The Limit
When I was a young teenager a film came out which I really enjoyed but which at the time was slated by the critics. The film was “Wolf” with Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer. A line from that movie has stuck with me since:
“Life is mystical. It’s just that we are used to it”
No linguistic construction can penetrate reality beyond the confines of human interests. Language is a tool, and a creative one at that. In fact language and linguistic construction is about the purest expression of human creativity.
Unlike the creativity of a visual artist which reshapes existing phenomena according to innate vision, language comes straight through from that place in consciousness from where the movement we call creativity issues. Not that we need to endorse a substance dualism like Descartes. Merely to recognise, if only nominally, a distinction between the form of creativity and the form of the created which are, being mutually implicated, inseparable in actuality. Creativity, or our concept of creativity, depends on creation, just as creation depends on creativity. Mutually dependent, they distinct forms empty of independent self-existence.
One of the names for God is Islam is Al Haq, the Real. The ultimate in East Asian Mahayana is named Dharmakaya, the body of the Dharma, which is reality. Thus far (to use the above examples as naming just two markers for the ultimate boundary) can linguistic construction go, and no further. The ultimate reality cannot be encapsulated since all language is shaped according to the interests of the human form and as such is limited.
However, the movements of that place in consciousness which are transformed and expressed through language, but which place itself is not readily (or possibly at all) graspable through language, is the place where the purest expression of reality emerges to experience. Here, the universal and the particular are not separate, not yet separated. Neither here are the dualities of subject and object, of being and time. It is the very hinge of all subsequent elaboration, objectification, abstraction, construction.
And though it is the very foundation of both the experience of the world and our own experience, it is nevertheless beyond objectification.
Life is mystical. And language can only ever go so far.