Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
WIZARD: In other words, a language and a culture, might mean
the linguistics have a different outlook.
NORIO KUSHI: Yes, there's definitely a difference. One thing,
the pronoun I, is not so prevalent in Japanese. You can have full
complete sentence structures without that.
TRIP: Which maybe because that's the way people conceptualize,
maybe that's why part of the reason why their culture is not such
an individualistic culture?
NORIO KUSHI: Yes. I would venture to say that they're
inspecting the phantom selfing as the rest of the world. You know,
they may not be as deeply enmeshed in it, they're still competitive,
and they're still… even if they're not amongst themselves, they're
competitive with the world. And one of the symptoms is also
exceptionalism. And we think that there's some special purpose to
life.
WIZARD: One of my mentors, early mentors, who was affirming
what I had stumbled on like yourself and Trip, was an illiterate
person in Jamaica, and he never used the word, “you”, it was never
in his language. He was always, I and I. There was no other in his
way of thinking, and I'd never run across anything like that.
NORIO KUSHI: That's fascinating.
TRIP: Relationships, this is the bugaboo I think of almost every
day, and I think most of us spend our entire lives expending most
of our time, energy, and resources on this idea that there's the
right intimate relationship out there for us, we're always seeking it.
And then you say of course once we get into that relationship we
judge that it's the wrong person so we can continue the
unconscious mechanism of seeking [Laughs].
NORIO KUSHI: Yes.
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