The Problem with Words

Asher’s relationship with words has been unusual, to say the least.

For the first six years of his life, he was a solitary and almost silent child. He avoided social contact and, he tells me, spent much of his time thinking. Six years is a long time to think. Imagine a sage or a yogi in retreat on a mountain somewhere without the distractions of everyday chatter and interaction. You may think it’s fanciful to compare a quiet pre-schooler to a highly developed adult seeker of enlightenment, but Asher insists that small children are not born stupid before gradually learning wisdom; that they are still very much in touch with their aware spiritual selves before human socialisation has taken its toll. Looked at from that perspective, perhaps it’s easier to accept.

That time of silent contemplation was followed, in his case, by more than twenty years of concentrated effort to acquire and refine his language skills. Once he became motivated to learn to use spoken language, things started to change. Learning to manipulate the muscles of his mouth to form intelligible sounds was arduous work at first, but that was nowhere near as hard as picking up the doublespeak of social worded language — the euphemisms, obscurities, sarcasm, ironic asides and frequent mismatch between thoughts and words. Those still remain confusing and difficult for him, as they do for many neurodivergent and/or telepathic people.

Despite the challenges, he mastered almost every phoneme required to speak English, developed an impressive vocabulary and managed to inject enough prosody (expression) into his speech to make it relatively easy for others to listen to. By the time he reached adulthood, Asher had mastered words.

There was a problem, though. Words served him well enough in daily interactions and gave him the ability to live a more-or-less independent life, but they failed him miserably when he wanted to share his metaphysical understanding.

“Don’t bother asking me what visiting another dimension is like,” he’d tell me. “There are no words to describe it.”

Sometimes he would settle unhappily for the closest word to the concept he wanted to share. (“I’m not 100% sure if the term ‘energy’ is perhaps the most appropriate but admittedly I have nothing better so will use it for clarity purposes.”) However, as his out-of-body explorations of astral realms became more expansive, his ability to convey the experiences in words began to break down.

Gradually, his willingness to engage in spoken or written dialogues with me about such matters started to decline. He continued using speech and writing in his commonplace life, but withdrew, first from speaking and later from writing about the paranormal aspects to me. As explained in detail in my book, A Mind Beyond Words, Asher divided himself into two parts: the everyday physical man going about his daily life and talking when he needed to, and the metaphysical being whose consciousness was mostly located out-of-body and who communicated with me by direct mind-to-mind contact.

He’d given words his best shot and found them lacking for his purposes, so he tossed them aside and concentrated on helping me to develop non-verbal dialogue to an acceptable standard.

As someone deeply immersed in words, both spoken and written, I found losing all verbal contact with Asher difficult. On a very personal level, I still miss his voice and receiving those wonderful, rambling discourses he used to send me.

I am somewhat able, though, to put aside my own self-pity when, as in the following telepathic discussion, he conveys his own responses to worded as opposed to non-worded conversation.

I find it hard to imagine a sensitivity so intense that each word uttered would feel like throwing a missile at the other, but this dialogue allows a deep gaze into how crass and unyielding 3D life feels to someone more comfortable in higher, non-physical dimensions.

Here, in a still very ‘condensed’ form, Asher explains why he dislikes using words, and prefers our way of communicating:

Jes: You once told me that if you had a two-minute spoken conversation with me, you would spend around two hours afterwards going over it in your mind, pulling apart every word and nuance. Is that still the case?

Asher: It does complicate potential interaction.

Jes: And yet that doesn’t apply for you in non-verbal dialogue?

Asher: Words are frozen thoughts.

They become solid and intractable, like hurling lumps of ice at someone.

They’re cold and heavy. They can hurt.

Sending my thoughts to you is like sending a cloud of water vapour.

They don’t take form until they reach your mind.

There, you condense them into a liquid state. They become a joint process between us.

I say ‘liquid’ because you have some leeway as to how you receive them.

You pick up a gestalt: I can send feelings, sensations, memories and a context along with the meaning. It flows.

Jes: You really don’t like words, do you?

Asher: No, I don’t.

He’s correct, of course. I rarely receive his thoughts as a stream of words. There are textures of meaning and background context which rarely make their way into my written renditions of his thoughts. Yet the process is often only subliminally recognised as I struggle to record his messages and keep the dialogue going.

I know how incredibly lucky I am in this respect. Imagine, if you’ve never been fortunate enough to experience it, how freeing it is to send or receive an emotion directly to and from someone else’s heart. No limiting words. No hunting for an apt simile or some figurative way to describe it. The whole, utter, complete sensation moves straight from one individual to the other. Of course, our phones are great at instantly transmitting photos or videos of a scene to someone miles away, but with telepathy, you get not just the pictures, but the sounds, the space, the temperature, even, and you feel it the way the sender does. Best of all, it works as well for an imagined event as for one being experienced in ‘real’ time, whatever that is.

This post is a slightly abbreviated extract from our second book collaboration, which is currently being put together.