Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
meaning. For the simple fact that you have to have someone that
gives it meaning. Okay. So now let's back up a little bit. There is
one arena; I mentioned layers of an onion. So in the interval you
mentioned human tapestry, and what I call the human world of
labels and language, I refer to that as the human tapestry into
which we are born. So here I am in Pennsylvania, sitting in
Tankan in Pennsylvania, but where does Tankan in Pennsylvania
exist? If I look at the trees, I don't see Tankan in Pennsylvania, it's
like digging the ground, and I’m never going to find it. It's a noun;
it's a label, right. So in the same way the United States of America
is a label. So if I fly into Logan Airport from England, and I tell the
immigration, when he asks for my passport, and I say, "What
passport? United States is an illusion", he's going to throw me in
jail. But in fact no animal would ever mistake the United States of
America as something that's real; it doesn't exist for an animal.
WIZARD: Or a tree, the sun, and the sky?
NORIO KUSHI: Right.
WIZARD: Or everything else.
NORIO KUSHI: Yes, exactly. So the only place where meeting
really exists is in language, so the word tree means points to a
particular object in nature, okay. So the word tree means that
object. And then we make up these things like the United States of
America means this, okay, and if you want to argue with the
immigration officer, he's going to throw you in jail.
So the phantom self is a linguistic distinction, it only exists for
humans because humans' capacity for language in the human's
brain, the human brain's capacity for language, and once we've
made this human concept a noun, like a tree, then it's got to point
to something, it's got to mean something. So therefore that's the
underlying mechanism with the phantom self-obsession with
searching for meaning.
WIZARD: Labeling everything.
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