A Labyrinth of Language

Mystic insights

The mystics tell us that in the ultimate experience, the living truth, all is one, time falls away, death disappears, pain does not exist, all is mind and all is now; there is no more dichotomy like mind and matter, subject and object, past and future, no ego, no other, everything merges into one, now and now is eternity.

Any cosmology that ignores these fundamental and universal mystic insights is bound to be erroneous or incomplete, and, like most of philosophy, likely to be an entanglement in concepts, a labyrinth of language; and often depressingly unclear.

This kind of conceptual philosophy does not make us come closer to the real world, but alienates us from our true nature, which is to be free of compulsive thinking and to rejoice in the miracle of life by being in the present. Our true liberation cannot reside in a lofty philosophy but only in a full genuine appreciation of our own experience every moment. True life is only now.

Living truth

Philosophy has always, at least implicitly, been about living the true life, which is the right life. So philosophers might do better analysing the aspects of the enlightened state of the human mind, than continuing debating concepts and solutions that are based on a basically inferior insight in reality than that of the mystics. The philosopher is a man of language and reasoning, the mystic is not, the philosopher often vainly tries to put into words what the mystic says cannot be said.

The “living truth” is a life-changing experience, whereas a “literal truth” is an intellectual high-point, at best never forgotten.

So also for Western philosophy the main emphasis should be on attaining to the “living truth”, like it is in the philosophies of the East, which in fact derive from the mystic insights, unlike the West, where reason prevails, and mysticism is some kind of ‘irrational bliss of hermits’. But yet a bridge can be found.

So ‘ever the twain shall meet’.

Although the ‘living truth’ cannot be put into words, many mystics certainly did, and do, speak, although often not in the reasoned language of philosophy. What we have to do is extract the contours of their truth from their words to advance in understanding reality. An insight will grow when the ground is ready.

Without being enlightened we can still use the true insights in our conceptual approach of reality and seek to find common ground and a common language on which to base our scientific concepts of reality. Our concepts, which are our conditioning, are often our biggest hindrances in gaining insight, we think in patterns and communicate according to them. This is how all of institutional science gets trapped in paradigms, which only a few, if any, dare question or cast away. Scientific theories should be routinely scrutinized on the validity of their assumptions and concepts; paradigms can be obsolete overnight by new insights or findings in other fields of science and should be abandoned.

The mystic

The mystic will assert that our common sense of time is an illusion, which must mean that breaking through the “time barrier” (Mach-zero) is a major aspect of enlightenment (or of a “peak-experience”, a ‘kensho’) An important aspect of this falling away of time is that boredom disappears. The mystic does not get bored, s/he can sit all day doing nothing, without having the urge to “do”, to escape from the moment, from now. Elderly people can have this wisdom.

In a sense meditation is training against boredom, training to conquer time, the ‘urge of time’ in us, which makes us restless, and it confronts us with the near impossibility to stop our thoughts, to stop us from thinking. Thinking is nearly always about past or future, not about now. And now can do without thinking.

It is we who create the distinction between mind and matter, because after all there is a big difference between a cup of tea and a thought. But there is also a big difference between a thought and the pain I feel when I hit my thumb with a hammer. Is my thumb matter or mind and what about the pain?

Our experience is the world

What makes it all mind is that all is experienced by me, the cup of tea, the thought, the pain: experience. And then the inevitable question arises, but then who is me? Me is the one mind as it arises from the living body, being individualised in its environment, but our body is one with the world, although we usually don’t see it that way. You have only to look at your body in its surroundings to see that it is very much present in your environment, it happens to be its centre, it carries your environment.

You are the centre of your world as long as there is a “you”, when the “you” dissolves, you become the world and you are without abode.

What can help us further seeing the mind in the world is the scientific analysis of matter, which will turn out in the end to be without eigen-substance (self-substance), it is, as it were, only condensations of mathematical and geometrical standing wave patterns in space. (see for yourself: Chladni, Cymatics, Lauterwasser) It shows that, in fact, in as far as matter has substance, it is an enduring excitement of space, in constructive resonance, a configuration of standing waves, so space itself is the substance and the energy, the ground-vibration.

Harmonics

Harmonics of wavefields are the basis of reality and these can be expressed in numbers and in that sense numbers rule reality through the mathematical laws of resonance. Since language, as an ever active memory, is based on resonance, the step to the mind is easily made, as space is an aspect of the mind, and in many ways space is the mind. (remember the space in your brain)

So if we can experience our body as a dense kind of space, and this we can, since we don’t feel any specific part inside our body at rest (when we are fine), then it feels just as one energetic density without exact boundaries, so here we experience the truth of scientific insight that the atoms are 99.9 % space, our body is just 0.1% denser then space (the weight of our will) and that is how dense space is.

The key to our understanding of matter must be our body, the dichotomy of mind and matter has a lot in common with that of body and mind, but there is more to that, because our body is something we do not rule, it rules itself, it completely functions without us doing anything else but answering its calls, we breath, we drink, we eat, we sleep, we relieve, we ‘don’t have to think about it’. We think we can control all these things by acts of will, but for a large part our body is master and we follow, because if we don’t, our body punishes us by causing us pain or discomfort to remind us of our duties. Cravings, addictions, all ruled by the body. (Only the accomplished yogin can to a certain extend rule his body by his mind)

So in many ways we are the ‘subject’ of our bodies, subordinate to it, but our body in turn is subject to the principles of Nature, or effectively, is the closest principle of Nature immediately accessible to us.

So who is us?

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