The Motivation For Liberation
Our motivation for liberation has to be more powerful
than the dream state in which we live.
We cannot just think or read our way out of our illusory state; we have to actually see, and realise that that moment of seeing is our reality. Words are hollow unless the meaning is personally experienced.
Words do not impress. Recognition in experience does. And it’s quite a shock to realise that we have conformed to a stereotypical illusion.
Fixating on words is close-minded, and creates a cascade of reactions.
Liberation is open-minded, and brings confidence, free from reactions.
BUDDHA IN THE MUD is a blog - a living book based on the Dzogchen teachings. Our teacher is life, and life is karma. We are all Buddhas in the mud of concepts. 
Thanks for these insights, Tony. Let me quote a bit of the daoist Zhuangzi, to further your point about words being ultimately meaningless. It’s the *experience* that constructs our reality, not the definition that words try to impart to it.
“Nature is constantly changing, becoming, transforming [. . .] Yet language can make sense only by fixing a meaning in words and names. It freezes the course of changing nature and constructs another fictitious or linguistic world “grammatically.” So “words are not blowing breath. Words have worded, but what a word worded is never determined” (Zhuangzi) (2/3). In other words, language does not represent nature accordingly and properly, so why should we trust it or take it seriously?” (LIBERATION AS AFFIRMATION: The Religiosity of Zhuangzi and Nietzsche, by Ge Ling Shang)
In his treatment of the daoist Sage’s writings, Mr Shang introduces a very different take on Zhuangzi, from what I understand. This is why I am continuously amazed by how the daoists understood the Dharma despite the geographical improbability of their having had interactions with the Buddha, proving, in my opinion (which is what all truths are, essentially, according Mr. Shang’s interpretation of Zhuangzi) that these things are universal truths which can only be proven again and again.