Hi James and Anita

Like Anita, I also wonder if such radical nondual insight into total disappearance truly soothe?
Noticing my own tendencies I must also ask if this vanishing is a connection to Life or an escape from it? To soothe, to escape to engage… all desires…

“The Buddha said: If you say the Buddha has spoken the Dharma, you slander him. In truth, not a single word has been spoken.

I realize that to engage in such questions at all is to leave the nondual space… begging the question whether asking the question already answers it… perhaps with another question: “Who is asking?”

Still when not held as a philosophy but as a inner realization that arises naturally, I know such nonduality can be liberating… As I explored the nondual space, I noticed how the inner narrator sustains identity, and how moments of wordless presence reveal a deeper truth of a state not so much as silence, but the absence of all “scaffolding”.

I wonder if what we call “self” is not a fixed entity but a linguistic construct. Language gives shape to experience, measures it, judges it, and in doing so, creates the illusion of continuity. Without words to name or narrate, the self dissolves through the quiet absence of description.

“Without language to describe the self, there is no self.” In this sense, disappearance is not a metaphysical event, but the natural result of language falling away.

Joseph Campbell once said, “The ultimate aim of the quest must be, not to see, but to be. And that being is not a being with a name, but a being beyond names.” Even this reflection is a paradox of language trying to point beyond itself.

The question I’m left with is whether language is not merely a tool for communication, but THE medium through which the self is constructed and maintained. Here I’m reminded of the call “not to judge” and I wonder if this call wasn’t a call to silence language itself?

How much, if not all the suffering we create for ourselves, and others is a matter of holding on to words too tightly?

Hi James

Language and thought are only tools of communication. They arise and fall — It true all things arise and return – sound arises and return to silence, motion arises and returns to stillness, time arises and returns to the eternal, which isn’t a measurement of time or a measurement at all.

Still, I don’t feel language is only a tool. Language arising from the eternal is what gives birth to the sense and illusion of self. Without language, there is no self to describe, no continuity to uphold. In this way, the “me” is not just a bundle of thoughts, but a structure built from words. When language loosens, the scaffolding collapses. No language, no self.

“The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, stillness eternity.
Realizing the relationship of the temporal moment to the eternal — not moment, but forever — is the sense of life…
Realizing that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die.” – Campbell

At this point in my life I don’t feel the radical nondual disappearance as a path, while learning to hold words lightly has… soothed my soul. We are unfortunately limited to language to speak of what can’t be spoken. In the end we find the words that suit us and then let them fade away.