Harmon, I have a sense through your writings not only of a searching, eloquent, fertile mind, but also of genuine modesty and, to use that extraordinarily open-ended word, humanity. Surely, this amounts to more than a hill of beans. You undoubtedly will have distorted the "true Tao." How can one commit the formless into form? Doesn’t Lao Tzu himself start out with this very question? Words being both forms and formed inhabit the same half way house we humans must live in. Words cannot be the Word, and the Word itself, the Creative Potential springing out of Unknowable Potentiality, even that Word is incapable of expressing its own source.
Many people today view language as debased. Perhaps so. There was a time, was there not, when the ancient Irish used poetic rhetoric to rouse the waves to assist them in battle. This was a different "use" of language from the proto-technical commands of the Persian emperors to the Mediterranean in their wars against the Greeks. Poesis as "making something happen", so to speak. How so? By invoking the energy at the core of things. Can we still do this? Why not? Not to influence the swells and eddies of the sea, perhaps, but to stir the metaphorical waters of the psyche. Aren’t you doing your bit in this, your minor but deft contribution to the "sea change"? Please do not underestimate your impact. What may seem like just talk to you can affect others quite differently, as evidenced by some of the people who wrote back in appreciation of you. The old Talmudic injunction against precipitous speech ("A word let loose is like an arrow let fly") can also be interpreted as acknowledgement of the precision words can attain: how accurately they can "hit" a target.
You speak of some sort of psychic communication as the only real one, and seem to imply that this is, of necessity, other than communication through words and images. But do you really believe this? Are words and images to be seen as clumsy tools for the third dimensional realms, vastly inferior to the instantaneous transparency of higher dimensional "psychic" communication? Is there really such a thing as transparency? I mean, is there truly a "medium" utterly free from distortion, outside of pure potentiality? Consider water, that most transparent of earthly elements. Does it not bend sunlight – is this not then a form of distortion?
I think you are quite right in stating that we can only learn, never be taught, and that we can only communicate when some sort of psychic communication occurs. But I'd venture all of this is so precisely because we’re all on separate but linked pathways. We each exist on multiple levels yet perceive temporality according to the dictates of the 3rd dimension. Whatever "sacred" contracts we individually have with life in a current incarnation will cause us to interact "paramagnetically" with some but not with others. For reasons we can only be obscurely aware of, we will be able to communicate effectively with certain people, not at all with others. This has absolutely nothing to do with culture, class, education or other forms of conditioning, though these too, of course, play their role.
Briefly, I find your thoughts on energy and economy and on peace and stillness to resonate strongly with mine and I hope to discuss this further after I have read more of what you have to say.
Let heart and mind be one,
Yours,
N.