The Sheer Terror of Moving Past Words
(But do it anyway)
Anything you understand thru language is thru a map. A map is not the territory.
Words are a pale representation of our actual experiences. Try using words to communicate what it was like to have a peak experience; you can’t.
To break the cycle of divisiveness and conflict in our world, we must go past words.
I can say “we are one” every day for the rest of my life, but it doesn’t mean a damn thing until you and I go through the profound experience of feeling 100% connected.
So… how do you do this?
Moving past words is terrifying. It takes a commitment to behaviors others call crazy, unhinged, even “off the deep end.”
Hiking to Machu Picchu, I had a blissful hour in which neither my friends nor any other hikers were nearby. I was walking a trail first carved in the 15th century by the Inca, leading to a place hidden from the world for centuries. I lost my sense of time, and for a moment, the present expanded into the 15th century. Words can’t capture how I felt.
Chase stillness, rather than activity. Cut distractions out of your life. Leave everything behind but your willingness to learn from the universe.
When I say “learn from the universe,” I don’t mean read more Substack newsletters or spend an entire night on YouTube. I mean empty your mind. Turn your whole body into a receiver. Chant. Lie silently in nature.
A perfectly still mind is how you signal the universe that you are open to receiving guidance. It is how you download wisdom and insights.
I believe the most powerful insights do not come from our brains; they come from elsewhere. If true, words aren’t the signal—they’re the static.
To receive true signals, get rid of the noise.
Translation: move past words.
This is an incredibly difficult lesson to learn. I am writing today’s piece based on notes I took 18 years ago. Every now and then, I move past words. Most days, words separate me from universal wisdom.
Rather than give you more words, I’ll stop here. This shift—the movement past language—is not safe, not linear, and not for the faint of heart. But if you're ready, you already know what to do.
A plug here for psychedelics! I had two mushroom experiences decades ago that gave me an assignment that shaped my life:
Empress of the World: I was sitting cross-legged on my bed when everything became very calm. Unusually, surreally so. The future was up to me, and what I had to do was “let everything land in my lap.” I was to accept reality with no resistance or drama or story. Reality is what is regardless of any opinion about it, and I was to anchor myself in this primary perception. I sensed that if even one person practiced total acceptance, and the challenge was for it to be me, it would be the pivot for humanity to get to a new place.
Cosmic Remorse: A group experience was led by a guide who gave us “heroic doses.” We had been asked to go back and back and back to where we had come from when all of a sudden I wooshed into my current reality from some infinite place, beyond the beyond, like my small self had come from an infinitely larger existence where everything, including me, was sacred. This led to uncontrollable sobbing “for ever having doubted myself.”
If one cannot stop talking, one can never experience inexpressibility.