Words can lead us in the wrong direction

Words have either the magic of wisdom, or the magic of deception.

Sometimes, language can be misleading: this why it is so important to understand words within a context. In modern English, words seem to reinforce only our mental-physical existence, and never our spiritual being. Words can be used to keep us down – but the same words can open us up. So we have to choose them carefully.

The use of sloppy text-speak is particularly worrying.

If we are not precise about the words we use, the true meaning (in certain contexts) disappears, and we come to rely on a conventional fashion of understanding. We may lose our ability to express spiritual qualities. More and more meaningless words are being created by the ‘new world’, giving rise to confusion. Neurolinguistics has a magical deceptive effect on the brain and mind, as we are highly suggestive.

Words are magical. Words are spells. They can express feelings and experiences that are very subtle, and that open up previously unnoticed universes. Or they can limit us and imprison us…and we will not even notice! I sometimes wonder if this is done on purpose to dull our experiences: we may find one day that we have no words to describe spiritual experiences, and so ignore the experiences themselves. We dumb ourselves down, and so lose intelligence.

Take the word pretentious:
Pretentious: attempting to impress, by affecting greater importance or merit to ourselves than we actually possess. In other words trying to be what we are not!

On a social level, this is aimed at others and meant as a negative attack on them: it is often used in the same way as the word ‘ego’. The person being accused of being pretentious is merely a product of neurolinguistic programming, manifesting the idea of being better than others, in a social context. Pretentiousness and ego do not actually exist, they are merely games of the mind.

Consider this:
As sentient beings, we all attempt to impress by affecting greater importance or merit to ourselves, and so obscuring our Buddha nature. We are sentient precisely because we believe in this puffed-up “I”, which has been created by a mistaken view of reality. Additionally, society that has been excited into believing that getting to the top of the ladder in conventional reality is important.

At death, this is all irrelevant!

As sentient beings we all have the potential of Buddha nature, but give greater importance or merit to our mental-physical selves than our true nature. Again, this is the effect of nurture – corporate social ideals which waste our precious time, wealth and energy.

However, as sentient beings, we should impress upon ourselves and others a greater importance to the Buddha qualities we all actually have. We are allowed to be that pretentious! We are sentient, and so we are deluded about our true nature. As practitioners we just have to live with that, until these delusions drop away.

We sometimes (quite often) meet those with extra puffed-up-ness 😉 , who elaborate themselves to the point of spending most of their lives working hard to impress others who are, in turn, trying to impress everyone else. It’s a really silly battle! It’s madness! Why spend one’s life trying to impress those that are deluded?

Deceptive magic – ‘bettering our self’. Perceptive magic – ‘there is no self to better’

In the mean time we have to practice, we have to pretend to be enlightened.

If we have to
…pretend/practice..
…pretend/practice…
to become Bodhisattvas
(working for the benefit of others)
then one day, when we realise our wisdom nature,
we will no longer have to pretend.