Words we regularly use can greatly influence out consciousness and feelings. Paul Starobin, in After America; Narratives for the Next Global Age, wrote that the U.S. is in a new age which requires large cognitive adjustments, and that they must begin with a new vocabulary.
The education researcher John P. Bean observed that modern academic establishments use words that reflect accountancy, production, and competition, which corporations focus on. He proposed new words, and they’re easier to appreciate and use when we look At/With/Beyond:
Play: Transformation, creativity, risk taking, suspending judgement, avoiding rigidity, building trust, and building community
Mysticism: Wonder, surprise, meditation, and amazement
Soulfulness: Devotion, healing, depth, relatedness, heart, spirituality, and integrity
Mythology: Transforming consciousness, finding parallels, contemplation, and experiencing the rapture of being alive
Madness: Outrageousness, overstepping boundaries, challenging conventions, and creating new frameworks
Art: Beauty, harmony, balance, and perspective
Community: Relationships, mutual obligation, and sharing meaning
I propose several additional words to apply to learning:
Infinity: Abundance, expanding beyond conventional boundaries, possibility, depth, and ever more vistas
Travel: Exploration, horizon expansion, challenging your assumptions, putting yourself in other people’s shoes, and embedding yourself in more cultures
Flight: Higher perspectives, vast panoramas, and freedom from past boundaries
Nature: Growth, evolution, ecosystem, organism, vitality, fertility, and interconnection
Family and community: Sharing resources, growing together, mutual support, compromising for the good of the whole, and empathy
Romance: Giving, affinity, intimacy, affection, excitement, and embracing the unknown
Celebration: Exuberance, temporarily jettisoning formal rules, new encounters, and fun
Magic: Finding unexpected connections in the world, enchantment, and discovering the unforeseen
Paradise: Luminosity, grace, bliss, and love
Today’s news outlets and social media are so full of negative words that the repetitions can easily be reinforced in people’s consciousness. A woman I met noted that her name, Ruth, meant friend and merciful. She also noted that the word ruthful was largely dropped from the English language while ruthless has still been commonly used. Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius, in Buddha’s Brain; The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom, noted that our brains often encourage us to focus more on negative experiences than positive ones. This increased our prehistoric ancestors’ abilities to survive, because their nervous systems were highly attuned to dangers. They could notice predators, enemies, and approaching storms more quickly.
Hanson and Mendius thus said that we should make an effort to remember all the positive things that happened during the day, including enjoyable exchanges of meaning with others, appreciating beauty, finishing a job, creating something, being immersed in nature, and savoring excellence in art and thinking. Regularly using some of the above words can constantly remind us of the world’s infinite wonders and our limitless possibilities for exposing and enjoying them.
Terms that I explore in my books and on this website, including multifaceted, multidimensional, convergence, expansive, opalescent, and holistic, can be seen as at least as basic as words that denote distinct objects and ways of manipulating them.
Using terms from this article in conversations can remind all participants that there are always more meanings to find in the topic that’s being discussed. If we review our positive memories several times each day and use some of these words to refer to them, we can always improve our views of the world and enable them to expand.