"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth."  --Lao Tzu

Most of us know that the mind keeps babbling a steady nonstop stream of words.

Perhaps that’s one reason why silence is so highly esteemed in the non-dual world.  

And yet weirdly, so many teachers and wanna-be teachers go on...

and on...

and on...

about everything, including silence.

Every day a new 38-paragraph discourse.

So. Many. Words.

Isn't it weird that many exhorters who tell us, “Remain silent,” have so dang much to say?

As if, if they just keep typing, they might drag their readers into enlightenment by sheer exhaustion, wearing us down syllable by syllable.

Or as if, if they just keep typing, readers might be fooled into thinking there’s something in all those words.

Instead of nothing in all those words.  About silence.

Maybe some of these Sages might try taking their own advice. If only because long treatises are pretty much contradictory to what they’re supposedly espousing.

So when they go on and on, maybe they're revealing that they don't have themselves that which they’re trying to sell.

Since anything truly understood can probably be said concisely.

Meanwhile all that wordiness is like a curtain. What’s behind it is still there. But the curtain may well block the view.

Which is why, if what we’re after is enlightenment, words are not helpful. They obscure. They obstruct. They deceive. Language is dualistic-  separating from experience.

So it's possible that silence, realization, enlightenment, may not be transmittable, or attainable, via words.

Though of course we can’t do without language at this point in our species’ evolution. We wouldn't even want to; we need it.

But when we’re talking about consciousness or awareness or enlightenment, we might have a very different experience…

If only we could just zip it for a while.

Because all those words anchor down the self.

After all, if mental, written and oral descriptions could be set aside, what might be left?

If we could feel without describing, act without analysis, experience without evaluating good or bad…

Without all the blah-blah of what I’m thinking and what I’m feeling and what should happen and what is right or wrong…

What would happen to the sense of self?

Would there be a center-point, an I, a Me, a You, without words?

How would we know?

And therein lies something many Mind-Tickler readers have been looking for, for a very long time.

So if enlightenment is wanted, we might try setting the words aside once in a while.

All of them.

We might try experiencing without talking about it.

Even to ourselves. Especially to ourselves.

Now of course this is not easy, which is why I say, “Try.”

Luckily just the attempt can prove mighty interesting.

Though granted, this non-word-experiencing might not produce Great Impressive Books and Important Lengthy Posts and Explaining-Enlightenment Discourses on Facebook.

Still, being doesn’t need to be described.

And the silence, the space in and around all the wordy narratives…

Might make the exact same existence…

Be experienced very differently.

And that just might speak…

For itself.

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