The Limits of Language and the Senses
Dear friends,
We all know how imprecise language is, and how hard it is for our words (and thoughts for that matter) to capture reality. The best we can do is an approximation. I heard a marvelous story recently on this point.
In the early days of AI and language translation, the programs were not as good as they are today. To test an early version, a programmer put in the Bible phrase, "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." The machine was asked to translate it into Russian.
Of course, the programmer could not read the Russian result, so he took the produced sentence he was given and asked the machine to translate it back into the original English. A good test. But what he got back was, "The vodka is good but the meat is terrible." :-)
Lest you think this whole newsletter is just an excuse to share this great story, let's look at the deeper meaning of this...
There are simply things that the mind and language cannot capture. We can see this in the phrase, "A picture is worth a thousand words." It is often the case that much, much more is communicated visually than verbally. But what about what cannot be captured by the senses at all?
And even the senses: dogs can simply hear things we are not even aware of. A dog's sense of smell is also infinitely more refined than ours. It is said an eagle can read a newspaper headline a mile away (at least those eagles that have learned to read, I suppose!).
These senses are great, to be sure, but what we really want to do is feel Spirit. To do that we cannot use our senses, but must develop a quiet heart so as to cultivate intuition and refined calm feeling. As Jesus said to Peter at one point, "Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven."
There is much around us that we cannot know. I have always been grateful that I can neither see nor feel all the wifi signals we are surrounded with at every moment. But there are some things we cannot sense that are truly worth becoming aware of. This requires more than our commonly used senses.
May our hearts become still enough, and our minds receptive enough, that we can move beyond what we can touch and see, and feel Spirit's gentle presence, love, and compassion at all times.
Blessings,
David G., manager
For the staff at East West