space without cleavage

One word spoken or thought

Existence cleaved in two

We use words so much. We're thinking in words. We're communicating in words. Words are everywhere in our human lives.

Have you ever really looked into it? What is a word? It's a symbol – that is it's something that represents something else. It's really important to see that the word is not the thing it is representing. It's separate from it. It's a symbol for it. And this use of symbols has already created a division, a separation from what is and from the symbolic representation of what is. There there is already a split created by the use of words, the use of symbols.

There is another way, though, that an individual word cleaves the universe into two parts. In order for a word to be useful, it has to refer to a subset of existence. The word denotes a set of things: might be physical objects. The word "dog" refers to a set of animals. It might be actions, emotions, colours anything. But in some way each word creates a boundary between the things it refers to and the things that it does not. The word includes some things and excludes others. This is the nature of a symbol, and whenever we use a symbol, we are cutting existence in half. We are creating a separation. We are establishing a boundary.

All of this has a certain utility, it's useful. The problem arises because we confuse our symbolic world of the mind, of thoughts, of words, with reality itself. In reality there is no boundary. There is no separation. There is no dividing line. And in our symbolic world of thought, of words, there are only dividing lines. We could say that reality is continuous in its very nature, and words are discrete in their nature.

And one way of looking at the whole spiritual search, the whole spiritual inquiry is to see that we are really hoping to get back to the place where existence is felt and lived and understood as one undivided whole, which is the way it is and has always been and always will be. And for that to once more be our lived reality, we need at least from time to time, to set aside words, to enter a wordless space, a space without cleavage.