That’s the test. Rather like the joke about politicians, “How can you tell if a politician is lying?” — “Their lips are moving”.
Words are what separate us, what creates multiple divisions within us “Id, Ego, Superego, “the soul”, ‘the Transcendent, ‘God'”, etc.
We simply don’t need to roll around in all this societal poison. It’s a con job. A way to keep each other at each other’s throats, so that the alpha predator humans can extract money power and resources from the rest of us.
Now Spiritual systems bear a lot of dishonor too, but not all of them. The systems that are more experiential, such as Zen or certain forms of Yoga are designed to heal the schisms within ourselves and our societies.
So what is the ‘religious or spiritual impulse’?
Its your creative, wholistic right brain hemisphere calling out to be heard, to draw the rest of your noisy and painful mind and body into alignment.
That’s it.
So…. lean into that.
Lean into being healthy.
Now, even the best systems need a few words as backup, to ‘let the horse out of the coral’, as once the ‘horse runs free’, there’s no need to discuss fence breaking or gate opening tricks. Just run free.
Zen has koans and the pointing of fingers and meditation to look at things arise and fall. Nothing much verbal, except as a ‘trick’.
Some yoga systems teach you to stop mind-fucking yourself by pointing you at the body, not the brain. Again, words are just a ‘trick’.
Platonic Surrealism is not a religion, unless you call it a ‘religion of no religion’.
It has tons of words for the noisy and suffering ego, to help ska doodle it over to a more healthy configuration, until you can start doing simple practices like ‘tracing’ to enter the ‘trace state’, which is beyond all need for words, yet is not even spiritual or religious. It’s really just neurology
in action.
In short, as any reputable religion or spiritual system knows, it’s the words that imprison and cause suffering; cause us to judge and hate each other; no word has ever ‘liberated’ or ‘saved’ even one single person in the entire history of the world.
Before humans had a language, they lived in something approaching harmony with nature. Oh sure they cut down trees, burned down entire regions sometimes, to scare their prey for hunting. And yes, there were likely grunts and pointing. I’m not saying there was no communication; there was a rich nonverbal communication system.
But they never invented democrats and republicans, the ‘saved’ and the ‘unsaved’. They couldn’t. There were no toxic words yet, to create such toxic things.
Yes we have flown to the moon. And yes, human languages can be wonderful, artistic and useful things to get things done.
But we use words to make ourselves sick.
It’s not necessary though. We can return to what we were AND still use words if actually necessary.
Kevin Cann|
10/17/2024