Wisdom Studies,
Issues of Our Time,
Counseling, and
Improvisational Music.
John Genyo Sprague, M.A.
The Word
Written Thu, 2011-01-20
Words and the Truth
Here at Genyo Academy, we are operating in the realm of words, language, and linguistic thinking, just as we all do most of the time during our lives. Language is a tool human beings have developed and use to communicate with each other, to articulate connections and patterns, and to describe reality. Right now I am writing and you are reading, and we are using words to communicate about the nature of our ongoing existence.
Reality itself, however, does not exist (solely) within the words we use to describe it. The words are simply sounds, shapes on a page or screen, and neurological patterns going on in our brain. They are that part of reality. We use words to name, signify, articulate, and express. We use these patterns of shapes and sounds to express ideas and describe what we perceive, but there is certainly more to life and the universe than these worded expressions. What about the visual experience of watching the changing sky colors at sunset, or the smell of food as we prepare a meal? The words we use to refer to such experiences are clearly not the experiences themselves. The problem is that linguistic thinking has become such a prominent part of our consciousness that we often mistake our thoughts about reality to be reality. Since the vast universe and all its diverse phenomena is largely not-words, this disjunction between our worded minds and reality itself causes us a lot of problems -- confusion and suffering.
If we liken language to a tool, such as a carpenter’s hammer, then we might say that we often have a hard time distinguishing between ourselves and our tool. Of course, when we are engaged with using a tool there is value in being deeply united with that tool. However, a negative side effect of merging is that it can be hard to put the tool down, or to know who we are independent of our tool. Anyone who has tried to quiet the mind during meditation practice knows how the worded mind typically keeps chattering away, even when we want to let it go and quiet down for a while. This is a bit like a carpenter who cannot stop his hand from making hammering motions, even after the day’s work is done.
There is a well-known story from the Zen Buddhist tradition. A nun asked Huineng (a very famous Zen master, the 6th Patriarch of the Zen lineage, who came, remarkably, from an uneducated background) to explain the meaning of an important text. He responded, “I am illiterate. Please read out the characters to me and perhaps I will be able to explain the meaning.” She responded, “How are you able to explain the meaning, if you cannot even recognize the characters?”
“Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words, in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?"
This simple teaching has profound implication. All spiritual or philosophical doctrines, ideas, and teachings, no matter how profound they may seem, are nothing more than fingers pointing to the moon, Yet so often we get caught looking at the fingers instead of the beautiful moon. We argue: “My finger is best; it's the right one to use. Your finger is not good; it's wrong.” So many troubles and conflicts are caused by people arguing over whose ideas, or whose religion is best. However, if we can recognize that every philosophy, every religion, is simply a pointer, then we do not need to fight. We are each looking at truth from a different vantage point. No teaching is absolute; each is valid to the degree that it is useful – a pointer and guide that has been valuable for certain individuals and groups to experience and live life meaningfully.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein showed in his seminal early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, how reasoning in words cannot say anything definitive about metaphysical concerns. He went on to argue that all philosophical problems are in fact problems caused by language. In his later work he suggested that language is more like a diverse set of language-games that we engage in, in order to communicate. The words we use cannot say definitive abstract truths independent from our daily lives. Rather, language is a creative endeavor, arising out of our ordinary daily lives, to communicate points of view, to direct other people’s attention to see what we are seeing, the moon of reality as we are seeing it.
Whenever we try to come up with “the best” or "the right" philosophical or spiritual ideas, we are essentially looking for the words that will best direct our attention to the way life is, and how best to live. The words that work best for me, may not work best for you. Your religion is home for you, but might not be for me, and vice versa. Describing the ultimate nature of reality as “God” works well for some people. But for others, the concept of God is problematic, and they prefer to speak in other terms, such as goodness, humanity, or a non-theistic spiritual concept such as Buddha.
As you explore the offerings here at Genyo Academy, please know that I do not believe that I am somehow speaking The Truth. These are simply offerings. The truth is your life, and each of our lives as we live them moment by moment, in relationship with everyone and everything. What I am trying to do here is use words in ways I hope will be valuable towards the goals of reducing our conflicts, stimulating reflection and insight, encouraging healthy, positive dialogue, and ultimately manifesting a joyful, yet realistic and sustainable life on planet earth. What is your offering? Please share your own thoughts and ideas. Join in the language game we are playing. Together let’s find ways to live together on planet earth that benefit us all.
for a related essay, see Questioning the Word
Comments
Language: Our Gorgeous, Marvelous Prison
This topic of language is very rich and alive. I love words -- their textures and denotations and nuances, their cadences and secret, revelatory histories -- and also recognize that words constrain me, locking me into constructs of "reality" that are beautiful yet deeply inadequate and even delusional. Not only do words fail to map precisely onto the experienced universe; words also build my perceptions of that universe into a language-determined model that locks me into a specific, narrow range of experience.
For example, in my English language a thing with green leaves and branches and bark and roots is precisely that: a thing. It's a noun, a static object called "tree." If I'm not careful, this noun will determine how I experience the thing we label "tree." In other word-systems, however, particularly some Native American lexicographies, "tree" is not a noun -- it's a verb. The word is something like "tree-ing," not only reflecting the experience of a tree as a dynamic, living process, but also, through the use of the word as an active verb, creating that experience of the animate tree in the speaker. How do we enjoy our glorious, marvelous prison of language, yet also become liberated?
One way is to remind ourselves that language isn't a value-free, transparent medium for conveying meaning, as we often naively assume, but is actually at best a translucent filter and a construct that can distort meaning or even block it entirely. The "Language Poets" of the 1980's explored this by foregrounding language and fracturing its syntax to reveal the complications of using words to transmit meaning. As noted in Genyo's essay, Wittgenstein also explored these properties of verbal language, particularly in his "Blue Notebook." We can stay alert to how we use language. We can remember, as Genyo says, that it's a finger pointing to the moon. We can notice, too, how words can be exploited for political purposes -- Orwell, of course, was adept at this in his essay "Politics and the English Language" -- and how words are subverted in advertising to create artificial needs and maintain an addictive society of passive consumers.
We also can turn to non-verbal languages. Mathematics is a language emphasizing precision and elegance that utilizes a different symbolic system than word-based languages, a different set of signs and signifiers, and it maps a sort of abstract, parallel universe of numbers that at the same time is sufficiently congruent with physical reality that we can use it to predict the tides or send a spacecraft to the moon. Music, too, is a non-verbal language that directly and immediately conveys emotion, a straight connection to the heart and to the whole body. This language of sounds and rhythms seems to be deeply embedded in human consciousness, probably in our very DNA, and most likely preceded our verbal languages. Prehistoric bird-bone and ivory flutes have been carbon-dated to 35,000 years ago, coeval with cave paintings of bulls and lions and mastodons, and indicate that our ancestors used musical language at the very dawn of our human awareness.
Noam Chomsky writes of an archetypal "deep language," a universal substratum that underlies all human speech; the deepest "deep language" is probably music. Other non-verbal languages communicate significant information as well. There are visual, graphic languages of pictorial signs. There are computer languages in coded binaries of ones and zeroes. There are the primordial non-verbal communications of a mother cooing to her baby, and the baby cooing and gurgling in response, and the full range of non-verbal communication -- touches, grunts, sighs, moans -- that we use in sex. It can free us, too, if we try to imagine non-human languages. What is the language of whales, those songs of clicks and beeps and groans in sonar? What is the dancing language of honeybees? These are languages beyond our comprehension, yet by trying to imagine them we escape the narrow confines of our human linguistic prison. (And how is it that a gray parrot like the renowned Alex apparently can be taught to express its thoughts and feelings through spoken English?) Returning to verbal languages, there's so much to say about them, and we can only say it by saying it -- turning around and around in our labyrinth of words. But it's a splendid labyrinth. We should try to live well in it, with our eyes open.