Text, it either Makes No Sense,

or it Doesn’t Say Enough, Doesn’t Say Enough.

- Tem Noon, lyrics that find their way into various other songs once in a while.

Derrida defined Text as what is repeatable. A set of graphemmes which have been inscribed, a trace has been rendered into the world. Or a set of characters on a screen. Recordings of all media would qualify as text, because they constitute traces recorded and rendered into a symbolic representation. One could easily think of the photographic frame as a text which represents itself, but recalls through some depiction real or imagined a specific emotional and/or historic description.

The criticism that one must make of text is that it lies. This is different than saying that a writer is lying, that an author is deceiving. They may be, but even the honest, earnest, most insightful and learned author will produce text that lies. This is because the words seen by the reader trigger the reader’s own voice, reading words which are understood in the context of the reader’s life. Yet, the reader gives this voice of their own mind in their own head the name of the author, like it is the author’s voice telling them something.

We are our collection of texts. The name associated with those texts becomes a shadowed presense, a voice commenting endlessly. The internet is the ultimate orgy of producing and reproducing of text after text after text. Computers have allowed Text to make the great leap, a leap like DNA took when it found itself in multicellular organisms rather than single celled amebas. Computers have allowed Text to become Software. All software is text, text has always been software. So now, text is the data in the book, and the code which executes commands when you click on a link in that book. Computers and the internet have literally brought text to life.

So, if we know text is lying, is it still possible to use text? Sure, but “Believing” texts can be a problem. You should know what text is out there, but you can’t read everything, and ultimately, none of it really matters. What matters is your own experience of the world. And most importantly, your experience of the world NOW.

What is real is what is NOW. The Heart Sutra’s Emptiness, which is the source of all Forms, is NOW.

All of text, and any other recording, can never, ever, ever take its readers to NOW. The reader has to be there, sacrificing their own NOW to review, repeat, recapitulate the text, which is a repeatable, yet inevitably outdated trace. The reader is the one with the NOW. You have to be alive to have NOW, and there are many people ready to take your NOW and encourage you to use your NOW for their benefit.

We are still left with the need to explain ourselves, and we can’t see everyone face to face, so we depend on text to convey something of our message.

So another guiding principle of Heart Sutra Science will be: Be very wary of description. Words describing anything cannot be absolutely correct, at best they can be relatively correct, and they can perfect for certain people, but extremely misleading for others. We are going back, pealing back what text has mislead us into. We seek to understand the world without first assuming there is anything different about spirituality and science, emotion and rationality, music and painting.

We each live in a world, and that is the world we are responsible for. It is to help individuals make sense of their worlds so they can read everything but believe nothing that I create and dedicate Heart Sutra Science.