When we think, do we not hear words?

They may be in the form of a chattering mind or a quiet one. Still, there are words.

When we sing with no words in the lyrics, does the listener not hear words in their heart?

Words are ubiquitous and pervasive — readily available at the tip of the tongue or as darting molecules in the mind.

Yet what is a word? What is its root?

Let us start with breath:

Breath is the primordial hum.

It is the signal of spirit. It is ever-present; all attempts at measuring it are only approximations because it has its origin in the unknown — and rightfully so.

As humans love to prod the unknown, the result can only be approximations. These approximations happen within enclosures and confined contexts.

“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us.”

The Word is an approximation of breath. It is the form that breath takes when it is contextualised and, furthermore, enclosed within defined meaning. As such, words are a paradox: they are powerful as breath yet limited in scope. No wonder words became the root of fragmentation and separation between peoples and places.

Thought is Word.

When words are strewn together through labelled language, thought is conferred continuity: there is a past, a present, and a future. The human being stretches the self thin along this linear line — always threatened by the light of the unknown, the uncertain, the non-physical, and the non-visible. This linear line is thought: a mirage of words.

Word is action.

Visible action emerges from thought.

The nature of one’s action is the reflection of one’s conditioning by thought.

Thus, the human being is a “Word made flesh.”

This Word is destined to dwell amongst people, places, and things — that is, “to dwell amongst us.”

The “us” in this saying is what the Igbos call anyi — the communal, the collective, the space of relation, the arena of personhood.

Thus, it starts with breath — the signal of spirit, the formless — and enters form as Word. Then, in order to enter the arena of the collective and communal, it is “made flesh.”

When one listens to another speak, it is either that one is listening to what the other says through the filter of labelled language and predefined meaning, or one is listening to how and what breath does in the moment. The former is often judgemental and reproduces (or is always looking to repair) the fragmentation and separation between self and other. The latter, however, is a timeless action. It is the sacred integration of the one and the many — which is the entire point of physicality. The fragmentation of physical reality is only a product of associative thoughts insisting on continuity. By this insistence, linear time emerges.

When the police officer, Derek Chauvin, pinned his knee into the neck of George Floyd — as if to enact the image of the Fallen Angel — what was being enacted, in essence, was the sinister face of separation: separation between the white police officer and the Black other. It is said that before Floyd took his last breath, he kept whispering, through constricted lungs, “I can’t breathe.” This is breath truncated, fragmented, because in breath-as-spirit there is no separation. Breath is life.

Breath’s action is timeless, and so is its Word. The Word of breath expresses itself through free thinking. Thinking is free only when it is allowed to arise and dissipate without attachment or the need to hold on to it as memory, image, therefore thought.

Free thinking is the movement of spirit, and thus is untethered to linear time and the image of thought, even as it operates within and beyond its confines.

So thinking is in line with the action of the spirit when it is free, clear, and lucid. It is the channel and resonance through which all is made flesh.

The self, the other self — all things:

We are Word made flesh.

This is the inner working of manifestation.