04/23/2026
But you know if you talk all the time
You will never hear what anybody else has to say. And therefore, all you'll have to talk about is your own conversation
The same is true for people who think all the time. That means, when I use the word, "Think", talking to yourself
Sub-vocal conversation
The constant chit-chat of symbols and images
And talk and words inside your skull
Now, if you do that all the time
You'll find that you've nothing to think about except thinking
And just as you have to stop talking to hear what I have to say
You have to stop thinking to find out what life is about
And the moment you stop thinking
You'd come into immediate contact with what
Korzybski called, so delightfully, "The unspeakable world"
The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells
The texture of shadows on the floor in front of you
All these things, without being named
And saying, "That's a shadow, that's red
That's brown, that's somebody's foot"
When you don't name things any longer, you start seeing
Because say, when a person says, "I see a leaf"
Immediately, one thinks of a spearhead-shaped thing
Outlined in black and filled in with flat green
No leaf looks like that
No leaves, leaves are not green
That's why Lao-Tzu said, "The five colors make a man blind
The five tones make a man deaf"
Because if you can only see five colors, you're blind
And if you can only hear five tones in music, you're deaf
You see, if you force sound into five tones
You force color into five colors, you're blind and deaf
The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound
And it is only through stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color and sound
That you really begin to hear it and see it
So, let me say again
I'm not talking about the ordering of ordinary everyday life
In a reasonable and methodical way as being "School-teacherish"
I'm saying, be nice, if you were nice people, that's what you would do
For heaven's sake, don't be nice people
But the thing is, that unless you do have that basic framework
Of a certain kind of order, and a certain kind of discipline
The force of liberation will blow the world to pieces
It's too strong a current for the wire"
The unspeakable World-Adi Goldstein
