Cocoon
At the moment, if ever it comes, your mind moves to ponder the “wild” nature of the quantum world, you may begin to fathom the beauty of the “process of self-organization that generates systems and organisms, all of which are within the constraints of—and constitute components of—larger systems that again are wild…” such as heavenly bodies and the action of gravity working to keep them in orbit. Language is not a creation of man, but rather a complex manifestation of human interactions with witnessed phenomena, and the divine. Languages have ranged from compendiums of perfect expressions of nature, such as Sanskrit, to more objective and rational languages, like German. When you juxtapose two languages that exist on opposite ends of the language spectrum, for instance, Sanskrit and German, you can begin to see how “language goes two ways.” In terms of a more mathematical language, like German, “imposing a net of categories on an untidy universe,” we can begin to understand what the Zen Buddhist philosopher Dogen means when he philosophizes that “to advance your own experience onto the world of phenomenon is delusion.” On the other hand, when we consider languages that are “naturally evolved wild systems whose complexity eludes the descriptive attempts of the rational mind,” i.e. Sanskrit, we can see how “language does not impose order on a chaotic universe, but reflects its own wildness back.”
In Einstein’s later years, he never gave up the search of a theory of everything, an equation that would unify gravity—his theory of relativity—and electromagnetism. He struggled with this problem until his last moments on earth. The impediment that stood betwixt him and the answer was the obstacle of words. His “words” that allowed him to arrive at one of the greatest achievement in the history of physics, the theory of relativity, was also the source of his impasse to further discoveries. Einstein refused to accept the findings of the quantum world, the world of the sub-atomic particles and their corresponding forces. This refusal to open his mind to a new advancement in the language of physics, blocked him from realizing the wild and savage beauty of the quantum world, and subsequently thwarted his attempts at new discoveries. Without the acceptance of this new physics lingo, into Einstein’s attempted equation, he never had a chance to begin the process; to allow himself the ability of experiencing the beauty of the new language that reflected the wildness of the quantum world back onto humanity. His words were clearly a kind of “cocoon” in his experience, protecting himself from the ideas and new language that would force him to break out of his habitual patters, and allowing himself to constantly recreate his “basic patterns of behavior and thought.” Would it have been painful for these new ideas to touch his ego? Would these new discoveries in the world of physics have been a sharp jab into his “cocoon” of his familiar thoughts and words? In the words of Chögyam Trungpa, “We surround ourselves with our own familiar thoughts, so that nothing sharp or painful can touch us.” Einstein was; the true predecessor to Newton, a genius, mastermind of gravity, Nobel prize winning prodigy—and most importantly, human. abc
It matters not which language is our native tongue, or how many languages we speak. This gift to human kind is such, that we can use it to free us from the shackles of binding, blocking speech, and move into a place of greater discovery, and experience a richer taste of the world around us; our perceivable phenomena. We may be able to liberate the beauty of the world, that is blocked by our insulation of words and language, by mastering the skills of language itself. If we master the beautiful world of language, a self-organized, “wild” process of nature and evolution, we attain the discipline that will allow us to be free. “Discipline and Freedom are not opposed to each other,” writes Gary Snyder, “We are made free by the training that enables us to master necessity, and we are made disciplined by our free choice to undertake mastery.” In the quantum world, nothing is simple, the complex and seemingly chaotic world of the sub-atomic particle, moving downward in scale, to the superstring theories, all we have is a probability that something will happen, it is precisely “a realm in which many patterns remain mysterious or inaccessible for us. Still, “the menu is not the meal,” and what these probabilities and so-far incomprehensible realities mean for us, is the “natural world” which “is mannerly, shapely, coherent, and patterned according to its own devices,” it is this world in which we have the gift of language, for better or for worse.
There is nothing that frustrates me more than a fellow human who is so eternally attached to their patterns and habitual, familiar ideas, that they lack the ability to see something that is right in front of their face. There are three things in life that I try to steer away from discussing; food, religion, and politics. This is not to gas so far as to say that I will never choose a discussion on these subjects wisely, but there is good reason to try and avoid, what will remain to me, dead-end conversations. When it comes to these three areas of discussion, all we have, as sensory beings, is our direct experience and opinion. When it comes to food, people are so attached to their ideas about what is right, healthy, good, and/or acceptable to ingest. These preconceived, habitual, and more often than not, pattern-locked ideas of food, stem from family, culture, society, and are entirely emotional attachments. Almost all the same attachments and breeding grounds for habitual patterns and beliefs of food can be applied to both religion and politics. To quote Dogen once more, “to advance your own experience onto the world of phenomenon is delusion.” The notorious “cocoon” of food, religion, and politics, is strong, and it is so thick that most people encapsulated in such a protective barrier, cant hear the voice of reason, even when their lives may be in danger. Buckminister Fuller once said, that to begin his process of “doing his own thinking,” separate from the world of accepted experience, he had to “set-up a moratorium on speech,” so to not allow himself “to yield to conditions reflexes.” He spoke of these conditioned reflexes as “parrot talk,” speaking without the knowledge of speech and language, “without understanding speech itself.” He knew that by truly understanding the discipline of language and speech, he would be free to explore the world of phenomena around him, without the barrier of habitual patterns of speech, our “cocoon” of words.
-JMS
