Reading between the lines

Reality can never be communicated, only experienced.

Words can never cause another person to experience anything. Only the receiver can perform the act of experiencing. We speak in order to draw smaller and smaller circles around the experience we are trying to provoke in the other person. When the circles are as small as we can go, we have a reasonable assurance that the other person has experienced the same thing that we have.

Writing (or saying) something using a lot of words allows us to refine the various possible meanings of the communication to a point where we not only have been able to express ourselves (i.e. we feel like we have accurately represented the experience) but also have been understood (i.e. we feel that the recipient has accurately reproduced the experience for themselves). This is easy. The way to do it is to start talking (or writing) and not stop until the other person is able to communicate back that they have experienced the same thing.

When we read religious or spiritual texts we often are confronted with the fact that the text is much shorter than what we really need in order to be able to reproduce the author's experience. This is simply because it would be impossible to expect an author to be able to write a text that could be understood by anybody at any time in any situation.

Writers of these texts therefore resort to a form of compression that allows them to accomplish two goals.

The first goal is to express themselves in a form that can be understood. It is not important how long it takes for the understanding to occur and indeed many of the authors (of these texts) that are read today have been dead for some time. The notion that it is irrelevant how much time and effort are required to understand the text is an interesting one since it underlines the fact that it is the understanding of the communication that is the ultimate goal.

The second goal is to allow the communication of the concept to be passed on even by those who do not understand it. In order for this to be possible it is important for the concept to be expressed simply. If the simplicity of the expression is great enough then even the greatest fools of the earth will propagate the message until such time as someone with the capacity to understand it can hear it.

So we have two conflicting goals: understanding and simplicity. How then are we to formulate a concept that is inherently complicated and deep in a way that is simple? Recall that simple in this context refers to the complexity of the message, not the complexity of the concept.

The Tao Te Ching expresses complicated concepts in simple verse. The Bible expresses the truth in the words of Jesus via parables. A highschool student could learn and recite each of these stories with little difficulty. However without the key to what is locked inside, they remain opaque and confusing.

The key is to "explode" the concepts hidden within each story; to tease each sentence apart and to push our understanding of each aspect of the work to it's limit. We need to read between the lines. Unfortunately, there are not very many lines so there appears to be a huge number of possible interpretations for each of these esoteric texts. The trick then is to draw as many lines as we can so that the space between them becomes smaller and smaller until, one day, perhaps, we will experience reality.