The original Word of Helen Keller

The only thing I remember and hold about Helen Keller is her description of the moment she realized the IDEA of the word. Alone in this unfathomable darkness without the primary senses of sight and hearing, her teacher put her hand under running water and wrote the symbol for water in her other hand. Keller describes the awakening her soul with the bursting light of the Idea that the felt sensation was WATER…suddenly, there was a mediator between Knowing and the Known…it was the Word.

But her genius is that as she began to build the Idea of the world out there, even though she could not see or hear it, she kept her seat in the Knower that Knows before the world (our parents) is born or created.

This brings new meaning for me of my favorite Catholic prayer or affirmation as I see it: “Speak but the Word and my Soul will be healed.” The question is who speaks it? Do I wait for God to speak the Word? Or Jesus? Or do I speak it, and who is it that speak this Word, and what is the Word? Oh, the darkness of the unknown surrounds us when we begin to ask questions. Who do we think is going to answer us?

Who is the Knower that Helen Keller was before, her face before her parents (the world) was born? We are all this Knower when we are born before the world is formed by language and defined names and forms. “What that, Momma,” the child asks as he builds a world in which he will live, a world of Words. But what is the original Word?

For Helen Keller the symbol of water in her hand was connected to the felt sensation of this fund—you see I have no word for water that is not a symbol for water. What is the original water before it was named? Only Hellen Keller knew. Who was she before the name? Who are you before the name?

This is our forgotten face, our buried face, our Beloved face. And we spend our whole life digging up landfills of accumulated names and forms looking for her.

In today’s Zen Fit I’m exploring what a Zen Fit is. We all have them but we have no name for it. We are like Helen Keller when it comes to awakening because our western tongue has no words or names for it, and even when there is a name, like “awakening” we think the name is the thing, so we are never satisfied because the believed in the name is dust in our mind. We. remain thirsty.

Who are we before our names are born. This is why Helen Keller gave me a Zen Fit this morning. When the Idea that the sensation of water in one hand and the symbol of water in the other was One yet two, that was Zen. That was Satori. That was Eureka of Archimedes when he had the Idea of water displacement that solved his problem of measuring the gold in the king’s crown without destroying the crown.

This Idea that bursts upon us creates a new whole, a new world. For Helen Keller, it was the Word that creates a world in which she could live and connect with others, a known world. But for her, fortunately for us as well, she stayed in her original Word, the Knower before the known was born as the words. She was the Word and the Word was her. Before the Word Helen Keller did not exist as a center of the world. But when we believe in the words as real, then we lose our center. Do you see?

The IDEA that bust upon the dark mind of Helen Keller was that the symbol of water and the feel of this moving cool substance was One. The Idea connected the unknown with the known (the symbol) and made communication and relationship possible. Helen Keller was born with that Idea. A world was born. In the Bible, we go right to that moment when the Word is God and God is the Word.

The Word God is like the symbol Water in Helen Keller’s mind. There is this unknown nameless Being that I am, before there is distinction, and the Name of God, the Word burst upon my mind, and I realize that the name, a symbol, and this unknown being that I am in the darkness before the name is One, a metaphor that holds the known and the unknown. The Word that creates both me and god.

But then in the accumulation of words, language, knowledge, culture, religion, we stake out territories with our words and believe that our words are God and yours aren’t. We have lost our original Word.

In this Bible quote I notice that In the beginning, I was the Word. In the beginning, was the word, but I read it, in the beginning, I was the Word. This is a shift from the Word being IT to the word being I AM. Both views are true but incompatible. So we need an IDEA that can hold both at the same time.