What makes life so disorienting is that its greatest revelations and greatest transformations are inarticulable. William James knew this when he listed ineffability as the first of the four features of transcendent experiences. Everything beautiful and meaningful, from the grand elations to the small gladnesses that make life worth living, is irreducible to words, is sand slipping through the fingers of language as we try to capture it.

Although we can transcend the limits of any one language by borrowing wonderful words from others, or inventing wonderful words, there is a fundamental limit to all language, to how much of the world can be worded, how much of our experience named. And while learning to name is learning to see, unlearning to name can lift the blinders of language so we may see more clearly and more deeply into the nature of reality, into those regions of experience we can’t begin to understand — because understanding depends on explanation and explanation is language squared: the if/then logical language of mathematics merged with the narrative language of storytelling.

“Words are events, they do things, they change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her love letter to the fertile space between us. Sometimes, however, we need the eventlessness of pure being in order to reach that space within us where the most immutable truths dwell — about ourselves, about this world, about what it means to be alive.

Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973) explores what that takes in a 1967 lecture found in the excellent posthumous collection Talking Zen: Reflections on Mind, Myth, and the Magic of Life (public library), edited by his son Mark.

The deepest knowledge we have, Watts observes, is not composed of what we have learned in school or in books but of a knowing in which “there is nothing to be remembered and nothing to be formulated.” It is a knowing of what he calls “suchness,” it is achieved “only through being completely here,” and it asks of us the one thing most difficult for the human animal to do:

There is really one absolutely necessary prerequisite, and that is to stop thinking… If you talk all the time, you will never know what anyone else has to say, and therefore all you will only have to talk about is your own conversation. The same is true for people who think all the time, and I use the word think to mean taking to yourself, subvocal conversation, the constant chitchat of symbols and images and talk and words inside your skull. Now, if you do that all the time, you will find that you have nothing to think about except thinking, and just as you have to stop talking to hear what others have to say, you have to stop thinking to find what life is about. The moment you stop thinking, you come into immediate contact with what Alfred Korzybski called, so delightfully, “the unspeakable world” –that is to say, the nonverbal world. Some people would call it the physical world, but these words “physical,” “nonverbal,” and “material” are all conceptual, and it is not a concept… it is simply this.

This awareness helps correct a central misunderstanding of Zen practice, which ripples out into a broader misconception about the search for meaning:

If you really understand Zen, the Buddhist idea of enlightenment is not comprehended in the idea of the ordinary, nor in terms of the infinite, nor in terms of the finite, nor in terms of the eternal, nor in terms of the temporal. These are all concepts.

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When you are awake to the world, you suddenly find that the so-called differences between self and other, life and death, pleasure and pain, are all conceptual and they are not there. They do not exist at all in the world that simply is.

Couple with Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger on how quantum physics affirms this fundamental suchness, then revisit Watts on the ocean and the meaning of life, becoming who you really are, learning not to think in terms of gain and loss, the only real antidote to fear.