Language and the Invisible: Who Shapes the Other?

The relationship between language and the invisible raises an essential question: how do words shape our perception of spiritual experience? From one culture to another, prayer, the divine, and the spirit take on different forms, revealing a diversity of grammars of the sacred. The anthropology of the sacred thus shows that each tradition builds its own way of expressing the invisible. Subjective consciousness, for its part, remains partially irreducible, which leaves a gap between lived experience and its translation into words.

Yes, probably. Inner experience—ecstasy, sudden silence, intuition, the dissolution of the ego—can arise without words. But as soon as one tries to share it, transmit it, or understand it, language takes over, giving social existence to the invisible. As Claude Lévi-Strauss reminded us in The Savage Mind, 'myth is language that works at a very high level.' Raw invisibility remains mute; language gives it a voice, at the cost of a translation that is often imperfect.

Because each language is an active filter. From there, we naturally move from 'prayer,' often understood as a relationship directed toward a transcendence, to broader notions of 'spirit' and 'the divine.'

The names for the divine, moreover, vary profoundly: God or Allah in monotheistic traditions, Brahman, the Tao… Each carries an entire cosmology. Likewise, the word 'spirit' is polysemous: it can refer to an immaterial substance, a presence, or a vital breath.

Among the Bedik and Bassari of eastern Senegal, bolong designates a force connecting the living, the dead, and natural forces. Among the Lisu of Yunnan, ni is simultaneously breath, shadow, and double of the being. The Hopi of Arizona maintain with the kachina—spirits of natural forces—a relationship made of dances, offerings, and silent prayers. In India, with Amma, darshan is a direct visual exchange with the divine. Zen monks, for their part, focus on cultivating attention and satori—an experience of awakening or perceptual shift—without addressing a personal transcendence. Finally, in Jewish Kabbalah, the Shekhinah embodies the immanent presence of God, often associated with the feminine.

Thus, the same terms—'prayer,' 'spirit,' 'the divine'—never refer to the same realities. Each culture draws its own map of the invisible, and that map often ends up becoming the territory. It is through this map that individuals learn to orient themselves and navigate the world, in order to make sense of what they perceive.

Quantum physics holds a unique place in contemporary discussions of the invisible. Notions such as entanglement, superposition of states, non-locality, or Heisenberg's indeterminacy seem, metaphorically, to resonate with ancient mystical intuitions: the hidden unity of reality, the interdependence of beings, or the fundamental limits of human observation.

It is precisely this proximity of vocabulary that explains their appeal. In a world disenchanted by classical physics (mechanical and deterministic), the quantum universe appears more mysterious, more fluid, and less predictable. Terms like 'energy,' 'vibration,' 'frequency,' 'field,' or 'dimensions' have quickly moved beyond their scientific framework to become powerful cultural metaphors, used to speak of emotions, inner transformation, or connection to the world. They allow contemporary spiritual discourses to attempt a seductive reconciliation between science, consciousness, and transcendence.

Yet this appropriation is problematic. Physicists warn: taken out of their rigorous mathematical context, these concepts apply neither to consciousness nor to the spiritual realm. The Orch-OR hypothesis (orchestrated objective reduction) remains highly controversial (due to the problem of quantum decoherence), and the quantum 'observer' is not a human consciousness.

Neuroscience and contemporary physics now make it possible to describe with increasing precision certain biological mechanisms of perception, emotions, or states of consciousness. They can observe neural networks, quantify certain neurochemical reactions, or map brain regions activated during an emotion, a meditation, or a sensory perception.

But between the observation of physical mechanisms and the lived experience itself, a significant gap remains that science cannot fully bridge. Science can describe the biological correlates of an experience without fully accessing how that experience is inwardly felt by an individual.

Thus, it leaves untouched an essential question: that of subjective consciousness, which remains, to this day, largely unexplained.

In what language, and perhaps even science, cannot fully exhaust.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls this the 'hard problem of consciousness': why and how do physical processes give rise to a subjective experience lived from within?

Science can thus measure the wavelengths corresponding to the color red and observe the brain regions involved in its perception. Yet it cannot verify whether two people inwardly experience that color in exactly the same way.

The same holds for experiences such as pain, presence, love, silence, or prayer. We use the same words, but we can never fully guarantee that the lived experience behind those words is identical from one individual to another.

Language enables the sharing of the world, but never allows complete access to another person's inner experience. This gap is not necessarily a flaw: it is perhaps the very mark of the invisible—that residue of human experience which always resists any perfect translation.

When one tradition elevates its own grammar of the sacred to the status of universal truth, linguistic differences turn into sites of tension and conflict: crusades, spiritual colonizations, clashes over blasphemy or secularism. One never fights the invisible itself, but the words that claim to speak it. 'Submission,' 'idolatry,' 'truth' change meaning depending on context, but become violent when they are absolutized.

Conversely, secularized societies that reduce spiritual experience to a neurobiological illusion create an impoverishment: a lack of rituals, community, and depth. Relativism, for its part, dissolves all critical thought.

Indeed, the transcription of the invisible always involves issues of power and struggles.

Through four demanding practices that allow one to inhabit this tension:

• Recognize that our words are historical constructs, partial and oriented. They illuminate and they silence.
• Practice a perpetual translation between symbolic grammars—from Bedik *bolong* to Zen satori, from Amma's darshan to Hopi kachina, from Lisu ni to Jewish Shekhinah—without annexing the other's experience.
• Consent to a pragmatic agreement on effects (calming, transformation, connection, presence) without demanding unanimity on ultimate causes. This is a form of pragmatic peace: sharing fruits without requiring the same roots.
• Understand that no one fully escapes symbolic systems, not even the materialist scientist.

We are, as Ernst Cassirer reminded us, symbolic animals. And as Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.' This tension is not a flaw to be solved, but a condition to be inhabited—where what is most alive is born.

The invisible will remain largely a matter of vocabulary—not because it is illusory, but because our language, powerful as it may be, remains insufficient to fully exhaust it. There will always remain a residue, an excess that words cannot capture.

Wisdom consists in listening to the other's experience through their own grammar, without reducing or rejecting it. To encounter the other is not to absorb them into one's own language; it is to learn to hear, in their language, what our own cannot express.

And perhaps the deepest invisible is found neither 'up there' nor 'elsewhere,' but in that inexhaustible part of human experience that words constantly strive to grasp without ever fully succeeding. It is then, in what might seem like a failure, that language finds its fecundity and the invisible comes to pass.