The Finger on the Glass

 

By Avikal E. Costantino

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

It’s 1970. I am 20 years old, deep in the student movements shaking the Western world, convinced that language—manifestos, speeches, the right words in the right order—can change everything.

One winter evening I have dinner at a mutual friend’s house. There is a girl there, Alessandra, almost four years younger than me. There is an immediate, unmistakable attraction between us. At some point she moves her index finger slowly in a circle on the rim of her glass, looks me in the eyes, and says: “Too bad I will never be able to communicate to you in words what I am feeling right now touching the glass.”

I remember the stillness that fell inside me. Not confusion—recognition.

She had named, with quiet precision, something I had carried since childhood: an inner laceration I had never found words for. The unbridgeable distance between what I feel, what I am, and what I can actually convey to another human being through language.

Needless to say, that attraction turned into love.

For years I lived with that gap as a kind of private affliction. I was drawn to words. I read everything, I argued passionately, I wrote. But beneath all of it was this uncomfortable awareness that the most important things—the quality of a particular afternoon light, the feeling of a hand on my shoulder, the way love opens something wordless in the chest—could not survive translation into language. Something was always lost. Or more precisely: language could only point at the edge of experience, never enter it.

10 years later I found in the words of my master, Osho, the same understanding—but with something more.

Not just the acknowledgement of the gap, but an invitation to explore the space between words, the space that silence holds.

“You taste something. Is there a way to describe it? You smelled a perfume; you listened to music. You have the experience of it and it’s intriguing. You can tell what happened to you, but you can’t tell exactly what it was. Language was created by people for worldly matters. For the sacred there is only silence.”

This became one of the compasses of my life. But there is a second layer to this problem, one that took me longer to see.

The difficulty with language is not only its inherent limitations—the fact that words are symbols pointing at experience, never the experience itself. There is something else: the way we use language as a form of protection, often without knowing it.

Most of the words we use daily did not originate in us. They arrived from parents, teachers, cultural expectations, the unspoken rules of the environments we grew up in. We absorbed them before we were old enough to question them. They told us what success should look like, how love ought to feel, which parts of ourselves were acceptable and which needed to be kept hidden.

I call this inner authority the Inner Judge. You will recognize its voice. It says: I should be more. I must try harder. I can’t change. I’ve always been this way. It compares, it predicts and it warns. And it shapes, quietly and continuously, what we say and what we leave unsaid.

When I look back at my younger self, convinced that the right words could change the world, I can see how much of my own language was a performance. Articulate, passionate, and filtered.

Expressing what was acceptable, not always what was alive.

The gap between experience and expression is not only a philosophical puzzle. It is lived daily, in the small moments: when you want to say something tender and what comes out is ironic. When you want to ask for help and what comes out is a complaint. When you want to say I love you and what comes out is nothing at all.

What I have been exploring in my own life and in decades of work with others, is whether a different kind of language is possible. Not a new vocabulary, not better technique, something more fundamental. It is a way of communicating that arises from presence rather than from the accumulated script of who we believe we are.

This requires learning to listen, first inward, then outward. What is actually happening in the body right now? What emotion is underneath these thoughts? Is this response coming from the present moment, or from an old wound that has been reactivated?

It requires the integration of mind, heart, and belly, what in many traditions is called the hara. When we speak only from the mind, our words can be precise but disconnected from what we actually feel. When the heart is also present, there is warmth and contact. When the body is included, what we say carries our whole presence, not just our analysis of it.

And it requires a particular kind of courage: the willingness to not know. To say I don’t know without that being a failure. To hold a question: Who am I, beneath everything I have been told I am?  Let it open something, rather than rushing to close it with an answer.

This is an invitation—the same one Alessandra extended to me across a dinner table in 1970, with her finger on the rim of a glass: to acknowledge what cannot be said, and then to find out what happens when we stop pretending otherwise.

I would love to know: where in your life do you feel this gap most, between what you experience and what you can say?

 

Avikal E. Costantino is a teacher and guide in the Zen and Advaita tradition who has worked with individuals and groups internationally for four decades. He is the founder of the Integral Being Institute and facilitates retreats and courses in Australia, India, Greece, and online. www.avikal.co and www.flowinginbeing.net

 

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

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