Yes, it is true that language and logic can imprison us in wordworlds, and alienate us from intuited reality beyond the reach of cognition and from our own inarticulate selves. Only what can be said and argued and objectively proven is real, and everything else is phantasm.

The problem here, though, is not with articulate reason. The problem is treating articulate reason as the sole arbiter of truth.

If we conclude that the problem is, in fact, with word and reason and decide to reject it or subjugate it, or if we claim that articulate reason knows nothing of any importance, or that it is articulate reason that generates logical and linguistic phantasms — and crown intuition and feeling as sole arbiter of truth — we only commit the same sin of excess, but in the opposite direction.

Now, we suffer another alienation — alienation from community. Without words or reason, we cannot communicate and share reality with others. We cannot make appeals or hear appeals or honor appeals. We can only fight or flee or fuck, but never love.

And in a state of anti-Logos, the community-making sacrament of communion stops being a sacrament, and becomes ritual sorcery. The “communicant” sits alone in a ritualizing crowd, performing magical motions — sitting, standing, genuflecting, self-crossing, muttering little prayers, summoning mental images and ecstasies and intimacies, and attempts to transcend the neighbor, to make direct contact with God.

No, it is not only the theorizing, theologizing, philosophizing mind that “is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

The intuiting, feeling, imagining mind is just as capable of the same kind of solipsism, when it rejects Logos.

An ethic of the mean finds the ideal in balanced moderation.

What is virtue in balance becomes vice in extreme.

Extremists believe some things are essentially good and other things are essentially evil.

Any trace of an essentially evil thing is a slippery slope to excess. Therefore, it should be opposed with excessive essential good. Every evil microaggression should be confronted by good macroaggression. The sins of secular atheism should be overcome with fundamentalist or traditionalist fanaticism. The infuriating imperfections of liberalism are capital crimes. And so on.

But! …Extreme moderation is also extreme.

There are no preexisting, eternal rules to follow.

And no method can guarantee success.

There is no solid truth holding us up. We all walk on water together. We sink alone.

Each application of the Golden Rule must itself be guided by the Golden Rule, and the guiding Golden Rule, in turn must itself also be guided. Ah, sahib, it is Golden Rule all the way up.

Each iteration upward ripples downward. … the infinite recursive, nonlinear, radically ordered, radically unpredictable. Under the anarchic order of chaos, futures swerve, lurch and bubble. The stirring of a butterfly wing can whirl a hurricane. Here truth is known only in the moment of disclosure.

It is from this, that we are suspended, always in suspense.

Golden mid.