What about names?

Some things need to be named. Otherwise, we go mad. Otherwise, we can't speak: to ourselves, to one another.

Some things need not be named.  They belong with the caotic, with the chasm. They strip us bare, take away our frame of reference. We can barely touch them. And yet, they need not be, and ought not to be named.

If we want to attain contact with anything beyond our present experience, we need to balance both: the nameable and the unfathomable. 

We won't be able to expand our awareness if we always play it safe, staying within the bounds of the concepts we know. 

We won't be able to direct our progress if we surrender our aims to nothingness (or everythingness, more or less the same thing).

In meditation, we aim at something, then we let go. One, then Zero. Then we come back. And we are no longer exactly the same.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet... but if we wanted to refer to it, after losing ourselves in its sweetness, we still would need to name it.

However, we don't need to deceive ourselves by believing having a name for them means we know everything about roses. Suzanne Vega sang:

"If language were liquid, it would be rushing in.

Instead here we are, in a silence more eloquent than any word could ever be.

These words are too solid, they don't move fast enough to catch the blur in the brain,

that flies by and is gone."