Shards of Consciousness

Words fascinate me. In another life I might have been a semanticist. But in this life, like many of you, my love for and fascination with words is primarily practical, not theoretical.

Words are the signs and symbols we use to formulate and manipulate our world. We use words to distill percept into concept. We use them to communicate, to rationate, to rationalize, to build relationships and to destroy them. We use them for both analysis and synthesis. Without a symbol system such as words embody, it is difficult to imagine what we would be like as a species.

But words, the verbal representations of our minds, aren't all we are or have. In many ways, they are as much a barrier to communication as a vehicle of it.

A few weeks ago I talked about words and music. Words are the head. Music is the heart. Too often we listen only with our heads, ignoring the heart. Words have meaning, but the meaning they convey is only a small part of what we want to express. By themselves they are only a map pointing at something else. We have to listen to ourselves, we have to listen to those around us, with our hearts as well as our heads, to get an inkling of what we are really trying to communicate.

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This episode of the Shards of Consciousness podcast is based on a post I wrote in February, 2007 called What Do You Really Mean? What Do You Really Want?.

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Music Featured

Corey&Cosmo - We're All Stars - Transcontinental Experiment Remix

Music provided by the PodShow Podsafe Music Network