Words Can Never Tell Who You Are, so Use Them and Don’t Let Them Use You
In the realisation that words serve as a map for us, we empower ourselves to use them instead of being used by them.
Words are the map of reality, but never reality itself. The word love describes the most beautiful feeling, but it is nothing compared to the experience of love.
Anyone who has their senses more or less in shape should understand this.
Words are an abstraction, useful for practical reasons, but what counts is always the experience, the feeling.
Or to put it another way: we process about 50 to 60 bits per second, but the body processes 11 million bits per second. The 50 to 60 bits are the thoughts, the words, the 11 million are the experience.
But we easily forget it. Actually, we are lost in our thinking; we are lost in the map. We serve the words. We have become mental slaves. If our identity is built around our thinking, we confuse suffering with pain, money with wealth, desire with love, religion with spirituality and having with living. When we live in our mental map, we only live our mental projection of life and not life itself.
In the realisation that words serve as a map for us, we empower ourselves to use them instead of being used by them. In this context, language proves to be an invaluable tool that guides our journey to higher levels of consciousness. They have the transformative power to describe the difference between a life that is characterised by deep meaning and one that is mired in mundane drama.