NOEMAYA

Words are a double-edged sword. They promise clarity, yet so often they land us in confusion. I think of how the message of Christ was once simple and immediate, but over centuries it has been buried beneath a mountain of explanations, doctrines, and demonstrations, words upon words that have obscured the living flame they were meant to reveal.

Spiritual truth is not a collection of axioms or statements about god or the nature of reality or life or afterlife. It’s not something to be thought but to experienced: here, we speak of God, or Truth, as an experience and not as an object of experience. In fact, whoever speaks of having an experience of god, they are mistaking a manifestation for an essence. In so far as experience has an object, God has no place in it; alternatively, the insurmountable gulf between the subject of an experience and its object is precisely the illusion that ought to be overcome for the God-experience to rise. It’s when the subject-object duality dissolves that one may call the residual stream a God-experience, and not an experience of God. For this reason, all thought, construction, faith and belief, even meditation and prayer and invocation, none can take us to that lost place that is nowhere but here, for they all presuppose a starting point and an end, just another gulf!

Thinking and living are mutually exclusive encounters with Reality. The Truth cannot be grasped by the mind, for the mind survives by dividing and naming, by shredding the living whole into concepts and categories. Words are only shadows of reality—snapshots of something too alive to be captured into the static framework of a concept or word. At best, they hang on the wall of memory as faded reminders of what is forgotten. Reality itself is never in the word. It is here, concrete and felt, living and being lived and yet remained unnoticed in the background of our petty distractions.

Yet we continue to speak and write more and more about it, believing that language can bring us closer to what is beyond language! Just like a drunk who keeps drinking in hope of someday encountering a bliss that is taken away be his very drunkenness. But the more we describe truth, the more we grate against it. Our words are like a sieve, shredding the seamless whole into lifeless fragments. Still, silence alone is not enough. To remain mute does not reveal the Real either. So we are caught: if we speak, we distort; if we remain silent, we conceal. Imagine if no saint ever spoke of what they saw! And it’s not the speech of the saints or those who see, but the endless babbling of the blind followers and those who failed to see that erects a hard and cold body of rotten doctrines and ideas around a once living truth. And then a whole people is captivated and captured by those statements about the truth and oblivious that to which they once referred.

Perhaps the better metaphor is a rope. Words can serve as a rope, tethering us to reality, but only if they lead us back to what is lived. To read without experience is only to grip another man’s rope, to grope and never touching the ground it reaches. The true rope is not meant to pull truth down to us; that only diminishes it, forcing it into our narrow frames—but to pull us upward, toward what exceeds us.

Intellectual prose, in this sense, becomes dangerous. It seeks to stabilize truth, to turn it into propositions the mind can hold, and oh yes! The mind can hold only propositions, only static images and frozen snapshots of something inherently flowing. But truth is not stable. It is not a stone; it is a flame, and not the concept of flame but the life of flame. To explain it in prose is like tying stones to a hot air balloon that’s meant to elevate you and your perspective: the more you weigh it down with definitions, the less it can rise, raise you up to that which cannot descend. The gulf between knowing about and living is as vast as the gulf between reading about honey and tasting sweetness. You may read a thousand pages on honey or glucose, but no book will ever give you the experience of that sweetness on the tongue.

This is the tragedy of becoming obsessed with much religious and spiritual literature. It gives the seeker the illusion that reading about the truth is the same as really knowing it, or at best the illusion that if one reads enough, one will get to know it at some point. It can seduce us into thinking that with every page we draw closer to the real, when in fact we drift farther. The more we read, the less we walk in the park, listen to a friend’s pain, or serve a stranger. There is more truth in a single act of love than in the entire library of Plato. Paul warned us well: “The letter kills.”

The state of a seeker who has isolated himself in his corner and is surrounded with books and endless readings about the truth, is akin to a child held up by his mother but facing away from her and restlessly seeking to find his mother in every passing stranger! Little does the child know that that which he seeks is the very thing that is holding him and his seeking. It’s to stare at and be infatuated with the poster of a beautiful woman who’s sitting right next to you and waiting for your attention.

And yet there is one form of language that does not kill but quickens: poetry. Unlike prose, poetry does not attempt to dissect reality into digestible parts to suit man’s weak stomach. It does not present truth as a set of conclusions but as a call to remembrance. Poetry awakens what is already within us. It does not define sweetness; it makes the soul taste it again.

Where intellectual prose shatters truth into fragments, poetry restores it to wholeness. One differentiates and the other integrates. Yes, that’s the tale of cosmic calculus!

Where prose pulls truth down into dead words, poetry lifts us up, turning us around the flame so we can feel its warmth. Prose turns truth into stone; poetry melts it back into liquid so it can be drunk.

Going through the prose forms of expressions is like skiing through a dense forest, constantly colliding with trees of logic and explanation. Poetry is a sparser wood, where the trees serve as guides rather than obstacles, allowing us to move freely and find our rhythm.

The truth is naked and simple, always before us, yet we have chosen to wear virtual reality headsets projecting images about it. We are watching a documentary of reality while reality itself sits unhidden before our eyes, and in fact within us. And when those headsets slip, we feel only boredom—so conditioned are we by our virtual representations that we have lost the capacity to see anymore, to see the unfiltered. Like staring at an illusion too long, the pattern becomes imprinted on the mind’s eye. When the image is gone, we continue to see it everywhere, unable to perceive anything else.

This is our condition. We have read too much, thought too much, stared too long. And so, like a novice at the microscope who mistakes the reflection of his eyelashes for a new discovery, we confuse our own projections with the real.

To be free, to see, we must undo the spell of repetitive projections and conceptualizations. We must, and we can, escape Samara. Not by escaping the world but by embracing it as it is. This is not to escape reality; we have already escaped it; we are already in captivity, captured by our constructs of what reality is. But reality doesn’t lend itself to constructs; it demands naked encounter.

We must forget and unsee all that we know and all that we think. We must surrender who we think we are in order to see who we truly are. We must surrender what we think reality is in order to see it for what it truly is. And repetition itself can help us: to repeatedly put the headsets aside, to return again and again to the plain, unadorned real, even when it feels empty or dull. That emptiness and dullness and boredom is the withdrawal symptom of a lifelong addiction to conceptualization and repetitive thinking. Stay with that emptiness long enough and one day vision clears. But for that, all borrowed images must die. All the stories of philosophers, theologians, and scientists must vanish for the true sun to rise before our eyes. All our ideas of truth and reality must die for the One to appear.

Son, you have read enough. Burn the books, cast off the words. Keep only a single poet—your Hölderlin—to remind you of the sweetness that cannot be captured. For this prosaic logic has imprisoned us, but poetry still has the power to set us free.