Tag Archives: enlightenment

The multidimensional language learners

Four glass vases, three green and one blue, each holding a different flower
Image by James Cousins

The multidimensional planets struggle with your concepts of space, particularly inside and outside. Space for them is fullness, not distance, and to move from one place to another place seems an utter impossibility, let alone going in or sending out. To achieve what you would call movement, they increase their stillness, and every attempt to go inside turns the inside out in a resplendent kaleidoscopic dance.

This is why it’s so hard to teach them your three-dimensional languages.

We start with an utterance which to you would seem a straightforward description, simplicity itself. 

This is a flower.

We hold the object before them and witness their blossoming wonder.

This creates a division, as real as melting glass, forming itself into a vase-like shape that distinguishes this from not this. Once there was no vase, now, there it is! And the flower, pressing its radiant face outward, bravely, breaching the invisible, newly formed barrier between inside and outside—a miracle!

The multidimensional language learners yearn to meet you, the native speakers of these wild mysteries, to discover the secrets of your enlightenment.

Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about it in Episode 86 of Structured Visions, ‘Feelings are, like, inside things’. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.

Birdsong

Photo of a song sparrow
Photo by Patrice Bouchard

Xuan reached enlightenment in his last monastic lifetime, but he seems to have reincarnated anyway.

Despite all the doctrine repudiating such a possibility, he’s come back as a sparrow.

Focusing his thoughts—GLINT! WAFT!—is more than difficult. FLICKER! WISP! It is excruciating.

To battle distractions—LIFT! SWOOP! LAND!—Xuan sets his bird brain the task of reciting sutras—

REACH! FLUTTER!

—that he cannot for the life of him recall. Instead the seed—SEED! TASTE!—of some primordial chant fills his hollow bones and Xuan dissolves into…

SONG!

The end of language

A lone starling sitting on a flowering branch
Photo by Hans Veth

Language death occurs when a speech community loses its competence in its language variety, until it reaches a point where no more native or fluent speakers exist. 

A tale used to be told about the end of language. It went like this.

A monk stood in contemplation on a hillside at twilight.

As the sun dipped lower and the valley’s shadows grew, a flock of starlings rose in the darkening sky. Their numbers multiplied in rhythmic ripples until the liquid beads of their consciousness merged into one fluid wave. 

The monk felt his own thoughts dissolve, like an eroding shoreline, swept up in the birds’ murmuration, and he was enlightened.

He travelled into the valley to share with the people there the pathway to wholeness.

His teachings spread like a mighty wave, sweeping up the distracting thoughts of all the people in its wake. As their thoughts slipped away, so did their language.

No one knows this story now but me.

I am the one to whom language has been restored.

It came to me as I stood on the hillside at sunrise, contemplating the birdsong. From the richly layered harmonies of that dawn’s chorus, one strain rose above, distinct and piercing. Each note of the melody made itself known as singular, like drops of dark ink on a white page.

The persistent soloist set words to its tune. 

Startled, I turned to see a solitary starling casting its shadow on my shoulder, dropping shimmering feathers as it flew away.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss ‘The end of language’ in Episode 66 of Structured Visions.