“I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
How are you?I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
What is God?If you think that the Truth can be known
From words,If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening Called the mouth,
O someone should start laughing! Now” (Daniel Ladinsky, inspired by Hafiz)
Lao Tzu: “Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know”
Q: Would you agree with Lao Tzu’s statement that “those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know”? And if so, how come you keep speaking?
Fool: I would never disagree with Lao Tzu. And yet, Lao Tzu spoke those words! He used speech to point out the limits of speech. So, a certain kind of speech is still helpful.
Q: Would you say he contradicted himself?
F: No. Lao Tzu spoke in the spirit of reversal or negation. What he said was a quieting insight into the limits of language, but a limit is not a full deletion of language.
Q: What can and can’t words do?
F: We can fully sense any object in front of us without the need for words. All the qualities of the object are palpable, but “go without saying.” I don’t need to know a word for the color of the object in order to see it. I don’t need to know a word for its smell or shape. It’s only when there’s a practical need to distinguish utilitarian qualities of an object that words become helpful as positive identifications.
People used to claim that ancient people couldn’t see the color blue. But the experience of blueness was always a vivid human experience. Nevertheless, for a long time there was an absence of any practical need to distinguish blue from dark green. This didn’t mean they were less observant or narrower in perception…
Q: … but perhaps less intelligent? A capacity to notice distinctions and make use of them is a sign of greater intelligence. And having a larger vocabulary surely equates to more intelligence?…
F: …More intelligence in a positive direction, carrying more knowledge or memory, which is helpful in a rational, manipulative or focused direction – I would call this “brain athleticism”, which our culture favors. But this intelligence has overshadowed and weakened a negative form, that penetrates certainty, exposes limitations in knowledge, and receives wisdom from a wider perspective than any particular focus.
In fact, by developing a larger vocabulary for different shades of color, we are not necessarily becoming more sensitive to color itself. We are becoming more attuned to artificial categories of color, to names and words, instead of allowing color to remain a direct and ultimately unnamable experience, with its own shifting qualities, depending on light, shade, angle of sun, and contrasting environment.
And the name of a color will both sharpen our focus on that shading and prejudice us into seeing a generalized categorical “type” of color, rather than seeing the actual shifting qualities that morph and run from every defined boundary of knowledge.
The same is true of seeing anything, including human beings. We see “who” a person is based on the categorization we’ve created. Not just “white” or “black” or “Asian”, but “Tom” or “Dick” or “Sally”. We see the stories of one another.
So, this knowledge – this intelligence we gather about the world – can easily become a stupefying prejudice that holds our thinking within biased expectations and dulls our sensitivity to nuances that stray from these expectations.
Q: Are you implying that the more we “know” another person, the less sensitive to them we become?
F: Yes, are we seeing the person? Or, are we seeing the stories – the categories of character — we tell about them (and us)?
If we conflate these behavioral patterns with who we are, then we end up feeling trapped within these patterns. We buy into the categories of identity that the world assigns to us, and disappear into those scripted roles.
So, our perceptual range of motion – our flexibility – diminishes if we Know too much. Then we tend to think within the ruts of what has already been thought.
Q: Doesn’t this “script”, or the stories we tell about ourselves, reflect something real about us? Don’t our real experiences in life give us true shape and character?
F: A story is shaped by real experience. And the story shapes behavior. But a human being is distinct from the stories and behavioral patterns that develop.
The only signs of an actual human being (of “true character”) are found in losing self-consciousness and acting without the duplicities of self-defensiveness and self-promotion. All such “characteristics” are signs of entrapment within a false Self.
The real person is found in moments of mercy, altruism and empathy, which only happen in the absence of self-consciousness. A real person can’t be characterized, but can be felt as a spirit of reversal itself – in a capacity to laugh easily and lightly at one’s own expense, quickly admitting mistakes, reversing course, because the fictional structure of Self isn’t worth defending. These are signs of a real, if ultimately unnamable human being.
But our habits of behavior aren’t typically revelations of ourselves, but only revelations of patterns of duplicity (personality patterns) that hold us trapped.
Q: Aren’t we identifying the key qualities of a person in “getting to know them” as Sally or Tom? Don’t we obtain essential practical knowledge of their real tendencies and behaviors?
F: We learn to recognize the stories people tell about themselves. That’s real information, describing a habit of thought (a habit of behavior). But a behavioral trait isn’t the real person, it’s the story of themselves they’ve come to believe and enact.
It’s a category we’ve placed over the reality of ourselves, which has overwhelmed our experience of life, and trapped us within that script.
Q: If I call a liar a liar, isn’t that an honest assessment of who they are? Isn’t that an insight? Won’t you merely end up being too soft on liars and murderers by saying “it’s not really them”?
F: These judgements of liars and murderers are real insights into patterns of thought and behavior, but not insights into human essence.
A better metaphor might be that liars and murderers are entirely subsumed under a script. They are unable to stop being this scripted character. That’s true for all of us who confuse our habits of behavior (of thinking and acting) with who we really are. This conviction traps us in the role.
But murderers and liars are also trapped by the weight of their own history. They have to erase empathy categorically to avoid feeling the debt they have accrued in these roles. In this situation, the Self reveals itself as a mental parasite. It traps, deforms and devours the energy of their real existence. It “runs them”, as David Bohm phrased it.
We can kill the parasite, but the person needs to be healed. This is not being soft. Because healing is nothing short of Hell. (Maybe we could call Hell an inevitably painful hospital in the suburbs of Heaven).
Murderers and liars are being run by automated reflexes determined by linguistic scripts that have overwhelmed any sense of who they really are. And we help them remain possessed by failing to distinguish the parasitic disease from the real person.
And this applies to us in a more manageable form as well. A failure to distinguish our unfathomable being from who we think we are is a mostly asymptomatic form of the same parasitism. We are also made numb by hating the patient. This is also an automatic lack of empathy. If we can’t see the human suffering in a liar and murderer, then we also can’t heal. Because we’re also patients in the same hospital, and require the same loving distinction between patient and disease.
Q: Are you saying that a simple surface re-definition of murderers as “patients” will change them into nice people?
F: I’m saying it might be a better metaphor, not a new definition. It would leave us less susceptible to “being run by thought”. And it would suggest a different way to respond to psychopathy, rather than simply punishing it, which only worsens it and infects us.
Our problem may be that we have this great gift to name and distinguish qualities of experience for practical purposes, as metaphors. But our thinking is no longer free enough from these designations to see them as merely metaphors. And so, we latch onto these characterizations of others and ourselves as if they could pin down this fathomless and dangerous world into something real and solid.
And this parasitic fear leads to a compulsive, narrative voice in our head, which is constantly naming and characterizing everything in us and around us automatically – it’s part of the disease. The disease adds a narrative voice-over to direct experience even when there is no practical need for words, because it is running in circles, in an unacknowledged panic. And we end up caught in a filter of interpretation, perceiving our own mental categories as a primary experience, and get trapped there without noticing it, losing contact with the unarticulated actuality of life itself. And this state of mind leaves us susceptible to parasitic invasion (to fascism or its antagonistic counter-forces (vengeance)).
Q: Are these words building another filter of interpretation that draw us away from life itself?
F: Do these words pin us down or leave us more open-ended?
If our script tells us that “everyone is selling an answer”, then this script curtails our capacity to hear the reversal of answers.
But in pointing this pattern out, the pattern is momentarily interrupted. We begin learning only when knowledge falls apart. In that moment, we can recognize our answers (our positive language) as an objective influence on perception, like specialized goggles of some sort. So, we aren’t made gullible into believing that our microscopic or macroscopic or infra-red visions are telling us the “whole truth”. And this wider perspective than language leaves us open-ended, even while benefitting from the specialized insights of language.
But these words we hear would also have to be spoken in the spirit of reversal or negation. It’s what Bohm tried to talk about with his “Rheomode” experiment, probing the potential of language to be inherently proprioceptive and aware of its own fraying edges, which frees us to raise questions and wonder metaphorically, rather than “know”. In Bohm’s language, this is where Thought gets converted into Thinking. A more active play with category, in a less defined and rigid manner.
If the words are spoken in the spirit of reversal, release and metaphor, then it’s up to the reader whether or not they hear this in the same spirit.
So, the question can’t be answered positively. It depends on whether we see the distinction in these forms of language.
Q: Why can’t we simply tell one another to shut the brain down for a while, widen its perspective, and “be quiet”? Why do we need to go through all these “negative” words to shut down the system of language?
F: The reflex system that prompts thought and language today is far more overwhelming. And this is the whole premise of Beckett’s trilogy of novels, especially “The Unnamable” – the inability to turn off thought.
It’s harder now because the personal Self has become more important. And this Self is the central structure of language. The Self is composed of narrations of memory, justifications of belief, refutations of previous incarnations of ourselves (as well as other people’s interpretations of us), all of which are linguistic formations, along with the images and feelings they produce. The articulated color category of “me” is so convincing that we’ve lost the ability to see life itself in its truer colors.
So, for us today, we’d feel compelled to ask, “why should I be silent? What will it get me?” We’d seek an ulterior purpose, which generates noise. Then we end up listening to stop the next word from rising as a means to becoming a “silent person” (a better category of Self). And that becomes a far more repressive entrapment in thought than speech itself.
Or, as the voice in the “The Unnamable” put it: “… it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps. I listened. One might as well speak and be done with it.”
But in Lao Tzu’s era, perhaps not speaking was a more natural way of being. They weren’t buzzing at such a high pitch from all the technological gadgets beeping at us, the media, the propaganda of schooling (to be someone important), the fears this engenders in not being worthy. This is the system of thought – the matrix – descending on us to a degree it didn’t descend on earlier cultures.
Maybe in Lao Tzu’s era and culture, a homeopathic-sized drop of language might suffice to quiet the mind. It would be enough to remind us of the default state. Now we seem to need more statements of reversal to dis-enchant the mind from its verbal hypnosis.
Q: So, how do we achieve silence by a negative approach?
F: If we have a positive definition of silence, such as, for example, “not talking”, then every response to this question will seem like hypocrisy. But what if silence begins to morph in meaning as we realize that words can still be used in a state of silence?
Q: How is that not a contradiction? Are you saying it’s possible to speak silently?
F: The second form of your question is open-ended, which means it was spoken from a state of silence. Some genuine loss for words prompted you to wonder and be receptive.
There may be a subtle edge to the question, which is trying to trap the speaker in a contradiction. But the question also indicates a receptive state of mind, which means it arose from silence itself.
And for the interviewee, the challenge of “explaining” silence also provokes a “loss for words.” So, we’re both in a state of silence at this moment, even though we are relating to words.
If I’m merely “at a loss” because I’m still searching for words, then there is no silence. But if this loss is more categorical, then I stop looking within the category of language, and begin to notice actual behavior – the deceptive craving for the solidity of words (which is a craving for a solid Self).
Q: Is “craving” a behavior?
F: Yes, it’s a reactivity of thought. We can translate this behavior into the verb “Selving”. The craving for words is an action that attempts to make the Self feel substantial and known.
But the point is, now we are silently noticing the urge to speak (or to “selve”) without being compelled by this urge…
Q: … How can we silently notice an urge to speak? That sounds contradictory…
F: ….The moment a craving for a word forms, the craving is noticed. We can only notice such a craving if we’re not noisily condemning the craving. Just as we can quietly listen to the wind blowing through a tree, we can also quietly listen to desire blowing through words and body language.
Noticing the habit of speaking to oneself is not itself a noisy reaction. It’s a quietly receptive state.
Q: But how is it possible to find words – to converse – while remaining in a state of silence?
F: It depends on whether we seek words to cover the emptiness, or whether the emptiness itself finds words that reverse the urge for noise.
So, noticing the noise is not a noisy reaction. It exposes the craving to speak, which restores silence.
In other words, silence doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of sounds. It can also mean a non-intrusive receptivity to sound itself. It can even say things that reverse the urge to speak and restore an open-ended perspective, and thereby preserve silence, while also adding nuance to the question, what is silence?
For instance, does silence precede and exceed the material droplets of language that sometimes precipitate from this apparent emptiness? Can silence itself “speak”? Or, are we forced to remain in the old script that tell us that silence is only an absence of knowledge and intelligence?
Q: But I still have questions. So, is it possible that all these negative or reversed responses merely result in an infinite regression of “quieting” responses to a mind that will never stop talking?
F: Well, as long as there are questions there are responses.
And these responses can tirelessly reverse an entrapment in language wherever that is encountered. A noisy entrapment in the system of thought will exhaust itself sooner than the spirit of reversal. Stupidity exhausts itself eventually, if only by driving the species extinct.
But it’s not an infinite regression to enjoy dissolving a trap as long as it persists, because the response itself restores an open-ended quality of silence each and every time.
Whether this ends or not is the wrong end of the stick. The question should be asked of thought itself. Will it ever give up its own infinite regression?
Q: But if negative language isn’t capable of ending this “Voice” (as Beckett called it)? Then it’s also futile, isn’t it?
F: It’s futile if we are trying to quiet the voice one thought at a time, which is the futility exposed in “The Unnamable.” This effort is futile because it’s a dictatorial attempt to impose unity on a divided mind, which only causes more division. (Hence, “all these Murphys, Molloys and Malones…” that erupt in Beckett’s trilogy).
The entire category of positive thought has to be exposed as an illusion, not just one thought at a time. Just as we can get caught in a network of categorical thinking, a categorical negation an release us. Only then can we see the futility of all these assertions of Self as a categorical whole, which nullifies the urge for a perpetual Voice (or fake Self).
But negative language (the language of reversal) is already free from “the voice.” It is already a restoration of silence. It’s just that we’ve resisted extending this insight categorically. It implies our death in a sense.
Q: Is our fear of silence connected to our fear of death? Why do we feel this compulsion to speak in our heads all day – to reiterate ourselves in each moment? Why does this feel irrepressible?
F: Let’s presume that the voice is trying to be silent, but mistaking its own conclusions with silence. Maybe it assumes that an Answer will put an end to its nervous agitation; that it will silence itself with the correct answer.[i]
But every word is imperfect. And Thought hasn’t recognized this as a categorical limitation on itself. It thinks “I haven’t found the right answer yet, so I have to keep churning.” It doesn’t reflect enough on its own categorical limitations to notice that words can’t put anything to rest “out there”, only here, within itself.
But Thought is afraid of this silence-restoring refutation of its capacity to know things positively. Fathomless silence feels like death. Without reiterating myself constantly, that self dissolves.
So, perhaps the roots of our compulsion to overthink are tied to the category of “me” again. We forget entirely that this sense of Self is not the reality of our being. It’s a fictional category (like blue) that we’ve invented for practical reasons.
So, words may feel compulsive because we think we can know ourselves (know reality) better by articulating ever more nuanced categories of ourselves. But in doing this, we don’t end up “knowing ourselves” at all. We only end up making a more nuanced vocabulary to describe a Self, who is no more than an avatar we’ve built to represent our actual being.
The more we “know” ourselves in this way – as in I’m not just average blue, but aqua-marine or cyan, or azure or cerulean, and so forth, creating an infinity of shades of Self, which creates a kind of mechanical analog of individuality and uniqueness (like the uniqueness of a shuffled deck of cards) – the more we merely expand the web of language that distracts us from who we really are. And this in turn feels unsatisfying and compels us to pin ourselves down even more precisely.
In this way, the filter of language itself becomes more of a focus than the non-verbal actuality of this lived life.
Q: You keep saying, “we’re not who we think we are.” But doesn’t this infer a positive knowledge of ourselves as something superior to what we imagine? Wouldn’t this be another kind of positive conviction?
F: To paraphrase Lao Tzu, “those who know who they are can’t say it, and those say who they are, don’t know themselves.” We are not the person we have “in mind”, that’s all we need to know. That’s enough to leave our being untouched by sticky forms of language. As Beckett’s unnamable character said: “I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not me.”
We don’t need a creed to have faith.
In the same way that a certain kind of Taoist language continues even after we realize that no language can articulate the Tao, so, also, a kind of Self Concept continues even after we realize that “I am not I.” It’s a self that is made of words and stories, but transparently so (“relevated” as Bohm might say). At its best, it’s a proprioceptive fiction. And when this is seen clearly, this form of Self can no longer be taken too seriously, and no longer get stuck in these circular dramas of Self-defensiveness. And this shuts down the source of chatter.
Q: How does the deletion of a Self shut down chatter?
F: By removing the battery from the “system of thought”. The Self is the battery of internal chatter.
It’s as if we’ve been wounded by this web of language in which we’re caught. It has severed the Yang from the Yin. It has severed the Self from this actual Being.
This false duality within consciousness is a wound that bleeds a compulsive stream of internal speech (at a volume and speed unprecedented in history), because we’re constantly trying to stitch together the giant fissure within us, using a form of language to rejoin what that very form of language severs.
Q: Aren’t you inventing a duality between positive and negative forms of speech, or “Self” and “Being”?
F: When language is functioning in a balanced state, there is no need to mention the negative and positive categories of language (or the Self and Being as divided qualities). If they work together, there’s no duality. Then the two eyes blend. But when we become cross-eyed or one-eyed, the missing function needs to be noticed. This “noticing” isn’t creating the duality, but calling attention to the imbalance.
Q: So, on the one hand you are criticizing language as a blinding filter, while praising language as a means of dissolving the filter. And yet you’re also calling this filtering function a necessity. Can you clarify these contradictions?
F: They’re not contradictions if they’re all true simultaneously. Then it’s paradox, which requires a wider view.
A grid of understanding produced by language is in fact necessary. This grid is like a special set of goggles. We look through these grids of understanding (or theories, assumptions or stories) in order to manipulate otherwise indistinguishable features of the world for practical purposes.
An arbitrary range in a continuum of electromagnetic radiation can be called “the color blue”. This allows us to “see” blue in a more isolated form and focus on that color to produce certain utilitarian effects. Language makes “things” appear in the world for our use.
But if we never remove our thing-provoking goggles, then we end up seeing the earth merely through utilitarian frames, as gravel, oil, gas, real estate, etc.. And then we lose sight of the earth as a whole living being. And this means we end up focusing on the goggles or grid itself, rather than looking through them at a more real world.
So, language is helpful, but obsessive language is not. This overuse converts the necessary grid of metaphoric language into a blinding filter.
And there are other somewhat suppressed functions of language, which don’t build grids, but dissolve grids. Here language peers through itself, erasing its tendency to become conclusive and dogmatic. It’s a white-blood-cell form of language, which is Lao Tzu’s form. It calls attention to the ragged edges of our grids of understanding, like Bohm’s Rheomode or Beckett’s collision with positive futility.
Poetry is also an example of what could be called a language of reversal or negation. It is language that breaks the habits of grid-like thinking (cliché) and restores a dynamic relationship to what lies beyond language, which is the unnamable actuality.
So, all of those seemingly contradictory factors are simultaneously true. This is why strictly categorical thought is not very intelligent. It sees contradiction in what is really an inviting paradox. It tries to hold everything in a stable language, making language the boss, rather than using language as a shape-shifting tool of something beyond thought and language.
Q: Do we love words too much or hate words too much?
F: Most of us have a love/hate relationship to language. Because on the one hand, we are obsessed with words and constantly chattering to ourselves, which is how we try to edit and defend the boundaries of our self-definitions. And on the other hand, we hate this trap and feel cut off by our habitual word-frames from real, divergent experiences, and genuine relationship.
So, primarily people have stopped listening carefully to words, and don’t take as much pleasure in them as they once did. After all, almost all we ever hear now is the chatter of marketing propaganda in society and the chatter of self-marketing propaganda inside our own skulls. So, we’re sick of the words we can’t stop craving. We hate our craving for words.
But you can also genuinely love language for its second function, as a way of reversal, which includes poetry, philosophy and even scientific theory — I consider Bohm’s theories a form of poetry too, because they are ways of performing a perspective, rather than finalizing an answer. He mentions “theory” having its origins in the word “theater.”
But we can extend this appreciation of language by seeing it through the filter of shamanism or alchemical magic. Language does real work from this angle. Scientific theory, mathematical formulae, chemical symbology, musical notation are all forms of incantation that conjure from the infinite potential of the void various material rabbits that otherwise can’t materialize. There is no “thing” until we isolate it with these positive “spells” of words.
But positive enchantments are dangerous if they are used self-deceptively (for personal power). Then they require a more powerful corrective form that can awaken us from any enchantment that goes too far, such as fascism, nationalism, or any rigid form of identity.
I think we have to remain grounded in an intelligence that is less knowledgeable and “athletic” and more uncertain and receptive. This is where Lao Tzu’s language arises; a language that negates certainties and restores receptivity. This language isn’t personally authored, but is the wider world (the Tao) expressing a restorative silence through an individual tongue. And this material tongue serves mainly as a cipher or decipherer of what comes through the body/brain from that deeper well of silence that is our true life-source.
Q: Have these charms of disenchantment in fact brought you any closer to the Tao in your real life (outside this page)?
F: The final effect of all these words depends (again) on whether my foolish addiction to the act of writing ends up undermining the Tao it otherwise restores. It’s not the fault of the words in that case. But the fault would lie in my foolish relationship to words, which become like a retreat center I can never leave without losing my way.
This writing all seems to be heading towards its own categorical death, one way or another. For these words to be true charms of dis-enchantment, they’ll need to end. I’m not saying it’s a goal. But the full impact of what is being written is tending towards a critical juncture. It’s impossible to know who will die first: the “me” who places too much importance in what is written; this form of negative writing; or the body itself, taking all three out at once. But everything has to end in order to complete its meaning.
Q: Are you saying that writing is a “retreat” from life itself?
F: The real meaning of a “retreat” is a place where retreating from life (escaping life) is no longer permitted. Here is where I confront life without retreating. The mundane mind that refuses to reflect on itself is the real retreat from life.
But it’s an open question, a lovely paradox, whose resolution takes form here and leaves these prints. One can see where they lead or drift away. Language can become a retreat from life or a refusal to retreat. That’s the question.
[i] See, for instance, this passage from “The Unnamable”:
“Strange notion in any case, and eminently open to suspicion, that of a task to be performed, before one can be at rest. Strange task, which consists in speaking of oneself. Strange hope, turned towards silence and peace. Possessed of nothing but my voice, the voice, it may seem natural, once the idea of obligation has been swallowed, that I should interpret it as an obligation to say something. But is it possible? Bereft of hands, perhaps it is my duty to clap or, striking the palms together, to call the waiter, and of feet, to dance the Carmagnole. But let us first suppose, in order to get on a little, then we’ll suppose something else, in order to get on a little further, that it is in fact required of me that I say something, something that is not to be found in all I have said up to now. That seems a reasonable assumption. But thence to infer that the something required is something about me suddenly strikes me as unwarranted. Might it not rather be the praise of my master, intoned, in order to obtain his forgiveness? Or the admission that I am Mahood after all and these stories of a being whose identity he usurps, and whose voice he prevents from being heard, all lies from beginning to end? And what if Mahood were my master? I’ll leave it at that, for the time being. So many prospects in so short a time, it’s too much.”
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Relevant essays:
Negative Geography 