Before the Words

There is an old passage in the Zhuangzi that Ram Dass used to reference. The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you have the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you have the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you have the meaning, you can forget the words.

The obvious reading of the passage is that words are provisional. They're a mechanism for delivering meaning, and once the meaning has arrived, the mechanism can drop away. Serious readers of the traditions have always known this. The scripture is the trap. The realization is the fish. Some who arrive at the realization stop reading scripture entirely and no longer need to. The words did their work.

There's a less-obvious reading that Zhuangzi doesn't quite spell out but that the whole passage implies. If words exist for the meaning they carry, then the meaning is the primary thing and the words are the delivery vehicle. And a delivery vehicle is one option among several. Words can carry meaning. So can music. So can silence. So can images and gestures and specific arrangements of time. There is no reason to think meaning only arrives through the vehicle of language, or that a person must have language for a meaning before the meaning has actually arrived.

The meaning can come first. The words can come later. The having is real either way.

This dispatch is about a specific case of that phenomenon in my own life, and about what it says about how the perennial recognitions actually move through the world.

I. The album that arrived before the words

I was sixteen or seventeen the first time I really listened to Tool's Lateralus. It's an album released in 2001 by a rock band who by that point had been doing serious work for a decade, though I didn't know any of that at the time. I knew the album was doing something. I knew the doing mattered. I couldn't have told you what it was doing or why it mattered, but I received it as if it were addressed to me personally, and I kept receiving it, on repeat, for years.

There were no words available to me then for what the album was. I had no vocabulary for perennial philosophy. I had never heard the word lila or maya or fana. I had not read Watts or Ram Dass. The Zhuangzi passage above would have meant nothing to me. What I had was the album, and a specific state that the album produced in me when I listened to it, and the certain sense that the state was pointing at something real that the ordinary run of my life did not know how to point at.

Now, decades later, with the vocabulary in hand, I can see what the album was actually doing. And what I see is that everything I understand now was already in the reception then. The words did not add the meaning. The words let me name what I had already been given.

II. What the album is doing

Lateralus, the album's title track and centerpiece, is built on the Fibonacci sequence. The syllable counts of the verses spiral through the sequence — 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 — the vocal line moves in and out of increasing rhythmic complexity, and the whole song's structure mirrors the mathematical relationship that appears in nautilus shells, spiral galaxies, the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower, the branching of a river system. This is not decoration. The song is built on the Fibonacci sequence because the perennial recognition the song is doing has always understood that the mathematical structures underlying the physical universe are the same structures underlying consciousness. The universe unfolds by the same rule that consciousness unfolds by. To build a song out of the Fibonacci sequence is to say, at the level of the song's architecture, that the song is participating in the same pattern the universe participates in. The medium is the message.

The lyrics carry the recognition explicitly. Spiral out. Keep going. The whole song is a meditation on the movement outward from the constructed self — the self that clings to its boundaries and calls the boundaries security — into the wider pattern the self is a small local instance of. The lateral thinking the album is named for is the recognition that the ordinary linear self is trapped inside a frame, and that stepping outside the frame is possible, and that the stepping outside is what the whole of the tradition means when it uses words like liberation or moksha or awakening. The song does not use those words. It doesn't need to. It puts the listener into the movement the words describe.

Parabola is doing different work in the same territory. Where Lateralus is the outward spiral, Parabola is the arc of the incarnation — the descent of consciousness into form, the specific pain of being embodied, and the recognition that the pain is inseparable from the joy. Embrace this moment. Remember, we are eternal. All this pain is an illusion. The last line is easy to misread as a spiritual bypass, and Maynard knows this because Maynard is a careful writer, and the surrounding song does not permit the bypass. The pain is called illusion not to dismiss it but to name what the perennial traditions have named across every culture, which is that suffering is real inside the frame of the self and dissolves at the level the self dissolves at, and both things are true at the same time. The song holds both things without letting either defeat the other. It is the same recognition the crucible dispatch on this site was built around, arriving through an entirely different medium.

The Grudge, the album's opening track, is a teaching on the calcification that grievance produces in the practitioner. The song traces what happens when the ordinary self takes an injury and refuses to let it move through — the injury becomes identity, the identity becomes prison, the prison becomes a life. And then, in the song's climb into its final passage, the release. Let it go. Repeated, insisted on, screamed. This is not therapeutic advice. It is the specific teaching the traditions have delivered in a thousand vocabularies. The clinging that produces the suffering. The letting-go that permits the suffering to release. The song does not explain the teaching. It performs the teaching. A listener does not learn about letting go by listening to The Grudge. A listener enacts letting go, at the register of the body and the register of attention, for the duration of the song. The song is the practice.

The rest of the album carries the same work in other keys. I won't walk through every track. The reader who wants to hear what I am pointing at can go listen. What I want to name is that this is not an album that contains occasional spiritual references. This is an album that was constructed, deliberately and precisely, to do perennial work at every level of its architecture — the mathematics of its structure, the language of its lyrics, the sequencing of its tracks, the very sound design of its production. It is a serious piece of religious art in a form the tradition does not usually recognize as religious art.

III. The delivery

There is a question in this that I want to sit with rather than resolve. How did I receive what the album was doing, at fifteen or sixteen, without any of the words? What was the mechanism?

The traditional answer, which I now have the vocabulary to state, is that the recognitions the album is doing are structural features of consciousness itself, not culturally-constructed beliefs. They are available to consciousness whenever consciousness is prepared to receive them, in whatever form consciousness has access to. What the album does, structurally, is arrange sound and time and language in a way that induces the state the recognitions point at. A listener who is prepared to receive the state does receive it. The receiving does not require prior belief. It does not require vocabulary. It requires only the being that is prepared.

I was prepared. I don't know why. Some readers of this dispatch will have been prepared for different works and will know exactly the phenomenon I am describing from those works. Some will have been prepared for none of them and will not know what I am talking about. The distribution of who is prepared for what, at what age, is one of the more interesting questions the tradition has never fully answered. The tradition acknowledges the phenomenon — Krishna in the Gita says the practitioner who fell short in the previous life picks up where they left off in the next — but it does not fully explain why some fifteen-year-olds are prepared to receive a specific rock album as if it were addressed to them personally.

Maynard, the album's vocalist and primary lyricist, has been famously cagey across his career about explaining what his lyrics mean. Interviewers have tried to get him to unpack specific songs and he consistently declines. I met him once, briefly, at his winery in Jerome, Arizona. The person you meet in that context is a rock star and behaves like one — engaging, funny, a little wary. But there is something in him that runs deep and does not want to be surfaced in an interview or a conversation with a stranger. My read on this, for what it's worth, is that his cageyness is not mysticism-as-performance. It is the practitioner's recognition that the thing falls apart when it's explained to a person who doesn't already have it. The words about the meaning are a very different thing from the meaning itself, and words about the meaning delivered to someone who has not yet received the meaning through the actual work create only a conceptual placeholder that blocks the actual reception.

This is what Ramana Maharshi meant when he said the highest teaching is silence.

The extremity of Ramana's own case is worth pausing on because it is the phenomenon this dispatch is built around, taken to its furthest edge. When Ramana was sixteen, sitting alone in his uncle's house in Madurai, a sudden and overwhelming fear of death seized him for no external reason. He was in good health. Rather than flee the fear, something in him turned to face it and asked, in effect, who is the one dying. He lay down, held his breath, made his body as still as a corpse, and inquired directly into what remained when the body was treated as already dead. What he found, and later described plainly in his own words, was that when the body was gone the I was still present, awake, aware. Not the body-I. Something else. That recognition, in one sitting, at sixteen, without teacher or scripture or philosophical framework, was the beginning of everything he later taught. He had no vocabulary for what he had recognized. The Advaita tradition he came to be identified with was not something he had studied. The words he later used to point at his recognition were developed after the fact, as seekers began to come to him and he needed language to bridge from what he had received to what they had not yet. But the receiving was complete in that single sitting. Sixteen years old, in a room in Madurai, with no preparation. The recognition arrived on its own terms and did not require the words to be already in place.

His teaching that silence is the highest transmission comes from the direct experience of having received the recognition in silence himself. It is what Wittgenstein reached from the direction of philosophy when he wrote that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. It is what the koan tradition institutionalized. Maynard is not hiding the meaning. He is honoring it by refusing to substitute talk for delivery. His art is the delivery. If the art works on you, you have the meaning. If it doesn't, no amount of him talking about it would give you the meaning that the art itself couldn't. This is a serious position and it is the position the traditions have always taken about their most refined teachings.

IV. The recognitions do not wait

The whole premise of this site is that the perennial recognitions are structural features of the human situation, not cultural inheritances confined to a specific tradition. They arise wherever the conditions permit. The great classical texts of the traditions are records of the recognitions coming through when the conditions permitted, in the forms available to the cultures in which they arose. The Upanishads. The Tao Te Ching. The Sermon on the Mount. Rumi's Masnavi. The Cloud of Unknowing. Each of these was, in its time, an art form. Each did the work of the tradition through the medium available. Each is a delivery vehicle.

There is no reason the recognitions would have stopped coming through when the medium of scripture gave way to other media. The recognitions do not care about the medium. They come through wherever a person is prepared to receive them and wherever the conditions of the work are arranged to permit them. Watts talked about jazz. Ram Dass talked about the psychedelics that arrived in his generation. Terrence Malick makes films that do the work in cinema. Certain poets and novelists have done the work in their forms. And a rock band in the late 1990s and early 2000s made an album that did the work in rock.

The tradition of the recognitions is not the tradition of the specific texts that carry them. It is the tradition of the recognitions themselves, which arrive in whatever medium a serious practitioner is working in when the practitioner has the recognitions to deliver. The medium changes. The recognitions do not. The delivery finds the listener who is prepared, and the listener receives, and the meaning enters the listener whether or not the listener has any words at all for what has entered.

This is what the reader of this dispatch may have experienced with their own version of the phenomenon — a film that reached them at seventeen and that they only understood at thirty-seven, a novel that opened them at twenty, an album, a painting, a specific conversation with a stranger. If the reader has had this experience with any work, the reader knows exactly what I am describing. The work was doing something serious. The reader was prepared to receive it. The reception was real. The words came later, and when they came, they let the reader name what they had been given. But the giving was already complete.

The Zhuangzi passage that opened this piece is usually read as a teaching about the disposability of words once the meaning has been received. Read the other way, it is a teaching about the priority of meaning over its delivery. Words exist because of meaning. Once you have the meaning, you can forget the words. And, unspoken but implied — the meaning can arrive by any vehicle capable of carrying it. Once you have the meaning, the specific vehicle was never the point. The point was always the meaning.

The album is the vehicle. The meaning arrived through it. The words came later. The recognitions were there all along, and they were there before I had any way of naming them, and I received them as fully as I would have received them from any scripture had I encountered a scripture first. This is not, in the tradition's terms, a lesser reception. This is what the tradition has always described. The recognitions arrive when consciousness is prepared, in whatever form consciousness has access to. Some traditions call this grace.

Spiral out. Keep going.

This dispatch follows Dispatch 14: The Beloved Withdrawn in chronological order, and shares the holding-both recognition of Dispatch 12: The Crucible, there arriving through the maximum instance a human life can be subjected to, here through a rock album received whole at sixteen.