N.B. It is impossible to capture in words, the transforming relational continuum (the Tao), but one can use word-based (metaphorical) inference to stimulate an intuitive understanding. –“A man’s reach must exceed his grasp or what’s a meta phor?” (-McLuhan et al)

We use language and grammar to reduce the inherently nonlocal , relational) Tao to local and explicit abstraction, to render the ineffable Tao (a reduced version thereof) ‘effable’.  For example we employ language and grammar to re-cast nonlocal resonance as in ‘duning’ to local material mechanics as in …  ‘dunes with their own powers of sourcing actions and developments.  This effable-izing is made possible thanks to the ‘double error’ of language and grammar identified by Nietzsche (i.e. using ‘naming’ to impute ‘local existence’ and conflating this with grammar to notionally endow the ‘naming-instantiated local things-in-themselves the powers of sourcing actions and developments.  While the EAST employs such abstract reductive tools only as an insight-triggering go-by to enable language-based  (effable) sharing of (ineffable) experiencing of inclusion in the Tao, .. the WEST has allowed this reductionist tool and its constructions to be employed as the ‘operative reality’ ;  thus, as Emerson observes; the tool runs away with the workman, the human with the divine’.

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Once upon a time there was Chinese philosopher who intuited that the universe was a great ball of fluid energy that was in continuous transformation.  He called it the Tao.

While there were many features within this Tao, there were no features that had a distinguishable ‘beginning’ or ‘ending’ nor even a persisting separate thing-in-itselfness, and everything; that is, all visible forms that were included in the Tao, were without beginning and ending and separate existence.  They were ‘relational forms’ like boils in a boiling fluid, nonlocal formings emerging locally (because our viewing of them localized them by their emerging into our awareness), forming and enlarging and spreading outwards and becoming one with the flow. Even though our vision distinguished between forms, our experience was of inclusion in a fluid continuum.

Lao Tzu’s understanding was that because all forms were continually transforming features within the Tao, … it did not make sense to give them names since names did not change and all forms were relational forms undergoing continual transformation in the Tao.

But naming the forms was very useful for sharing observations and for discussing the transformation that was going on in the common living space.   It was more important to say; ‘watch out, there is big waterspout heading in your direction’, … than to be stopped from speaking by the understanding that ‘the Tao that can be told is not the True Tao’.   That is, there is a certain practicality, the practicality of sharing our impressions, in naming ‘formings’ that are purely relational and without ‘being’.

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