Emergence Part 5: Words as an Intentional Practice
We ought to strive / To use only the words / That we have discovered / The true meaning of
This is the 5th essay in a series of six. If you have not read the first one, you can find it (and more information about the nature of this essay series) by reading the initial essay, linked below.
Words as an Intentional Practice
Our ability to speak is one of the defining features of humans as a species. We often tout our ability for intelligent, rational, logical thinking as what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.1 Just as from the Sun and Earth, life was born - from our lips and language, ideas and culture take on a life of their own. We are quite literally imbued with the spark of creation and words are one of the most powerful ways we are able to manifest this power. From words on human lips are born entire civilizations.
Words are, by their very definition, shadows - they arose as symbols to communicate about the nature of reality. The word “sun” clearly is not the Sun, yet when we use the word it evokes our fundamental understanding of the Sun. For most of human history, the word “sun” evoked the most powerful entity in our lives - capable of both providing us with life and taking it away. For many of us today, sheltered constantly within controlled ecosystems, the Sun may be nothing more than a perceived health risk. The meaning of the word changes as our relationship with reality changes.
That is to say, as we become distant with the reality of the word, its true meanings get lost and all we are left with is the shadow-word. A shadow-word is sort of like a zombie, still walking this Earth, yet simultaneously disconnected from all things Earthly.
It is useful to imagine how children might learn a word, how a word will likely only make sense to a child if they know the real meaning behind it. This is why a baby’s first word is usually some variation on Mom, Dad, food, or milk - because a baby deeply knows the reality of these words and we, as adults, provide them with our shared language for these realities. A child does not first discover the word “happy” or “sad” or “angry”, they first experience happiness, sadness, and anger - the words become indicators for these feelings. In such cases, these are not mere shadow-words - they are words that point to a reality the speaker is familiar with.
When we know the reality of the words we use, we can use them as a unified being - the word itself is unified with its reality.2 We do not need to think deeply of what we wish to say, for we can use words that embody who we are. We can say what we mean and mean what we say. That is the gift of accepting ourselves as we are.
There is a great danger to our own well-being when we use shadow-words - words we don’t know the true meaning of. When we adopt and use shadow-words, we fracture our soul from our body - for a shadow-word is not grounded in reality and we must disconnect our soul from our body (which is grounded in reality) in order to exist within the shadow-word’s illusion.
Much of schooling in this society is dedicated to indoctrinating us all to a shared language of shadow-words. For example, vocabulary quizzes were an integral part of my grade school experience - over our childhood, we were asked to learn a huge quantity of words that were defined only in reference to other words. Only if we were fortunate could we draw the connection between the words being given to us and their true meanings.3
We are taught to feel at ease in the presence shadow-words. As a result, we are trained from an early age to experience the world through the illusions these shadow-words weave. We become quite comfortable in this shadow-world. We become comfortable because it is our bodies that let us know when something is wrong, it is our bodies that have the systems in place that tell us we are unwell, or that we are unsafe, that there is peril around us in some way or another.
Fully immersed in illusion, our souls are able to draw away from our bodies and into the perception of safety, disconnected from all warning systems our body is equipped with. For there is no mortal danger to us in the land of shadow-words - we feel physically safe in this realm. Fully immersed in the illusion, we begin to feel that maintaining the illusion is requisite for our very being. We react like scared animals when someone or something around us attempts to pull back the veil of this illusion - for any connection with our bodies and our bodies’ ability to sense the the brilliance of reality will feel overwhelming, a bright, burning pain.
There are many children who bristle and resist efforts to be indoctrinated to the use of shadow-words. The scene of a parent telling their child they have to say “sorry” for their actions is a familiar one - often times, children will not say “sorry” when they do not, in fact, feel sorry. Many children will actively resist being forced to use shadow-words - we all enter the world with our souls and bodies unified, and we naturally can recognize the things that will fracture us.
These children that refuse to use shadow-words are often treated as being rebellious, delinquent, uncontrollable - they are punished for refusing to step deeper into false illusions. They are punished for choosing the unity of their body and soul over the comfort of the people around them. The adults around them are dependent on the illusion - disconnected from their bodies and reality, a child refusing to accept the illusion is a threat to the very illusion itself. And so, such children are punished until they either choose to accept the illusion or their life becomes forfeit.4
When we are unified, we can recognize that shadow-words only work to fracture our soul from our body. When we live solely in the world of shadows, then we are alienated both from our bodies and from the physical world around us. Our names come to only represent the shadow of who we are - as opposed to the brilliant reality of our being. When we live in the shadows we cast our eyes at the shadows of one another’s true nature - looking directly upon the reality of another person becomes too intense, like stepping out from a cave and trying to witness the brilliance of the Sun.
There is, perhaps, no shadow-word that has fractured our beings more than that of “love”. Love is at the very center of the story of humanity - yet, many of us only know its shadow, many of us have never experienced the reality of it. Many of us have chased love’s shadow our entire lives, never for it to get any closer than the horizon. Many of us have submitted to the false illusions of “love” given to us, finding it to be more pleasant to live with its facsimile, than to accept the absence of the real thing.
To rediscover the reality of a shadow-word, we must seek to re-ground it in terms of the physical world. “Love” can be so harmful because its use is often in contradiction with reality - a parent will say “I’m doing this because I love you”, before hurting their child, whether physically, emotionally, or spiritually.
In her work, all about love, bell hooks undertakes this grand task of trying to rediscover the real meaning of the shadow we know as “love”.5 She begins by stating: “Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition.” She was navigating the apparent lovelessness in her own life and relationships, despite the presence of the shadow of “love”. For her book, she introduces a definition of love that she had received from M. Scott Peck in his work The Road Less Traveled. The definition he provides is that love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
What, precisely, is so powerful about this definition? First, because it defines “love” as a dynamic process - that love is something that exists through our being, namely in how we interact with ourselves (self-love) and those around us. Second, because this dynamic process must be made manifest in reality. While the definition remains a shadow of real love, this definition provides a recipe - much like how the recipe for a cake is not a cake, but it can be followed to make one. This definition of love feels that it is not purely a shadow-word, but instead grounded to a dynamic process, grounded in reality.
Most importantly, such a definition6 provides a framework for understanding what love is not. One of the things that makes us quite unwell living in the shadow world, is that we can never seem to definitively say if something is at it is - we don’t have the wisdom or permission to say what we mean and mean what we say. When we live in a world of shadow-words, the words can be bent to the whims of the illusion. Someone can hurt you and say that they “love you” - they can commit evil deeds and call themselves a “good” person. Shadow-words are malleable because they mean nothing - when we start to re-define words in terms of reality, in terms of the physical world, they no longer bend like tin, but instead become strong as steel.
When we wield shadow-words, our souls fracture from our body. When we are told the person that hurts us also “loves” us, our soul must deny our body in order to accept this as love. When a word is re-grounded in reality, it becomes a shield and a sword in our hands. When someone says they “love” us and then they hurt us, we can recognize that this “love” is a false illusion and we need not accept it as real love - we need not fracture our soul from our body to submit to this illusion of “love”.
This is why all about love is so difficult to read - hooks uses this definition to navigate the many relationships in our lives that “love” ought to manifest itself (such as with our parents, children, and our selves). The book is so difficult to read because, to truly accept the wisdom of the book, one must accept that they have not been loved when they thought they were, one must accept that, perhaps, they have never been loved at all. It is far safer to simply set the book down and live in the illusion of the shadow of “love” than it is to step into the reality of it.7
Much like how a broken bone must be set to allow it to heal, so too must the fractures between our soul and body. Defining the shadow-words we use in relation to reality and leaving behind the words that we cannot is one aspect of re-setting the soul-body fracture. For, when we step into the world with words that symbolize reality, we are able to live in unity with it. We begin to see shadow-words as the false illusions that they are and we challenge them in our very existence.8
In our new sight and awareness, we often become a walking confrontation with those who remain secure in the false illusions we have unwoven ourselves from. This is one of the great challenges in healing fractures of the body and the soul - we will be met with resistance by those who feel threatened by the impermanence of false illusions that our very existence implies. We will feel lonely as we risk losing the ways of being that feel the most like “home” to us. We risk giving up everything we care about to heal - we are forced to choose between truly loving ourselves or living in the false illusions of “love”. This is why reading all about love can be so very difficult. It is important that we never trivialize the re-learning of words, the withdrawal from false illusions, and healing the fractures within ourselves and with the world-at-large.
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It is important to acknowledge that many forces out there (often in the form of people, institutions, and businesses that want to control, exploit, or profit off of us) will use shadow-words in an effort to control and manipulate us. We live in a world of Orwellian doublethink, in which shadow-words are intentionally employed to actively fracture our souls and bodies and to maintain these fractures. Words are intentionally used to strip them of their true meaning - to immerse us fully in false illusions.
No shadow-words embody this more than “good” and “bad” - politicians will call themselves “good” and their enemies “bad”; companies will tell you living without their products is “bad” for you, that buying their products is “good” for you. These shadow-words somehow seem to mean both nothing and everything. Nothing because they are shadow-words, untethered from physical reality. Everything because these shadow-words are the central pillars to so many false illusions that have been woven. Many of us justify all the ills of life in the world and in ourselves by re-assuring ourselves that, “at least I am a good person”.9
It is not just that shadow-words act to fracture our souls from our bodies, but those who wish to exert power over us will intentionally and blatantly use shadow-words to cause these fractures.10 When we are fractured, when our souls and bodies are not unified, we are far easier to control and manipulate - we are willing to accept shadow-words and the false illusions they portend. Blinded by our disconnection from our bodies, we allow others to give us reasons (false illusions) for the unwellness that wells inside of us as a result. We dawn the fabric of false illusions woven for us by people who do not love us, but who instead wish to exploit us.
This intentional fracturing of soul from body is quite literal - for example, much of the food, health, and wellness advertising we see is designed intentionally to make us insecure in our relationship with our body. Many of us have (at some point) experienced intense insecurities around how our bodies look, how our bodies feel, how we use our bodies, and what we put in them. We are made to feel deeply insecure in our bodies as they currently are - as a result, companies are able to convince us to buy a wide-range of products and services intended to ease these insecurities. We become far more profitable, exploitable clients when the relationship between our soul and body is severed. Further, untethered from the voice of our bodies - we rarely find products that truly ease the ills we are experiencing, creating a constant loop of insecure consumerism.
As a note, I have no intention of sharing what I think makes for good eating, for wellness, or anything like that - when our body and soul is unified, we are in a position where we can trust what our body says it needs and trust how our body feels when we feed it and move it. We are each the person best suited for determining what is best for us - which is, perhaps, the main takeaway from this discussion. I believe that many of us have had analogous experiences with food, our bodies, and health and provides an apt example to navigate this topic.
When we live in the company of “real” words, then we become empowered to determine what is best for us. Our society has forced upon us the false illusion that expertise and knowledge is divided and concentrated within professional silos. That we should abdicate control and knowledge of our lives and bodies to those with the “proper” education. While a doctor may have a more formal and intellectualized understanding of “health” - no doctor can experience our bodies for us. This is not to say a doctor cannot assist us in becoming healthier (doctors and other health workers can play a very important role in maintaining our well-being), but many of us have come to believe a doctor is the only legitimate source of health knowledge. When in reality, not only do we know our own bodies better than anybody us, but medical doctors only have a limited set of tools (as fancy as some of them may be) to come to understand and treat our bodies - as such, we should come to doctors when we understand what they are capable of and understand that what we need is truly within their domain of capability.
Under the false illusion that medical doctors are the sole experts on the health of the physical body, we excuse ourselves from needing to know our own. In fact, we come to fear knowing and living in relation with our body in this way - for coming into such wisdom would lay clear the shadowy nature of this false illusion. Further, we then place unrealistic expectations on such professionals (who are, in the end, just human beings like the rest of us) - we come to expect that our problems, in all aspects of life (not just health), can be solved by dedicated professionals. We abdicate responsibility over all facets of our lives. Farmers must grow our food for us. Doctors must take care of us. Law enforcement must protect us. Schools must teach our children. Under these false illusions of professionalism, we come to believe we are capable of nothing (besides whatever professional title we carry ourselves) - which, of course, can only be believed if our souls are fractured from our bodies, for our bodies are capable of so much more than nothing.
When we ground our words in reality, we ground ourselves in reality. Our roots grow deep, firmly planting ourselves in the garden of reality. Grounded in words with true meaning, we are able to understand our body and what it needs - we do not simply abdicate responsibility for ourselves, for we know ourselves and we know the world around us. Grounded, our roots grow deeper into the ground and our branches extend out to the Sun. We grow into the world around us and, in this way, we come to know ourselves and we come to know the things we need to thrive and flourish - just as plants know they need the Earth and Sun and gravitate towards them, so do we gravitate towards the things we need to blossom.
It is important that we strive to only use words that we know the the true meaning of - or, perhaps, words we have come into relation with their true meaning. When we allow ourselves to live among shadow-words, we become trapped within the false illusions they weave. It is better to accept our lack of knowing, it is better to accept that we do not know the words for some things, than it is to use words whose real meanings we do not know. For words truly are incantations - when we use a word grounded in reality, we summon reality when we invoke it. When we speak of the “sun”, we call to mind the real Sun. When we use shadow-words, we summon the zombie it has become, untethered from reality but still walking this Earth. We summon something we don’t understand, we summon something that is not of this world, something, perhaps, quite “evil”.11
Most importantly, using only words that are grounded in real meaning is an act of acceptance. When we use words grounded in reality, then we accept reality. We accept the reality of ourselves and we accept the reality of the world around us. We are able to re-set the fractures of our soul and our body when we strive to put away all shadow-words, from there we are able to re-set the fractures between our own selves and the Universe around us. Once we become aware of shadow-words - words whose meanings cannot be drawn back to reality - it becomes easier and easier to identify them. Once we begin to release shadow words, we begin to heal and begin to accept ourselves as we are, we begin to accept reality itself.
For, there truly is great magic in words. Just as the spark of creation exists in the light of the Sun, so to does it exist in the words that we invoke. When we allow ourselves to heal, to unify our souls and bodies and when we allow ourselves to accept the world as it is - then our words become powerful tools for creation. We have no need to abdicate every responsibility in our lives to professionals, for when we step into knowing ourselves and the world around us, then we are empowered to be ourselves and to act with great intention.
We are able to say what we mean and mean what we say - and from the words on our lips, we are able to actualize and manifest our being out into the world, just as naturally as the Sun does shine, just as naturally as flowers open their petals, just as naturally as bees turn pollen to honey. Our reality is built upon layers and layers of creation, from the Universe to the Sun to the Earth to the birds and the bees. We are another layer and from us another layer is born. When we use words grounded in reality, not only are we able to accept reality as it is, not only are we able to accept ourselves for who we are, but we can also play our role in this great layering of reality. With our words, imbued with real meaning, we are able to shine our own light and - just like the Earth, flowers, bees, and honey - something beautiful, something greater than ourselves, will spring forth as a result.
It is worth pointing out that, as we become less intertwined with the natural world, no longer surrounded by and dependent on animals, we become more comfortable adopting false illusions that allow us to think we are somehow an order of animals so truly distinct from all the others.
This dichotomy of reality-shadow appears everywhere - we can start to build an intuition that everything we understand and know is but an aspect of a singular whole. We exist as an aspect of the Universe, it is not simply a home we reside in. We function best when we accept our nature as being of reality, not within it. The reality-shadow idea is a useful illusion for describing the way our soul fails to accept the reality of our body - for just as we are aspects of the Universe, our souls are an aspect of our selves. The idea of the “shadow” arises within our beings only where and when we do not accept ourselves and our position within and of the Universe.
I should note here, by the “true meaning” of a word, I do not mean that a word has an objective meaning. Words exist because we sought to name some aspect of the reality we are experiencing.
This is a primary motif in George Orwell’s 1984 (SPOILER ALERT). At the end of the book, after being tortured for not falling in line and accepting the societal illusions demanded of him by the state, Orwell declared that the protagonist Winston Smith “loved Big Brother”. Of course, this is not real love - Winston Smith gave up and submitted to the societal illusions, he accepted them, for further resistance was futile. This is the experience many of us have as children - we are surrounded by adults who cling to the false illusions of society as if they are God, false idols in the form of societal dictations, the Great Dragon of Zarathustra. When our bodies have us resist these false illusions, we are bullied until we submit and accept them, else we are excommunicated (or worse). When we submit to false illusions as children, we become the adults who fight like feral dogs when the illusion is threatened - for we were never permitted to trust our bodies and we feel as though we cannot live without the illusion, even as we suffer within it.
I noted that many people will bristle in fear at anything that challenges the false illusions they uphold. In all about love, bell hooks so fundamentally and plainly challenges the false illusions of our society that many people cannot bear to read it. It is as if opening the cover only to discover the Sun itself, unbearable to behold. I know I found it to be painful to read, but so critical to my growth. As I wrote this footnote, I recalled a deeply powerful passage that I read in 9th-grade, in the Ramayana (what a beautiful gift to receive such a memory), in which young Rama’s (the avatar of Lord Vishnu) mother looks into the boys mouth: “[His mother] then saw in [Rama-Vishnu’s] mouth the whole eternal universe, and heaven, and the regions of the sky, and the orbit of the earth with its mountains, islands, and oceans; she saw the wind, and lightning, and the moon and stars, and the zodiac; and water and fire and air and space itself; she saw the vacillating senses, the mind, the elements, and the three strands of matter. She saw within the body of her son, in his gaping mouth, the whole universe in all its variety, with all the forms of life and time and nature and action and hopes, and her own village, and herself. Then she became afraid and confused, thinking, “Is this a dream, or an illusion wrought by a god?””
To be clear, there are countless ways to define “love” in words - with the only fault in some being that they are false illusions and fail to lead back to the reality of love.
I think it is worth discussing how the journey towards recognizing shadow-words (and, more broadly, false illusions) is a long one. Often, at the start, we are arrogant and condescending in our wisdom. We feel it is absurd that other people are unable or refuse to acknowledge the false illusions we live within. We are often cruel to them, angry with them for their role in maintaining the false illusions, we look down upon them and we despise them. We hate the people we love for not truly loving us. I bring this up to say that every time we, as people, lift the veil of an illusion, it is deeply painful. It is to look, eyes wide open, into the heart of the Sun. So, when someone you wish to love is living in the shadows, do not hate them for not following you out of them - have compassion, for you know that the journey is lonely and it is painful and that they will be better for having you in their life should they find the courage to walk it.
There is an interview of a young Bob Dylan (featured in the film Don’t Look Back) that I think illuminates how we begin to carry ourselves when we become cognizant of and weary of shadow-words. The reporter asks Dylan if he “cares about people” and Dylan responds, “Well, yeah, but we all have our own definitions of those words”. He was quite aware, as the subject of the (somewhat contemptuous) public gaze, that even if he used words that held real meaning to him, that his words would be treated as if they were shadows, twisted to fit their own wants and needs. This is not to say that Dylan seemed to know precisely the best way to navigate being enveloped in the false illusions of others, only that he was aware and acting on this awareness.
When I was younger, I would bristle when someone called themselves a “good” person - not because they could not be “good”, but because the word “good” had no grounded meaning. When I would challenge people to define the word “good” (i.e., what makes you good? what is “good”?), such people would interpret this as me calling them “bad”. For, in effect, by challenging the very nature of shadow-words like “good”, “bad”, and “love”, we force people to engage with the reality of the false illusions they live within. Now I write long essays instead.
While writing this essay, I was watching a basketball game on TV in the background. A commercial for psoriasis medication came on with a jingle and its chorus was “Nothing is Everything” - over and over, the commercial repeated the slogan and it felt as though the commercial was mocking anyone watching, as if “Nothing is Everything” is a literal manifestation of the fact that businesses will render words utterly meaningless in order to sell us things.
This last paragraph is quite literally the entire plot to Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. Perhaps much of my own spiritualism can be traced back to this book - one of my favorite reads growing up, but one I also kept secret, for I often felt as a child it held information that others would not understand (i.e., this book is a “red pill” for you Sci-Fi fans). The book deals in a fictional land of fishermen, wizards, and dragons. To learn to wield magic over reality, one must know the “true name” for things. The basis of this magic is that if you are able to accept the true nature of reality, then you can work with it, you can speak to it, you can sow seeds in it. The troubles begin when, Ged, the young protagonist speaks the “true names” of things he does not truly know of himself, and as a result he summons a great, evil spirit into reality. It is a wonderful story, a parable for the importance of using only words we know the real meaning of and the perils that lay in wait for us if we use shadow-words.