Starting
| These ideas led me to try to stand evolutionary history
on its head. If, I thought, there is something to this chain of analysis with so little
proof behind it, perhaps one could experiment on oneself a bit. I proceeded in this way. Rather than use the simple phonetic patterns of classic mantras, I thought, what if I tried complex—abstract!--statements culled from the oldest books. Yet another assumption at this point was that one cannot divorce semantics from syntax, especially when one is looking at the roots of language. I let myself believe, for experimental purposes, that the meaning of a statement could in some way not known to us have an important effect. Perhaps the meaning is somehow a facilitating factor. |