Words on Wordlessness

POLONIUS: What do you read, My Lord?
HAMLET: Words, words, words.
- Hamlet, Act I, Scene v

One of the reasons that Zen appeals so much to postmodern culture is that the greatest insights of Zen are wordless.

In Paul Reps' Zen Flesh, Zen Bones he tells a story of the first Zen patriarch, Bodhidharma, to explain his book's title. Bodhidharma was testing his disciples' progress, and they expressed their understanding of Zen to him. He commended them for their insights: "You have my flesh! You have my bones!". The last disciple simply bowed to him, remaining silent, and to him the sage said "You have my marrow." Other Zen stories make the same point, including the famous koan of the sound of one hand clapping. (A koan is a kind of Zen riddle which is designed to be unanswerable by the verbal mind. Only by silencing the verbal mind can one attain true Zen.)

The various mind sciences are increasingly recognising the vital part played by those parts of the mind which have no words. Whether the wordless part is described in terms of the "right brain", the "unconscious" or the "limbic brain" (all of which are significantly different - I don't mean to imply otherwise), these studies show that the part of us which uses words and which we inevitably consider to be "me" (because it alone has the word "me") is not the part that makes some of our most important judgements and decisions.

In his fascinating book The Man Who Tasted Shapes, Richard Cytowic depicts the mechanism of decision as a dialogue between the cerebral cortex, traditionally regarded as the "thinking", distinctively "human" part of the brain, and the limbic system, or "mammalian" brain. In older terms, we could call these the head and the heart, because the limbic system is concerned with emotions.

As Pascal shrewdly remarked, "the heart has its reasons that reason does not know" (Pensées, iv.277), or as a friend of mine puts it, we decide emotionally and justify rationally. This is an entirely normal process, and we shouldn't be ashamed to admit it. Before reading Cytowic's book, I had come up with a way of describing it in terms of the "does-it-fit machine" (equivalent in role to the limbic brain) and the "rationalisation machine" (the cerebral cortex). In other terms, the cortex proposes, but the limbic brain disposes; it assigns weighting and positive or negative values to the factors in a situation presented to it by the cortex, and gives a judgement, which the cortex then reframes as a rational argument if required.

This is why, throughout this work, I will be referring (using words, inevitably and somewhat unfortunately) to approaches and techniques that attempt to quiet the verbal part of the brain, and to activate and make more accessible the insights of other parts of the brain. We do, whether we perceive it or not, use all of our brain in our lives, not just the verbal part. It would be a mistake to concentrate our becoming only on the part of the brain which can articulate its selfconsciousness verbally.

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