I agree that the trappings of mysticism fascinate a particular kind of audience, and that if I wish to make a particular practice more compelling to that audience, I can wrap the practice in those trappings as a rhetorical technique. And I agree that this works for pretty much any practice I can imagine.
Personally, I prefer precision in language when possible, both as a means of encouraging precision in thought, and as a means of facilitating precision in communication. But I acknowledge that it is not always possible, both because sometimes my thoughts are not clear, and because sometimes the granularity of language is too coarse to convey the distinctions I’m thinking about.
In the former case, I find poetic language useful as a way of circling around the stuff I’m thinking about but can’t quite zero in on yet, similar to circumlocution as a way of bypassing anomic aphasia. In the latter case, I often use poetic language as well, but I’m not sure it’s actually useful.
And of course sometimes I’m just sloppy with my language.
I agree that the trappings of mysticism fascinate a particular kind of audience, and that if I wish to make a particular practice more compelling to that audience, I can wrap the practice in those trappings as a rhetorical technique. And I agree that this works for pretty much any practice I can imagine.
Personally, I prefer precision in language when possible, both as a means of encouraging precision in thought, and as a means of facilitating precision in communication. But I acknowledge that it is not always possible, both because sometimes my thoughts are not clear, and because sometimes the granularity of language is too coarse to convey the distinctions I’m thinking about.
In the former case, I find poetic language useful as a way of circling around the stuff I’m thinking about but can’t quite zero in on yet, similar to circumlocution as a way of bypassing anomic aphasia. In the latter case, I often use poetic language as well, but I’m not sure it’s actually useful.
And of course sometimes I’m just sloppy with my language.