Damn It! I Don’t Have An Easy Teaching
or: The Time Has Come for a Rectification of Language with Sacred Truths
(Photo Credit: yhelfman/BigStock.com)
My teaching, if I may be so presumptuous as to call this conversation an exercise in education, is going to take time to unfold. Few are ready to hear; those who are ready don’t see the gestalt yet. I think I’ve got a picture of it.
I wonder if eventually some of the very earliest readers of this blog (like YOU) will look back some day with a deepened rootedness in the “language of the Real” and then re-read these blog posts and see that all along I was guiding you to it, to take in the Real, not through the meaning of what I said but in the life of the words.
Until then, there are moments when I wish I had an easier teaching. Like:
You are a precious snowflake.
God is love.
Just be present.
You are already enlightened.
My spirituality is kindness.
Or:
You are perfect just the way you are.
But there is blood on the snow, darkness in the mystery, cruelties that lead to a greater kindness, and you are perfect if you believe it so… and yet everything must change.
Realization is getting real, and human beings will do almost anything to avoid that, I fear.
If my tone is dark, blame the cosmos. This is the Week of the Swan in The Kalendar, my calendar infused with mythopoetic symbolism of the letter S. These dates are the home of Eve and the snake, evil and sacrifice, sadness amidst mere satisfaction, samsara’s ashes, sackings and snatchings, slavery and slaying, smallness and solitude… perhaps the soul does not confront a greater slog. It is as if evening has come suddenly at exactly 8:40 AM, and the world is engulfed in an uncertain darkness. Do you hear the sound of evil in the air?
In ancient China, the scholars who followed Confucius and read their classics spoke of times like these with uncanny prescience. They noted that periodically in the course of human events the ways that people speak lose touch with reality itself. Language grew overconfident or overbearing and nobody seemed to notice. People spoke like they knew what they were talking about, but their words betrayed the truth on their lips before they were even uttered. Language had become a trap for the soul, one that threatened the stability of the nature of everything. In such times, goodness itself was at risk of being toppled by evil.
What did they do in such perilous times?
The wisest among them called for a “rectification of language”. They wrote poetry and sang songs and composed pithy aphorisms that used language in ways that were more natural, more attuned to the rhythms of the cosmos. And their words sounded mighty peculiar to everyone around them who had grown accustomed to spite-filled, ossified, and putrid speech. They even sounded a little nonsensical because sense had become divorced from the senses.
We too live in a climate of lame and languishing language so that common speech is laced with the cyanide of cacophony for the spirit, no matter how well-intentioned or supposedly “spiritual” one may aspire to be.
The words are not easy to understand, but we can learn from the poetry of The Canon of Supreme Mystery. Yang Hsiung says:
When yellow is not yellow,
The autumn routine goes back and forth.
The virtue of the center is lost.
What does all this have to do with “Integral” spirituality, you might be wondering?
Simple. As we grow in consciousness, some of us will grow to the point of requiring to change the nature of our relationship to language itself. Those of us who do so may find themselves lost in the wilderness of strange notions, bizarre mysteries, the deeper they look.
Have you really listened to English lately? Here are just a few of its oddities.
Have you ever wondered if there were hidden patterns between the words we use and the symbols of the letters or numbers that represent them to us?
Have you seen a meme like this one in your social media feed and thought: that’s weird.
Good. Keep noticing the strangeness of the dream. These are silly examples, but perhaps they are deceptively silly.
Language can cast a spell on us. Will we be like the hero in The Adventures of Letter Man or will we be like the Letter Man’s archnemesis, the Spell Binder?
There is an alternative to being lost in the wilderness in a world where language has come unmoored from Truth, Beauty, and Goodness (as if we could wave a magic wand over those three words to shake off the sense of unease we feel in these days, but I suspect that they are not the most effective mantras for our problem).
There is another way. Wait until the book Lingua-U comes out.
Lingua-U can moor language in a metalanguage of Sacred Words that brings together the best insights into wisdom, truth, and human relations from all the Great Traditions, be they religious or secular. Taking a cue from Master Yang Xiong himself, we can borrow the symbols of his ancient masterpiece, The Canon of Supreme Mystery, and elevate them into a trans-religious spiritual technology for developing new insights into human nature by attending to the subtle energies of speech. In short, Lingua-U can become part of the “Integral toolbox”, a modality of individual and group practice for re-balancing the soul and social ethos through enhanced awareness of the subtle realm.
Will you choose a conscious relationship to language or simply slip into slumber? Do not go to sleep in the Week of the Swan. In a time such as this, sleep leads to sorrow; the greater the unconsciousness, the greater you will become sorry.