One of the basic human needs is to be accepted. One of the strongest positive feelings when something significant and emotionally charged happens to us comes when we share it with people who are important to us and they listen and understand us.
However, at one point in my life, something happened that put me in an unusual position in which sharing became inaccessible, even impossible.
I found myself in an “unpicked vineyard”, as we say in our Bulgarian language (which means getting oneself in an unfamiliar and complicated situation which is hard to get out of).
There I realized things that were unusual for my old “self”. For example, that we, humans, are used to talking and exchanging information with words without realizing how this actually works. And how sometimes it can stop working.
How do we communicate with words? A person knows a given language, chooses and utters words, and his listener hears them and, because he knows the same language, understands the meaning of what was said.
It sounds simple and clear, but deep down something else is happening. It turns out that words are symbols that we associate with some meaning, but they are not the meaning itself. They are something like containers with which we transmit information, but with an invisible feature at first glance. That the sender places a meaning in them before sending them, and the recipient, upon receiving them, does not find in them the meaning placed by the sender, but his own. The meaning of words does not lie in them. It is outside of them and is found in us, humans.
And then what do we actually do when we speak? We unconsciously rely on the fact that our interlocutor has the same or a sufficiently close meaning attached to the words as we do.
But if this is true then what happens if two people have the same word associated with different content inside themselves? Where does this content come from anyway since it does not reside in the words? And what happens if new content appears inside us for which there are no words yet?
…
Three years ago I embarked on a journey in a more unusual way for my old self. With a one-way ticket, no set plan, no end date, and no explicit intention of returning. To Colombia.
This experience, although it may sound like something standalone in time and space, is profoundly connected to my life story and is its natural continuation.
…
At one point I supposedly returned home for a while but in fact the person who left remained there in a sense. A different person returned.
When I got home I clearly felt how much I wanted to share everything and a large part of it, the one on the surface, I was able to tell naturally and easily. But for another part of what happened, the one that I felt was the most essential, I realized that I didn’t know the words if they even existed. But they should have existed, I felt and had no doubt that all of this was a very old human thing. I decided to look for them and also to look for other ways in which you can express the meaning in question which lied deeper than words and originated from certain states and experiences I got myself in during my journey. Three years have passed since then and I found only one word on the subject – in Sanskrit. Now I know that there are words scattered throughout languages, in old languages. These are ancient words as if forgotten and absent in newer and modern languages. I would very much like to learn why.
To my immense happiness my search led me to other people with such experience, some I spoke to in person, others I connected to via their books and still others we shared experiences with. I learned more about all this wonder and calmed down a bit.
…
I would like to start sharing, little by little, about the comprehensible and the incomprehensible. Words alone will not do.
I would like it to be a journey. Without a plan. Without an end date. And certainly without an intention of returning.