Very provocative and interesting Warner blog in which I'm pretty sure he doesn't behave like an A hole

Brad Warner posted a new blog today in which he talks about why the statement "we aren't these bodies" is wrong and why the statement "we are these bodies" is wrong also. Very interesting reading:

http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/2012/01/george-harrison-says-we-are-not-these.html

I enjoyed this one, Mike.

"The answer is that no category or definition we can create to try and box up the real world we live in can suffice." --BW

Love it.

Language, concepts, categories, definitions -- these are just within some small narrow field within a smaller narrower field of existence and really barely make a dent in the entirety of the cosmos, and I realize that is something I'm thinking about and telling you with words right now.

Language, concepts, categories, definitions -- these are just within some small narrow field within a smaller narrower field of existence and really barely make a dent in the entirety of the cosmos, and I realize that is something I'm thinking about and telling you with words right now.


-michaelmonson

Right! Which illuminates the essential fact: that it's not the descriptions that are the "problem", but rather the way we often forget what you just said while employing them Increasingly I feel like it's precisely the act of taking descriptions as definitive and literal that is what gives rise to distress/suffering/confusion.

It happens before I notice: suddenly something that is playfully, radically finite (language, description, emotion, concepts) is taken to define the infinite richness of the actual situation; then it's not so playful anymore. Than I'm stuck in an imaginary box...

Sometimes I really suspect that for many "seekers," what is actually happening is an intellectual pursuit, a "figuring out" on a purerly conceptual level so that they can think about things in the best possible way and talk and communicate in the best possible way -- but that that is all that is happening, it's not actually based on all the non-conceptual reality out there gotten through insight/practice/meditation/inquiry/etc.

I say this not only because that is how much of spiritual talking and writing looks and feels when I encounter it, but because I know I've done it myself over and over and over.

Mike, I think there's even a "figuring it out" obsession on pre-verbal levels that can be operative too. But yeah, I share your observation both in myself and others as well. On the other hand, some people just like turning a phrase in the same way as other people like to make something with their hands. It's an attempt to articulate the experience/nature of experience that will ring a bell with someone else who has shared the experience, or perhaps fortuitously illuminate things for someone who is aimed at the experience/insight but hasn't discerned it yet. That's the poetic side of language, I guess!

I think it complexifies things that, from the outside, trying to give artful expression to the inexpressible could be construed as trying to figure something out, since they might look the same from that angle: an attempt to put words and concepts together in a coherent way. But in the one case motivated by a misplaced faith in concepts' ability to discover truth, while in the other case motivated by an attempt to express something non-conceptual through concepts.