Reflection: Your Own Unsayable

Prompts to consider

• Think of an experience, aesthetic, moral, relational, or spiritual, that you have found genuinely difficult to articulate. Not merely emotionally private, but structurally resistant to language. Did you try to say it anyway? What happened to the experience in the translation?
• The apophatic traditions say the deepest reality is approached through progressive negation, stripping away inadequate descriptions rather than adding new ones. Can you think of a belief or concept you hold that might benefit from this treatment, where you would understand it better by saying what it is not than by saying what it is?
• Wittgenstein says the mystical shows itself rather than being sayable. Meister Eckhart says the highest spiritual achievement is a silence that has moved through language and out the other side. Is there a difference between the silence of someone who has nothing to say and the silence of someone who has gone beyond what can be said? What would that difference look like from the outside?