This is a page which is for fun, and for new ideas. It's also a "sitting
at the bar" sketch of the thinking behind the study which this site
represents. It's also a source of some pretty good sites to surf.
Let's get at it this way- language, communication of any form is, shaping
your mind right now, even as you read.
That's not some cyber-sessive riddle, it's a verifiable physical reality:
Any input to your senses reshapes your neural fibers--brain stuff
--physically. If you think about it--it's not that bizarre. Whether you
take Thermodynamics laws to heart, Buddhist
Causality,
or the common sense of Chaos,
there is intrinsic interconnection as a fundamental part of WHAT IS.
Aside from sub-atomic matter making up everything that "is"
(or because of it), modern physics attests to inter-causal links between
matter at its most basic levels. These involve energy and the acts of the
mind, including language, do the same thing.
Right now as I type, thoughts firing in my language regions of brain--and academic ones, and self-conscious ones (about how this may be sounding to you), and so forth--are triggering my spinal column to type, triggering actions in my computer (I HOPE), and then--if it works--the whole thing gets uploaded, you read it, the shapes on the screen before you become language in your mind's sorting eye, and the ideas--if you haven't given up on this ETERNAL SENTENCE--are making you think (what exactly that is, I don't know).
You see, anyone--anything can and will trigger you to think--but what that thinking will be, varies. This is the mystery of language--perhaps of life as well. The only things we know--and can convince others that we know--exist as language. If you can't describe it, or present it to at least one of the body's senses, it's very hard to say "it is."
Well, in ancient India, for one reason or another, two very powerful ideas began--intentionally or otherwise--which are rather interesting. Aside from the tantalizing mysteries of thought, philosophy and spirituality which many have come to recognize or--at least--know of from Ancient India, the theory of language and the developing creation of a concept of self or identity. Vedic India (early as 1500 b.c.e.) first suggested universal and cosmic unity in the form of the very entity of language: speech.
The first detailed grammar of language known to humankind dates from as early as 800 b.c.e. in India. Countless philosophical ideas of individual oneness with the cosmos, ethics of social beneficence, and even some Western philosophical ideas (Hegel was reading ancient Indian philosophy during the time he developed the idea of the Worldspirit) have arisen from the developing doctrines associated with the self in Ancient India.
These doctrines always used the sounds, word play, and rhythms of both ideas and meter to teach on many levels at once--depending on how deeply you knew the language and tradition. Many traditions in human history of done this. In each case, and oral tradition of memorized "texts" was the tool of the Knower. These texts were built upon one another as layers of commentary and cross reference and disputes/debates/brahmodya's involved citation, correlation, and integration of ideas across the vast information committed to memory.
For the memory-deficient modern scholar, RAM and HTML can do the same things. My dissertation, then, explores the EARLIEST uses of the most mystical words for the self in the way that they were discussed from earliest times. It is the study of the path of development by means of an electronic model of its way.
So, I picked these ten or so key words, began reading every line of the very large and oldest Indian text, the Rig Veda (c. 1500 b.c.e.), hypertext-linking every instance. This affords easy and diverse access to a VERY BIG text with great ease. It also enables systematic access to my path of research for the dissertation committee and other scholars. It emulates, as my study will argue, the way in which the grammar of ideas about the Self in Vedic India first developed.