Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Language: These words will be misunderstood
taiyaki
Veteran
There is an experience. You describe your experience to another using language. You assume that person understands what you are saying and what you experienced previously.
Words and any conceptual idea can never touch upon the actual experience. It can come close at times but it can never objectively describe an experience.
It is like trying to describe light to a blind person. You can give your theories and words about light. The blind person will then have ideas about light. Then say you cure the blindness in that person and they see light for the first time. Experience of the light is nothing like what the blind person thought of.
Words and concepts can only point to the experience. Words can never take the place of experience. Though they are functional and interesting we must always remember this simple fact.
We overlay a conceptual framework over our reality which causes division. We call the sky the sky and the tree the tree. We call ourselves humans and we call animals, animals. This creates a conceptual division. Animals are separate from humans. The sky is separate from the tree. This I suppose is useful for describing things and labeling...but we truly believe the actual objects to be concepts.
Let me frame this more logically. Birth: nothing to something. Death: something to nothing. When we look at reality we see that in actually it is nothing to nothing. We see that flowers die eventually, but in reality they aren't dying. They just turn back into water, dirt, etc. And when the conditions are right a seed will manifest into a flower using the water, sun, and sky. In a sense the air, sun, seed, and water all are the flower. Energy cannot be destroyed. Energy just moves into another form.
Separation only exists based on an assumption. If we look closely we cannot exist without the air we breathe, the sun which provides us heat and help plants glow so that the animals can eat the plants so that we can eat the animals. circle of life. lion king. hakuna matata.
Every thought and action is just energy. Energy moves.
So when you're looking at a pretty sunset, don't ruin it by saying, "oh, what a pretty sunset." As soon as you say those words you aren't looking at the sunset but looking at the words. When you love someone, don't tell them you love them. Just show them. When you are hungry, just eat. When you are sleepy, just sleep. Keep your life simple.
Words are important, but keep them out of your actual experience. We cannot fully experience reality if we allow our SUBJECTIVITY to get in the way. We start to judge and divide. We view reality how we want it or not want it. Reality should... be like this blah blah blah or reality shouldn't be this way. Reality is as it is. Your experience is as it is. It is neither inherently bad or good. Language is always dualistic (opposites). When we experience (being) there is no dualism until WE THINK. Prior to the thinking is just the PURE experience.
Crude example: when you're having sex. just have sex. don't think about having sex, while having sex. haha.
TLDR: Language is failure from the start. Don't except anyone to understand you. Failure to understand this will cause you frustration and lots of failure on your part. Experience by being fully present. You cannot capture reality by overlaying concepts on top of it. ♥♥♥
Words and any conceptual idea can never touch upon the actual experience. It can come close at times but it can never objectively describe an experience.
It is like trying to describe light to a blind person. You can give your theories and words about light. The blind person will then have ideas about light. Then say you cure the blindness in that person and they see light for the first time. Experience of the light is nothing like what the blind person thought of.
Words and concepts can only point to the experience. Words can never take the place of experience. Though they are functional and interesting we must always remember this simple fact.
We overlay a conceptual framework over our reality which causes division. We call the sky the sky and the tree the tree. We call ourselves humans and we call animals, animals. This creates a conceptual division. Animals are separate from humans. The sky is separate from the tree. This I suppose is useful for describing things and labeling...but we truly believe the actual objects to be concepts.
Let me frame this more logically. Birth: nothing to something. Death: something to nothing. When we look at reality we see that in actually it is nothing to nothing. We see that flowers die eventually, but in reality they aren't dying. They just turn back into water, dirt, etc. And when the conditions are right a seed will manifest into a flower using the water, sun, and sky. In a sense the air, sun, seed, and water all are the flower. Energy cannot be destroyed. Energy just moves into another form.
Separation only exists based on an assumption. If we look closely we cannot exist without the air we breathe, the sun which provides us heat and help plants glow so that the animals can eat the plants so that we can eat the animals. circle of life. lion king. hakuna matata.
Every thought and action is just energy. Energy moves.
So when you're looking at a pretty sunset, don't ruin it by saying, "oh, what a pretty sunset." As soon as you say those words you aren't looking at the sunset but looking at the words. When you love someone, don't tell them you love them. Just show them. When you are hungry, just eat. When you are sleepy, just sleep. Keep your life simple.
Words are important, but keep them out of your actual experience. We cannot fully experience reality if we allow our SUBJECTIVITY to get in the way. We start to judge and divide. We view reality how we want it or not want it. Reality should... be like this blah blah blah or reality shouldn't be this way. Reality is as it is. Your experience is as it is. It is neither inherently bad or good. Language is always dualistic (opposites). When we experience (being) there is no dualism until WE THINK. Prior to the thinking is just the PURE experience.
Crude example: when you're having sex. just have sex. don't think about having sex, while having sex. haha.
TLDR: Language is failure from the start. Don't except anyone to understand you. Failure to understand this will cause you frustration and lots of failure on your part. Experience by being fully present. You cannot capture reality by overlaying concepts on top of it. ♥♥♥
0
Comments
Although language may possibly be not up to explaining the final truth, it is still the medium of the dharma. After all isn't that what you're doing?
I'm just finishing a book about the two truths by Sonam Thakchoe, and Je Tsongkapa's teachings show that the final truth is accessible to conceptual or rather conventional knowledge. Whereas Je Gorampa states that it cannot be known through language. Its quite interesting as sometimes I think that disagreements about the final state come, not from the state itself, but from the means to describe it. And IMO I think Je Tsongkapa and Je Gorampa are talking about the same thing in very different ways. Though the author has a completely different view on this.
Enjoy the dharma,
Cheers, WK
check out intro link:
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Wittgenstein/wittgenstein.html
Other times we experience things 'second hand', and while this can cause division we can also gain insight. My own expertise in a certain recreational field comes as a result of language. Had I not sought to understand what others had come to realise then I myself would still be in the dark with these particular matters.
Of course certain interpretations and conclusions based on particular findings can also be wrong or incomplete. I have encountered many traditional approaches that hindered my own progress for many years and it wasn't until I found the internet, when I was able to find different understandings that have proven to be more worthwhile.
The value of checking our viewpoints against others makes language especially valuable in furthering our progress in unspecified matters and achieving results as opposed to reaching an impasse.
Good post. Language fails us and can never adequately describe our experiences. On the contrary, as you pointed out, we seem to fall in love with the words about our experience and seldom experience the experience.
All my best,
Todd
"Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" by William Carlos Williams, 1955
People ask, "What is the meaning of [a] poem?"
The most auspicious answer is, "The poem IS the meaning."
I have always thought that human evolution was vital to the Johannine creation myth ("In the beginning was the Word") because we can't write much with a single word.
Obviously there's the linguistic basis to art and music.
I might suggest there is a language of basketball (so to speak); how a ball winds up through a hoop by brilliant players consists of a beautiful language appreciated by a select few.
Soooo, your definition of language has to expand beyond those silly words.
Thing is, 98% of people THINK language is a word thing. That's where the problem lies. Excessive reinforcement by an uninformed, un-fully-educated consensus is holding us back.
Don't believe it? Spend your whole life looking at pictures, study art history, learn the language of design, then go to a museum and listen to onlookers ___EXPLAINING__ the painting! Hear people say, "I can do that!" The conversations occurring in art museums are like reading a kid's comic book! I used to listen to them and get nauseous; now I just keep my ears to myself.
People are word oriented and completely unaware of how diverse language forms can be as expressions of intelligence.
HAHAHA! No big deal. Life is for learning.
We use language to transcend it. We use images to transcend it.
They compose comments by arranging sounds in different orders (grammar) to convey different meanings.
So absolutely - language is not just about 'words'.....