Your phrase “the non‑duality of human early reactions” feels abstract and poetic to me, even though you experience it as concrete. I suspect that difference in how we use language is where we keep missing each other.

I feel a flush of foolishness for starting the topic, thinking I could use the very thing I’m questioning to somehow step outside it and see it clearly. It’s like trying to use a flashlight to understand darkness, only to realize the light itself creates the boundary. So I’m going to step back with words wiser than mine:

Trying to catch the wind
with a wicker basket
that’s the work of cleverness.

Turning words on words
to question words
that’s the labor of the mind.

The wise just smile.

When speech reaches its edge,
silence begins.

When meaning is squeezed,
it dries.
When it’s left alone,
it moves on its own.

Step back.
Empty the hands.
Loosen the tongue.

A soft breath
is enough.
An open space
needs no filling.

Perhaps a edit – Still, I notice that the parable is abstract… for me, it is my emotional language, a attempt to paint a picture. It’s how I feel my way through – “Prison House of Language”?

Hi Anita,
That is a very common response to the way I communicate! Please don’t feel it’s a lack of intelligence; it’s really just a mismatch in the “tools” we’re using. Language is funny like that, it can trap us and free us, and half the time we don’t even notice which one is happening.

The phrase “Prison House of Language” actually comes from a famous Nietzsche quote about how we are constrained by the words we use. I’ll admit, I was heading into deep waters and probably got a bit over my head!

The other day, I tried to make a serious argument following all the logical rules, and it was ripped apart for relying too much on metaphors. I realized I was trapped in my own way of speaking. I eventually turned the whole thing into a short parable just to make sense of it for myself.

It’s interesting: I use symbols, and you use emotional concrete language, but we both end up in the same place, telling a story.

Your brain scan story is actually the perfect example of what I was trying to say. When you said “nothing was found,” the words were so “slippery” they made it sound like you had no brain! For a second, the language trapped you in a meaning you never intended. That’s the secret, I think. Language often shuts things down, but also open them back up just by changing the delivery. Whether it’s a parable or a story about a broken computer, the story is how we finally hear each other.

I’m glad you’re finding that “emotional language” makes you feel more human. It’s a much better way to get out of the “prison” of big words than anything I was writing. I’m often frustrated by it myself.

Here is that parable… don’t worry about “deciphering” it. It’s just an image to sit with.

The Three Mirrors
There was a man who lived in a burning city. He carried a mirror so the people might see the fire was not the whole world.

Early in life he learned he had to keep a mirror within his own heart, knowing that if he let his heart catch fire, the mirror would melt and he would see only the flames. He heard of those whose hearts could burn without being consumed, and that left him wondering…

He also belonged to a guild of mirror makers. Some in the guild wanted to melt the mirrors to make shields for the soldiers. He wished them well but refused. He told them, “A shield can stop a sword, but only a mirror can remind the soldier why he should lay the sword down.”

Later, the city took some of the guild’s mirrors and built them into the walls. But once a mirror was part of a wall, it could no longer be moved to face the truth. It became just another stone.

The man witnessed all these things as he sat on the edge of the city and held the glass. His heart burned but was not consumed. He trusted that the coolness of the glass was more powerful than the heat of the flame. And every now and then, others would come to sit beside him, find rest, and share something to eat.

Please I continue to explore…

What struck me reading through this exchange was how clearly it showed that language isn’t only the words we speak. It’s a tool that opens our world, yet it’s also a boundary. In this dialogue I kept seeing how we don’t just use words; we live inside them.

A song became a distraction, then a doorway.
A worry became a trap, then a truth.
A poem became a mirror.
Even the back‑and‑forth carried its own quiet rhythm, painted its own picture.

The Sufis say everything speaks, all arising from and returning to the ‘Word’ we’ve forgotten and keep trying to remember. If that’s true, then even the mind’s noise belongs to the conversation… Art is language. Song is language. A tree growing is language. Even Taxes are language. Sometimes these things confine us; sometimes they open us. Often they do both at once. (the intention of the topic was to notice, when it was a relationship to a word and or event holding us back.)

Perhaps that’s where the old line comes in: For those with ears, let them hear…

For the last twenty plus years I’ve lived with tinnitus, so for a long time my silence has never been silent. The ringing is always there, a thin thread of sound running through everything, everything. Over time I learned, (had to learn?) that silence isn’t the absence of sound it’s the absence of being pulled around by sound.

The ringing never stops, but the struggle around it softened… most days. It’s pushed me to let go, to breathe through it, to find a different kind of quiet.

In that way it’s become a language too. When it grows louder, it’s a warning: something’s tightening, pay attention.

Even noise has something to say. Even distraction can be a doorway. So maybe the “prison house of language” isn’t a place we escape, but a place we learn to notice and listen to differently, where everything speaks, even the things we once thought were in the way.

I’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

Hi 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.

What 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.