The Ineffable

Have you ever wondered why spiritual masters will remain silent on what they are personally experiencing, or if they do speak about it, they often find few words for it?  The most we hear is that it’s a state of bliss.  Why is that state of Oneness so inexpressible?

Well, there are really two reasons.  One is a very practical reason, and the other is a very mystical reason.  The first reason spiritual masters don’t talk about their direct experience is that we are not in that state ourselves, and any description they give will immediately seed our imaginations.  There is no other way, our minds immediately grasp onto anything.  So, a description of their direct experience will just springboard us onto an imaginative journey steered by our minds, and this is not the ultimate truth.  Why?  Because the ultimate truth cannot be grasped by the mind.  The journey to that truth is through an inherent inner experience away from the mind, into consciousness, then awareness, then life itself.  So, the best masters will always meet us where we are, in the mind, and then point towards this path, but not describe the destination because it must be experienced to be lived.

The second reason the enlightened ones typically stay silent or at best use metaphors, such as in spiritual texts, is the limiting nature of language itself.  When you say a word, that conjures up a meaning in the listener’s mind.  If you say this is a fruit, then immediately everything that is not a fruit is excluded and separated away.  Language is inherently dualistic.  So is the way we have been educated in school.  We are very deeply conditioned to objectify everything as separate from the other.  Science is all about compartmentalizing and classifying.  Our very brain is the tool for discerning what something is, and what it is not.  But existence is everything.  It is all-inclusive.  There is just flow, and it is all-encompassing.  It is simply Oneness in the purest sense, in continual unfoldment.  It is indescribable because the very act of attempting to describe it fragments the One Truth that simply Is.

Once you melt into existence itself, then what is there to describe and who is doing the describing, and to whom?  Once you are life itself, there is just spontaneous unfolding timelessness that at once is everything and nothing, expressing in non-expression, sparking the universe in utter stillness and silence.  There is only “Isness”.