How would you know what a “thing” is if you had no words to define it?

If there were no words for pain, love, fear, happiness, doubt, joy, yin, yang, how would you know what “it” is?

Language is how we both create and perceive the world around us. “Things” are only “real” because we can define them.

Take into consideration this famous excerpt from the bible:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”
-John 1:1

A highly esoteric and brilliantly coded message, there is a lot of truth held in the above.

In yoga, there is the concept of “Subject-Object,” where we perceive the world through a dichotomy of two Ideas (Idea 1 being Subject, Idea 2 being Object). However, there is another level to this entirely where you are able to completely remove both Subject and Object; a state called Samadhi—a state of pure no-thing-ness.

In this state, there is no “thing” to be perceived, but the experience of Awareness itself. For those of you who know it, you will have your own words to describe it; and for those who don’t, my best attempt is referring to it as a state of Pure Awareness or No Mind. If you’ve ever been in a Flow State, or read the book Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi*, it is essentially the same thing.

Going back to the concept of words, it’s important to remember that we are all born into a wordless, No Mind state, up until when our parents or guardians start to teach us language (ie. a collection of words). From there, we start to build our own container (or context) for the world around us, creating our reality through the words we’ve learned. It is at this point that we also start to build self-awareness, understanding, and the concept of “me, my, I”. Words are how the “Ego” gets formed.

Why is this important? Because we can quite literally paint the picture of our reality the way we want with the words that we choose. 

Let’s say, for example, you keep failing at a task—that’s only because you have the word “fail” in your vocabulary. Now, what if instead of the word “fail” there were only the words “in progress” or “trying again”; how would your world change then? What if there was no word for “ugly”—there were only the words “not for me”—how, again, would your world change?

Taking this a step further, and what really illuminated me to this concept in the first place (Vish* first bought this up on The Socratic Gamers Podcast: Episode 334*), is also realizing that different languages have different words to help them paint their reality; creating “cultural norms”. Further still, in an interview with the director of Dune, he explained how there was no word for “crazy” in the Fremen language; instead it was the statement “you’re drinking sand”*. In both cases, saying “you’re crazy” and “you’re drinking sand”, the chosen words illicit a completely different set of emotions and subsequent follow up thoughts.

As a caveat to this—this also presents the opportunity for us to be mass-controlled by words via the policing of them. If we start to take words away, or make certain words illegal, then we start to police our minds and subsequent narratives (think: 1984’s Thought Police*). In contrast to this idea of policing words, I personally think it would be more beneficial to not simply “ban” words; rather, have a collective understanding of how words shape and re-shape our reality.

A few years back, I had created the axiom: “The mind is the container for consciousness; you can only go insofar as the mind.” What I was trying to relay with this statement was the importance of continually expanding one’s mind in order to expand one’s consciousness because our mind creates the limits or boarders for how we intake and interact with the world. Having now realized this new truth about the power of words, I’m now altering that statement to: “The mind is the container for consciousness; and words are the container for our reality.”

So, use your words with care. They’re a lot more powerful than you think.

-words cast spells; that’s why they call it spelling.