The words that comprise language, and thus language itself, are merely symbols, and symbols denote meaning. The meaning is what unfolds as our experience of reality, so when you approach a word and its concept, it is meant to facilitate us accessing the concept or the idea directly in order to have an experience of its reality, which we then articulate as meaning.
But words as symbols are very limited simply by virtue of their nature as non-corresponding representations of the reality to which they point. There isn’t a one to one correspondence because the word is not the reality; the word “tree” is not the tree, the word “God” is not God, so your ability to access the reality behind the word is predicated on your already inherent knowledge of that reality in the first place. So then acquiring knowledge, not of things but the Principle of things, of Reality, of Truth, that is, spiritual knowledge, represents a paradox; that on one hand, we approach a text to acquire knowledge of God, but on the other hand, to understand the text you must have prior knowledge of God already. So for instance, if you read the word “fire” without ever experiencing fire, without ever seeing or touching it, then the word “fire” will have very little meaning. You may not even be able to picture it properly in your mind, let alone simulate its experience through imagination.
So traditionally in pre-modern spiritual-religious thought, in all traditions, the notion of Divine Knowledge was always a process of remembering. The words as symbols were merely meant to reactive our ancient memory of God, of The Eternal, of Unity and Oneness. When combined with song, with prose and other poetic devices, which is a universal feature of recitation of scripture, ancient emotions and feelings, as messengers of that long forgotten Divine Memory, are revealed within us, and we may once again have Divine Knowledge. The texts will now make more sense to us, they will have meaning to us, not as projections of the ego but as reminders of true experience.
When you have higher experiences of Reality, then the words will have meaning. Prior to those higher experiences, your understanding of what the words are actually saying will be incomplete, even to the point of being oppositional in meaning and orientation. For this reason, talking about God without undergoing a spiritual practice is basically heretical, for the word “God” to us may then even point to the concept of “Devil”; indeed, when the word “God” activates feelings of oppression and narcissistic fear, it may in fact be demonic forces operating through references to God. This represents inversion, where the profane masquerades as the sacred, where disempowerment masquerades as empowerment, where the false self pretends to be the True Self.
The attempt to understand the highest Truth with the most ignorant mind will necessarily lead to total inversion. We see this amplified in modern approaches to religion, often under the banner of organized religion, but also, under the banner of alternative New Age approaches – as overcompensations – to the perception of the old ways. Both, as epistemological consequences, have emerged through the bloody evisceration of spirituality from religion through the mechanism of modernity. On a mass scale, they are like an empty corpse of the once vibrant body, the symbols no longer being understood the way they were meant to be.
Traditionally religions were understood as spiritual disciplines that revolved around cultivating the mind, the body, and the spirit in order to remember the ancient Divine Knowledge nestled in the root of Being, the Heart, which is the seat of consciousness. There are many verses, for instance, in the Qur’an that can only be fully understood when their reality is experienced to some degree, such as the verses that talk about the soul and its leaving of the body, or the verses about the soul’s journey and the Lote Tree, or the verses about God and the Divine Attributes, or the verses of Light, or the verses that describe the elements of Heaven and Hell. The same is true for the Indian texts that mention concepts such as the energy body, the “Pure White Radiant Light” as the true nature of mind, and higher states of non-attachment and उपेक्षा (Upekṣā), and so on. These are expressions of higher realities that are impossible to be understood by a mere reading and textual interpretation through reason. Interpretation goes through the filter of the mind, which in turn is based on experience. If we attempt to interpret using our experiences of worldly life, the symbols that point to non-worldly life will be reduced and made material, and thus corrupted.
Words, as symbols, are inherently tied to the spiritual path. Words have resonance by virtue of their sound structure, which is tied to their descriptive aspect. This resonance has vibrational qualities which enliven the spirit with feeling and emotion. The words of the Divine Path are spiritual symbols that revive ancient feelings and emotions that are connected to the Divine Memory. In all spiritual traditions there is the association between meditative practices and sounds, and between sounds as vibrations and colors and their frequencies, all together in order to convey Beauty as a unique experience within. Through the frequencies of sound and color, painted upon the canvass of imagination, there is the activation of that ancient memory of God. As an experience, it characterizes the very nature of Being, which is that of Beauty; this nature of Being, colored in Beauty, resonates from the physical dimension through the energy dimensions or the subtle dimensions, which is experienced through the energy or subtle body, all the way up to the Divine Presence itself. This resonance, therefore, is like a bridge that connects us to the Divine Reality, and it describes the Path of Ascension or the Path of Enlightenment that is referenced as the central premise of the various spiritual-religious traditions.
