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Meditation Practice - Buddhispano

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Conference<br />

Figure 3 An English Speaker’s Hallucination<br />

If we take these as examples of the general phenomena of ignorance, which I believe is<br />

correct, one of the most interesting implications that becomes obvious is that ignorance is not just<br />

the active distortion of perception, but it is also at the same time and in exactly the same way, and<br />

imposition of a compulsion on performance. There is no biological reason for these inhibitions of<br />

pronunciation; they are entirely a function of the systemic ignorance imposed upon us by our language.<br />

Figure 4 A Thai Speaker’s Hallucination<br />

In concluding this attempt to convey a sense of how deeply semiotics and linguistics is<br />

related to Buddhism, I would like to point out that the entities that are at work in these last two<br />

examples are not actual sounds, but are abstract categories of sound, dened within a matrix of<br />

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