On the Nature of Words, part III: Every Language Has its Own Wish

The search for a path through life

By now, perhaps you see that words are a whole world of living creatures in the same way that the world we are in is a world of living creatures; and, indeed, that’s exactly the case. If Emmanuel Swedenborg were reading this piece, he’d explain to you that this is part of his doctrine of correspondences—which I will not bother trying to explain here. If you’re interested, you should go look it up yourself. Swedenborg well understood the power of words, and explained it at great depth.

As an aside, I’ll report here that I recently gave a woman who has been in the work for most of her life Swedenborg’s “Heaven and Hell.” She’s been reading a lot of Maurice Nicoll lately, and noted deep similarities between his ideas and Swedenborg’s.

I explained to her that, unbeknownst to the world at large, Nicoll was an avid follower of Swedenborg. It is impossible, in fact, to fully understand his psychological commentaries on the work of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky unless one has read Swedenborg, but never mind. It would probably upset people to realize that there are so many important connections between Swedenborg and Gurdjieff’s later work, because of an odd inclination to believe that Gurdjieff sprang into being out of whole cloth from nowhere.

The point about words is that words have a life of their own that is independent of us, and that we have almost no understanding of. If one begins to form words within the root of one’s being and follows them, they are able to lead a person into the place that they came from; and the place that words come from is ultimately metaphysical, not physical.