I'm listening to the podcast On Being, which I'm not sure if I like yet, but I'm listening anyways. I like this bit below about language shaping experiences/ concepts. My house was just talking about this the other day. I wonder about my experience being shaped inherently because of concepts built into language - and more in the sense of the things not appreciated because they're not built into the way we speak. I also wonder how much language vs culture effects values and things generally undervalued in our society like time vs money, happiness vs success. Something like that.

"You know, I send this out and then I get these messages, "Wow, this is happening in Iran?" Or I send pictures. I just realized afterwards that our visual vocabulary has been affected. If we think of Iran, we only have certain visions of unfortunate moments in recent history that get repeated. And our language — Rumi is so aware of that. Language can take over our lives and make us not see things. He actually has a fabulous verse, he says [Persian spoken]. "Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world." I mean this is the most sophisticated, philosophical approach to language. Now we talk of language as being constitutive of experience, but that's exactly what he said. You know, "Get yourself a new language and then you will be able to see a new world." And that's definitely what we need to do in relation to that part of the world and certainly with Iran, to see the dynamics. A tremendous amount is going on that we don't get to hear about."

Professor Fatemeh Keshavarz
From APM On Being: The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi