Words create thoughts

You explain something simple to someone close to you, and they understand it in their own way. They explain something, and now it is you who hears something other than what they meant to say. And more than once you have also heard words said only to sound important. You rarely notice any of this: the words come by themselves, thoughts form out of them by themselves, and you use them without a second glance. How often do you ask yourself where the words you think with come from? And what are your thoughts made of?

Thoughts are made of words

You hear and speak words every day, but who these days knows what a word is? It sounds familiar and seems clear, yet the essence held in it slips away. Many people repeat even the phrase “words create thoughts” without sensing how much stands behind it.

The essence of a word is kept in its origin. Translated from Greek, etymology means the study of the true meaning of a word: it shows which root the word grew from and what was put into it at the start. Grammar links the true meanings to one another, sense is built from them, logic is built from sense, and this is how words shape awareness.

It is commonly held that thoughts create reality, but thoughts themselves are made of words. You cannot think without language, and language is your words. So it is words that create thoughts.

It is all simple if you do not complicate it. If the words are distorted, so are the thoughts, and after them your whole reality.

You see things as they were named for you from birth

Imagine that from the day you were born, the people close to you called water firewood, and day shadow. That is how you would perceive them. You would take your words from those around you, and you would simply have no other names. If you were thirsty, you would ask for firewood and be brought water: at home, that is how everyone talks.

But at someone else’s house, the same request would bring you logs, and you would wonder why people do not understand you.

And you would argue for and defend the very thing that kept you from understanding others, and others from understanding you. After all, these words are your own: the people closest to you said them, and giving way would mean admitting that they were wrong.

In the example of firewood and shadow, the mistake is obvious at once. With words for what can be neither seen nor touched, it is harder: there is nothing to check them against, and the mistake is easy to miss.

You got your own words the same way, and you have probably never checked them. And your children hear from their very first days how you name things.

What matters most here is the time before the age of two, though few people know about it, and it is sometimes even ignored. A child is only beginning to remember “mum”, “dad” and everything else, and you think the child has no awareness yet and does not understand. True, the child does not understand, but it is exactly at this time that they take things in well. That is why some parents, from the very start, express their thoughts in front of the child in an etymologically correct way. But how many parents take that approach?

Everyone has their own truth

We all see and understand things in the same way, only each of us has a slightly different attitude. Words came to us through many people, and in every age each of them understood them and related to them in their own way. Hence the saying: everyone has their own truth.

On top of what came from others comes a person’s own character, and everyone’s traits are their own, like fingerprints and DNA. Nothing repeats. Only stereotypes repeat: what people call a script shared by everyone.

New words only add to someone’s importance

Every word carries a meaning, but people use words any way they please. What comes out is verbiage, with neither sense nor order in it. And new words and meanings are brought in only to underline someone’s importance. There is no weight behind them, no understanding either, and above all none of the essence that everything is made of. Nowadays such words have become the norm.

Take any new word you have started saying yourself lately and try to explain it simply. Is there any essence behind it?

Everyone hears words through who they are

Whatever you say, your words are always accompanied by who the listener is. That means their perception, their awareness, their inner world and all the patterns they themselves are made of. With any change of mood, they do not even notice that the words mean something quite different to them, or nothing at all, because their opinion has already formed. And once an opinion has formed, the process of understanding is broken.

You listen the same way yourself: if your opinion of a person is already settled, you hear every word they say through that opinion.

That is why no one stops to think that your thoughts, your reasoning and the words you put across in an etymologically wrong way are perceived by others in their own way. Why this happens is unclear, and someone starts shouting at someone else. This goes for teachers and for everyone else. And yet you can see that ordinary awareness is missing even in those who believe that, according to the stereotype, they ought to have it.

Questions to ask yourself

Check the words you think with:

• What words made up your heaviest thought today?
• Which words you got in childhood do you still defend without ever having checked them?
• Whose attitude to things came to you along with the words?
• Where in your words is a stereotype that everyone repeats?
• Which new word do you say most often, and what essence does it carry?
• Who did you form an opinion of so long ago that you have stopped hearing them?

To start, take your most familiar word and ask yourself what it means to you and who you got it from. If it resists, write to me below: we will work through it together.