How etymonline.com led me to truth

In July of this year, I was reading an email newsletter that mentioned the etymology of the word "compromise," which means "a mutual promise." I didn't know much at all about etymology (i.e. the history and origin of words), but I felt compelled to continue exploring. I was introduced to a website called etymonline.com and I started searching various words.

Searching words on etymonline.com is a fun game to play on its own, but I became a little obsessive, and it turned into a spiritual exercise.

What I learned through this practice is that when you distill a word down to its original definition, and then distill all the words from that definition, you find that most (maybe all?) words stem from a handful of words: is, am, be, exist, real, and being. These words are at the very bottom of the English language. We cannot define beyond them, because we cannot define them.

For example, the English etymology of those words is as follows:

• Is: "third person singular present indicative of be,"
• Be: "be, exist, come to be, become, happen,"
• Am: "first-person singular present indicative of be; to be, to remain,"
• Real: "actually existing, having physical existence (not imaginary)"

As we all know, existence is not a concept you can point to by using language. Existence doesn’t live in the form of a concept, and that’s because it lives beyond form. There are no further concepts you can point to and define what it means "to be", or "to be real", either now or throughout history.

And since we use language to explain and communicate knowledge, it dawned on me through this practice that we don’t actually know anything beyond "exist"—not even "I exist" because the root of "I" just means "a being," which, again, means "exist."

It’s one thing to follow this line of thinking and understand it intellectually or analytically, but to fully embody and embrace the idea that everything you think you know is all just a total guess beyond "exist" is freeing. Perceiving reality from that state of mind led me to a beautiful experience—an indescribable and amazing recognition that hasn't left me and I suspect never will.

Language now seems simultaneously very baseless—not really based in anything “real"—and yet there is a bottom: the core words “is, am, be, exist, real, and being”. Somehow this has changed how I understand reality, presence, and what I think I know is true.