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PeterParticipantI’m reminded of Rumi’s image of words as waves on a vast sea. Sometimes those waves are gentle, and sometimes they arrive as a storm, like the one Pi (Life of Pi) faces in the middle of the ocean. In the moment, the storm is terrifying as it breaks our rafts and strips us bare. Than in the quiet that follows is a different kind of beauty. It’s the silence of a heart that has stopped fighting the waves and finally learned to breathe with the ocean. Both the storm and the quiet are beautiful, but only when we stop trying to name them and simply learn to float.
“My words are like a ship, and the sea is their meaning. Come to me and I will take you to the depths of spirit.” Rami
“Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. When the ocean is searching for you, don’t walk into the river. Listen to the ocean.” Rami
‘Heart is sea, language is shore. Whatever sea includes, will hit the shore.’ Rami
PeterParticipantThanks Alessa
Hi Thomas, thank you for that. I agree language is a profound gift and one I think is intimately tied to the gift of consciousness itself. It is indeed the bridge that keeps us from being truly alone.
What I love about poems, and yours was beautiful) and Zen stories is how they invite us to hold that gifts lightly, so the words are less likely to become cages. In my own meditation, I’ve noticed a strange paradox: the very words I use to make my experience conscious can sometimes create a wall against that experience. There have been moments where I wasn’t sure when I was using the words, or when the words were using me.
For example, my relationship with the word Forgiveness, and it is a relationship, actually kept me from the act itself for a long time. The word arrived like a commandment, already shaped by other hands. I found myself bowing to it, forgetting it was mine to rename. I’ve learned that when a word tightens around the heart, no doorway opens.
I once thought I had to heal the past. But I’ve come to see that the past was never the wound, only the mirror. It was the lens I carried that needed tending, a lens made of words that had become too heavy for the truth. When we hold them lightly, the silence beneath them finally begins to breathe.
PeterParticipantHi Alessa -a wonderful lead into to similar thoughts I had – (I’ve been pondering this subject for a few weeks)
“In the beginning was the Word.” I have always imagined that Word not as language, but as a living movement… creative, spacious, and uncontained.
Into this Word, Adam appears and I imagine him running through the garden with the delighted curiosity of a child, touching creatures gently, laughing as names rise in him like small miracles. “Father,” he says, breathless, “I called this one hare. Do you like it?” And I imagine God smiling, not because it is correct but because it is alive. In that moment, naming is participation, a joining in the unfolding music of creation. Nothing is fragile. Nothing is broken, Nothing is judged. Even “wrong” names shine with an unguarded radiance.
But there is another version that lives just as vividly. In this one, Adam returns from that same joyful day only to meet a God whose face has hardened. “No,” the voice says. “You named it wrong; are you trying to brake everything…
Suddenly, the garden tightens. The air thins. The freedom of naming collapses into anxiety, and the Word that once created begins to contain. Naming becomes a duty weighted with the fear of error. This is a different kind of fall, a quiet exile that happens not by leaving Eden, but by losing the relationship to the Word that made Eden open.
Yet the story doesn’t end in exile. I imagine Adam years later, walking the garden with careful steps, still convinced that a misplaced syllable might fracture the world. He kneels beside a trembling creature, and something soft and familiar stirs, the primal urge to greet, to name, to share delight.
For a moment, he braces for the reprimand, for the familiar tightness of judgment. But the garden is quiet. And then, like a memory carried on a breath, he hears it: the warm, untroubled laughter of the first God. The One who delighted in every name, even the awkward ones.
Something loosens. He remembers naming as play; he remembers God as companion; he remembers that nothing was ever fragile. Adam touches the creature and lets the name rise the way it once did, freely, gently, without the fear of breaking creation. And as the name leaves his lips, the world does not shatter.
It inhales. It breathes.
———-
“In the beginning, the Word created; after the fall, words contained; and when remembered, the Word is too alive to speak.”
Sufi wisdom suggests that our deepest suffering is not a lack of doctrine, but forgetfulness, a loss of the original resonance beneath the sound. We have forgotten the intimacy behind the naming.
The path, then, is Remembrance: a return not to a concept, but to a vibration of Being. It is a state of such profound life that to speak it is to diminish it… We do not find the Truth by defining it; we find it by becoming the silence in which it breathes.
And so sometimes the wound is not the past, but the word we’ve been using to approach it. And sometimes healing begins not with speaking, but with remembering the silence beneath the speech.
PeterParticipantPrison House of Language
The walls are built of vowels and iron nouns,
A mortar mixed from should and must and when.
I pace the cell while all the world renowns
Arrive as echoes scratching from my pen.I feel a grief without a face
A tidal ache that never finds
Yet lonely is the closest word,
A hollow key that fits no door.I hunger for a truth too soft for speech,
A pulse beneath the grammar of the mind;
But since my youth, I’ve bartered what I reach
For definitions where the lies are signed.The “I” I speak is not the “I” I know,
Just syntax haunting bones it cannot feel;
And what we call a “wound” can never show
The raw, unworded space that waits to heal.We cease to think the moment we agree
To walk the narrow halls the lexicons command.
To stay within the lines is to be “free”
Yet here I am, exiled in my native land.So let the “hurt,” and “forgive” fall past;
Let the unfinished sentence hang in open air.
For only when the final word has breathed its last
Will I be found in the silence waiting there.PeterParticipantWhat surprised me most, in the days after stepping into that room, was realizing that the barrier had never been the past itself. The memories weren’t what kept me circling the same ache. It was my relationship to the words like forgiveness, the weight I had given them, the shape I insisted they take, the way I kept holding them up like a key that refused to turn.
It’s counterintuitive, almost disorienting, to discover that a single word can stand between you and your own healing. But that’s the quiet trick of language: when a word grows rigid, we start mistaking its limits for our own. I had been trying to enter the past through a concept that had long since stopped carrying the life of what it pointed toward.
Only when I set the word down, when I stopped asking it to do what it could not do, did the past begin to soften on its own. The healing didn’t come from naming, but from stepping into the space that appears when naming falls away. The story is simply the moment I realized that the door I couldn’t open was made of language, not memory. And once the word stopped trying to hold what it could never hold, the room behind it finally let me in.
PeterParticipantOn the Word That Would Not Open
There is a room in me where language never learned to walk. I used to think the door was locked, but now I see it was only held shut by the weight of words I carried, all the forgive me’s and I should haves pressed together like stones in a satchel.I believed each word was a key. But every time I reached for one, it turned to dust in my hand. So I sat in the doorway of my own silence, too weary to speak, too afraid not to.
One day, while tracing the grooves of an old wound, I whispered the word “forgiveness” the way you whisper the name of someone who left years ago. The word echoed back to me, thin, obedient, harmless. Nothing in it moved.
It was then I understood: The word had become a wall. And I had been kneeling before it, thinking it was a gate. I felt a loneliness then, not the ache of being unseen, but the ache of seeing at last that I had mistaken the symbol for the thing itself.
So I placed the word on the ground, gently, like setting down a cup I no longer needed. It did not break. It simply stopped trying to hold what it could not hold. The silence that followed was not empty. It was spacious, like a lung discovering its first breath. In that space, something shifted, a soft loosening in the center of my being. As if the truth, long patient, had been waiting for me to stop talking.
I realized then that forgiveness is not a word you say, but a room you return to. A room where nothing must be named, and nothing is held against you. Not even the years you spent trying to open a door that was never meant to be opened with language.
I stepped inside. And the moment I did, the loneliness slipped from my shoulders like a garment I no longer needed to wear. In the quiet, I finally felt found.PeterParticipantI found a word lying in the dust today. It had grown tired of being spoken. When I picked it up, it broke into light just enough to show that the door I kept pushing was only a shadow on the wall. So I walked through the place where the word used to be. On the other side, nothing waited. And somehow, that was the first kindness I had felt in years.
When definitions become the walls that keep our hearts in prison is this not the truest loneliness?
The Word That Bars the Door
These walls are made of language…
vowels mortared with should,
nouns sharpened to a point.There is a grief here
that no syllable can hold,
a tide with no shoreline
except the thin word lonely,
a key that has no door.I have traded my life
for definitions,
for the safety of names
that keep me from the truth
breathing beneath them.The “I” I speak
is only the shadow
of the one who feels.
Every word for “wound”
is a veil over the wound.And when we walk the path
the dictionary lit for us,
we call it freedom…
though every step
shrinks the world.So let “forgiveness” fall away.
Let the sentence collapse
into its own silence.Only there…
where nothing is said…
Will I be found…This falling away is not meant to silence pain, only a doorway I’ve found beneath my words.
The silence is mine; may every heart speak its pain in the way it needs.PeterParticipantMy first reaction to what James said was that even the idea of “surrendering” eventually gets surrendered. It’s not something you do so much as it’s something that happens when you stop holding on. Even the ‘you’ dissolves. And yeah, that can absolutely feel like a loss at first.
When I first started meditating, based on what I thought meditation was supposed to be, the silence that met me felt almost indifferent and so painful. Than as my constructs, my stories, and what I believed myself to be started falling away, it honestly felt like I was disappearing too.
But over time I noticed something important: when the constructs fell away… I didn’t. There was still a presence in that “nothingness.” A kind of spacious, quiet awareness… the same stillness AUM rises from and returns to. And in that space, “I” wasn’t abandoned. “I” was held.
From that sense of being held, compassion began to arise on its own. And I realized that the “nothingness” we’re so afraid of isn’t a loss or a void in the frightening sense. It’s the openness that holds everything. It’s what allows everything to appear and dissolve.
That, to me, is the Love James is pointing to, not an emotional love, but the underlying presence that’s always here when everything else drops away.
PeterParticipantCanvases All the Way Down
Body… the first canvas.
Breath… the first brushstroke,
rising from the unseen, returning to the unseen,
moving in a rhythm older than memory.Mat beneath body…
second canvas of quiet flesh,
holding the arcs of motion,
the folding and unfolding,
the ancient prayer spoken without words.Floor beneath mat…
wider canvas of many breaths,
bearing the weight of countless bodies,
each one a tide, each one a whisper
in the great dark.Beneath the floor…
deeper grounds of stillness,
one upon another, falling away,
yielding, dissolving into deeper night.Canvases upon canvases… veils upon veils,
each one thinning, each one opening,
each one pointing toward the ground
that cannot be spoken.Until all surfaces fall away,
and only the ground remains…
unspeakable, unpainted, unborn.
Where breath has no owner,
where body has no edge,
where the canvas
and the painter
and the painting
are one.PeterParticipantHere. Before thought. Before the painter. Before the painting.
PeterParticipantHi James,
Maybe… there is that hollow between breaths, when rising has ended and returning has not begun… a space not held, not owned, simply suspended, weightless, known without a knower.
At times it feels like dissolving into the canvas, the surface still blank though it carries every painting that has ever appeared and every painting still waiting to be born. Sometimes I notice yin and yang dancing across that emptiness‑that‑is‑fullness, and sometimes, rarely, I find myself in that instant before the brush descends, when “I” am and am not the canvas, or the paint… Then the Hermit taps his staff in the dark: no further.
It’s a slipping out of the frame, a pause where the familiar “me” does not gather itself… and yet walking continues, breathing continues, the world continues. A quiet shift rather than a dramatic disappearance — a vanishing that erases nothing, only the one who imagines he is the painter of the scene.
“Between rising and falling, the breath disappears. Who notices the disappearance?
PeterParticipantWhen surrender is total, the duality between “me” and “world” collapses. Even the idea of enlightenment collapses. What remains cannot be named… even silence surrenders.
Yet both of us speak and undo ourselves…
James, what strikes me in this exchange is the way language keeps pulling us back in, even when we’re both pointing beyond it. The moment we speak of the “unspeakable ground,” we’ve already stepped into the very movement we’re trying to dissolve. Such is the suchness of dialogue.
My own approach, and what I felt you point to, is exposing experience itself, as a construct. Trusting that when the scaffolding of interpretation is seen for what it is, it loosens. And when it loosens, every construct, including my words, even yours, dissolves. What remains is not a metaphysical claim but a kind of seeing: the world as a mirror without a face, transparent to what is transcendent.
In that sense, I’m not trying to name the ground or deny it. I’m simply watching how the naming happens, how the world‑as‑told arises, and how it falls away. Where your language points to the source before all stories; mine points to the unraveling of the story itself. Even that one… Different gestures, both moving toward the same vanishing point.
And then, because life is never finished with us… as if from the far edge of the road, Lao tzu wanders by to remind us of the gravity of things. He taps his staff on the earth and murmurs: “Heavy is the root of light. Still is the master of moving”. – Tao Te Ching 26
He speaks of wise souls who travel with the “heavy” wagon, who return each night to the solid, quiet house, who do not let themselves grow lighter than the world they inhabit. For lightness loses its foundation, and movement loses its mastery.
And suddenly the whole conversation, the unmaking of self, the dissolving of constructs, the unspeakable ground settles into something simple: A body standing on the earth. A breath rising and falling. A life that must still sweep the floor, fold the sheets, carry out the trash… to vanish into the nameless and still walk steadily through the named world, rooted, present, unhurried, as if carrying a quiet house within.
PeterParticipantSo many levels to such stories!
I am reminded of the Christian story of the Rich Young Ruler who asks Jesus what he must do to “inherit eternal life.” and Jesus’ response: “that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom”.
In both of these stories, the seeker asks for something ultimate (Eternal Life / The Key to Happiness). Each in their own way treating the “answer” as an acquisition rather than a transformation.
In the Christian Story: The young man asks for eternal life, perhaps expecting a new commandment or a blessing. Instead, he receives a surgical strike to his deepest attachment. He wasn’t prepared for the “answer” to cost him his identity, and he walks away sorrowful.
In the Zen Story: The rich man asks for the “key to happiness,” perhaps expecting a mantra or a secret. Instead, he receives a heart-pounding experience of loss and desperation. The master’s “answer” is a shock to the system rather than a verbal explanation.
In both stories the seekers don’t realizing that their hands are too full of diamonds and status to grasp anything new.
In both narratives, the “Masters” use the men’s own wealth to expose their internal poverty. The Christian story ends with the man’s failure to let go. The Zen story ends with a “practical joke”, for if he is a man of his word, he must now give up the chase and hand over diamonds in exchange for the “key” he just found.
The third story offers resolution: The monk stands naked by the window and sighs, “The moon cannot be stolen.” – “Rich” and I imagine ‘happy’ in his emptiness.
And some advice for rich men: Don’t ask a question you aren’t prepared to have answered. 🙂 Once asked, a question can’t be unasked….
PeterParticipantFor fun – Percival and the Scholar of Appearances
One morning, Percival the Wanderer, and some called fool, found a scholar sitting beside a well, staring into the water as if waiting for something to rise.“What do you see?” Percival asked.
“I am studying the world,” the scholar replied. “I am trying to understand what is real before thought names it.”
Percival nodded. “Ah. I lost my names years ago. They kept falling out of my pockets.”
The scholar frowned. “Without names, how do you know what anything is?”
Percival picked up a stone and held it to his ear. “It tells me,” he said.
The scholar sighed. “Fool, Stones do not speak.”
“Only to those who insist on listening,” Percival said.
The scholar leaned closer. “Tell me when you stop thinking, does the world disappear?”
Percival laughed. “No, friend. Only your version of it disappears.”
The scholar stiffened. “My version? Are you saying the world I have spent my life studying is nothing but a mistake?”
Percival shook his head gently. “Not a mistake. A story. A beautiful one, even. But still a story.”
The scholar’s jaw tightened. “If the world is only a story, then what remains when the story ends?”
Percival pointed to the well. “Look.”
The scholar looked. He saw water. He saw his reflection. He saw the sky trembling on the surface.
“I see… everything,” he whispered.
Percival nodded. “Yes. Everything that was hidden behind your explanations.”
The scholar turned to him. “So the world is real?”
Percival shrugged. “As real as your breath. But the story you tell about it, that one comes and goes.”
The scholar closed his eyes, seeing… “Is this prayer?”
Percival smiled. “When the heart looks at the world the way you just looked into the well, without naming, without grasping, without fear. Just seeing, yes”
“And contemplation?” the scholar asked.
“That,” Percival said, “is when the well looks back.”
The scholar opened his eyes. “And you, Fool, what are you?”
Percival bowed. “I am the space between your thoughts where the world slips in.” And with that, he wandered off, pockets empty, heart full.
PeterParticipantThe world arises with consciousness – birth… Thought creates the appearance of a world – experience… When thought stops, the world dissolves – enlightenment the “death” of the constructed universe (self)….
I’m not sure the question for me is whether The World disappears, but whether the world‑as‑told disappears… the universe that arises with my birth, my speaking of it. That’s how I read James comment, though I’m not assuming this is what he meant.
I tend to see language, thought, and ego consciousness as inseparable. When language loosens its grip, when naming, measuring, and explaining fall quiet, The World doesn’t vanish. What dissolves is the self, the interpretive layer that I place over experience of self.
When language pauses, the whole constructed surface of experience softens. What remains isn’t nothing. It’s simply the world before a I describe it: raw, immediate, unfiltered. Or perhaps it is “nothing,” but only in the Zen sense of the word?
So the questions James words raise for me are: What is the world before I speak it? What remains when the story falls silent?
The world is no longer “my world”
The self is no longer “my self”
The heart is no longer “my heart”There is presence…. And in that quiet, the world is still here, but the one who grasps at it is gone. In that space, ‘nothing’ is born and nothing dies.
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