We are possessed by our minds and crave exorcism. Language is the rope that binds us into place, the nail in the cross that fixes the transepts of duality.
With language and story, we project the world. We have imagined it, created it, defined it, limited it. It seems that we need to limit the world, our reality, in order to work with it. Language is an extremely useful tool, perhaps the most useful human tool ever invented, but in order to make it work for us we have first to tame it. And we have tamed it, brought it out of chaos, out of eternity into time, broken it into pieces that can be measured and used as building blocks to construct our world.
At the same time, we have gone too far in taming language, have taken away much of its energy out of fear that we would lose control over language and thus lose control of our minds and our world.
Thus when we use language, instead of employing it in ways that are fresh and open and creative, we instead “round up the usual suspects,” grasp the words that most quickly and easily fit, rely on habitual tendencies to pattern our language in ways that are safe and non-threatening, harness or ignore our imaginations and make them walk in familiar ruts.
We need to tame language in order to use it, in order to communicate. But we must take care not to cage it, not to remove its life force, not to disengage its resplendent charge.