Semantics is a tight blanket and most minds get woefully enmeshed in it. Every measure of stressful or upsetting experience has its sound track, and at some degrees of reduction in power the ability to discriminate can fall below a threshold and words themselves can seem to have energy and power. But I do not think the mind is language driven, in herenty, just that it gets language-entangled.

In the several traditions that build around meditation, it is a common theme to find an emphasis on letting go of words, and of even thoughts, and to seek to acheive a state of no-thought, consciousness without object. And many people report they have done this successfully.

Feelings, forces, and perhaps meaning itself, are more the upholstery of thought than the dinglicheit of thought itself, I think. But thought, conversely, easily gets tangled up in its own forms and symbols, and can confuse them either with outside reality or its own substance.

One path to betterment is through discriminating more and more among these things.


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