Experience and the 'Language Game'

After reading Scharf’s article several questions come to my mind regarding experience and language:

Without language, how can we know WHAT experience is?
Even if it is ineffable how can it exist or happen/have happened without the representation of language?
If there is no experience, then how do you explain or understand accounts? Are they merely a product of socialization? In other words, we think that they exist, so they do to us? Is that not a bit patronizing? Or, at the very least, reductive?

And also, are all religious or mystical experiences the same at the root – that is should we assume that they all come from the same ‘place’ or is the notion of ‘family resemblances’ that Scharf mentions (97) more profound? If you consider the phenomenon of alien abduction (108-109) in contrast to William James et al, could it be that the experiences under consideration are NOT some sort of contact with one thing. But several or multiple forces, for lack of a better term. Fundamentally, is there a way to separate experience from its roots? As Scharf summarized: the progression from Post-Enlightenment attempts to defend religion as the expression of experience, to Perennial Philosophy to its effects on D.T. Suzuki and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (that is on non-European traditions and our notion of them). Even though the concept of experience is situated in a certain universalism, is it useful anyway? Can it be divorced from that?

So what role does language play in all of this? Well, without language, that is signifiers, how do we know it exists (even if only as a recollection or happening in our minds? Regardless of what assumptions that makes about the nature of the mind, especially in terms of autonomy.) In other words, is the ‘dream report the only criterion for the dream’ (113)? Is the recording of experience the only way it exists?

Or is the application of language to experience, whatever it is, as Dennett claims (111) relational? I think that in terms of the scholar, perhaps. BUT in terms of the individual, the community member. No. If you look at groups that have a strong confessional component, such as charismatic Christian churches (even if they are descended from the same phenomena that inspired William James) what does it mean for members to share tales of their experiences with each other? The same could be said of any other tradition with framework descended from Perennial Philosophy (100-103).

I guess the biggest assumption that Scharf discusses is our really foundational myth of the autonomous individual (111) and that this individual is in possession of inner, private experience. But how do we get around that? Not only is the individual central to the current European-inspired framework, BUT it is central to any attempt to address persons outside of their signifiers. Fundamentally this is tied to social justice, if there is no concept that we are all individuals and all equal, then people and groups can be objectified.