Intro 2 | Shifting One’s Perception

I first learned about the deeper meanings of baybayin from my Filipino artist friends(Mary Ann Ubaldo, baybayin jewelry artist, Urduja.com; and Bing Veloso, musician, ritualist, scholar of indigenous studies, author of Saysayin ng Baybayin). These women are part of a Filipino spirituality movement in the Philippines.

Don’t let the term fool you. The Filipino spirituality movement isn’t happening because of cultists trying to start a new religion. Rather it is made up of people who are establishing that Filipinos are and always have been a spiritual people, and that they didn’t need the coming of European colonizers to bring religion for them to experience spirituality (see Institute of Spirituality in Asia). These people are PhDs, scholars, researchers, artists that explore not only the anthropological and cultural identity of the Filipino, but also the psychological and spiritual aspects of identity. Many of them are proponents of Pamamathalaan, Sikolohiyang Pilipino, the process of Pamamaraan and decolonization.

As I began to meet more people within this movement they too have shared their own insights to the baybayin meanings. These meanings have been shared and discussed many times not only amongst their peers but also with ordinary people in the Philippines, in both formal and informal settings. And I will be sharing their ideas and interpretations in future blog posts.

Pedro Paterno with his El Cristianismo en la antigua civilization tagalog(1892) and Guillermo Tolentino,  a Philippines National Artist, with his 1972 article on Bathala, could easily be cited as the originators of the various deeper meanings of the baybayin because they wrote and published these concepts first. But, many writers of the first books of age-old epics or folks songs are not necessarily the originators or owners of the common known oral traditions of their times.

After all, one of the traits of the Filipino personality, going back into our heritage and ancestry, as per Sikolohiyang Pilipino studies, is talinghaga, that is, metaphorical sight, understanding and communication. That said, the deeper meanings of baybayin could very well have existed in times way beyond then when they were first written about and they could also have been widespread among Filipinos and not just the ponderings of only the few men who first wrote about them.

In addition to talinghaga, our Filipino ancestors’ spirituality was animistic, that is, they believe that all things in the Cosmos had a soul or spirit — from trees and animals, houses and bangkas, to the seas, mountains and stars, and they spoke to these “things” and honored their existence in their own lives. To understand this kind of spirituality in our Filipino ancestors and even in our beliefs that still exist today, is to also uncover another beautiful aspect of our culture in the Philippines.

Suffice to say, many ordinary Filipinos(non-scholars, non-artists) don’t need any book at all to get the meanings of the baybayin symbols of Ba and La. They can look at those symbols and tell the meaning right off the cuff, that is, BA is for “babae”(female) and LA is for “lalaki” (male). Ongoing examples of everyday Filipinos and the inherent trait of making metaphorical connections between inner understanding, inner sight and the outside world—talinghaga.

After all, the ability to gain access to any symbolism’s meanings comes from both natural human tacit knowing (Tacit Perceptions of Symbolism, Baybayin Alive) and inherent human ability of the psyche to interpret artforms, symbols and dreams (Psyche, Maker of Symbols. Symbols, Keys to the Psyche, Baybayin Alive). And for Filipinos there is such a knowing as katutubong kaalaman or indigenous knowledge in getting to the deeper meanings of baybayin.

Thus, the Baybayin Alive blog is for those of us who are willing to step out of the realm of our western thinking or even our programmed thought processes.

Here we can create a wholistic process of understanding baybayin. We will go back into history and explore how writing systems might have developed. We will explore how other cultures throughout history and even into modern times also have writing symbols with deeper meanings and even spiritual aspects or magical power. We’ll explore the relationship between tacit knowing and imagery—art and sculpture, pictographs, icons and symbols of not only the pre-colonial Filipinos, but also of neighboring Southeast Asian countries and around the world.