Definition: Language

One of my friend recently talked about "Japanese fortunetellers," and it seems that many Japanese visit fortunetellers often. My friend happens to visit a fortune teller who also happens to be her friend. How nice, she gets to know her fortunes for free. Normally, me and my Japanese friend exchange language (Japanese - English), and we choose a topic for debate and learn during debate. Last week, it was "Japanese fortunetellers". Some of the things she told were really interesting (and sometimes funny).

School of fortunetelling: It seems that there are many schools that teach fortunetellers. And as one can understand the fees seems to be very high.
Language used (frequency spectrum): It seems that they communicate in the Electromagnetic spectrum, with cosmic bodies, some of which seems to be knowing our fortune

The words Language and Frequency spectrum, impressed me and led me to some more (re)search. It seems that, all living and non-living things in this universe are communicating in a form or other, we can understand if we can listen to it. Literally it means, the objects around you, like for example, a tree, insect, sun, moon, your umbrella, pen, pencil, eraser, ..., etc are all communicating to you, in one way or the other. We can involve ourselves, only if we know its language. Sounds strange, right!

How do we define a language,
Definition-1: A systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols (this definition is inadequate for our fortuneteller)
Definition-2: A language is a dynamic set of sensory symbols of communication and the elements used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon. (this is from Wikipedia).

After reading a few definitions on languages, I had to make up my mind that our definitions are limited to human languages. Even for this (small) subset, our definition seems to be inadequate. For example, we use a lot more than symbols and sounds to communicate. Or does it again depend on the definition of symbols. Kind of getting complicated, and philosophical.

It also seems that (good) fortunetellers can infact read your mind. Some speculate this as a trick called "cold reading". But some people say that the oracle read your mind not from symbols, but by the frequency of your thoughts. Now what is the "Frequency of thoughts"?. Physically it means the perceivable (electromagnetic) waves that emanate from our brain cells. Till recently, I was of the view that modern computers together with some super expensive sensors that can sense ultra low power signals from our brain, are decoding the grey cells functions. But, it seems that we can determine these signals with less expensive technologies. Foretune telling.

My friend went on to the extent of presenting me with a Japanese version of a book on cold reading. In Japanese it reads something like, "uranaishi", fortuneteller. I am trying to read it with my limited Japanese *language* ability. Progress has been very slow :-(

I dont believe in fortunetelling period. But recently I am reading more about some part of brain that human beings seldom think of using, and many saints and gods use it to perfection. And this brain can work wonders for those people. Probably these fortunetellers are using that part of the brain.