The Word

Two thousand years ago, the marvels of the modern age would have been indistinguishable from magic; these are marvels we interact with every day without a proper appreciation for the incredible power that has been granted to us through the labour of our ancestors. Two thousand years ago, man was yet still wise enough to recognize magic when he saw it, and to call it what it is. Two thousand years later, the technological leaps that we have made make no lasting impression on a generation which has known them from birth, and modern man feels comfortable, even justified, in the claim that the efficacy of science has thoroughly dispelled the superstitious and primitive belief in magic.

As much as modern man may recognize how much his world differs from the world of his ancestors, he can never truly appreciate the sheer magnitude of his ascent because it has raised him above the clouds, and he has since forgotten how far he had to climb, mistaking the clouds for the earth and mankind for mere mortals. We think ourselves to be fools wandering through a spiritual wasteland without sign or sense, when in fact the opposite is true; we have cultivated a powerful magic called science that now bewitches us into thinking that it dictates all that there is or ever could be, and which furthermore deceives us into the false belief that this is the way things always were, and the way they were meant to be.

So, when the modern man hears the proposition that 'language is magic', he scoffs at it and fails to realize the profound reality which has been stated; 'magic isn't real', is his two-bit reply. I charge modern man with the crime of failing to appreciate the magic of technology and consequently I charge him with a blindness when it comes to the magic of language - a blindness which finds its origin in the very notion which is being doubted. For it is only by virtue of this magic of language that the models and ideas that modern man has about the world seem to him so utterly compelling, so undeniably real. It is this very magic of language which bewitches modern man into thinking that the language of science is sufficient to characterize the entire universe, and that there is nothing imperfect in this perfectly human construction, this empirical science. It is precisely the enchantment of language which leads man to doubt its magical properties, because when one postulates a world in which magic is excluded by definition, a curious thing occurs: he begins to inhabit just such a world, and he takes this world which his projections have wrought for him to be THE world, THE reality. He holds his conception of the world to be totalizing and in this one stroke he falls prey to the enchantment of his language, which cannot know its own limits and which sets for him the very boundaries of his existence, beyond which experience cannot go. This is the insight captured by Wittgenstein when he so aptly remarked "The limits of my language are the limits of my world."

Language is a hall of smoke and mirrors which is just as likely to reveal the true nature of any specific situation or profound puzzle as it is to hide that true nature behind the nature of one's own projections. It is by venturing deeper and deeper into this hall of mirrors that man has somehow become dissociated from his natural state: we have created an entire world full of things that work exactly as we understand and intend, and consequently we no longer believe in anything which seems to be impossible, because we have a greater sense than ever before of what IS possible. It's such a curious paradox, that it should be precisely that magical elevation of ourselves above the animal world, every single thing we have discovered and created, the world that we have transformed around us, which occasions us to believe that magic has no place in our terribly *modern* world. It is the fact of modernity, the fact of technology, which makes magic so unbelievable, because we say today - now we know, it never was. We have become so normalized to the magical effect we have, that we think it is somehow not magic when we make a plane fly or design the engine of a high performance car to produce unparalleled propulsion through time and space. So now, we cast light in every direction only to turn around and say that there is no such thing as the ability to 'cast' light, we produce it with electricity and harness it with our filament, and so we cast our light and we say, look - now we can clearly see, that there is nothing about the world that is impossible, and certainly not the ability to create light. This illumination is so common today that we fail even to recognize how profound the notion of 'light' was for men of the past, for whom night heralded a recurrent encounter with their own ignorance about the world. But all these brightly lit streets WERE impossible for much of history, and it was only through the willingness of humans to believe in the impossible, and to attempt to bring it into being - despite the fact that we had no idea how it worked - that we have managed to construct this vast maze of technological progression which we now call civilization. And now that we have it, we not only fail to appreciate it, but we say that the fact that we managed to do it has proven that it was in fact within the realm of possibility, and because it is no longer deemed impossible - because it is no longer profoundly unknown - we deem that it is not now and never was magic to begin with. In other words, it is the very ease with which we work our magic today, that arcane understanding we wield, that we use to justify the non-existence of magic. It is the very success of our own arcane science, our own magic, that leads to our bewitchment by it into the false belief that it characterizes reality totally and that what is outside its framework is consequently impossible in the natural world.

There is a reason why The Bible calls its teaching 'the word of god', and why the notion of logos as 'true speech' which 'brings the world into being' is essential to the christian doctrine. This reason was a primal recognition of the unbelievably creative power of language, most particularly of true speech; this creative potential, this capacity to transcend the world that we inhabit, the world that we understand, this POWER of language is precisely what was meant by the notion of 'the word'. The word is the way that we become conscious of ourselves and of our world, and in the very instant that it sets us free of old ideas which limited our reality, it is transfigured into a new set of chains. The word is the path that one takes towards Truth and understanding, towards enlightenment, and in this respect I am reminded of the power of the notion of the Tao. The word is the way towards transcendence, it is both freedom from limitation and limitation in itself; the word is the way that we are made capable of transcending our past selves, and it is the way that our ideal self can become realized in the present moment.

This is from the first verse of the Tao Te Ching:

"Existence is beyond the power of words

To define:

Terms may be used

But are none of them absolute."

The word is the power, latent in all men, to define existence despite the impossibility of that task, to set the limit of the world so that we might function in it. So too is it the power to overcome this self-imposed limitation, the capacity inherent within us to grow and change and adapt to the world at large. The word is the power to see things as they are, to say how they are, and consequently it is the power to become masters of the world. Is it really so surprising that, now that we have become masters of this world of ours, we have forgotten that ancient origin of our power? Is it so surprising that language functions invisibly, so subtly guiding our every thought that even the best among us can scarcely even recognize it? Is it so surprising that the very power of language has blinded us to its power, because it has enslaved us to a conception of language which is just-so and nothing more. The word is the way, it is the path and it is the power that allows us to remake our image of reality anew, and indeed it is by this very power that we remake our image of ourselves, and ourselves in that image.

So let us remake it again, anew, and let us imagine ourselves as the gods our ancestors would have taken us for, as the magicians we once wrote about, as the masters of the world that we have truly become, but let us not forget: the word is the way - both the way we have come, and the way we have yet to travel. The word is the path we must walk, and it is the power of consciousness which elevates it above the darkness of ignorance and misunderstanding.

The word is the way.