The Definition That Negates Itself
Explorers of consciousness return and try in various ways to communicate what they've learned. Some devote their lives to service and let their actions speak. Some make pictures, some dance, some make music. And some write.

The word people are the ones to be careful about.

How do you say the unsayable?

Right up front, in the opening lines, the Tao Te Ching gives fair warning: "Those who speak do not know, and those who know do not speak." And then whoever wrote that little book goes right on and speaks 4,000 words.

One way to try to talk about the unsayable is paradox, which the author of the Tao Te Ching resorts to again and again.

The big paradox, which Lao-Tze and other mystics and writers and artists, repeatedly try to get across is completely

absurd,

ridiculous, non-scientific nonsense, the paradox that goes against 99.9% of our waking, daily hot-stove experience.

In ten thousand ways, they say:

Contrary to all of your sensory experience,
there are no boundaries. All is one.

Not two, they say. And everybody, from the uneducated peasant farmer trying to raise food in rocky soil to the parent watching a baby learn to live in a dangerous world to the cosmologist contemplating red shifts and black holes, guffaws.

Not two.

One.

What in Western mysticism is called the unio mystica, the mystical union.

In Sanskrit: tat tvam asi. Thou art that. But that's not the end of it. Also from Sanskrit: neti, neti. Not this, not that. So, not only not two, but also not this, not that.

In other words (so to speak): not two and also not not two.

Next Page >>

Back to Saltlick Contents

Send this page to a friend.

Magellan's Log V

Magellan's Log front page