The basic dynamism of the truth is so shocking to encounter that almost everyone habitually flees into the relatively safety of representations almost immediately. This directs a new light upon certain religious admonitions against imagery: these are not mere arbitrary commandments — they are crucial practices whose structure forms the basis of certain peculiar protections against the classic and parasitic dangers of representational thought itself. It was, after all, something quite like this thought that was the vehicle of our ejection from paradise, and it remains the single most dangerous and misapprehended force on our world.

Truth must modulate at least as quickly as the observer’s understanding blossoms, yet truth can set up an explosive cascade of such blossomings, and is thus propelled far beyond all possibility of human acquisition. At best we may pursue its dynamisms of expression as though chasing something evolving in myriad ways and at myriad speeds as we pursue its ‘real form’. Well, it’s ‘real form’ is explosive evolution, which means that the form is a verb, a way, not a noun — a thing.

And direct exposure to the nature and character of Truth is a shocking experience that would send most of us scurrying desperately away from this dynamism into categorization, description, and representation — the basic stock in trade of our modern representational cultures and minds. But that activity is an opposing reaction to truth. It actually immediately divorces the participant from truth’s essential dynamism and character, while at the same time replacing these streams of sensing with tokens and reductive tags. As if this were insufficient, it then often pretends that the tokens and tags are either the truth themselves, or equivalent with it.

Representation is the opposite of truth. Truth is, like us, alive. A being-way. Living. Changing, explosive, learning. To touch it at all is to be drawn into instantaneous evolution, not endless experiences of crafting, manipulating, promoting and defending representations.