The return to sensitive communication
according to ancient civilisations.

4 - The miracle of empathic communication :

        After this episode recounting the escape from Egypt of a people who had been held there as slaves, centuries passed, punctuated by the rise and fall of civilisations, and marked, in each individual, by a permanent struggle between respect and hatred for the other.
After many centuries, this struggle led to the emergence of a new school of thought, heralded by the teachings of Jesus. This new vision of human relations was to transform the law frozen in words into real-life experiences and feelings


        At the time, political change was impossible without violence, so it was through religion and the example set by one man that change began.

        We have already discussed the circumstances of this man's birth [NdA], as well as the environmental and family conditions that contributed to his development.
We also discussed the long transition in religious culture from a vengeful god to a god of love [see : The Importance of Laws].


Thanks to feelings, any prohibition has been transformed into a lived experience :
        - Compassion - ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’, (John 8:7 the adulteress)
        - Moral sense - ‘Let the little children come to me, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’, (Luke 18:16, Matthew 19:14)
        - Non-judgement - ‘Do not judge and you will not be judged’ (Luke 6:37)
        - Love without limits.
All summed up in one sentence :


        It is thanks to this transformation of human relationships that an event will take place that will be described as miraculous by all those who had forgotten that they were capable of perceiving the world in a different way.
How will this event be described by Jesus' disciples ?



        The group plays an important role here, because everyone needs the experience of others in order to be transformed.
120 disciples, including the 12 apostles (according to tradition), brought together by the teaching of their ‘messiah’, learned and put into practice new behaviour.
This behaviour is described in " 1 Peter 4: 8-10 ".

8 - Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.
9 - Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.
10 - Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.

        This gift, the result of the long transformations brought about by Evolution, is the one that everyone is endowed with from birth [cf : the child's moral sense].
It is shown in the example given by the life of Jesus:
        - the sharing of the loaves (John 6, 1-16),
        - compassion for the adulteress (John 8:7),
        - forgiveness: ‘Absolve, and you will be absolved’ (Luke 6:37),
        - acceptance (the gift of his life).

        Although we cannot say that the event recounted in the ‘Acts of the Apostles’ is true, due to a lack of historical evidence, we can nevertheless imagine that an incomprehensible event was transformed into an extraordinary event as it spread, before being recounted by other disciples.
To do this, we could imagine that men who had relearned to feel and rediscover within themselves the capacities of their childhood, ceased to conform to written rules and henceforth acted according to their hearts.




        For us, the description of such an event is a metaphor for the opening up of a hitherto attenuated or even erased sense : hearing.
We know that one of the very first senses to appear in the foetus is that of hearing [cf : The sensory universe of the foetus]. This sense listens, not to speech, but to sounds coming from the mother's environment: the gurgling of the intestine, the beating of the heart, the emotions expressed by the mother's voice and the movements of her body...
Hearing will be perfected, as it is essential for the development of the sense of empathy that the child will express from the 18th month onwards.


        Of course, in the context of the text we are looking at, it is not a question of hearing with the sense of hearing, but of feeling, in the depths of our being, the information that reaches us through this sense.




        Using a new metaphor, this passage indicates that all the participants became aware of something to which each of them had individual access.
How did this awareness come about ?


        To feel at a distance, hearing is not enough : it can detect emotions but cannot determine the cause of these emotions. For that, vision is needed.
Vision, which complements hearing, is also essential to the development of empathy and compassion. How can we experience these feelings if we are unable to hear a voice altered by emotion, or to read the same emotion on a face ?






        So the appearance of tongues of fire could mean the rebirth of a lost sense that suddenly allows us to discover a reality different from that described by words.
The rediscovered sensitivity, a source of spontaneity and openness towards others, will give rise to a new mind, not one of reason and law, but one of listening, observation and the feelings experienced: a mind that can be considered to have become ‘healthy’ once again.



         After the domination of a world seen through words, reality becomes luminous. Believing and seeing with the heart are incomparable.




        Although they came from all parts of the world, these men had one thing in common, and that was their piety : they were believers who followed the laws of Moses and listened to their fellow men. Their lives are no longer governed by the mere meaning of words : their feelings determine their conduct.




    This multitude then perceived things differently.
Let's go back to the first moments of human development.
For the listening foetus, the sounds that reach it could be no more than noises. Yet they are linked to the mother's feelings : well-being, irritation, tiredness, pleasure... By establishing its first contact with the surrounding universe, the unborn child learns its first language, the one selected by the "evolution-god".

    So how are we to understand this noise heard by the multitude ? We can understand it as the shudder that runs through every body during an intense emotion, and this emotion experienced by each person spreads to everyone present. No one can remain silent.
In this passage we see two communities with different experiences:
- those whose spirit has been transformed, who speak and act through the language of the heart,
- those who act only according to the law, for whom the event is a mystery that arouses their curiosity.




    How can we fail to be surprised and fascinated by such an event? When we are used to understanding only the people who share our culture, when we are used to understanding life only through the words that try to describe it, it's a miracle to discover that people all speak the same language through their gestures and emotions.
However, the astonishment only concerns those who reason. For those who feel, the question no longer arises.
So we see a reversal of the situation: whereas the development of speech paralleled the inhibition of sensitivity, the renaissance of sensitivity puts all cultural knowledge in the background. Whereas words encourage misunderstanding, feeling enables everyone to understand and share.





    Aren't we confusing mother tongue and social language here?
The social language is the language that we learn, long after birth, and which corresponds to the codes established within the group.

The mother tongue is the language that develops within the mother. It will be put into practice after birth, at the heart of the family: it is the language of the parents' love for their child.

So what is the “mother tongue” that this multitude perceives? It is the language of communication and sharing, a forgotten sharing that has just been rediscovered.














    Jesus, by speaking of a god of love and encouraging people to follow his example, gave his fellow human beings back the ability to communicate through their feelings, and the ability to understand the feelings of others, not through knowledge, but through the rebirth of empathy.





    Reasonable man, by learning to inhibit his instinctive perception, has rendered it unconscious. He has ended up forgetting that such possibilities lie within him. When he becomes capable of feeling again, he can only wonder.
Should he listen to his feelings, let himself be moved by the beauty or misery in the world around him ?
Should he give credence to the language that teaches that a poor person is despicable, and put forward false abilities that are linked to money and power ?

If they have not taken the conscious step of freeing themselves from their inhibitions, ‘reasonable’ people can find themselves unsure of what to do.





    In the same way, the reasonable man, who has acquired the habits of the community and possesses personal convictions, generally judges the expression of sensitivity to be profoundly ridiculous.
As we have seen, a similar judgment is made of the dreams we have at night, when they tell a story too far removed from generally accepted behaviour.

    So, without being able to live his sensibility, man will judge the world around him solely on the basis of his knowledge and experience, in other words, his ignorance. For example, if he knows that wine weakens self-control, he'll attribute the unusual behaviors he witnesses to its intake.


























The origin of verbal language : (continued)


Bibliography :