Thursday, January 23, 2025

Words

When we encounter language, spoken or written, it is not received as a chain of definitions. Language is received as a flow of meaning. Words are representations of categories of experience, and naming is a form of shorthand for easy reference. We find here the inestimable value of education. Our library of experience determines the richness of our understanding.

Metaphor and analogy are tools of meaning with great explanatory power, but that which is beyond the various categories of our experience is beyond the reach of metaphor, and with regard to our humanity there are possibilities of being that amount to the emergence of an entirely new kind of creature on the twining tendrils of the tree of life.

An ancient master once remarked "Why does the enlightened man not step forward and declare himself?"



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