Life has arranged the neural connections of ever increasingly civilized, collective humanity to see things differently. The more civilized you are, the more do words which mean nothing, mean something. In savage conditions, where living literally is a day to day survival existence, everything people would say would mean something. In cultured circumstances, the more civilized you are, the less do any words you utter mean anything. That is simply how it is, and even ordinary minds, if the matter is mentioned, can momentarily drop life’s enforced pretense and acknowledge the truth. But the rest of everyday cultured existence is a flat out, verbal betrayal of this knowledge. Men’s words are mercilessly driven to brazenly proclaim their efficacy, in a realm where there be naught with actual authority, to straighten them out.
Hence are humans able to engage in that great sport unique to them – arguing. All there is normally to oppose, refute any word’s claim, is another word, and what grand entertainment this provides – passionate grappling bouts and no one physically harmed. There are vigorous struggles and no one leaves actually defeated. No one wins and no one loses, and no one seems to notice! This is how the faux contests are able to be re-staged anew, day after day as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, in all of the previous encounters. Like choreographed, meaningless wrestling bouts about which the audience retains no memory from one day to the next. Vicious X wins the belt tonight from Ferocious Y, but everyone understands it was scripted and has no permanent or substantive meaning. They treat the next day’s apparent contests as unencumbered by such, and this is how words manage to survive with their ipsidixit reputation for significance intact.
A person born somewhere genetically outside the general neural bullpen of collective humanity, with the corollary desire to see that which others show no interest in, must sooner-or-some-time-else see words for what they are, or their frantic arm waving and mass popularity will poke out all of your potentially good eyes/I’s – and keep ‘em poked out. Do not listen to words, no matter how seductive they seem – even when they speak to you about learning how to see those special things you so long to see and understand. Words only point to themselves; words only talk about themselves. Listening to words in your attempt to wake-up-from-the-dream is accepting directions from Alice on how to get out of Wonderland. There is something in man that a few can listen to which does not speak, and it knows the truth for which the few so passionately seek. Only thing is, it does not know that it knows anything in particular. You have to keep digging around in there until you suddenly see what it is that it knows – then you’ve got it.
J.