Written stories, publications and documents, including historical documents are considered to be the “gold” standard of knowledge. Published material is regarded as the bloodline of academia and research, while verbal communication such as lectures, seminars are regarded as second tier, fleeting and less relevant until they are written and published.
Yet the oral tradition has been with us for thousands of years and worked very well, carrying stories, songs, tales and wisdom across cultures langugases and epochs of time. Some stories have survived for a thousand of years before they were written down, for example Troyan war story and Odysseian epics etc. Oral tradition, the narratives passed by multitude of stopry tellers and individuals has a distinct “anti-fragile” advantages, namely:
- Automatic translation. Travelling artists, story tellers, historians comedians, shamans etc speak the local language, dialects and use the local contemporary meaning of words, slang and idioms.
- Oral tradition automatically adapts to the changing language over time. The same story is retold using the current language, if the language changes over time, the language of the story adapts but the gist of the story remains unchanged, or may even become upgraded over time as the level of culture increases and different aspects of the story may need to be emphasized.
- Oral narrative is self correcting, to a higher degree than the written text. If the multitude of story tellers or artists tell the same story then they are able to correct each other if one makes a mistake.
- Higher resistance against a manipulation and censorship, due to a distributed nature of the narrative holders and retellers. The authorities cannot always identify who carries the knowledge and wisdom in their minds.
- Connects directly with the Unconscious and the Heart Mind through vibration of sound acting upon the Body without distortion by intellect or Ego. [suggested by Lawrence P.]
In contrast, the written “scriptural” knowledge, while having one major advantage of being more detailed to begin with, is “fragile” and has many disadvantages which are particularily evident over longer periods of time.
A) Witten knowledge deteriorates over time without a possibility of self-correction – the physical carrier of the message such as paper deteriorates and can ben destroyed, even when multiple copies are printed. Libraries require constant supply of resources to maintain, which is subjected to economic instabilities, natural disasters, accidents, wars and natural decay.
B) Written knowledge cannot adapt to changing language, meaning of words and requires active efforts to retranslate, edit and reword the text to be understandable and to carry the intended meaning. Such editing is dependent on the skills of the editors and often leads to a loss of information.
C) Maintainance and re-editing of old written text can and has been used for the purpose of political manipulation, marketing and religious indoctrination.
P.S.
This was received during a meditative-channelling session which was presented in this article: https://paganheretic.wordpress.com/2021/03/03/scriptural-ritualistic-beliefs-promote-negative-selection/
– but was not written down at that time since it is more general and slightly off the topic. This article is therefore a continuation & extention of that 2021 post. Stan B.
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