In the News (The New York Times [1]): “New research is teasing out more of the profoundly miraculous process of language learning in babies. And it turns out that even more is going on prenatally than previously suspected.
“By looking at international adoptees — babies who were adopted soon after birth and who grow up hearing a different language than what they heard in the womb — researchers can see how what babies hear before and soon after birth affects how they perceive sounds, giving new meaning to the idea of a “birth language.”
“Experts have known for some time that newborns prefer to listen to voices speaking the language that they’ve been listening to in the womb, said Anne Cutler, a psycholinguist who is a professor at the Marcs Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development at Western Sydney University, in Australia.
“Newborns can recognize the voices they’ve been hearing for the last trimester in the womb, especially the sounds that come from their mothers, and prefer those voices to the voices of strangers. They also prefer other languages with similar rhythms, rather than languages with very different rhythms. …”
Question: What is your opinion as a Kabbalist about the connection between the brain and speech, what are words and letters [2], what is expression?
Answer: Speech is a very complicated mechanism that expresses thoughts and emotions that we learn and acquire throughout life, but this mechanism begins to develop even in the embryonic state of the person.
Before it is born, a fetus hears and understands the speech of its mother, so a baby begins to understand the speech of adults at a very early stage, even after a few weeks. The manner in which the parents speak with him is of great importance, as well as the behavior of the mother during pregnancy, because she is communicating internally with him and the fetus absorbs everything. All of these impressions influence his speech.
In fact, speech is a divine gift to humanity, with its help, he communicates with the Creator [3].
Just as a mother speaks with a fetus who is not yet born, or with a baby, so we must also imagine to ourselves that we are conversing with the Creator, and if we just want to, we can exchange words with the Creator; this language is called a sacred language.
With its help a small person (this could be someone who is adult in age, because from the perspective of his internal development he may still be small), is linked with the Creator and can communicate with Him. If it is not in words, then it is with a smile, gestures, inner drives, and so forth. In other words, a language is a code.
Furthermore, Hebrew is a special language that was created in a written and spoken form, with all its inner meanings, from the forces through which the Creator and the creature converse with each other. So there is nothing that can be substituted for Hebrew, it is the foundation of all languages.
Question: Does this mean that Hebrew actually lives in everyone?
Answer: Absolutely! This is because the letters are composed of two forces, vertical and horizontal.
As a result of this, the letters have square shapes because there is nothing besides the two forces, vertical and horizontal, from above to below, from below to above, or from right to left, and from left to right. These two directions include all the forces of nature within them, because the horizontal is characteristic of bestowal and vertical is characteristic of reception.
Question: And what is a point?
Answer: A point is both the beginning of a vertical line and a horizontal line, or their intersection. From this state comes the communication of a person with the Creator or even between people. It seems to people that they are communicating with each other directly, but they are communicating between them through the Creator.
Comment: You are asserting revolutionary declarations, like Hebrew exists within every person…
My Response: Hebrew is the foundation of the inner program of a person, like the foundation of any computer program is zero and one. It is the same thing here.
Comment: An additional declaration is that we are communicating through the Creator.
My Response: Solely and only! He connects us and nobody else! Otherwise, we would not be connected. All of us are absolute egoists, and as such we have no ability to have contact between us, the Creator fills the void and the space between us. What this means is that our language is the Creator.
[201910]
From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 1/23/16
Related Material:
The Difference Between The Written Language And The Spoken Language [4]
The Forces Are What Operate And Not The Sounds [5]
In What Language Should One Speak With The Creator? [6]