The immune system in our body is responsible for any defensive reaction against foreign material. Language acts as an immune response, keeping the world in a shape we are familiar with, keeping new and potentially “unnecessary” experience out. The “unnecessary” experience guarded by language could include:
- Ideas that are incompatible with our beliefs and the way we experience the world
- Experiences that we have not been trained into – for example, we learn a vocabulary and language at university that allows us the experience of a doctor, a lawyer, a computer programmer, an architect or a psychologist. The specialised nature of language in this example acts as a ‘barrier to entry’ to anyone not versed in the language – you can’t have the experience unless you have the words.
I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr C. D. Broad, “that we should do well to consider the suggestion that the function of the brain and the nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive.” The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.
According to such a theory each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a messy trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born. That which, in the language of religion is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and as it were, petrified by language. The various “other worlds” with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large… Temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,”…or by means of drugs.
Aldous Huxley, DOORS OF PERCEPTION:1954. p.22
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