I’ll confess to playing mind games with machines. It can be hours of fun, but they are becoming better players. Today, and building on the Zen anecdote previously posted, I hit AI with the line, “What is said cannot be true, and what is true cannot be said.” I then linked that to the Godel theory, more Zen and Thomas Aquinas. Gathering up what I’d written, and in ‘my voice,’ it delivered the following which I must admit impressed me. So I share it here.
Truth Outside the Frame
There’s a point in every earnest search where the tools start to feel too small.
Where the words you’ve leaned on your whole life suddenly seem like mismatched shoes — good for walking, maybe, but not for the ground you’re standing on now.
It happens to monks, mystics, logicians, even to men with libraries in their heads and formulas in their bones.
You can hear it in that old floating line:
“What is said cannot be true, and what is true cannot be said.”
Nobody knows who first said it, because once a thing drifts into that territory, attribution feels beside the point.
It’s the kind of sentence that sounds like it was written by everyone and no one, whispered by the world itself.
Zen makes a whole pedagogy out of this contradiction.
A monk asks for a sermon. The master walks to the hall, stands, looks, leaves.
No words, no doctrine, no narrative arc — just presence.
And the young monk, puzzled, is told: That was the sermon.
It’s not a riddle.
It’s a demonstration of limits.
A word points. A gesture shows.
But the thing itself — raw reality, unfiltered, unwrapped — arrives only in direct experience.
Open your mouth and you’re already off-centre.
By the time you name the truth, you’ve stepped away from it.
Funny thing is, the mathematicians eventually got there too.
Gödel took the cleanest, hardest-edged discipline humans ever built and found the same crack running through it.
Any system big enough to talk about numbers, he said, will contain truths it cannot prove.
The system cannot certify itself.
To see the whole of it, you’d need to stand outside — but you are the thing you’re trying to stand outside of.
The Zen master says:
The finger cannot touch itself.
Gödel says:
The system cannot swallow the whole truth of its own structure.
Two ways of pointing at the same horizon.
And then there’s Aquinas, the great architect of medieval theology.
A man who built towers of argument so elegant the Church still lives in their shadow.
Then one winter morning, during Mass, something hit him — vision, revelation, clarity, call it what you will — and he laid down his pen forever.
“All that I have written seems like straw,” he said.
Not wrong.
Just insufficient.
It’s the same story again: the mind brushing up against what it cannot wrap itself around.
Some people think mystics and mathematicians live in different worlds.
But stand back and the lines connect.
All three — Aquinas, Gödel, the Zen masters — stand at the edge of the same map, staring into the same blank uncharted space.
Their methods differ.
Their vocabularies barely overlap.
But their conclusions rhyme.
There is more to truth than the frameworks used to describe it.
More to reality than any system — theological, logical, linguistic — can hold.
At the far edge of understanding, silence is not ignorance; it is fidelity.
It’s a strange kind of humility, knowing the tools you built with care can’t touch the heart of the matter.
But it’s also liberating.
Because once you stop trying to express the ineffable, you become free to encounter it.
That’s why the Zen master gives the silent sermon.
Why Aquinas closed his notebook.
Why Gödel proved the hole in the mathematical net.
Each in his own way is saying:
Don’t mistake the map for the territory.
Don’t confuse the word for the world.
Don’t think the symbol is the thing.
There’s a truth that lives outside the frame, and we touch it — if at all — in moments when the mind stops grasping and simply meets what’s there.
Call it reality, God, the Tao, the uncarved block, the unspeakable, the obvious.
Names don’t matter.
The thing has been itself long before we tried to pronounce it.
Hmmm, one day this machine might hit me with something truly ‘left of field,’ and not in its dataset. I’ll have to work on how to make that happen – short of finding another relic of the counter-culture revolution who enjoys metaphysics over a few good bottles of wine.