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By giving a false picture of reality via the imposition of human categories and classifications the reality we view through our conceptual intellects is merely the shifting phantasmorgia of our words mere bubbles of words casting shadows over our minds and rendering reality falsely. Through our minds clouded over with words we overlay the real with fictions of our minds mere phantasms of our imaginings. A world of word play a mere deception of our word chattering minds. Forms of illusion as ephemeral and as insubstantial as the multi-refracting colours shimmering and dancing through the vapors enveloping a waterfall
Mystical theology and science share a common understanding in regardto the limitations and hindrance of language in unlocking reality. Bothwould agree that language falsifies reality. It falsifies it by imposinglimits to the real. It falsifies it by imposing human categories andclassifications to the real. For both realities is beyond words andhuman concepts. Reality transcends language. Language in fact hindersa true understanding of the real. What language does is create what the Hindus’ call Maya. Namely a conventional reality based upon language-a world of appearances and forms of illusion or deception generatedby a falsifying language which an unenlightened mind takes as the onlyreality. For the physicist Bohr language is a barrier to understandingreality Dante like Lao Tzu, Pseudo-Dionysius St Augustine (354-430),St Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) Zen and many forms of Easternmysticism knew the simultaneousinapplicability and inevitability ofhuman language when talking of reality or God and his attributes anddomains. Whether the reality as investigated by science is really just another name for God or the realityinvestigated by science is just a reality and not the God of religion.In other words is God just another name for reality or is reality just another name for God is by the by. What is important is this reality/God as understood by both science and theology is beyond the ability of human language –and thus intellect tograsp
Heisenberg notes that “ the strangest experience of those years was that theparadoxes of quantum theory did not disappear during this process ofclarification; on the contrary they have become even more marked andexciting.”In regard to the paradoxes and contradictions of quantum theory Wick statethe orthodox view when he says “here my opinion of the orthodox quantummechanics, like Bohr, comes down to the meaning of words. “Classical” and“complementarity”, insult and commendation, are euphemisms; the beliefconcealed is that Nature has been found in a contradiction
Nicholas of Cusa states “... needful to enter the darkness and to admit thecoincidence of opposites beyond all grasp of reason ... [God] art foundunveiled is girt around with the coincidence of contradictories ... the doorwhereof is guarded by the most proud spirit if reason and unless he bevanquished the way in will not lie open”
To some Buddhists “... logic and meaning, with its inherent duality, is aproperty of thought and language but not the actual world”“... all our knowledge is what a Taoist would call conventional knowledge,because we do not feel that we know anything unless we represent it toourselves in words, or in some system of conventional signs as the notationof mathematics..
“Beatrice’s caution about extending human concepts beyond the horizon ofsense-experience in which we learn them applies not only to such terms as“long” “white” and “beard” but- more challengingly to such terms like “just”or “love” which may be as we say “abstract” but which we have nonethelessabstracted from our experience in this earthly world”“Dante could have learned from St Augustine (354-430) as from St ThomasAquinas (1225-74) about the simultaneous inapplicability and inevitabilityof such “human terms” and specifically of physical language and imagerywhen talking of God his attributes and domains. “As Zajak notes “particles and waves are macroscopic concepts whichgradually lose their relevance as we approach the submicroscopicdomain.”