Tools, Not Lords

We must keep words in their places: excellent servants but very bad lords. Poets innately know this, thus words dance to their tune rather than the other way about. In my world the outer (let me call it that for just a moment), thus that to which words refer, is the governing reality; the symbols that evoke it are just tools. Some people fasten on words as if these had a heft, tangibility, and immutability—but experience has taught me that the same sound or written form often means quite contrary things all depending on the mysterious “outer” the speaker or writer actually holds in mind.

I’m after that tangibly real. But when I get away from ordinary, physical things, that real becomes invisible; in actual experience it’s just a feeling inside me. Take words like soul or self. Therefore, to save time, my initial interest when picking up a book, say, is to discover the writer’s existential stance. If it greatly differs from mine, I rapidly lose interest. Stance, of course, is unimportant if the reporting is about simple, generally observable facts, but if the matter is murky, aesthetic, or requires interpretation, the person’s stance becomes important—if for no other reason than to save time. A person’s existential rooting, to use another word, determines the meanings he or she will attach to the words.

I spend a great deal of time pondering the writings even of people whose general stance agrees with mine, especially writers far away in time, thus when my context of the life in those times is thin. I spend time wondering what invisible feelings the words they use actually represent. What did they feel when they used this word or that? What did the Buddha mean when he used the word anatman (no-self)? If there is no self, what is the point of nirvana? It couldn’t mean what the summaries say, what the dogmatists ignorantly hammer home, bludgeoning us with a patent contradiction. Well. Today I chanced across a very brief but very potent post on The Zennist, here, titled “Prior to nirvana.” It’s worth a trip there to read it. Here we have the kind of explanation that makes sense to me—entirely in harmony with genuine, hard introspection—which is the real root of knowledge, rather than that which concept-juggling yields. In a nutshell, the Zennist argues that the self the Buddha called no-self  was the corporeal entity, this current composite—not at all the self that I have in mind when I use the word.