During my 10-day Vipassana meditation, I reflected on language. Words are a constant reminder of our duality, constantly reinforcing the illusion of separation, from each other and the world. I read this passage from a letter that my father wrote and this section about language struck me. There is such profound wisdom in my father's reflections that I wanted to share them as a Heart Gift:
'Language is the unwitting culprit – and the life-sucking harpies of lassitude. To be intelligible words must convey concepts fixed and circumscribed – but in a deeper sense eventually dead, dead to heart’s afflatus. Arrested in this fixity, words become drained of that living, vibrant ever-changing marvel immanent in the reality, the ‘things’ they are meant to represent. Steeped in mawkishness, the spirit loses verve and freshness. Grown vapid, wearied down in the struggle for living, it sheds zest for life, the urge for wonder. That Creation gurgling all around us of marvel and mystery untold, always pure and resurgent, to the purblind soul in apathy lies profaned, shriveling into clichés of deja-vu. With the lowly cares of living this glorious many-splendored life is atrophied, mutilated into a pitiable dwarf floundering in the humdrum and the hackneyed spewed of his decayed perception. And if the spark of the sublime gimmers still in his graying depths, this man may yearn to escape, to escape up some distant mountain, or sail away solo the seven seas – yonder to seek the heritage forfeited in the here and now. Oh, by all means, scale the peaks and sail oceans wide. But not to quest escape from inner palsy, but to embrace the world – and grieve it be not yet the universe – and take it for arena to waltz the glorious dance of life and consecrate its mysteries.
Thus the quiddity of the emotion in my waking moments cannot be readily expressed in words. When I write ‘leaf’, the object thus denoted is one we have seen a million times over, something green which grows on trees, its colour changed to brown when autumn plucked. Something so trite, so commonplace as to be seen but hardly noticed, and certainly not expected to quicken the heart. Thus the word ‘leaf’ robs the object it represents, the individual Leaf of sap and molecule, of its immanent marvel, of the ultimate mystery locked up in its essence; in the sap-pulse along the exquisite pattern of its nervure, never identical to that of another leaf, in the perfection of which it breathes, synthesises, nourishes… And therein arises the paradox well-thumbed by pundits of Zen, Tao, Sufism, and mysticism generally:- to become a receptacle open to deeper reaches of wisdom, first the accumulation of knowledge must be swept out. To marvel at and commune with this wonder in which life steeps us, the spirit must first be cleansed down to pristine innocence and purity of wonder. To convey more accurately that rapture of my waking moments I’d have to strike out the nouns, verbs and adjectives used in my description. Banish the words ‘laurel’, ‘green’, ‘leaf’, ‘breeze’, ‘glisten’, ‘stretch’, ‘seek’, ‘blue’, ‘thrush’, ‘spider’, ‘fixity’, ‘speck’, and the rest of them. For inevitably they hold the blight of deja-vu, words to which the reader may bring merely the dead shell of the entities they are meant to denote, shells emptied of their intrinsic spirit, their immanent wonder.
How to bring consciousness to apprehend its surroundings, the surroundings of the here-and-now, with that virgin gaze of wonder of, say, a being just arrived from another planet, a totally different planet? Mystics do so in ecstasy, but the state of ecstasy in incommunicable. Luminaries of Zen went for short sharp blows of pun and paradox with which to wrench and hurl consciousness into higher perception. Like that Zen master, who while walking with disciple past a shrine, spat on the holy image within. And asked his scandalised followers:- “Show me where there is no God so I may spit there. But what is my spittle in God?” Exponents of Sufism availed themselves of tools of allegory and mind-vaulting contradiction. Like that Sufi master, who, promising his pupils an essay holding key to the mysteries of Eternity, handed them a blank sheet of paper. Idries Shah, that exponent of Sufism to Western readership, has done just that in a recent book of his. India evolved meditation with which to still the mind into pure mirror held up to the Absolute. And meditation is the path over which in my very humble and faltering ability I steep consciousness in those walking moments.'