Be careful. The moment you start talking you create a verbal universe, a universe of words, ideas, concepts and abstractions, interwoven and interdependent, most wonderfully generating, supporting and explaining each other and yet all without essence or substance, mere creations of the mind. Words create words, reality is silent. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
This is interesting because, on one hand, I’ve heard one of my professors say that if you cannot explain your ideas, they are nothing. If you cannot make them concrete in communication, and they remain in your head, what’s the point? Legitimize them with words, share them with others in language.
At the same time, he insists that language isn’t actually that important. It’s just a byproduct of how our brains are structured. Language is not behind cognition.
An interesting contradiction, isn’t it? On the one hand, ideas for the sake of ideas may seem frivolous. On the other, language is simply a medium by which to express ideas, and is incapable of communicating them directly. As Aldous Huxeley put it in The Doors of Perception;
“Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
And of course, on the third hand, reality and our ideas about reality are two altogether different beasts.