Saturday, April 27, 2013

Beyond Words

(This is, in a sense, a follow-up to another blog-post I wrote: "Illusions in Language".) 

I can perceive things without having words. Things exist apart from thoughts.


The British proponent of Zen, “Alan Watts”, often talked about how too much thoughts and words muddle your perception. He said,“You don’t have to understand things in words in order to make something happen”. You don’t have to understand in words how you breathe, you just breathe. Someone who does understand how to breathe can’t do it any better than you do. You do not need to have a word for the colors red and blue, you just see the colors.


Having the belief that perceptions and words are identical is not only wrong, it is dangerous, because then, like most of the world, you cannot “get out of your head” and perceive things just as they are without words, and then your language becomes a kind of box that you cannot see out of because you have spent your whole life in the box. You assume that just as words describe things that are familiar and well understood, that everything there is to know and experience is already familiar and well understood one way or another.



If we are too in touch with thoughts and words we are not in touch with reality. We must not confuse the world as it is with the world as we see it, as we think about it, talk about it, describe it. On one hand, you have Reality. On the other, you have symbols. Those symbols are useful - no question about that for even half of a second. But, just as we confuse money for real wealth and may use it as a substitute for real wealth, we confuse the symbols with the reality behind them and use it as a substitute for Reality.



Now, to move on to my next point, I want you to Imagine this: your language is part of your own personal Plato's Cave. The prisoners trapped in the cave have a language formed from there illusory life experience in the cave. They don't have words for the sun, or for animals, etc because they have never experienced those things. They can't form thoughts in there heads about those things, because again they have no concept of them. There language is very limiting, but they don't know it.

Perhaps the prisoner who escaped in Plato's famous allegory first considered that there is something outside of that box, and as a result of that went on his way to perceiving it, or experiencing it, because he has become open to that.

When the prisoner experiences that thing outside of the box, it is nothing more than a consciousness-expanding moment. His awareness is stretched like a rubber band.

That man, the prisoner who escapes the cave, has no words for the experiences that are happening to him. The limits of his world have reached beyond the narrow halls of language.

I am a very lucky man, because I know what it is like to reach beyond words! I know what it is like to be so stupefied by your experiences that the language faculty shuts down so all you are left with is raw experience.

When I first had an out of body experience it totally changed my view of the world. I felt like that prisoner who left Plato's Cave, and that the rest of the people were still stuck in that cave. I have no words for the sounds, sights, and sensations of the out-of-body state, but I am familiar enough with them to know how to react and to know what they mean.


The reason why I have brought all of this up is because people who claim to be spiritual do not want to exude the necessary effort to experience the states that they believe in so deeply, but which are nonetheless very attainable. Having an out-of-body experience, or a deep meditation, transforms you radically because you have reached beyond your conventional experience of reality and experience something totally new.

Likewise, the words "tranquility" and "stillness" don't hold a candle to the actual experiences of deep meditation. I heard those words used in relation to meditation before, but that didn't prepare me for being in those states.

In closing, "The map is not the territory". The guide to having an experience is not a substitute for the experience.

(Soon, I will be posting articles on how to have very vivid dreams, lucid dreams, & out-of-body experiences, as well as how to remember them and prolong them. Stay tuned!)