Langu age

About twenty years ago, it was still believed that after the brain’s initial formation period, brain networks were static. Neuroscience now recognizes that the brain is shaped by experience on an ongoing basis.  Brain plasticity is the ability of the brain to rewire itself and form new networks at any age. 

The internet, and especially social media, is without a doubt affecting our reading and our writing, but what I find particularly fascinating, are the examples of brain plasticity in these areas, now slowly coming to the fore.

Without us being consciously aware of it, our brains are adapting and adjusting to the time we spend online.

The splitting of words as we type in haste, the joining of words for convenience or for use with hashtags, (a word only recently added to the Oxford dictionary), omitting letters for the sake of character limitations, and the use of numerals 4 certain words, are now everyday phenomena in cyberspace.

The very concept of cyberspace is effecting not only the way we use words but also the meaning we give to them and the way we see them. 

What if nowhere is seen as now here

Tweeps refer to everyhere not everywhere as they meet online with users from various countries simultaneously. 

The concept of an iCloud is not at all strange.

The blog u r reading right now is called here2here.

Only recently I came across this tweet:

@GammaInfinity One whole day has passed, and I remain amazed that until yesterday I had never noticed that “race car’” backwards is “race car”.

These are exciting times, for these very abilities will overflow into everyday life.  Whereas before we could look at something for years without noticing certain aspects of it, we will now begin to take new perspectives on worldviews we had never questioned before.  Outlooks conditioned by upbringing and culture will be looked at with new eyes. Reversals, splittings & combinations will see insights evolving.

As an exercise, I decided to take the word “language” and play around with it. 

Langu age, was perhaps a natural split, as we hear much about entering a new age.

Research revealed that besides being an iphone app to make the learning of Spanish and Mandarin Chinese a lot of fun, “langu” also means “my” in Swahili. 

A promoter of collaboration, I immediately looked up a translation for “our” in Swahili, only to discover that it is  “wetu” which I of course read as “we too”, appropriate I felt in an age of interconnectivity and connectedness!

Lan guage was another possiblity.

My eyes muddled up the letters in guage on first reading and I saw it as gauge.

LAN is an acronym (hard to believe that two years ago I did not know the meaning of lol!) for local area network, but as more and more of us access online space, the question of what to gauge as local becomes an interesting one. 

Let’s look at one more possibility for “language”: La ngu age.

Age keeps reoccurring, la added a French ring to the, and ngu is an acronym for never give up. The never give up age!  

My eyes, probably because I come from Africa and have many times visited the Kruger National Park, immediately saw “gnu” the first time I read la ngu age. The age of the gnu?

The gnu is a wildebeest and spends much of its life as a loner on the move. This is possibly not inappropriate when we consider how we as individuals are continuously on the move in cyberspace.  In a sense we are alone as we do this, but in another sense, this aloneness is only physical.  On an energetic level, we connect to so many others in virtual space.  The gnus are famous for their annual migrations in the Serengeti, and together we in here2here space, are making mass migrations to new ways of being.

People from the West write and read horizontally from left to right. In the East many languages are written and read vertically from bottom to top. The mass migrations we are making together in cyberspace, however, are rewiring our brains and altering the way we write and see things.  Now, for example, in the West, emoticons are written vertically :) while the Eastern smilies interestingly enough run horizontally ^_^ with most of us beginning to use them interchangeably.

In @GammaInfinity’s Flickr photostream you will find what he has entitled Luminal Butterfly. He states that in this magic fantasy, butterfly has another stage after adult, where it becomes pure light, creating beautiful displays in late summer.

Not only is language undergoing a metamorphosis, but we, both as individuals and as the collective, are undergoing one too.

As we do so the heart is opening:

heartheartheartheartheartheart is becoming 

hear the art hear the art hear the art 

_/|\_

Meeting in the gap

Yesterday, in South Africa, making my way to my boarding gate for my flight back to Dubai, I passed a little shop selling Ndebele art.

Today, 24hrs later, I had lunch in an Iranian restaurant.

 

These photos were taken within one day of each other and between them was a gap - the gap of place, the gap of time, the gap of culture.

Yet now you see them both, brought together by my sharing them with you in this here2here space where we meet. 

This space is in itself a gap between us and yet it is a gap not void of content. On the contrary, it is the space of untapped potential, the space of creativity, the meeting place of various personalities, cultures and worldviews, made possible by technology.

It is a reminder of the many gaps we encounter on a daily basis.

The beauty of communication can only be appreciated by acknowledging pauses between words, whether they be spoken or written. Music is filled with pauses between notes, gaps between movements.

There is the transition point between ending one task and beginning another, the time of waiting for a new phase in one’s life to begin, or even the time spent waiting for the lights to change while on the road. 

These gaps are not wasted spaces or wasted time. They are filled with potential when we become mindfully aware of them. 

There is always a moment between an experience and our response to it. The simple act of pausing and finding this gap is proving to have many benefits on many levels of being.

As we begin to find these gaps, inner rhythms can be acknowledged, and when necessary, alignments made with the universal rhythms present all around us. These universal rhythms have always been there, but it is as if we are only now, not only as individuals but also as a collective, beginning to hear them.  

One place these universal rhythms are to be found is in the gaps between cultures. These gaps were once thought of in a negative way, as if they were points of separation and divide. On closer inspection they are a meeting place to discover similarity, interconnectedness, unity and creativity.

Meet you in the gap!  

Light Through - Electronic Stained Glass

There are some days that seem to be filled with colour.

Last week, shortly after my return from the Liwa Desert, I visited a centre in Dubai called Wafi and experienced such a day. Camera in hand, I clicked away. When selecting a few of the images to share in a gallery, I noticed that most of those I had chosen involved light shining through glass.

I was immediately reminded of an interview I had been listening to, in which Jeremy Johnson discussed the terms “light on” and “light through” with John David Ebert. 

Light can shine on something or light can shine through something. Marshall McLuhan, a communications theorist, used the terms “light on” and “light through” to highlight the media that went hand in hand with various cultures throughout the ages.

In the west, in the Middle Ages, light had shone through.  The stained glass windows of many cathedrals are testimony to this. They told stories to the beholder and were meant to point the one looking to a Presence beyond. The dominant belief at the time was that the light of Spirit was shining through all that was taking place.  

The invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in the 15th century had ushered in the Renaissance, an age of “light on”.  The printed word had to be looked at.  Light had to be shone on the printed word so that the eye could read it.  

The digital age has once again ushered in “light through”, and the gadgets we currently use are like electronic stained glass. Their high resolution makes them luminous and beautiful, with light shining in from behind.

These gadgets make it possible for you and I to meet and exchange information immediately.  Even right now, our spaces are overlapping. We are sharing a common boundary and an exchange is taking place.

When two entities interconnect, be they systems, concepts, devices, cultures or human beings, the common boundary they share and where an exchange of information and/or energy takes place is known as an interface. 

The place where we are currently meeting, I have chosen to call here2here. In it, we are able to “interface” - which I will translate as - meet in the space between our faces. here2here is the common boundary we share right now, a space where our subtle energies meet. In this space, you somehow shine through to me and I shine through to you, with webcams and apps such as facetime providing a possible enhancement of this meeting. 

Aaron Koblin in his TED talk, quotes: “The culture of the 19th century was defined by the novel, and the 20th century by the cinema. The culture of the 21st century will be defined by the interface.”

I am of the opinion that the interface will again allow us to become aware of a special light shining through, a light symbolizing the transcendent.

Already the miracle of this is becoming apparent as, for example, interfacing is making it possible for east and west to allow light to flow through to each other. 

Special online museums are enabling us to view each other’s art and so learn more about the culture of the other. The resulting fusion is producing new masterpieces. 

The exhibition, “Through The Looking Glass” by Syrian artist, Mouteea Murad, is currently running in Dubai. When I viewed the exhibition, I was immediately reminded of stained glass, not knowing then, that this would be the topic of this blog!

I include the picture I took of one of his artworks here, because it symbolizes for me in image, that which I have attempted to say with words. 

I include too, a video featuring the music of Jon Hopkins. The piece is entitled, “Light through the veins” and the sounds and images of this video speak too, where words fail. 

Suspended Together

The minute I connect to the internet I enter a space, which though not visible to the eye, is filled with enormous activity.

Going “online” is an entry into a web of interlinked connectivity and information. Navigation in this space has to be learnt, but once mastered, opens the door to a world of connections and information.

This ever-growing web of interconnectedness is suspended, as it were, over all that takes place in the world today. We are reminded of what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere. In 1959 he wrote that technology was creating “a single organized membrane over the earth”.    

Not only is this web of interconnectedness suspended, but the minute we crawl into it we become suspended together.

“Suspended together” is also the title of an artwork recently featured in the exhibition entitled “terminal”, which I visited in Dubai. The artist is Manal Al-Dowayan and the piece created in 2011 is neon with black paint.

Although part of an exhibition focusing on air travel, this piece also spoke to me of the concept, which I have chosen to call here2here.

here2here is first an foremost a space of community, a place of the “we”, a place where we are “suspended together”.

At first, I used to think of this space as an in-between place, a place where we meet before going our separate ways.  In some sense it still is, but as advances in technology make connectivity and communication more instant and accessible, and with the advent of social media, this here2here space is also becoming a place where many of us spend a good part of our day. 

My physical state of being, my location, what I am thinking, or that which I would like to share with another, is available 24/7 if I so wish, with others sharing a similar stream.

A collective stream of consciousness is arising as it were, and is flowing even through hand held gadgets of individuals.

Suspended together we ride virtual waves, we hear the opinions of others we are only able to meet because of this space, and we are challenged to broaden our worldview.

Our electronic interdependence also allows cultures to meet. It is enabling the taking of a planetary perspective, the taking of multiple perspectives, and is encouraging dialogue with other perspectives. We begin to recognize diversity and at the same time we realize the need for unity. 

We are learning to develop empathy, as the “other”, we suddenly realize, is more like us than we had imagined.

Karen Armstrong, in “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”, states that compassion means “ to endure (something) with another person, to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to feel her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into her point of view”.

As we are suspended together, the heart is encouraged to open to allow this all in. 

The compassion so essential to a peaceful existence in a global world begins to blossom.