Musings on the inadequacy of words to define reality....
Unless one starts feeling raw pain, suffering or happiness, without pigeon- holing it into conceptualized compartments, the experience and the understanding of it is often incomplete. The psychological ideation of experience kills its beauty and any direct contact with it. When the Buddha held up a rose in front of his disciples as a sermon, only Ananda kept quiet and smiled without any ratiocina tion about it ; or when Gertrude Stein wrote : 'A rose is a rose is a rose', she indicated the "factualness" of things that are self evident and needs no further elaboration. The point is that the process of labeling is merely a socially convenient contrivance , and the moment it takes on the mantle of reality then we are in serious trouble. The other day I heard somebody telling me that she was going through a "Mid life crisis". Now, in one single pithily defined phrase, she has wrapped her entire gamut of feelings and thoughts spread over years into a snug little