#language

I have always had the capacity to go within myself and to discover the silence within, the inner meditative quality, the inner source of love and truth – the inner language of silence. Now I also notice that this silence is going deeper, and that I go beyond the ego and disappear into the silence. First this brought up fear, but now I am enjoying this meditation of disappering into the silence and to be nobody. I have started experimenting with this phenomenon to understand how to consciously go beyond the ego: yesterday when I took a cofee at a restaurant, I consciously turned my attention within and disappeared into the silence, which was like finding an inner source of bliss. In aloneness, I experiment with being consciously alone as a door to be egoless. In conscious aloneness, the ego can not function. In aloneness, your are not. When I am walking, I consciously experiment with being with Existence without having the mind constantly commenting. I try to just be wordlessly with the people and situations that I meet on my walk. When I can just be with Existence, it opens the door to be one with the Whole. ↗

— Swami Dhyan Giten

#bliss #ego #existence #fear #love

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience. ↗

— Nancy Mairs

#gender #language #experience

Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies? ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#lightning #nature #rain #thunder #wind

Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me. ↗

— Kathy Acker

#life

Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* ... We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It's not heard or seen or thought it's felt. That's the original knowing. ↗

— Richard Rohr

#body-and-mind #body-image #body-language #body-mind #identity

The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes. ↗

— Courtney Love

#language #love #suicide #death

The spoken word has come to dominate many Protestant forms of worship: the words of prayers, responsive readings, Scripture, the sermon, and so forth. Yet the spoken word is perhaps the least effective way of reaching the heart; one must constantly pay attention with one’s mind. The spoken word tends to go to our heads, not our hearts. ↗

— Marcus J. Borg

#experience #faith #god #language #words

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation. ↗

— Amy Tan

#concepts #daughters #family #fear #heritage

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense. ↗

— Siri Hustvedt

#language #memory #words #imagination

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them. ↗

— Jasper Fforde

#imagination