Identification & Language

Alfred Korzyb­ski in “Sci­ence and San­ity” (1933) reflects on the verb “to be” and the process of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. He used to train his students to avoid say­ing “I am”, ask­ing them “Is this all you think you are?”.

Have you noticed when we are asked “who are you”, often, we say our name, and maybe men­tion our occupation/job title? Is this all we are? The verb TO BE can be lim­it­ing and reflects our beliefs about ourselves.

His work was based on the view that human beings are lim­ited in their knowl­edge by the struc­ture of their per­cep­tions and their lan­guage. Unable to expe­ri­ence the world directly, they resort to “abstrac­tions” (non-verbal per­ceived impres­sions and ver­bal indi­ca­tors expressed through lan­guage).

The struc­ture of our per­cep­tions and our language (which deter­mines our under­stand­ing) some­times mis­leads us as to what is going on, what we must deal with. We cre­ate an abstrac­tion and this is the real­ity we deal with. He called for an increased aware­ness in each of us of that process of abstraction.

Inter­est­ingly enough, some 800 years before Korzyb­ski, in India, Shankaracharya, the cre­ator of the phi­los­o­phy of non-duality (Advaita Vedanta), men­tioned the human process of “Adhyasa”, super­im­po­si­tion of mean­ing onto the unchang­ing real­ity through our senses, and its rem­edy, “Apavada” decon­struc­tion of the oper­a­tion of the senses.

Expand­ing the struc­ture of our lan­guage and our per­cep­tions, we can truly achieve mind-boggling results! In coach­ing, con­scious use of lan­guage assist clients to expand their model of the world, and con­se­quently, solve their problems.

To learn more about how to use language: check out the next MasterMinds NLP Practitioner Course.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *