Hi Tilmar

I like the virilization technique which doesn’t sound weird to me… all the best people have a little weird 🙂

Helcat, One of the things I apricate about eastern thought like the Toa Te Ching is that its a reminder not to hold on to words to tightly. Like a good poem one should give the words some space to breath.  I also apricate the emphases on experience rather then believing.  The latter is when, I think, we tend to mistake the words we use for the things that the words can only point to. The word tree is not a tree.

Interestingly thier is a old Christian practice – Apophatic theology – which also uses negation (emptiness?) as a path to affirmation.  Apophatic was a practice of unsaying anything one said especially when what is being talked about is Transcendent.  (There are those that argue that negation is nihilistic though that is a trap one could fall into if one mistakes the map for the territory)

In the Toa Te Ching – The name that can be named is not the eternal Name – The Nameless is the Source of Heaven and Earth – the named is the Mother of the Ten thousand Things.  In the Geneses Garden story Adam is given the task of naming (the first scientist?) . I picture Adam excitedly telling G_d about his day naming this and that as if he discovered that which he named and G_d smiling to her self. Imagine if instead G_d becoming upset yelling at Adam that he broke creation by getting a name wrong.  Yet that is what we often do to one another.

The word/name tree is not the eternal Tree, naming, measuring, judging creates the Ten thousand things while the Nameless is the Source (of experience?)  Watts associated this notion with the fact that we tend not to notice the background of the object even though we can’t discern the object without the background. To name the Horse a horse Adam needed to separate the suchness that is Horse from the background of which we are apart of. Once named we forget about the background and consider the horse as separate from other things named including ourselves.  Through the task of naming duality arises, I am this not that. I am the name I give myself  separate from the eternal Nameless (emptiness). 

We can’t experience motion without relationship with other objects to measure against. (The circle without circumference and center is everywhere – we are each the “emptiness that makes the wheel work”??? – Motion creates Life). We can’t ‘see’ the object without its relationship, context, from the background. The error we make is assuming that this relationship to our experience means separateness. Believing we are separate, we suffer. Confronting the notion of duality though negation the background (emptiness – as we do not ‘see’ it just as we do not see light only what the light illuminates) becomes the Source it is rather then the naming of the object illuminated that we ‘pull’ out of It . The naming being a kind of game we get to play, the Ten Thousand things after all, work for us.  We are not brought into the ‘world‘, implying separate from it, but emerge out of IT.

🙂 Whose wired now. 🙂

On a practical level – perhaps?  I’ve spent a lot of time working on undoing the my attachment to identity, to naming. Undoing the message that you are your tribe, you are your job, you are your feelings, your thinking… you are a ‘identity’…. (Nothing like a perceived threat to a notion of identity to bring out the ego protector.)  I suspect with the current attachment to words, mistaking the map for the territory, that we have made the transition through the second half of life, where we are to let go of such things, more difficult. My thought is that maybe the language of negation (emptiness) is the ‘slap’ needed to break us out of that habit?