Symbols of Symbols: Why I Keep Writing About Something That Can’t Be Written About

I’m sitting here typing words about the thing that words can’t reach.

Fingers on keys. Letters assembling into sentences. Sentences stacking into paragraphs that point at something no paragraph has ever touched. Every morning, same ritual: open the laptop, stare at the blank page, and attempt the impossible – describe what’s left when the describer isn’t there.

This is the stupidest job in the world.

The Wrong Tool for the Wrong Job

A word is a symbol. It points at something. “Tree” points at the thing outside your window with the bark and the leaves. But even that’s already a lie – the word “tree” isn’t the tree. It’s a sound that humans agreed to associate with a category of tall wooden things. The actual tree doesn’t know it’s a tree. It doesn’t know anything. It just grows.

Now take that one step further. A word like “awareness” or “self” or “truth” – these don’t even point at objects. They point at other symbols. Concepts. Abstractions of abstractions. “Awareness” isn’t a thing in the world the way a tree is a thing in the world. It’s a symbol pointing at a symbol pointing at… what, exactly?

You’re already lost. That’s the point.

Words are twice removed from what’s actually happening. They’re a map of a map. You’re reading a description of a description of something that was never a thing to begin with. And somehow, I keep writing these descriptions. And somehow, you keep reading them…

…and occasionally, something lands anyway.

The Match That Lights Itself

Here’s what I’ve noticed. The words don’t work the way you think they work.

You read an essay like this and your mind grabs the concepts, chews on them, files them under “interesting philosophy” or “pretentious nonsense” or “I wonder what’s for dinner.” The intellectual machinery does what it does. That’s fine. That’s its job.

But sometimes – not because of the words, and definitely not because of the writer – something else happens. Something between the sentences. In the gap where the concepts run out and meaning hasn’t arrived yet. A flash of recognition that has nothing to do with understanding.

Not “I get it.”

More like – the getting falls away and what’s left is what was always there.

The words didn’t do that. They can’t do that. They’re the wrong tool. They’re a hammer being used to explain that hammers don’t exist. But somehow, in the act of swinging and missing, the miss itself reveals something. The failure of language to capture this – that failure IS the teaching…

…if you stop trying to succeed at it.

What I’m Actually Doing Here

I’ll tell you what I’m not doing. I’m not teaching. There’s nothing to teach. You can’t teach someone what they already are – that’s like teaching water to be wet. The wetness is prior to the lesson.

I’m not sharing wisdom, either. Wisdom implies someone who accumulated it, and the whole point is that no one’s home to accumulate anything.

What I’m doing is closer to demolition.

Every essay is a small controlled explosion. You come in carrying assumptions – about self, about truth, about what enlightenment is supposed to look like – and the words are shaped charges placed against those assumptions. Not to replace them with better assumptions. Just to blow them up and see what’s left standing.

Usually, what’s left is nothing.

And nothing turns out to be everything.

But even that sentence is too much. Even “nothing is everything” is a concept the mind grabs and turns into a new piece of furniture for its spiritual living room. Look at my beautiful nothing. Isn’t it elegant.

No. Drop that too.

The Only Honest Thing I Can Say

I sit here every week and arrange symbols of symbols into patterns that point at what’s beyond all patterns. It’s absurd. It’s like trying to use a net to catch water – the catching IS the missing. The net is made of holes, and the water goes right through…

…which is exactly how the water gets to where it’s going.

I don’t know why this works. I don’t know why words that are twice removed from reality occasionally produce a recognition that’s zero times removed from anything. I don’t know why the wrong tool sometimes does the right thing.

What I know is this: I’m sitting here typing. The keys click. The screen fills with symbols. Outside, a bird makes a sound that means nothing and communicates everything.

These words are being read right now. Understanding is being attempted. Which is the one thing that never works…

…and also the only thing that ever has.