Chocolate Verses

What are you feeding yourself?

Transitioning from one language to another is a labor-intensive activity for the mind. It can be exhausting. When emotions are high, this is especially so. This is why foreign language speakers are at a disadvantage when trying to make an argument in a second or third language. It seems that no matter who we are, the most intimate and powerful messages we wish to communicate from the heart, tend to come from our first language. In that space, we can communicate at a level of profoundness that multiplies to the depths of perception everything we intend to say.

Communication though is a two-way street. If John is on State Street and Philip is on Main Street, short of having electronic means of communicating, what difference does it make that John speaks well? Philip must be where John is in order to get the full impact of the message. Two people can use the exact same words but have extremely different understandings of what they mean because they're on different paths.

I’m going to coin a phrase to illustrate a point, a phenomenon of perception within language. I will call it perspective anchoring. Perspective anchoring is an experience like what you have in music production. If you create an instrumental piece of music that has a lot of syncopation across several tracks and mute the track that carries the downbeat, a weird thing happens if you walk away from the composition for a while and come back to it later. When you come back, if you press play in the middle of the song, you won’t necessarily recognize it. This new composition can make logical sense, but it will be unrecognizable. It will sound like a completely new song. Now, if you unmute the track that has the downbeat, you will suddenly be jolted back into listening to the track the way you originally created it. This is like perspective anchoring. Hearing the alternate version, your mind made sense of it as best it could and that is audio pareidolia. The downbeat anchors your perspective. In the absence of a downbeat, your mind will imagine a different starting point. Two people can hear the same recording and end up on opposite sides of the rhythm and experience two totally different songs with differing moods.

What are the conditions for creating pareidolia?

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon that involves perceiving meaningful patterns or images in random or ambiguous stimuli, usually visual. For example, some people may see faces, animals, or objects in clouds, rocks, or toast. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, which is the tendency to find connections or meanings in unrelated data. Pareidolia occurs when the brain tries to make sense of complex or vague information by imposing familiar shapes or concepts on it. The fusiform face area, a part of the brain that processes facial recognition, is activated when people see face-like objects, even if they are not real faces. Pareidolia can also affect other senses, such as hearing voices or music in noise. If the material is complex enough and other conditions are met, it's easy to slip into pareidolia.

Within the disciplines of exegesis and hermeneutics, there are controls for this kind of projection when reading scripture. It's called eisegesis, the interpretation of a text by reading into it one's own ideas. The concept is not new. But how can you control eisegesis when you do not participate fully in the culture that created the material? Human activity is the most complex of all systems to be studied. Talcott Parsons, a researcher and sociologist of the mid-20th century was highly criticized for trying to devise a comprehensive theory of social activity. Exegesis from the outside looking in is like Talcott Parsons. In an effort to avoid eisegesis, systems of practice are created to define and describe the experiences written within the pages that occurred within a totally unrelated culture. Here’s a crude analogy. A child is enviously looking through a shop window at another child eating chocolate ice cream. The hungry child is very bright and extremely clever. He takes his dog Petey home and has a novel idea. Johnny asks his mother for a cup of sugar and heads out behind the barn with his faithful dog. Just before dinner, his mother calls Johny inside, and to her surprise, Johnny has brown schmutz all over his mouth, hands, nose, and clothes. She goes, “Johnny, what on earth did you do with that cup of sugar I gave you?” He replies, “Petey and I made some chocolate!”

Scripture as we read it is an omnibus of 66 books relaying information about millions of lives over thousands of years. It is one of the most complex undertakings ever created. No singular ordinary human has the mind to encompass all of the ramifications or ideas held within those books. It’s far too much to absorb. Avoiding eisegesis while living outside the culture is like looking through a shop window with one eye blindfolded. Imagine hearing, "I’m not going to look through the window with my right eye because it's biased."

The only way to avoid being outside and having the perspective of being outside is to actually be inside. To claim otherwise is hubris.

Understanding scripture properly starts with having the right downbeat. It starts with having the right anchoring point. It starts by not being outside the culture. If an interpretation is formulated from outside the culture, no matter how sweet it tastes, you just might be enjoying Petey's delight.

Baruch Hashem