Sometimes an emotion can more adequately be expressed through a sound, a gesture, a song, or a dance. Sometimes an idea can be expressed better through a story, pictures, or a demonstration.
Life experience has taught me that there are some lessons you need to learn for yourself. You can be told something all your life, but you need to do it at least once before you realize all the reasons why. If you learn something for yourself, you learn it better than if someone simply tells you.
Sometimes you need to live it to understand it.
Words in themselves are meaningless. The words you read on this page are causing you to think thoughts. The thoughts are being strung together into ideas. The idea you get from these words might be different from the idea the next person gets, because your thoughts are different, because your life experiences are different. Words have different shades of meaning depending on who hears them. That's why communication is so much more important that just talking and having someone listen. The talker has to be sure the listener is hearing what s/he's saying, and not anything different. This is why it's often easier to be taught something by a person than it is to read it in a manual.
So I imagine that when ancient wise guys and gals decided they wanted to pass their teachings along in writing, they considered this factor. And they wrote poetry. They wrote poetry to invoke ideas, feelings and images. They were obscure so that we'd have to figure it out for ourselves, their words simply lighting the way.
Lao Tzu
Is not the Everlasting Tao.
Name that can be named,
Is not the Everlasting name.
Nameless, the origin of heaven and earth;
Named, the mother of ten thousand things
Therefore, always without desire,
In order to observe the hidden mystery;
Always with desire,
In order to observe the manifestations
These two issue from the same origin,
though named differently.
Both are called the dark.
Dark and even darker,
The door to all hidden mysteries
