very keen ears, like the bush baby and the big-eared bat, sleep with their outer ears folded. Seals are known to sleep underwater while holding their breath. The deepest sleeper of all, not counting hibernators or the sperm whale, is reputedly the sloth bear of India who has such a fierce temper that even a hungry tiger has never been known to risk attacking him.