The way of negation. This is the path of Mystics throughout the ages, of which I count myself one. Because language is a construct of humans, based on explaining things through their differences and relationships, the mystics assert that you can’t use it to speak of things that are all inclusive and One. Also, because language is a way of reflecting life and presenting it in a symbolic way, it is limited in dealing with life directly.
Out inner conversation in the end is a self reflecting series of assumptions and trained beliefs that only reveal themselves. They are not the life energy that is within that gives life. If you ever have been around a dead body it is true that it can no longer language, but there is something far more fundamental missing. Something that try as you might you can not truly express with words, yet you can be totally aware of.
Awareness, knowledge, are distinct from language. Animals that supposedly have no language are quite capable of being alert, aware and focused, and have great knowledge in them. Yet they don’t have language. When I play the guitar I am in a state where I know everything about playing but I have to shut off the internal conversation so the knowledge can flow. Though language was used to give me the information, to express it I have to stop language.
So, to the mystics, to reach that which is real and eternal, one needs to access a part of you that is not spoken, not known. We also hold it as arrogant to assume one can know the mind of whatever it is that is this place. This place of trillions of stars, sound, planets and suns that sing, endless expressions of life forms and energy, all those things that many humans discount because they have no use to them and their internal self absorption. So to be aware, one needs to shut up within, to let a deeper part that knows but has no words, to let it come to the front. It is there, I know from personal experience. Many discount it because they have no knowledge of it, like a child who discounts adulthood because it doesn’t exist in their experience. As if all life, all this endless amazing level, of all the hundreds of levels, is defined by ones own self absorption and nothing else exists. This is how most of the world lives. So the mystics follow the path of negation, to negating of all the meaning they assign to life around them, because all that meaning is designed to reflect you and you alone.
Not that we don’t use language, we just don’t “believe in it.” All the writings of the mystics used language. But they only point at something. Like a finger pointing at the sun, language is like the finger, not the sun, but it is the sun that matters.
This is a long running “argument.” In Greece there was a fight between the rhetoriticians and the mystics. The ones who use rhetoric say that if you can’t express your point in clear language then it is essentially chaos that bares no fruit. The mystics feel that language gets you all caught up in the symbols of life and don’t give you life, so what is clearly expressed in rhetoric is in fact nothing. They actually had a fight over this and a few people died, but then we all die.
The key thing is that as you use language, be completely aware that it is a symbol of life, not what you are. Your body is hear if you speak or think or not. As a matter of fact it can exist while you are completely lost in thought. The question is, are you the awareness that gets caught in thought, or the awareness that lives in the body? My experience is that when you silence the hold of language, something that lives in the body awakens, and has life.