I found myself getting extremely confused while reading this passage, and the only thing that really stuck was the notion that some things are impossible to explain in words. I agree with this. Words just confuse things, and they are very limiting in their meanings. I like this idea of abandoning ordinary images and language in order to see the truth.
It took me a while, but I finally found a comparison that I could understand and attempt to explain.
Emotions.
Emotions are basically impossible to put into words. Sure, you can say that you're happy, sad, frustrated, disappointed, or intrigued, but those words rarely reveal how you are really feeling. If you assign a single word to what you are feeling, you'll never understand emotions. Emotions are usually a combination, anyways. Only by experiencing emotion, can you truly understand them. You can study happiness forever, but you'll never truly understand it, unless you experience it. (Which is partly the reason why self-help books make me laugh.) You can only see truth if you don't categoize or try to name your emotions. It may look like anger, smell like anger, and taste like anger, but it's really something completely different that we don't have a word for. Anger over losing a sports game is different than the anger of a friend stabbing you in the back. Love for a friend is different than love for your partner or love for your car, yet we find it necessary to assign a single word to these completely different feelings. Language is very limiting. This is where the paradoxes discussed in Fritjof Capra comes into play. Emotions can be extremely contradictory if they are attempted to be explained in words.
One cannot be logical with their emotions.
One cannot be logical with buddhism, either.
Picture from: http://waa.uwalumni.com/onwisconsin/fall01/emotional1.html
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