Recently while fumbling an attempt to explain emptiness, I learned how short words can fall at conveying an idea as slippery as highly contxtual as emptiness. Confidence in this view relies on cumulative, experimental, playfully intuitive comtemplation. Explaining it only works if the listener already understands it to some degree. Any more explanation and it seems overly complicated. Any less and you don’t convey your point. Words must hew meaning out of a space of meanings, and often this involves whittling away at the space in one direction.

A lot of concepts that get conveyed need honing in both directions. As the world is finding out over web calls and various messaging services, different mediums carry different contexts that make conveying ideas pre-honed. The medium is the message. You need to put up multiple sets of bumpers to cushion your listeners to an idea. Or if you’re being optimally lazy in true Zen tradition, “Mu”. Often you’ll need more than two directions to narrow this spectrum of ideas to convey down to what you want. The number of directions needed to specify an idea is the dimensionality of that idea. Great ideas use perspective to reduce dimensionality to show signal through noise.

Failure to recognize something as higher dimensionality than it really is can lead to all sorts of traps in thinking. A famous koan is Ganto’s Ax. In it, a man sees two monks meditating on his lawn. He rushes out with an ax and yells at them, “If you stay on my lawn I’ll chop off your heads. If you get off my lawn, I’ll chop off your heads. If you get off on my lawn, hoo boy heads will roll.” The monks, seeing the question in the context of a higher dimension than not on the lawn, not off the lawn, simply continue meditating. The man puts down the ax, satisfied.

You can see an example of dimensionality in physical existence as percieved by our eyes and brain. Hold up a piece of paper so that the edge is a line. When you view it like this, you can only see “maximum effort” or “apathy”, “Hardcore diet” or “gluttony”, “FOX” or “MSNBC” (to beat a dead horse). When you shift your perspective you see the whole sheet. You can put in the right amount of effort, diet healthily, or be deprogrammed from hatred. It’s not the co-opted Oneness, nor the materialistic dualism. It’s not A nor not non-A. What appear to be opposites are only opposites from a certain viewpoint. When that viewpoint shifts, paradoxes unravel.

It’s false in a binary, terary, or n-ary statement. With the finite amount of perception we have via senses or sensors, measuring a situation in dimensions will inevitably confine it’s reality to those dimensions. The measurement is inherently tinged by the measurer. Does it mean they’re all the same One thing? No. Does that mean they’re disconnected? No. Does that mean that every new thing is built on existing things? Mostly, but again not always. The real Truth is too dimensional for truth as captured by words, pictures, thoughts, or concepts. You must experience beyond these limiting concepts. “‘Empty’ should not be asserted.’Nonempty’ should not be asserted. Neither both nor neither should be asserted. They are only used [for the purpose of communication].” That which can’t be typed into 160 characters, will get saved for long-form discussion. That which cannot be spoken of will be passed over in silence, ax or not. That which cannot be spoken of must be experienced.

It’s a sad fact that some sayings can’t be understood until experienced. We’ve all made seemingly large mistakes in our teens and twenties, and we usually think our past selves wouldn’t listen to our current selves’ advice. Does this make the advice less worth saying? Although I see some truth in “he who speaks does not know, he who knows does not speak.” Tao Te Ching - Chapter 56, it seems like it’s worth trying to give just the right amount of description to lay out the map but with enough freedom left to explore the territory. It may be doomed the minute you use words to capture something unconveyable by words. Then again, the payoffs might be mutually satisfying. At worst, you can say you tried, laugh at the probable miscommunication, and find fulfillment in the effort.