The Limits of Language to Describe the Reality and Tao

There are limits to language, if we use words to speak, we make a model of the world. A Map. -and the map itself is not the Territory.

For we can talk about Water, but we can’t drink The Word ‘Water’ as if the word was water itself.

As such, in reference to the Tao Te Ching, the spoken Tao is not the Tao.

“the tao that can be spoken is not the eternal tao”

Words and language are limited in their design, this is with purpose and reason. It’s okay to be limited as well, for words are tools and their ability to be useful is forged through their limitation as well. For instance, if any word meant EVERYTHING and was without limits, then we could just say the same utterances over and over to say and mean everything. How would we understand eachother? When the ambiguities of definitions overlap perfectly?

So by the nature of limitations, we give power to our tools. Our Words. Definitions wouldn’t mean anything if it weren’t limiting or defining something.

And so I speak of this as a note to the wise, that words are not reality itself.

“What is reality? Obviously, no one can say, because it isn’t words. It isn’t material—that’s just an idea. It isn’t spiritual—that’s also an idea; a symbol;  Reality is this [gong]. You see. We all know what reality is, but we can’t describe it. Just as we all know how to beat our hearts and shape our bones, but cannot say how it is done.”

-Alan Watts

A lot of society builds social constructs through the use of words and language. Our signs and sigils erect Logos for Non-Corporeal Corporations and Entities casting a gripping shadow over society through belief and thought-form like an Egregore of Invisible Giants made manifest by the interactions within people’s individual realities.

Signs and sigils gave way to the runes that make our language, and we speak it over and over. A Dead language and a dead tongue to speak of things in the Here and Now. The Present. As if marking time with the notches in our words and the scratches made by pens or keystrokes.

“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts.

So, he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusions. By thoughts, I mean specifically, chatter in the skull. Perpetual and compulsive repetition of words, of reckoning and calculating. I’m not saying that thinking is bad.

Like everything else, it’s useful in moderation. A good servant but a bad master. And all so-called civilized peoples have increasingly become crazy and self-destructive because, through excessive thinking, they have lost touch with reality. That’s to say, we confuse signs, words, numbers, symbols, and ideas with the real world.”

-Alan Watts

Yet at the same time without language, we would have to find other means and methods for communication. We would be limiting our world view through the failed use of language itself. For having spoken any bit of language, means that we are cursed and blessed by language itself. If we only know a few words, then we are very limited in our world view.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

The more we learn, the less limited we are. Yet at the same time, the more we add weight to our words and give it more meaning, the more limited we become separating us from reality through the use of these smoke and illusion. The Maya of it all.

A Paradox, which, for the dear reader or listener, has already fallen. For you, understanding some of these words, means that you are befallen into the vortex of semantics and meaning.

Perhaps though, we can rejoice. For there is nothing we need to know, nothing we need to understand, and nothing we need to do. Simply being is more than enough, and that too shall pass within the time and space that confines our little sandbox.

Epilogue,

I merely had some musings around the concept of conceptualizing reality, the limits of language, and how being cursed with language means that we are limiting ourselves by not falling more craven to newer words.

In a Way, we’re addicted to words trying to cope in hopes to find the truth that is, ironically, beyond words.

Hahaha, yet I still stand by the statement. A Truth that is smaller than the Great Truth, still a recursive truth and one that REMAINS TRUE OUTSIDE TIME AND SPACE. That truth is;

Words Mean Things