Email: On ‘Not Wasting My Words…’ (5.7.2020)

Dear Gillian

For years, I used to regularly throw my writing away, or delete it, etc. I did this because I was aware that my words and my understanding did not yet ‘match’ one another. In other words, what I felt inside was not yet honestly reproduced on the outside through ‘words’. Lecturing and teaching through verbal expression also took years to perfect. You see – ‘words’ – are personal history but they do not have to exist. Words (in whatever format) can be a) produced, b) withheld (i.e. ‘not produced’), or c) removed from existence (that is ‘deleted’, ‘altered’ or ‘purged’, etc). Today, I tend to write exactly what I feel and what I mean. I do not waste my words but treat each expression as a precious stone dug from the ground! My inner being is now able to expression itself precisely through the medium of the written word, but I also notice that this now includes the spoken word. I nolonger regret what I write, or feel like a fraud as I did when young and lacked experience and depth of understanding. Today, the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ correlate without any undue effort, and certainly no regrets. Of course, everything is timing and positioning. Words are history, but words can also be used to recreate a ‘new’ history with no past – over and over! I think we must use our words wisely, and free ourselves (and others) from the tyranny of the past. In a sense, when we realise this fact, the past can be anything we want, or non-existent. I notice indigenous cultures live very much in the ‘now’, whilst industrial cultures – due to the nature of the working day and the clock regulating the factory – are obsessed with time and use notions of time as just another means of oppressing individuals and groups. Revolution – like religion – changes time, alters time or replaces conceptions of time – creating what seems like a new beginning, or at least a different orientation of being. The cross is the sun that traverses the sky through the four seasons, whilst the star arises in evening, shines through the night, and signifies a new dawn and a new day! After-all, the sun is a star, and there is a body of early European work (upon the study of Buddhism) that equates the Buddha with the ‘sun’! Enlightenment suggests that the mind and body ‘shines’ and I have always found this a curious analogy, bearing in-mind that words (and concepts) are not to be wasted.