Language

No one has ever understood anyone else by means of words and language.

Why?

Consider how language operates.... you have an experience, but being human you cannot share your experience directly with someone else. You conceptualize the experience, attempt to capture it in thought, then you attempt to transpose the thought into words, but realize that the right words are difficult to find, you realize that no words exactly represent what you are trying to express, you keep trying and compromise with words, eventually accepting some that approximately correspond to the thought, then you sound the words via some flaps of membrane in your throat and observe them come out through your mouth, noting that the particular sound, timbre, rhythm, pitch, colour, phrazing etc that your inherited body makes doesn't quite correspond to the quality and dynamism of the original thought, and now has, by a series of transformations, become even more distant from the living original experience. You realize that your words sound slightly contrived and empty, almost random, a very poor approximation to what you had hoped to express. Nevertheless the sentence has now been spoken, and you watch your beloved listen to, and react to, your words. You see her struggling momentarily in her mind to match the sounds that you made with words, as she personally and uniquely understands them, and next to match them with what she believes are the conventional meanings that she has absorbed from the society within which she has grown up. She also struggles momentarily to match your words with her own experience, and then match those experiences with concepts already present in her own mind..... and amazingly, suddenly she seems to connect the sounds with something. She smiles, and says; Yes, that is very interesting.

You have no idea whether or not she understands you, whether what is now in her mind is exactly the same as what is in your mind. Her words may reassure you, but ultimately you are confined to your own mind and she to hers.... unless you have direct access, which is possible. But direct access doesn't use language.

Let us take an example.... I give you a peach. You hold it in your hand, touch it and smell its subtle paradisal fragrance You bite into it and taste it. Oh... magnificence. Pick up the telephone and tell your beloved what you have experienced..... without using the word 'peach'. All you have to do is to convey the essence of peachness in language.

Difficult? Even impossible? I agree.

No one has ever understood anyone else through the medium of language.

You haven't understood one word I have used so far. Nor have I understood anyone who has ever spoken to me. Nor have I ever understood anything I have read, neither what the author was expressing, nor why he wanted to write what he did. Poignant? Melancholic? Separate? That is the human condition. The human nature is one of unbearable limitations.

The gods do not use language. They have mouths but they do not open them. They are silent. If it is necessary to communicate... they have a much better method. Unlike human language which is almost random and uncertain in result, their method is exact and certain. They use darshan, showing. If they wish to demonstrate something to you, they put the experience directly into you. Their experience becomes your experience. Of course you may misinterpret the experience, fail to understand it, but any misunderstanding can no longer be due to misconceptions of language. Time is strange, in the divine world the past has not disappeared into oblivion, it is still present. Therefore the divine being can put any experience directly into to you, for you to observe and understand, even as far back to the beginning of creation, and so reveal the forces at work. The divine being can, through the process of darshan, show you Great Brahma discovering the principle of creation. Then you know as gods know.

Advaita Vedanta teaches that there are many Brahmas. Probably that is true. The Brahma associated with our world, did open his mouth and a sound came out, continues to come out. Advaita says it is the sound OM. It is a sort of rhythm, a vibration, a rhythm of huge overpowering force. It creates everything. The traffic noise in the city, the cooing of the pigeons in the trees, the sound of the pedestrians walking along the pavement, even your own heart beat..... all are part of the great rhythm. It seems impossible to escape from it, since it both encompasses everything and holds everything transfixed. Our Brahma seems to suffer from a compulsive creation disorder. No one seems to be able to stop him. Maybe he has a reason, an instruction, we know not of. For myself, looking at the world and the things that are in it, evaluating its nature and quality, I can't help thinking it is all somewhat immature, bizarre, cruel, appalling. Maybe that young immature Brahma should have kept his mouth shut? Great Brahma is of a different quality to the young Brahma who creates our world, and of him no criticism is made. Reluctantly, I tentatively have to propose the thesis that all our problems, all the imperfections of our world, result from the immaturity of the gods. Silence is a finer state than sound.