Another connection to R. Barthes’ semiotics and his ‘good fortune of the signs’. The ARE – VID – EOR has no further meaning in the sense of a pre-defined, cultural or otherwise defined language.

No, they are scripture, writ, or ‚literacy’ as R. Barthes says. But they may mislead an individual to read themselves and to write themselves! They are pleasure in text, in texture or in the ‚erotic realm of text’!1 And it is the ARE – VID – EOR, as a texture or realm, which provides for direction.

Several meanings are included therein. Awareness thereof is given, though they are hardly able to be combined to create a cultural meaning. However, combinations such as ‘happiness’, pleasure, liberation, or samadhi can be found to what lies beneath, or to conjectural science.

As Faqir Chand says, at the start they combine to an ‘egoism of sound’, a pleasure in ‘understanding too well’, to a pure invocation drive, or to a proclamation drive, but finally, in a way that necessarily surpasses that. And this is what is important.

After all, we have seen that exercise in Surat Shabd Yoga finally leads to targeted thoughts in the case of ‘assignment’. The ‚appearance’, Other’s attention (SHINES) and ‚speech’, the Other’s assignment (SPEAKS), all refer to one’s own thinking – where else were it to be found?

Thinking ... – Kirpal Singh would put it this way: A mind’s thoughts are shifted and compressed to the ‘soul’s’ thoughts in Surat Shabd Yoga. Though Sant Mat teachers declare the ‚mind’ to be a negative, bothersome and lowly nuisance, they do seem to make a contradictory stand when it comes to the intellect.

Kirpal Singh often referred to the great benefits of intellectual support, though he wasn’t literate in precise scientific thinking. For yogis, thinking is a mental function. In science, we also regard thought as not being fully transparent. We know that thinking is deformed by “defense mechanisms” of the Ego or of the “Ego-Ideal”.

This means that there are ‘unconscious thoughts’ (a strange Freudian term which is better expressed if we were to describe ‘unconscious thought’ as an insistence of meaning, or of a suppressed sense). In this manner, the mental function of thinking can also be mendacious thinking or – as I often mentioned in this book – an echoed-thinking.

Some ideas, religious doctrines, or teachings that are fixed in the mental (i.e. mental systems) are only rehashed thoughts). So to say that one has to bring his thoughts from mind to the soul is an uncertain expression. We have to bring “unconscious thoughts” to the consciousness by winding them through the knot of a “linguistic crystal”, 2 such as ARE – VID – EOR.