Why Spiritual Language Is So Hard to Understand

https://youtu.be/qBZVggZqCjk

Have you ever picked up a spiritual book, read a sentence three times, and still had no idea what it was trying to say?

About ten years ago, I picked up A Course in Miracles and couldn't get through it. The sentences were so dense and layered I couldn't parse a single paragraph, let alone the meaning underneath. I put it down and walked away.

Recently I picked it up again — and something remarkable had happened. Not to the book, but to me. I could read it. Not just follow the words, but actually feel what it was pointing at.

The book hadn't changed. My consciousness had.

But that experience kept pulling me back to a question: why is spiritual language so difficult to access in the first place? Why does so much of it feel like it's written in a code you haven't been given the key to yet? That's not an accident. And it's not a you problem. Once you understand the mechanics behind it, a lot starts to make sense.

Language Was Built for a Different World

The first thing to understand is that language was never designed for this.

Language evolved to help us survive — to name objects, warn each other of danger, coordinate and communicate. It's extraordinarily good at describing physical, concrete things. Things you can point to.

Spiritual experience isn't any of those things. When someone tries to describe a feeling of oneness, or divine love, or the sense that time completely dissolved during meditation, the vocabulary simply isn't there. Theologians have a word for this: ineffability — an experience so profound it literally defies description.

This isn't a modern problem. Rumi didn't write poetry because he was simply a poet. He wrote poetry because every time he tried to describe what he was experiencing in plain language, it fell apart. The experience was too large for ordinary words. Lao Tzu opens his most famous text by telling you that whatever he's about to say will already be inadequate. Meister Eckhart, a 13th-century Christian mystic, kept describing God using deliberate contradictions — not because he was confused, but because every time he tried to pin it down with a clean definition, something essential was lost.

These are people from completely different parts of the world, different centuries, different traditions — and they all ran into the exact same wall. That's not a coincidence. It tells us something important about the nature of what they were trying to describe.

The Words Themselves Have Never Been Defined

Here's the layer that is, practically speaking, the most frustrating — and the one that doesn't get talked about enough.

It's not just that spiritual experiences are hard to describe. It's that the core terms themselves have never been formally agreed upon. Words like enlightenment, the Holy Spirit, energy, soul — these get used constantly across books and teachers and traditions, almost never with a clear shared definition. Everyone assumes everyone else knows what they mean. Nobody stops to define it.

Take soul and spirit. People use them constantly, often interchangeably. But what do they actually mean? Are they the same thing? Different aspects of consciousness? Different layers of a human being? Depending on the tradition, the answers change completely. Some systems distinguish sharply between the two. Others merge them entirely. And yet conversations continue as if everyone is working from the same definition.

This is a significant source of confusion in spiritual discourse — people using the same words to mean entirely different things, and nobody stopping to check whether they're actually referring to the same thing.

A large part of the work on this channel is going back to these foundational terms and actually trying to define them. Because you cannot build real understanding on a foundation of undefined words.

Your Brain Is the Bottleneck

Even if we had perfect language, we'd still have a problem — because the organ we're using to process all of this isn't built for it.

The human brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, runs on linear logic. Cause and effect. Past and future. Self versus other. It's a survival machine designed for a three-dimensional physical world, and it's extraordinary at that job. But whatever we're pointing at when we say Source, or God, or universal consciousness — it doesn't operate linearly. It's boundless, nonlinear, and outside of time. Asking the prefrontal cortex to fully grasp that is like asking a calculator to compose a symphony. The tool is simply wrong for the job.

The philosopher Aldous Huxley described the brain as a "reducing valve." His argument was that if we experienced the full unfiltered reality of Source all at once, we couldn't function — the overwhelm would make ordinary life impossible. The brain filters the infinite down so we can focus on the finite and survive.

The result is that any genuine spiritual insight has to be downsampled to fit through human neurons. It's like running advanced software on a 1980s computer. The machine can technically run it, but only by stripping away most of the complexity. What you're receiving when you read a mystic's words is a low-resolution representation of something originally far richer.

The vagueness isn't the point — it's just what survives the translation.

This has real historical weight. Ramana Maharshi, after a profound awakening experience, reportedly entered states so deep — where his awareness had merged so completely with pure consciousness — that he lost all connection to his physical body and required others to care for him. After two years he gradually returned, began to speak again, and became one of the most significant teachers of enlightenment of the 20th century. What came out of him was the best translation he could offer of something that was, at its core, beyond translation.

Paradox Is Intentional

This is also why spiritual language uses so much deliberate contradiction.

The silence that speaks. Lose yourself to find yourself. The emptiness that is full. Read literally, these sound like nonsense. That's exactly the point.

When your rational mind hits a genuine paradox, it stalls. It has no category for it, no way to resolve it, no logical next step. And in that moment of stalling, the linear mind confronts its own limitation — the recognition that no amount of additional thinking is going to get it there. In that gap, pure awareness gets a chance to come forward.

Zen Buddhism built an entire practice around this called koans — unsolvable riddles like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" The student isn't meant to find a clever answer. They're meant to exhaust every avenue of logical thinking until the mind finally surrenders. In that surrender, in the silence where thought stops, awareness steps forward. That's what the koan is pointing at.

So when you encounter a spiritual statement that appears to contradict itself, don't dismiss it. It may be the most sophisticated communication in the entire text.

A Note on Vagueness as Manipulation

Not all spiritual vagueness is innocent, and it's worth naming that directly.

Vague language can be exploited. Statements broad enough to apply to almost anyone. Teachings where the meaning quietly shifts over time — and somehow always shifts in favor of those holding the power. Frameworks that keep you dependent on the teacher for meaning rather than pointing you toward your own experience. That's a real dynamic, and it's worth staying alert to.

The hallmark of genuine spiritual teaching is that it consistently points you back toward your own direct experience — your own capacity to feel, discern, and understand. The moment a teaching starts requiring you to fully outsource that discernment to someone else, that's worth pausing on.

A useful question to hold: does the vague language in front of you point toward your own inner experience and growth? Or does it point toward the speaker? Genuine spiritual language opens doors. Manipulative vagueness locks them and keeps the teacher holding the key.

Consciousness Has to Catch Up

The reason I couldn't read A Course in Miracles ten years ago wasn't because the book was badly written. It was because my consciousness hadn't expanded enough yet to meet it where it was. Spiritual texts are sometimes written at the level of awareness they're describing — and if you haven't yet grown into that level of consciousness, the words will sit flat on the page, inaccessible. That's not a failure. That's just where you are in the process.

If you've bounced off a book, a teacher, or a tradition — don't write it off. Put it on the shelf. Do the work. Come back to it. You might find that the words haven't changed at all, but they're landing completely differently — because you're reading them from a different level of consciousness than you were before.

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Spiritual language is vague because it is attempting something genuinely difficult: using a tool built for the finite to point at the infinite. The writers aren't confused. The traditions aren't being evasive. They're doing their best with a fundamental limitation every mystic across every culture has encountered.

The language is a finger pointing at the moon. The mistake is staring at the finger.