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A Lewis Carroll Koan [1]
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Date: 2025-05-11
In Through the Looking Glass, Alice finds herself in a forest where nothing has a name. This is a known ailment, a form of anomic aphasia, usually from brain damage, in which nouns vanish from the sufferer’s memory, but all the rest of language remains. Similarly one can lose verbs while retaining nouns and the rest. We can ignore all of that for our own religious purposes, while considering what it means in terms of No-Self.
The experience of No-Self takes many forms, and is expressed in many koans, as we have seen in this Diary series. In Lewis Carroll’s passage below, having no names for anything completely removes fear. This is a fantasy, but it reflects a reality, that giving people and things and ideas nasty names is an essential part of demonizing them, and seeing past the names has a wide range of benefits.
There are many phenomena in the world that have a proper purpose as long as one doesn’t become attached to them. Actually, that is true of everything. I have mentioned that I was trained as a mathematical logician and computer programmer, where binary Yes/No logic has its specific purposes, as well as a Buddhist priest able to put aside the opposites where they get in the way.
Sometime I must tell you about meditating on the cosmic waveform pervading spacetime, according to our best but inherently limited understanding of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. And then casting those names and equations and what-all aside within basic non-attachment. The old masters knew nothing about this, but of course they didn’t need to. Or about all of our sensory illusions that can interfere with understanding until we recognize that they are, indeed, illusions. That’s something a lot of them did know about in considerable detail.
Alice finds herself a pawn on a chessboard, traveling by train from her starting square on the second rank to a new square on the fourth rank. She gets into a conversation with a large gnat, about the size of a chicken, who introduces her to bread-and-butterflies and other whimsical Carrollian inventions, and then tells her about the wood where nothing has a name. She continues walking onward, and then,
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