Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds
or
remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon
you.
You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into
implicitly
believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know
what
it is. The fact is: You dont know what it is. You have only
covered up the
mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple
stone, and
certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because
it has
unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about,
is the
surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg.
Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only
connected
with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of
which it
came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show
you the
way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or
hold it
and let it be without imposing a word or mental label on it, a
sense of awe, of
wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself
to you
and reflects your own essence back to you. This is what great
artists sense
and succeed in conveying in their art. Van Gogh didnt say: Thats
just an
old chair. He looked, and looked, and looked. He sensed the
Beingness of
the chair. Then he sat in front of the canvas and took up the
brush. The chair
itself would have sold for the equivalent of a few dollars. The
painting of that
same chair today would fetch in excess of $25 million.
When you dont cover up the world with words and labels, a sense
of
the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago
when
humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A
depth
returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness.
And the
greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as
prior to any
words, thoughts, mental labels, and images. For this to happen, you
need to
disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it
has become
mixed up with, that is to say, identified with. That
disentanglement is what
this book is about.
The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things,
people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality
becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle
of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. In this
way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy,
love, creativity, and aliveness.
They are concealed in the still gap between the perception and
the
interpretation. Of course we have to use words and thoughts. They
have their
own beauty but do we need to become imprisoned in them?
Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp,
which
isnt very much. Language consists of five basic sounds produced by
the
vocal cords. They are the vowels a, e, i, o, u. The other sounds
are
consonants produced by air pressure: s, f, g, and so forth. Do you
believe
some combination of such basic sounds could ever explain who you
are, or
the ultimate purpose of the universe, or even what a tree or stone
is in its
depth?
~ Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
