Living Words

There is a wonderful teaching in Zen about words that are alive and words that are dead. Living words arise spontaneously. They are fresh, creative and original, like life itself. Living words are always born new and innocent in each moment. They never carry the carcass of the past with them. Living words can only arise from the heart in this very moment.

When one speaks or writes living words, there is never any thought of what one is going to say. It is as much a surprise to the speaker or writer as it is to the one who hears it or reads it. This is why living words can only come from the heart and never from the mind.

Dead words come from the mind. They come from the past. It may be a thought you had only a second earlier that you feel like sharing. But this is already dead. When we speak about things we read or events we remember, we are dragging the past into the present. We are speaking dead words.

If we speak purely from our heart, if the past and future completely disappear, then words can be re-born and become living words. We don’t need to analyze words, speech or writing to know which are living words and which are dead words. This would be impossible for the mind. Fortunately our heart always knows.

It’s something we can pay attention to in our own life. Are we speaking living words? Are words flowing spontaneously from our heart, from a place beyond the mind and thoughts? Do they flow effortlessly as if we, as an individual person, are not speaking them? Do they seem to have a wisdom far beyond our own. Are they perfectly suited to this moment and the one they are spoken to?

Or are we merely speaking our thoughts? Is it just a rehash of things we have thought before, perhaps combined in a new way? Are we merely regurgitating things we have read or heard that we believe are true? Or that simply sound good? If so, these are dead words and they keep us and our listener from being fully present. They keep us from being truly alive.

Notice if any teachers or experts you have read or heard speak use living words or dead words? You cannot notice this with the mind. The mind loves hearing new facts and intriguing information. The mind loves being entertained. The mind loves dead words. It doesn’t really know what to make of living words.

The mind also doesn’t know what to make of Truth. Truth can only be in the present moment as this is all that is real. And the mind lives in the past. Lets say you need to make a speech or simply speak to someone tomorrow. You plan out in your mind what you are going to say. If it is a speech, you may even practice it. In your mind you are imagining that tomorrow will be exactly like today just one day later. You are imagining a whole scenario for how you hope the speech or discussion will go. When tomorrow comes you are so focused on what you imagine is going to happen that you completely miss what is actually going on. You take words that may have been appropriate yesterday when you were planning them and bring them into today where they may not be appropriate to this moment at all. And you wouldn’t even realize this. This is speaking with dead words. This is bringing the dead past into the living present.

It takes a great deal of trust and faith in the present to surrender all that mental planning and imagining and simply be in the moment and speak spontaneously from that moment. It doesn’t mean you can’t prepare facts or information you may need. But be fully present and speak to that present. Don’t carry the corpse of the past with you into the present. It kills your awareness of the present and it kills your life.

When you use living words, you are alive. When you use dead words you are dead and so are the ones who hear you. You kill everything with dead words. The whole world becomes dead, trapped in the past.

When you are present you are aware of everything. You are aware of what your audience needs to hear in that exact moment. You are no longer caught in “I, I, I”. “I want to share this.” “I need them to hear or do this.” “I hope they like me and what I am going to say.” This limits your entire reality to just the “I”. When you do this you have drastically limited and chocked off the reality of life in this moment. When you do this you are disconnected from life. This is what it means to speak with dead words. This is what it means to carry the corpse of the past into the living present.

Speak with living words. Be present. Let the present take care of itself. If you are fully present you will know exactly what to say in each moment. It is not your mind that will be speaking, but your heart, your entire being.