wolven angels of clay: i think crowley was getting at something entirely different than e- prime attempts, e-prime in my opinion is attempting to reengineer thinking, crowley i think was using the relationship between body and mind to bring awareness back to the body, rather than the minds notion that it is. Tell me more. I’ve not read any Crowley, but it seems your understanding of some of this may be similar to mine.
The main use of e-prime for me is to assist in the awareness of the process by which my thinking and language have abstracted from my experience, and about finding ways to reunite them if there is a significant divergence. “Experience” is descriptive of how events in the external world have had an effect on my body. To treat this as a purely intellectual exercise may keep things less solid and grounded. To treat it as a discipline which restores the primacy of our bodies to our identity and reattaches our thoughts to our senses would seem to keep us more solid and grounded.
The principle effects of exercises such as this one and e-prime are to create feelings of overwhelming smugness and one-upmanship in practitioners and engender an entirely misplaced sense of superiority over all the lower circuit mammals that haven't read the same hippy self-help books and are therefore clueless to the vastly transformative properties inherent in cutting the word "is" out of your vocabulary.
I’ve experienced this too. I remember getting really passionate in conversation about some album I’d bought (probably Lightning Bolt or El-Producto, the usual suspects) when another practitioner pointed out to me that I wasn’t using e-prime to describe my experience of the music. This threw me, as I hadn’t imagined that there could be a person present (they were all close friends) who hadn’t taken it as read that I was talking about my experience rather than ascribing qualities as belonging to the music. In later conversation it turned out that the condescending comment was a result of that individual feeling threatened by the way I placed high worth on music that he’d never heard of, let alone directly experienced. The comment was thus more about their means of protecting themselves from feeling hurt, as they weren’t used to being out of the loop and didn’t like being reminded that there were was an entire universe that they didn’t know about or understand. The person faced a choice, and they knew me well enough to know that I was overstating my case out of enthusiasm rather than delusion.
This isn’t an isolated example. You can give someone a hammer, but you can’t necessarily teach them how and when to use it. I work for the Police: there are time when I have to talk as though the weird construct called the “law” was not open for interpretation, in order to speak with authority. And there are times in the same job when I have to encourage flexibility of thought (dealing with racism and class hatred, for example). I get it wrong all the time, and most of the time you can apologise and then explain yourself in other terms if the first attempt doesn’t work.
The problem with e-prime is that it presupposes that there is a proper use of language to describe our experience, when if you’re really thorough even a phrase like “I believe I saw something that I would describe as a dog” contains all sorts of unchecked presuppositions about the nature of reality. What is this thing called “I” and how do I choose to separate it from “not I?” How do I “see,” and is the way in which I “see” the same as the way in which you “see?” In order to describe “something” as “something” I have to isolate it from its surroundings… you get the picture. Hence Gypsy’s rant about kittens: surely once you recognise that all language is an imperfect model of the world then you instantly transcend that, rather than getting bogged down with philosophy when you’re just trying to tell your mate that you’re getting the next round in.
In practise I find that most people have a self-awareness that’s larger than the language they use as shorthand for it.
However, E-Prime's incredibly impractical for everyday use, sounds pompous, and makes communication cumbersome and difficult. The only reason to use it for any length of time is to understand the concept behind it.
That’s it in a very generalised nutshell. Use it for the effect it’ll have on your self-awareness, and then keep it by as a something that may come in handy. Use it to restore people to their senses rather than tearing them down a peg or two. |
