8 Comments
User's avatar
W.D. James's avatar

I’ve been thinking about this all day. There was a Bible passage that came to mind. I think this is it:  And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God’s own will.

There are other similar ones. I take it to mean, in relation to prayer, that we use words in prayer but that God knows our hearts whatever we say.

Our hearts have their own language which is quite different from the language which gets defined and bound up with power/domination.

Expand full comment
Mankh's avatar

Different versions say similar things, the gist of which is that, imho: words and names don't convey the true essence/actual experience and yet words/names are functional and part of our experiences in the material world.

"The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name. (Conceived of as) having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth; (conceived of as) having a name, it is the Mother of all things." (J. Legge)

or

"The Finite cannot be all of the Infinite!

THOU by any specific name is not all there is to THOU.

The un-nameable is the Father of the myriads of things.

The nameable is the Mother of it's own myriads of things."

https://spirit-alembic.com/thou.html#text

Expand full comment
Peter d'Errico's avatar

thnx for the added info!

Expand full comment
Mankh's avatar

The title of the piece reminded of:

“Only in silence the word,

Only in dark the light,

Only in dying life:

Bright the hawk's flight

On the empty sky.

"The Creation of Éa” / "A Wizard of Earthsea"

― Ursula K. Le Guin

Expand full comment
Peter d'Errico's avatar

yes, Ursula !

Expand full comment
W.D. James's avatar

'A payer.' Yes, indeed.

Expand full comment
Harmony's avatar

ah, yes, just like they did away with their Messiah

... hide the truth [Gospel: 'the good news' that all Beings are all equal, interRelated beING] ... that which puny words cannot begin to discuss

hide 'it' away from all humans curious and trying to BE

commodITize it ... the kNowing and cherished AWE for existING ... kill the reverence!

hide the only truth, that beING an author over your existing, fully relating with and 'through' 🌎, is the only 'power' ... being an authorITy over this storyline

but in His, JC's court-case, they made the most severe punishment (blasphemy, to repeat, 'so am i') quite clear [Crusades and such]. "don't you dare repeat, understand, and embrace That [despite these good works that I do, greater shall you do]"

if you 'love your messiah', you'd never dare to follow his foot steps and Words!

so scary a proposition, that Billions of people obey the original procurators from 1000s of years ago, in a time and Land of extremely different and unRelated CONtext

lol

here we are today ... distorted, polluted, misrepresented in the NEW Word [especially King James, 'a vs. The-only' child of the divine]

... spread through the Doctrines-driven Law code ... an opinion that 'some human beings MUST remain elevated above all others' ... and the CONtrast expands

violence required to hide the eXtreme inTensionAll ... i'mBalance ... yes

do we pray, or in doing so [centrally among just our species], are we Preyed upon?

Expand full comment
Steven Schwartzberg's avatar

Thanks Peter! I was introduced to that wonderful book by a Yugoslav dissident back in the early 1980s named Mihajlo Mihajlov. He said the first question the secret police always asked during their interrogations was: “You seem like such a nice young man, why are you doing this to your family? Of course that was in the relatively unsophisticated communist world. In militarist Japan, the interrogations would begin with the gift of “mother-daughter soup”—chicken soup with an egg… I have heard that something like two-thirds of the communists interrogated in the militarist prisons in Japan left their Marxism-Leninism and “returned”—became adherents of Japanese militarism.

Expand full comment