Before you speak, you should ask yourself:
Is it necessary, #1?
#2 is it helpful? #3 will it create joy?
#4 will it create its healing?
And if the answer is yes, then go ahead and speak. Otherwise, just shut up.
Language is not something we created.
It's a part of the experience of human evolution.
So up until, say, 40,000 years ago, there were eight different kinds of humans.
We call ourselves Homo sapiens, which means "the wise ones".
We were humble enough to call ourselves the wise ones.
But then we gave names to other human beings.
We call them hominids like homo, Homo floresiensis, Homo neanderthals, etc.
So they all look like you and me, just like in a cat family you have
lions and panthers and cats and tigers and cheetahs...
In the human family, you had eight different types of humans.
And they all had a primitive language, which all animals have.
And that language is only about three things. Only three things.
Number one, food. Number two, sex. And number three, danger.
Because that's how we survive, and that's how humans were.
The language was for three things.
Then one species, you and me, our ancestors.
We created a language for telling stories.
And the first stories, the most common stories were gossip,
who's sleeping with whom, who can be trusted, who's betraying whom,
who's cheating on whom etc.
And then the second, so that's still the most common language.
But once we created a language with stories, then we created other stories.
For example, after gossip, the second most common language was money.
There was no such thing. I'll cut your hair and you fix my shoes
became too inconvenient.
So we said, "okay, let's give each other the shell. I owe you this much."
And then a copper coin. And then paper. And now digital money. It's all a story.
Wall Street. What do we call Wall Street itself? It's an exchange.
Exchange of ideas, values and everybody who buys those ideas,
they make money out of this. What's the stock market?
How people are feeling about themselves right now,
and how anxious they are about their future. That's what the stock market it's a story.
But everything that we call colonialism, nation-states, empires,
latitude, longitude, Greenwich Mean Time, it's not Botswana Mean Time,
it's Greenwich mean time. It's a story and it's an arbitrary story, but we all hold it to be true
and it constructs our everyday reality. Even the universe is a story.
There's no such thing as a universe
because what you call stars and galaxies, how do you know they exist?
Well, their perceptual activities in that narrow band of activity
that we have, the five senses and we have a story around that.
We call it the Milky Way Galaxy or, you know, next door, the Virgo Galaxy.
But if you wiped out the human nervous system and human stories,
there would still be experiences, but they wouldn't be human experiences
and there wouldn't be any galaxies or telescopes or Hadron colliders or...
all an extension of our stories.
Language doesn't describe, it constructs experience.
And actually, in both the Buddhist and Vedantic and Yogic schools,
language is a very important part of what we call reaching enlightenment
or the source of all the experience, which is also called freedom from suffering.
Language is one of the eight things mentioned in Yoga, but also in Buddhist philosophy.
Before you speak, you should ask yourself:
Is it necessary, #1?
#2 is it helpful? #3 will it create joy?
#4 will it create its healing?
And if the answer is yes, then go ahead and speak. Otherwise, just shut up.