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MYSELF Much in this book has been described in narrative terms. The constructions employed could be understood if the language were known to conform to the conventions of spelling orthography, print, grammar. Are those rules to be understood as applying only to the domain of articulate speech, or is it possible that they derive from and apply to some domain of which we are unaware? Are the rules according to which I conform also to be understood to be a part of the representation to which some yet undisclosed realization approximates? The matter obtrudes if I am working with someone who does not pay attention to, or attach importance to, the verbal content of what I say, but interprets the ‘flatus’, the breath with which I say it. I may be under the impression that my articulate, verbal formulations are what is important; he may be concerned with the breath with which I say it.
The complexity of the problem is increased if the ‘flatus’ is the link between X, someone or something not me, and my self; the ‘flatus’ requires a spectrum of meaning to express ‘Divine afflatus’ at one extreme, to ‘poison gas’ at the other. It becomes still more complex if X is able to ‘transform’ the sound waves, which I think he hears via his auditory apparatus, into waves which I think would be usually appropriate to visual apparatus. If I suppose he hears what I say to him, but in fact he is seeing my words sailing through the air, the link between myself and X becomes a problem which cannot be solved with the existing apparatus.
Let us assume that there is such an entity as the mind; furthermore, that there is such a domain as approximates to, but is not identical with, the mind; that the ‘rules’ of that domain and the entities within it are only expressed in the crudest terms, derived from the
ordinary animal's experience of sensuous reality. Then my problem and the problem between myself and my partner assume a scale of difficulty which lies beyond the reach of their existing spectr