Words are not enough

Ordinary experiences can be expressed easily in conventional language. The rub lies with the mystic's experience when his consciousness undergoes a change.... Language cannot keep pace with the seer's progress in awareness where, as Sri Aurobindo says, 'All things, in fact, begin to change their nature and their appearance; one's whole experience of the world is radically different.

There is a new, vast and deep way of experiencing, seeing, knowing, contacting.' It obliges the seeker and the student to adopt a 'much more subtle holistic and organic' interpretation of the mystic's utterances.

Mystic experiences transcend sensory perceptions too. The Katha Upanishad says, 'What is soundless, not palpable, formless, imperishable, likewise tasteless, constant adoreless, without beginning, without end, higher than the great, stable....' To give expression in words to the glimpse of such reality, a seer feels short of words and resorts to riddles, paradoxes, contradictions and mythological devices.


The Buddhists call knowledge that comes from such an experience as 'absolute knowledge' because it is not based on classification, abstractions and is not relative and approximate.