What’s the difference between me and you? And what’s so bad about big egos, anyway? In this episode we explore the relationship between ego and language. We move from Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to D.T. Suzuki’s explanation of the Zen Buddhist perspective. We explore Suzuki’s analysis of two poems about encounters with flowers, one by Basho and one by Tennyson.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Ego angels.’

The essay by D.T. Suzuki I discuss is:

Suzuki, D. T. (1960). Lectures on Zen Buddhism. In E. Fromm, D. T. Suzuki and R. DeMartino (Eds.) Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis (pp. 1-76). Grove Press.

It’s available on Internet Archive.

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What are your top three wishes? Are they selfish?

As it happens, your wishes may be worse than selfish—they may be toxically self-effacing. If you participate, on whatever level, in a society in which people are continually and oppressively bullied into thinking they need to be someone other than who they are, then you may be wishing for things that obliterate your own unique selfhood.

In this episode we explore the linguistics of wishing—with a close look at realis and irrealis expressions—and discover what grammatical structures can reveal about a desire for a transformative society. We explore the possibility of a social structure in which individual selfhood is protected and sustained by a mutually supporting community.

The book I refer to in this episode is Selves, bodies and the grammar of social worlds, and you can learn more about the analysis I did there in Episode 58, ‘Communities of Sara Mills’.

The stories I read in this episode are ‘Beyond desire’ and ‘Ala’s lamp.’

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What new language would you most like to know? Is astrology on your list?

Does astrology count as a language?

Maybe the language of the stars could be classified as a pidgin, a language without native speakers.

But if, as discussed in Episode 96, ‘The Earth’s language’, languages are ways of organising information, then it might be more accurate to describe astrology as one of the Earth’s languages.

If the Earth has a language, it’s using it to tell us:

• You don’t just exist as an ego, as a first-person pronoun, or a proper name
• You don’t just exist in relation to all the things that people have said about you...or that you say about yourself
• You also exist as a being who took their first breath at a precise moment in the Earth’s movement through the cosmos.

Get your birth chart on astro.com.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Pidgin.’

Connect with me and discover my courses on jodieclark.com

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Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. Rate, review, tell your friends!