words

Language and concepts are the illusion. Words create it. When we speak, we communicate on the level of that illusion. When we identify with words, try to find truth in words, try to find life in words, try to find ourselves in words, we become confused.

There is nothing in any of it. Words are only pale reflections, pointers at best. Life is silent. Wordless. Life is underneath and all around the words. The words only represent conceptual distinctions of our own creation. A complex, self-referrential system of relatively defined processes, utterly distinct from life itself.

Life is. I am. That's all there is to know. The rest is purely practical.

I am as I am, and I am not an independent, fully conscious entity among billions of other independent, fully conscious lifeforms. Everything and everyone is part of an unfathomable process which we have little say over. There has never been anything personal in anything that has happened "to me". It's all a collection of stories and interpretations, words upon words. They have as much reality as I've ascribed to them.

If I can be like the duck, able to receive a peck on the tail, flap my wings and move on, without creating a story about it, knowing there's nothing personal in being pecked by another duck, then what is there to hold onto and carry around in my head? I can just be as I am, let others be as they are, let everything be as it is. Just feel the pain, flap my wings and carry on paddling around with the other ducks.

The only useful words are yes and no. It's either a yes or a no, in all things. This is all that needs to be identified and communicated. When is it a yes for me and when is it a no?

Simple.

(note: wrote this near some ducks)