It Is Never the Thing Itself
It is almost never the thing itself that harms or heals us; it is our relation to the thing.
Take smallpox: once, it devastated entire civilizations. Now it is, for all practical purposes, powerless against us. The agent did not undergo some grand metaphysical transformation; our relation to it changed. Through knowledge, medicine, and a different mode of interaction, the same phenomenon came to occupy a different place within human life.
The same is true of language: if someone says, “I hate you,” those words may land with tremendous force for an English speaker. To someone who only speaks Swahili, however, the same sounds are little more than noise. The vibrations are the same. What differs is the relation consciousness has to them — the way those sounds are received within the container.
This is part of what I mean in A Philosophical War when I speak of language as a double agent: it can help point toward Verity, giving just enough structure for experience to be shared. But it can also turn against us, ossifying perception, reanimating old beliefs, and creating unrealities which consciousness must then suffer.
Words do not act alone. Illnesses do not act alone. They act through relation to. They act through the conditioned ways both Being and consciousness receives them.
This is why I say that so many of our problems are, at root, problems of education. Not education in the narrow institutional sense, but education as the cultivation of relation. If we do not understand what a virus is, how it moves, how the body may come into a different relation with it, then we remain at its mercy. If we do not understand what a word is, how it has been formed, inherited, and loaded with old meanings, then we remain at its mercy in much the same way. There are very few problems, if any, that would remain unchanged were our relations transformed at the level of consciousness itself.
But relation cuts both ways. The same patterning that can free us can also imprison us. The same linguistic capacity that allows the phrase “I love you” to carry warmth can allow “I hate you” to carry a force drawn less from the present moment than from inherited wounds, accumulated memory, and prefashioned interpretation.
This is why corescence (the capacity to be with that which consciousness draws itself towards) matters so much in our philosophical war. Again, to coresce is to be with a happening as it is, rather than as history insists it must be. It is to encounter phenomena prior to the full takeover of concept. In corescence, the word, the illness, the system, or the insult does not vanish; but its meaning is no longer dictated solely by old scripts.
The point is not invincibility. The point is clarity. What is happening is a relation, not an absolute verdict descending from some external world.
Nothing is simply out there acting upon us in isolation. What takes place does so within the living container of consciousness, as a relation between one part of the happening and another. And once that is seen deeply - rather than merely asserted conceptually - a different responsibility comes into view: we are not merely victims of words, germs, or systems. ………We are custodians of the relations that give them power.
