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Main Index
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that he has not felt the inadequacy of ordinary language, that simply shows he has never felt love, he has never felt any meditative moment, he has not known ecstasy. His heart beats no more; he is just a corpse. He lives and yet lives not. He moves, walks, but all his gestures are empty; they contain nothing.
If a man has not felt the inadequacy of the prose language -- the empirical language, the language of facts, mathematics -- that simply shows that he has not experienced any mystery of life, that he has not been living really. Otherwise, how can you avoid the mysteries? That he has never seen the full moon in the night; that he has never seen the beauty and the splendour of human eyes. That he has never laughed, that he has never cried; that he does not know what tears signify. That he is a robot. He is not man, he is not human -- he is inhuman. He is just a machine. He works, he earns, and then he dies. He reproduces and then he dies. But in vain -- he cannot say why he lived in the first place.
It is true that this kind of language is needed, it is a need, but even if all the needs are fulfilled, the ultimate need remains unfulfilled by it -- the need to celebrate, the need to rejoice; the need to have a dialogue with the stars and the ocean and the sand; the need to hold hands, the need to fall in love, the need to dance and sing. The ordinary language cannot fulfill that ultimate need, and that ultimate need is what is specific to humanity.
A man is man only in so far as he lives in that ultimate need.
In questions of love and death and God and man, the first language is not only inadequate but also dangerous. If you use the first kind of language for the ultimate concerns of life, by and by your very language will destroy them. That's how we have destroyed God. That's how we have destroyed all that is beautiful and significant. Use wrong language and sooner or later you will be trapped by the wrong language, because your mind lives through language. You know only that which comes into your language; you know only that which you can clearly think about.
If you have dropped the vague world of heart, the vague world of
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