Ch. 13 E and E-Prime (4/27-5/3)

Hannah

Have the group experiment with rewriting the following Standard English sentences into English Prime. Observe carefully what disagreements or irritability may arise.
A. "The fetus is a person."
B. "The zygote is a person."
C. "Every sperm is sacred/Every sperm is great/If a sperm is wasted/God gets quite irate." (Monty Python)
D. "Pornography is murder." (Andrea Dworkin)
E. "John is homosexual."
F. "The table is four feet long."
G. "The human brain is a computer."
H. "When I took LSD, the whole universe was transformed."
I. "Beethoven was paranoid, Mozart was manic-depressive and Wagner was megalomaniac."
J. "Today is Tuesday."
K. “Lady Chatterley's Lover is a sexist novel.”
L. "Mice, voles and rabbits are all rodents."
M. "The patient is resisting therapy."
N. "Sin and redemption are theological fictions. The sense of sin and the sense of redemption are actual human experiences." (Paraphrased from Ludwig Wittgenstein.)
Repeat the experiment of passing the rock around the group, with each person trying to sense and feel the rock without forming any words about the rock in their brains.
Let each member of the group contemplate the following sentences, then let each one pick out the sentence that she or he would find most embarrassing to say out loud:
A. My mother was a drunken whore.
B. I am a cock-sucking homosexual queer.
C. I am a dyke and I'm proud of it.
D. I have always been a coward.
E. I am afraid to be alone in the dark.
F. I would be very happy if my spouse dropped dead.

Let each member speak out loud the sentence that arouses the most emotional resistance.

Let other members observe the tone and "body language" of the person trying to say something he or she dreads to say. Observe especially smiles (how sincere do they look?) or embarrassed giggles.

Let the members discuss the results of this. Especially, let them discuss why, after studying a chapter about the differences between words and non-verbal existence, most of us still fear certain words or ideas. And let them note how everybody probably showed (by tone, body-language etc.) that they did not "mean" what they said, as compared to the performance of a good actor who could speak any of these sentences with total conviction.

Recall the famous "penis" scene in the film, Born on the Fourth of July (in which Tom Cruise as a paralyzed veteran tries to explain to his mother what lifelong impotence means to him). Compare his "sincerity" and conviction in shouting that his penis will not get hard ever again with the comparative lack of "sincerity" of the class, who have presumably not had dramatic training.
How do actors learn to get beyond the taboos that control most of us? Do any of you, of heterosexual preference, think you could portray a homosexual as well as Brando once did? Why not? Discuss this in the group.

jjones

"Since the brain does not receive raw data, but edits data as it receives it, we need to understand the software the brain uses. The case for using E-Prime rests on the simple proposition that "Is-ness" sets the brain into a medieval Aristotelian framework and makes it impossible to understand modern problems and opportunities. A classic case of GIGO, in short. Removing "Is-ness" and writing/thinking only and always in operational/existential language, sets us, conversely, in a modern universe where we can successfully deal with modern issues." (Pg. 98)

This, to me, appears as the meat and potatoes of the book. If there was one thing I wish everyone would take away from this book, it would be "E-Prime."

The time that I had COVID-19, I was lucky enough to quarantine with this book. Since I couldn't socialize with anyone, all I could do was read, watch movies, and text people. Someone had loaned me Quantum Psychology, and it was exactly the book I needed at the time. I devoured the book and arrived at E-Prime which sounded like a relatively do-able challenge. RAW mentions that it can be easier to use when writing as opposed to speaking since we can go back and edit ourselves. Well, I took my quarantine as an opportunity to text only with E-Prime.

I had a lot of difficulty at first, and my phrasing seemed awkward at best. I'm not sure how many people noticed that subtle shift in my responses but taking the verb "to be" out of the English language took away some of the phrases and linguistic habits that I relied on in conversation. My responses probably seemed less "objective" to the people I talked to since I began saying “seems to be” and “appears like.” Writing with this constraint, my mind started naturally assimilating those linguistic habits that come with E-Prime.

All this culminated in a very, very intense experience of Cognitive Dissonance. I reached a point where I no longer trusted any information, right or wrong. I could no longer rely on any "given" and I became painfully aware of how many projections hid in "Is-ness." I continued using E-Prime, trying to get to the heart of this agonizing Cognitive Dissonance that E-Prime stirred within me. I eventually realized that my mind was really getting caught on the idea that there "is" no "wrong" with anything.

At that time in my life, I was utterly convinced that I must be doing something wrong, otherwise my life would’ve been perfect. I had grown up being told about the American Meritocracy meant if I could just find the thing I was really good at, I would be financially and materially set for life. The problem “was” that I couldn’t figure out what was “wrong” with me that I wasn’t making forward progress in life. I fixated myself on the fact that I gave people around me all the grace in the world to step all over me, but I did not extend grace to myself. Instead, I actively disempowered myself because I was certain I did not know the "right" way and I feared that taking the wrong step would doom my chances at a comfortable life. I was afraid of doing something wrong, unforgivable, or creating bad karma.

As I continued to fixate on the fact that there "is" no "wrong" way of life while also believing that there "is" a "right" way of life, the Cognitive Dissonance rose to such a level of torment that all I could do was blast off above the Cognitive Dissonance like a rocket. I'm not really sure how else to describe this experience, as it was a very visceral thing, and I felt something invisible within the realm of my head shoot up and rise above the turmoil that brooded in my mind. With this rising came the realization that if there "is" no "wrong" way, there "is" no "right" way either.

This sudden realization made the clouds part and the Sun shine once more. I relaxed as the synthesis dawned on me, "Any way that something gets done is the best way to do it." Realizing this broke my brain. A lot of my rigidities, fears, and insecurities just fundamentally did not make sense anymore. This “is” not to say that E-Prime solved all of my mental health issues, but I could no longer justify or find logic in the things I used to disempower myself. I truly believe that E-Prime triggered this shift. It destroyed the notion that "X is Y" and "X is just Y." It made me aware that I can't really speak on anything I haven't experienced for myself. Doing so just comes out like hot air.

I try to use E-Prime as much as I can. I often still fall back into "Is-ness", especially when time "is" of the essence, or when I am aware that E-Prime will inspire too much ambiguity in the other person I am interacting with. But the mechanism of E-Prime still exists in my mind and reminds me of how many of my perceptions are just that, my perceptions, not reality. As I continue to use E-Prime, it continues to challenge me to hold conflicting ideas in my mind and recognize that there is space for everyone's perceptions (even when I disagree with those).

"If we look, again, at the translations into English-Prime, we see that no contradiction now exists at all, no 'paradox', no 'irrationality' in the universe. We also find that we have constrained ourselves to talk about what actually happened in space-time, whereas in Standard English we allowed ourselves to talk about something that has never been observed in space-time at all - the 'isness' or 'whatness' or Aristotelian 'essence' of the photon." (Pg. 100)

“In simpler words, the Aristotelian universe assumes an assembly of "things" with ‘essences’ or ‘spooks’ inside them, where the modern scientific (or existentialist) universe assumes a network of structural relationships.” (Pg. 101)

There “is” so much more to say about E-Prime, how it relates to Qabalah with its structural thinking, how I can argue that the Law of Thelema requires structural thinking for consciousness of the True Will, and how E-Prime can be one of the simplest and most effective tools to demonstrate this level of cognition to people. But ultimately, these are all things that are best experienced. I cannot find where I read it, but I seem to remember RAW (or someone else) making the claim that E-Prime as an exercise gets the aspirant closest to the Buddhist frame of mind.

jjones

Also, side note:

I highly recommend AI users to tell their AI to respond in E-Prime. E-Prime greatly improves the quality of its responses and cuts through the fluff that AI loves to present.

Hannah

@jjones omg, I had a very similar experience!! When I started to work on projections, it was similarly tormenting... part of the intense anxiety was due to the realization that I couldn't trust my own mind. What I thought was stable was actually in fact so highly mutable that I was in fact slipping and sliding my whole life! Who I thought I was, my very identity, was dependent upon easily changeable conditions like whether or not I ate breakfast, what smells brought up a contrived memory, general "hunches" and so on.

It becomes even more difficult when contemplating the elusiveness of "truth" and how vast this universe is, how little we truly know. Personally, this opened an interesting space where I discovered how much power and responsibility I have in my life. That is so intense you experienced this kind of rupture during the pandemic!

jjones

@Hannah What a relief that I'm not alone in this experience :')

The mutability of it all is definitely trickster vibes. I often find I don't want to respond to things knowing that whatever I might say right now will probably change in the near future. So I tend to rely on structural statements rather than statements of opinion (though I still tend to be highly opinionated ). This has led me to largely experience socializing as comparing opinions, and few in the mundane sphere care about structurally sound statements haha. I often fear I come off boring or overly safe. The people who are aware of the non rational tend to be the people who find value in the way I interact, but I admit it makes it difficult for me to have surface level conversation, even when that's what the situation calls for.

I'm curious how this has affected you socially?

After this experience, I found it difficult to talk about anything I didn't have personal experience of. I also became hyper aware that whatever experience I have, other people have a completely different experience and set of circumstances they're working with, and bridging that gap is the miracle of communication. Nowadays, I find myself pretty introverted (partly as a means of defense in regards to projections and partly because communication became more difficult as I realized how many different ways it can go wrong) and sometimes wish I was more talkative like I used to be.

Realizing that the world runs on projections, I find it difficult to identify with anything anymore (since my inner voice says "That's just a projection!"). I also find it difficult to take people too seriously (perhaps because I couldn't take myself so seriously anymore). Nonetheless, the social skills I've used in the past no longer seem to work, having realized that most of the skills I used were built from projections that no longer benefit anyone. Although everyone "is" unique, Uniqueness only has value in relation to something else. Because of this, I find it difficult to assert uniqueness in and of itself. However, it seems asserting uniqueness motivates a lot of attention seeking behavior that creates social situations in my life.