Mental Tongue
There’s something pure and holy about language. Not the study of language per se, but of my language – the language that my mind thinks in. I can’t understand how, but my brain thinks in English. I doubt that my mind did not think until I learned to speak, because if I couldn’t think, I couldn’t learn to speak. Every thought that passes through my head is in English now, but I wonder what my mind spoke before I learned English. What is the native tongue of my brain?
I cannot recall with any accuracy the earlier days of my childhood. The first memories I have are more “old home video” than memories. But, I do know that no matter how far back I go in the past within my mind, I am always thinking in English. I wonder if perhaps English might be my native mental tongue, but immediately chastise myself for such a thought. It is obviously false for two reasons. Firstly, what about the people in Germany? Or Africa? Or Japan? English isn’t the language they grow up to speak, so English cannot be the native mental tongue. And besides that, there is a second reason why English cannot be the default tongue of my mind. It’s simple really. You see, English was not the first language to exist. Yet people’s minds still worked, as we can see through art and ancient writing. Because of this, English can’t be the mental language of the human race. If it were, the inscriptions on Roman coins should be in English, the Pharaohs’ tombs should be covered in English, and the Rosetta stone shouldn’t exist. But, as we know, none of these are true.
Miscommunication has been responsible for many problems over the years. My favorite example is the Martian Probe that crashed because of miscommunication. You see, the engineer for the Probe had used the English unit system in its construction: inches, feet, miles, and pounds. Mission control, however, used the Metric system when issuing commands to the Probe: meters, kilometers, and grams. Because of this simple error, a 125 million dollar spacecraft was literally piloted straight into the Red Planet. Poof. Apparently, miscommunication can be expensive. I don’t want my mind to crash and burn in my later years because of an inability to translate my thoughts into English. But I don’t know how I can stop that from happening. At least in the case of the Mars Probe the investigators could go back and find the source of the miscommunication. I, however, cannot do that, as I do not know what my mental tongue is.
I think what caused me to first think about my native mental tongue was that I sometimes try to think without thinking in English. I believe that thinking in English only slows me down, since it is not my native mental tongue. Every thought I have must first be translated from that native tongue into English, which obviously must take some time. If only I could skip that step and think my thoughts in whatever pure language my mind speaks! Then, might my mental reaction speed quicken dramatically? Would I be able to instantly make decisions in my mind, instead of having to argue back and forth with myself in English before reaching conclusions? What possibilities would open up for me if only I could return to that mother tongue of my mind?
When it comes time for me to make a decision – like what to order off of a menu – I have to think about it. Essentially, I argue back and forth in my mind about what course of action to take. “Should I order the sandwich? Or should I order a salad? The sandwich costs less and is more filling, but I know that the salad is better for me. Do I really care so much about health issues that I’m willing to pay more for it? I suppose not. I guess I’ll order a sandwich.” If my mind spoke in its native tongue, shouldn’t I be able to complete that entire argument at the speed of thought instead of the speed of mental speech? Would the entire inner dialogue be reduced down to a split second? I know that I would still have to argue back and forth in my mind, but if that argument was in my native mental tongue, shouldn’t it be much faster than mental English? When I think to myself in English, I have to slow down my thoughts to the speed of speech. If I didn’t, all of the English words in my mind would run together, much like when a speaker tries to shovel out sentences faster than my mind can translate their words to thought. But, if my mind was relieved of the burden of translation, how fast would I be able to think? How fast would I be able to make decisions? Some people seem to make decisions like that instantly and I wonder if they might be thinking in their native mental tongue. But, what is it?
What could the inner language of my mind possibly be? What is the language my mind first understood? Wait, “the language that my mind first understood?” How about, “what did my mind first understand?” Wasn’t that love, sadness, anger, kindness, and joy? True, we do not normally think of emotion as a language, but mightn’t that simply be because we no longer speak it as our first language? Fundamentally, language is just a tool that lets humans relate to one another and describe things. Yet, to show someone kindness through an act says more words than a written note or a spoken speech ever could. A hug can say more than all of the words in the dictionary. A sneer can often insult more thoroughly than any spoken curse. Why is that? Might the expression of emotion be the simplest language between fellow human beings? And, if such is the case, mightn’t emotional feelings be the core language of my mind/soul? Everyone understands happiness, sadness, and anger. No matter what culture a person is from, there is knowledge of these fundamental feelings. Anger is my first response to the mistreatment of myself and has grown over time to also become my natural response to the mistreatment of those I care about. Sadness is the first response I feel to the loss of things I care about. Happiness is what I feel when things are going right. Could all three of these feelings be part of the language I spoke as a babe? Could feelings be the basis for every thought that travels through my brain?
Feelings aren’t very specific. No, they tend to be rather general. I think about the feeling of love specifically when I think about general feeling. There is love because we are loved first, there is love that is unconditional, there is love amongst friends, there is love between husband and wife, there is love that is physical, and there is love that is emotional. In English, we only have one word for all of these feelings: love. We rely on adjectives and other modifiers to further clarify that one word: brotherly love, parental love, unconditional love, etc. We combine these to further explain the type of love, such as unconditional parental love. Still not specific enough, we need to describe what we feel love to, so nouns are needed: I feel unconditional love to my parents. The single feeling of love is just too broad for our human species to tolerate. As humans, we like to understand. In order to understand, we need specifics, details. Apparently, simply feeling love, or happiness, or anger was not enough – we wanted to know more. We are a curious race after all. Did language come about because we felt a need to clarify our feelings? Were just hugs, and kind acts, and feeling love towards someone not enough? Did we really feel a need to take away the feeling and replace it with words? And, if such was the case, how would my mind have functioned if it only felt, and never thought?
I am generally a rational man, not prone to sudden outbursts of unbridled emotion. Yet I was not always this way. I grew up as an open child, unashamed to show the world how I was feeling at any particular time. And then, I went to school. I found that the other children were very much like me: they were unashamed to show the world how they felt. However, the majority of the other children also enjoyed showing me in a personal way just how they felt about me. They took great delight in turning my childhood life into a torment filled existence worthy of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Every idea I ever had was stupid. Everything I enjoyed in life was either weird or idiotic. They even told me I was ugly and stupid looking. Despite my best efforts to make peace, this went on for many years. But through those years I learned that the best way to avoid being singled out for teasing was to become neutral in every respect. The only way to do that was to carefully think through every action I was about to do. By analyzing my actions, I could determine how the others would respond. And because I could know how they would respond, I would often not do the things I wanted to. I avoided the teasing and the ridicule at the cost of the things I cherished: Legos, reading, writing, and friendships. Most of these I managed to enjoy while not at school, but friendships were something I lacked until the fifth grade, and I had no close friends until high school. It’s not that I didn’t want friends. It was just that no one wanted to be friends with Andrew, the loser.
I say all of this to let you know that I have spent a great deal of my life in reflection. I also say all of this to let you know that I lost myself during that time long ago, and am only now beginning to rediscover myself. I am not the cold hearted and data oriented machine that I sometimes appear to be. That is a mask. I have worn it for so long that I have forgotten who I am. It is a comfortable retreat, a place where I know I am safe. Yet, it has always lacked one simple thing: human interaction. I can do anything I please as the masked man, except open up and talk with others. Such a thing, to me, is akin to a knight removing his breastplate just before approaching a stranger whose intent is unknown. Yet, little by little over the years, I have forced myself to do it. And I have found that just talking to others is not what I lacked. I talked to people all the time at school. No, there was something deeper missing. That something was positive conversation that spoke to the native language of my mind: feelings.
We all move away from our native mental tongue as we mature and grow up. Yet for most people, we do not replace it with the spoken words we hear, but rather base our spoken words on the feelings we have. In this way our words have substance. In this way our words have meaning. And that, I believe, is what I lacked as the masked man. I knew the meaning of the word ‘hatred’. It was shown to me daily, from nine in the morning till three in the afternoon. I knew the meaning of the word ‘anguish’. I felt it very strongly every day, like a hole inside of me that throbbed and ached. It was words like friendship, compassion, trust, and even love that I did not know the meaning of.
I knew growing up that my parents and family loved me, but for some reason the meaning did not register with me. I grew up with them loving me, and I felt on some level that it was their job to do so. To do otherwise would suggest that they were incapable parents, and my parents were far from incapable. But I was under no illusions either. I could tell when I ran to them, excited about some new thing I had done or discovered, that they usually only feigned interest. “That’s nice,” they might have said, “now go on outside and play.” And I understand now that parents are not going to be interested in everything their child does, but I think I was just more perceptive than most children. I know that by the age of eight I realized that not everything my parents did for me felt genuine. O that I knew what I know now! I know now that they showed me even greater love by trying their best to be interested in things they found uninteresting, but I somehow overlooked this as a child, seeing instead only the fake smiles and feigned interest. So, I grew up without fully comprehending the meaning of the words love, friendship, and trust.
In high school, I finally found my best friend. I had talked to him before, since kindergarten actually, but never really gotten to know him. It took me until my freshman year in high school to realize that I could be friends with him. I can still recall that day when it happened. All of the high school students were gathered into one room (it was a small Christian school of less than twenty students). It was the last day of school before Easter Break and the administrator of the school showed us a short video. The video showed a man being abused by soldiers. His whole body was covered with bloody wounds when they were done. Those same soldiers then started to mock him, and spit on him. They forced him to carry a wooden plank through town, which was so heavy that someone out of the crowd had to help him carry it. And when that man had endured all of that, they lay him on the wooden plank and pounded giant nails into his hands and feet, pinning him down. And then, they set the wooden cross upright and just waited for him to die. I thought I had known this man since kindergarten – His name was Jesus. But it was through that video that I truly learned the meaning behind the phrase, “died for me.” From then on, the words love, friendship, and trust have fascinated me, because I began to see what they mean. And also since then, Jesus has been my friend and Savior.
The native tongue of my brain is emotional feeling. Since the day of my birth, I spoke it within myself. Yet, it was not enough to simply feel. I had to learn to describe those feelings. Actions sufficed for a time, but even they were too broad and general. So I learned language with which I could describe how I felt, when I felt, and to whom or to what I felt. But, language was dead to me without meaning. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but having never smelled a rose I could not ascribe meaning to the word – That’s how it was with me and the word love. I had a basic understanding of it, but had never truly experienced it. My childhood experiences with my peers were not conducive to my understanding of the word. But once I saw in that Easter video just what Christ went through for me, then I knew. The native tongue of my mind is love and my God converses with me constantly.
I cannot recall with any accuracy the earlier days of my childhood. The first memories I have are more “old home video” than memories. But, I do know that no matter how far back I go in the past within my mind, I am always thinking in English. I wonder if perhaps English might be my native mental tongue, but immediately chastise myself for such a thought. It is obviously false for two reasons. Firstly, what about the people in Germany? Or Africa? Or Japan? English isn’t the language they grow up to speak, so English cannot be the native mental tongue. And besides that, there is a second reason why English cannot be the default tongue of my mind. It’s simple really. You see, English was not the first language to exist. Yet people’s minds still worked, as we can see through art and ancient writing. Because of this, English can’t be the mental language of the human race. If it were, the inscriptions on Roman coins should be in English, the Pharaohs’ tombs should be covered in English, and the Rosetta stone shouldn’t exist. But, as we know, none of these are true.
Miscommunication has been responsible for many problems over the years. My favorite example is the Martian Probe that crashed because of miscommunication. You see, the engineer for the Probe had used the English unit system in its construction: inches, feet, miles, and pounds. Mission control, however, used the Metric system when issuing commands to the Probe: meters, kilometers, and grams. Because of this simple error, a 125 million dollar spacecraft was literally piloted straight into the Red Planet. Poof. Apparently, miscommunication can be expensive. I don’t want my mind to crash and burn in my later years because of an inability to translate my thoughts into English. But I don’t know how I can stop that from happening. At least in the case of the Mars Probe the investigators could go back and find the source of the miscommunication. I, however, cannot do that, as I do not know what my mental tongue is.
I think what caused me to first think about my native mental tongue was that I sometimes try to think without thinking in English. I believe that thinking in English only slows me down, since it is not my native mental tongue. Every thought I have must first be translated from that native tongue into English, which obviously must take some time. If only I could skip that step and think my thoughts in whatever pure language my mind speaks! Then, might my mental reaction speed quicken dramatically? Would I be able to instantly make decisions in my mind, instead of having to argue back and forth with myself in English before reaching conclusions? What possibilities would open up for me if only I could return to that mother tongue of my mind?
When it comes time for me to make a decision – like what to order off of a menu – I have to think about it. Essentially, I argue back and forth in my mind about what course of action to take. “Should I order the sandwich? Or should I order a salad? The sandwich costs less and is more filling, but I know that the salad is better for me. Do I really care so much about health issues that I’m willing to pay more for it? I suppose not. I guess I’ll order a sandwich.” If my mind spoke in its native tongue, shouldn’t I be able to complete that entire argument at the speed of thought instead of the speed of mental speech? Would the entire inner dialogue be reduced down to a split second? I know that I would still have to argue back and forth in my mind, but if that argument was in my native mental tongue, shouldn’t it be much faster than mental English? When I think to myself in English, I have to slow down my thoughts to the speed of speech. If I didn’t, all of the English words in my mind would run together, much like when a speaker tries to shovel out sentences faster than my mind can translate their words to thought. But, if my mind was relieved of the burden of translation, how fast would I be able to think? How fast would I be able to make decisions? Some people seem to make decisions like that instantly and I wonder if they might be thinking in their native mental tongue. But, what is it?
What could the inner language of my mind possibly be? What is the language my mind first understood? Wait, “the language that my mind first understood?” How about, “what did my mind first understand?” Wasn’t that love, sadness, anger, kindness, and joy? True, we do not normally think of emotion as a language, but mightn’t that simply be because we no longer speak it as our first language? Fundamentally, language is just a tool that lets humans relate to one another and describe things. Yet, to show someone kindness through an act says more words than a written note or a spoken speech ever could. A hug can say more than all of the words in the dictionary. A sneer can often insult more thoroughly than any spoken curse. Why is that? Might the expression of emotion be the simplest language between fellow human beings? And, if such is the case, mightn’t emotional feelings be the core language of my mind/soul? Everyone understands happiness, sadness, and anger. No matter what culture a person is from, there is knowledge of these fundamental feelings. Anger is my first response to the mistreatment of myself and has grown over time to also become my natural response to the mistreatment of those I care about. Sadness is the first response I feel to the loss of things I care about. Happiness is what I feel when things are going right. Could all three of these feelings be part of the language I spoke as a babe? Could feelings be the basis for every thought that travels through my brain?
Feelings aren’t very specific. No, they tend to be rather general. I think about the feeling of love specifically when I think about general feeling. There is love because we are loved first, there is love that is unconditional, there is love amongst friends, there is love between husband and wife, there is love that is physical, and there is love that is emotional. In English, we only have one word for all of these feelings: love. We rely on adjectives and other modifiers to further clarify that one word: brotherly love, parental love, unconditional love, etc. We combine these to further explain the type of love, such as unconditional parental love. Still not specific enough, we need to describe what we feel love to, so nouns are needed: I feel unconditional love to my parents. The single feeling of love is just too broad for our human species to tolerate. As humans, we like to understand. In order to understand, we need specifics, details. Apparently, simply feeling love, or happiness, or anger was not enough – we wanted to know more. We are a curious race after all. Did language come about because we felt a need to clarify our feelings? Were just hugs, and kind acts, and feeling love towards someone not enough? Did we really feel a need to take away the feeling and replace it with words? And, if such was the case, how would my mind have functioned if it only felt, and never thought?
I am generally a rational man, not prone to sudden outbursts of unbridled emotion. Yet I was not always this way. I grew up as an open child, unashamed to show the world how I was feeling at any particular time. And then, I went to school. I found that the other children were very much like me: they were unashamed to show the world how they felt. However, the majority of the other children also enjoyed showing me in a personal way just how they felt about me. They took great delight in turning my childhood life into a torment filled existence worthy of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Every idea I ever had was stupid. Everything I enjoyed in life was either weird or idiotic. They even told me I was ugly and stupid looking. Despite my best efforts to make peace, this went on for many years. But through those years I learned that the best way to avoid being singled out for teasing was to become neutral in every respect. The only way to do that was to carefully think through every action I was about to do. By analyzing my actions, I could determine how the others would respond. And because I could know how they would respond, I would often not do the things I wanted to. I avoided the teasing and the ridicule at the cost of the things I cherished: Legos, reading, writing, and friendships. Most of these I managed to enjoy while not at school, but friendships were something I lacked until the fifth grade, and I had no close friends until high school. It’s not that I didn’t want friends. It was just that no one wanted to be friends with Andrew, the loser.
I say all of this to let you know that I have spent a great deal of my life in reflection. I also say all of this to let you know that I lost myself during that time long ago, and am only now beginning to rediscover myself. I am not the cold hearted and data oriented machine that I sometimes appear to be. That is a mask. I have worn it for so long that I have forgotten who I am. It is a comfortable retreat, a place where I know I am safe. Yet, it has always lacked one simple thing: human interaction. I can do anything I please as the masked man, except open up and talk with others. Such a thing, to me, is akin to a knight removing his breastplate just before approaching a stranger whose intent is unknown. Yet, little by little over the years, I have forced myself to do it. And I have found that just talking to others is not what I lacked. I talked to people all the time at school. No, there was something deeper missing. That something was positive conversation that spoke to the native language of my mind: feelings.
We all move away from our native mental tongue as we mature and grow up. Yet for most people, we do not replace it with the spoken words we hear, but rather base our spoken words on the feelings we have. In this way our words have substance. In this way our words have meaning. And that, I believe, is what I lacked as the masked man. I knew the meaning of the word ‘hatred’. It was shown to me daily, from nine in the morning till three in the afternoon. I knew the meaning of the word ‘anguish’. I felt it very strongly every day, like a hole inside of me that throbbed and ached. It was words like friendship, compassion, trust, and even love that I did not know the meaning of.
I knew growing up that my parents and family loved me, but for some reason the meaning did not register with me. I grew up with them loving me, and I felt on some level that it was their job to do so. To do otherwise would suggest that they were incapable parents, and my parents were far from incapable. But I was under no illusions either. I could tell when I ran to them, excited about some new thing I had done or discovered, that they usually only feigned interest. “That’s nice,” they might have said, “now go on outside and play.” And I understand now that parents are not going to be interested in everything their child does, but I think I was just more perceptive than most children. I know that by the age of eight I realized that not everything my parents did for me felt genuine. O that I knew what I know now! I know now that they showed me even greater love by trying their best to be interested in things they found uninteresting, but I somehow overlooked this as a child, seeing instead only the fake smiles and feigned interest. So, I grew up without fully comprehending the meaning of the words love, friendship, and trust.
In high school, I finally found my best friend. I had talked to him before, since kindergarten actually, but never really gotten to know him. It took me until my freshman year in high school to realize that I could be friends with him. I can still recall that day when it happened. All of the high school students were gathered into one room (it was a small Christian school of less than twenty students). It was the last day of school before Easter Break and the administrator of the school showed us a short video. The video showed a man being abused by soldiers. His whole body was covered with bloody wounds when they were done. Those same soldiers then started to mock him, and spit on him. They forced him to carry a wooden plank through town, which was so heavy that someone out of the crowd had to help him carry it. And when that man had endured all of that, they lay him on the wooden plank and pounded giant nails into his hands and feet, pinning him down. And then, they set the wooden cross upright and just waited for him to die. I thought I had known this man since kindergarten – His name was Jesus. But it was through that video that I truly learned the meaning behind the phrase, “died for me.” From then on, the words love, friendship, and trust have fascinated me, because I began to see what they mean. And also since then, Jesus has been my friend and Savior.
The native tongue of my brain is emotional feeling. Since the day of my birth, I spoke it within myself. Yet, it was not enough to simply feel. I had to learn to describe those feelings. Actions sufficed for a time, but even they were too broad and general. So I learned language with which I could describe how I felt, when I felt, and to whom or to what I felt. But, language was dead to me without meaning. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but having never smelled a rose I could not ascribe meaning to the word – That’s how it was with me and the word love. I had a basic understanding of it, but had never truly experienced it. My childhood experiences with my peers were not conducive to my understanding of the word. But once I saw in that Easter video just what Christ went through for me, then I knew. The native tongue of my mind is love and my God converses with me constantly.
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