If you feel confused, that's fine.
You are meant, at this stage, to feel confused. You have been trained since
birth to think a certain way. You have been conditioned to believe that this
is the only way to think and that all sane people think as you do. Zen seeks
to break this stranglehold and introduce you to the possibility that you and
everybody else, have got it wrong. Upsetting the logic cart is part of this
process.
(Robert
Allen)
Only words
Zen and taoism have always shunned words. Words
point
at things. But that is all.
This
website is an attempt to provoke the reader to look past the words
and be
inspired to discover tai chi, tao or zen.
Perhaps all three...
We will annoy some people, please others and perhaps bore many more.
Who can say?
It does not matter really. Words are
nothing.
We have no attachment to them. Nor do we prize them.
Inadequate
People occasionally ask us to define 'tai chi' - to explain it to them using a
few words.
This kind of request illustrates the ignorance and naivety of the person asking
the question.
The word is not the thing.
You cannot express tai chi verbally.
A conversation will not improve your comprehension, any more than reading a
book, looking at pictures or watching a video will.
Tai chi is understood by the doing.
Does the word 'chocolate' really taste of chocolate?
Beyond Words
Here is an extract from Ben Okri's book A Way of Being Free:
We began before words,
and we will end beyond them.
It sometimes seems to me that our days are poisoned with too many words. Words
said and not meant. Words said and meant. Words divorced from feeling. Wounding
words. Words that conceal. Words that reduce. Dead Words.
If only words were a kind of fluid that collects in the ears, if only they
turned into the visible chemical equivalent of their true value, an acid, or
something curative - then we might be more careful. Words do collect in us
anyway. They collect in the blood, in the soul, and either transform or poison
people's lives. Bitter or thoughtless words poured into the ears of the young
have blighted many lives in advance. We all know people whose unhappy lives
twist on a set of words uttered to them on a certain unforgotten day at school,
in childhood, or at university.
We seem to think that words aren't things. A bump on the head may pass away, but
a cutting remark grows with the mind. But then it is possible that we know all
too well the awesome power of words - which is why we use them with such deadly
and accurate cruelty.
We are all wounded inside in some way or other. We all carry unhappiness within
us for some reason or other. Which is why we need a little gentleness and
healing from one another. Healing in words, and healing beyond words. Like
gestures. Warm gestures. Like friendship, which will always be a mystery. Like a
smile, which someone described as the shortest distance between two people.
Yes, the highest things are beyond words.
That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When
literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless
moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your
being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary
condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the
emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies,
melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.
When things fall into words they usually descend. Words have an earthly gravity.
But the best things in us are those that escape the gravity of our deaths. Art
wants to pass into life, to lift it; art wants to enchant, to transform, to make
life more meaningful or bearable in its own small and mysterious way. The
greatest art was probably born from a profound and terrible silence - a silence
out of which the deepest enigmas of our lives cry: Why are we here? What is the
point of it all? How can we know peace and live in joy? Why be born in order to
die? Why this difficult one-way journey between the two mysteries?
Out of the wonder and agony of being come these cries and questions and the
endless stream of words with which to order human life and quieten the human
heart in the midst of our living and our distress.
The ages have been inundated with vast oceans of words. We have been virtually
drowned in them. Words pour at us from every angle or corner. They have not
brought understanding, or peace, or healing, or a sense of self-mastery, nor has
the ocean of words given us the feeling that, at least in terms of tranquillity,
the human spirit is getting better.
At best our cry for meaning, for serenity, is answered by a greater silence, the
silence that makes us seek higher reconciliation.
I think we need more of the wordless in our lives. We need more stillness, more
of a sense of wonder, a feeling for the mystery of life. We need more love, more
silence, more deep listening, more deep giving
(Ben
Okri)
Page created 1 May 1998