English, Communication and Interchange
Yesterday morning we had our little monthly English study circle after morning meditation. We are reading a booklet by Dr. Krishnamacharya and speak about it in English. It is an interesting text and the group members thus gain a better understanding of the language.
Later I had a correspondence with the Russian translator of books of the same author, and the correspondence again was of course English. The author’s mother tongue is Telugu, but he decided to write his works in English. Likewise I decided to do this weblog in English, though it is not my mother tongue. I often have correspondence with people of the Spanish speaking world, and since I don’t speak Spanish, we do it often in English. Here in Switzerland there are intense discussions going on about an earlier introduction of English into the school system, besides the other main national language, French or German. The last hundred years English has become the language of communication between many people in the world.
Dr. Krishnamacharya said that English was chosen by Spiritual Hierarchy as the language of the wisdom teachings, and no longer Sanskrit, to give access to the people. There was a deep inner meaning behind the outwardly aggressive colonialisation policy of the British Empire, laying the ground for this evolution. I don’t see it as a cultural colonisalisation through one language, but as a quality of time by which mankind is getting into a closer relation with each other. There are endeavours to create special top level domain language encodings on the web for non-Latin signs, like Arab, Japanese or Chinese. National languages, dialects and encodings will remain, but the need for a common means of communication is getting more and more a necessity of an interchanging world. In the subtle planes, before a word expresses in language, there is the first impulse sprouting forth, concretising as an idea and then clothing into a thought. In these three stages language as we know in the expressed form does not exist, though differenciation slowly comes in. It is only with the outer manifestation of the spoken word that there is this incredible “Babylon” of languages and cultural encodings gets predominent. Having a means of maintaining a unity of a language within this world of multifold differenciation is an invaluable means for the growing inter-connectedness of our world, until man again ascends to a non-verbal communication on the subtler planes of silence.
