Metaphors and Signposts

JUNE 17, 2014 -- Metaphors and Signposts

    Hi, Honey Bun.  I love you.  Ah!  Shabd returns the moment I begin this letter of love to you!

    I suppose I should make Shabd a theme today or someday real soon again.  

    But right now I feel pressed to try to find a clearer way to look at truth in language because language is a writer’s primary mode of sharing ideas with other people.  And I am a writer.

    There is an imaginary dividing line between fiction and fact.  What is fact and what is fiction, really?  These two ideas are beginning to need more explanation in context with my own writings as well as those of others.  My use of many terms are somewhat different from the traditional understandings of them.

    Should I be concerned about whether or not I am understood by anybody?  I think so, if I wish to engage intelligently with people, through written or spoken works.  Fortunately most of the people I engage with on the internet are literate and exceptionally intelligent.  

    One major reason I want to explore this subject and wrestle into some kind of better understanding, is that what we say today tends to trap us into an obligation to maintain that stance when the context changes with time.  This obligation becomes ridiculous and destructive when it loses its original context which gave it its life in the first place.  I once crawled around with a pacifier in my mouth and a baby’s rattler in my hand which was rightful to do when I was a baby.  But it is wrong to do so now as an adult.  After life moves on as it does in its constant flux, many of our prior statements and beliefs should be left behind because they were integral parts of a context that now no longer exists.

    Yet we often feel obligated to forever maintain previously stated political, religious, and philosophical ideas.  (Ask any politician).

    Do we create our own realities?  

    Many respected people say we do.  But many laugh at and scorn that idea.  Most of the detractors, I assume, adhere to some form of materialistic philosophy even though quantum theorists are increasingly shooting holes in the foundations of the philosophy of materialism.

    Honey Bun, as you can see, I could go back over nearly every word I have used so far in this missive and question its meaning.  The meaning of anything is so tied to its context that virtually every use of any single word has its own special meaning.  The context defines the word.  And no two contexts are ever exactly alike!

    I believe I have talked about this before, have I not?  

    How does metaphor rise from this?  

    Metaphor is a kind of transcendent meaning of a thing, one of a plethora of different kinds of meanings surrounding any one thing, like the many forces and particles surrounding the nucleus of an atom.  In that degree of observational refinement, we enter a different universe of ghostly entities and barely recognized forces that are real but not entirely understood and can only be spoken of in theories.

    Just so with every word we use in spoken and written language.  To really dig into the truth of any action or thing or state of things, we must go beyond the crusty level of verbal language, the level of sticks and stones where words are no more than crude signposts and primitive hairy-knuckled grunts pointing in this and that direction to turn a listener’s attention toward something, in order to see what we are trying to express.  

    We must go far below this limited level of human language.  We must go to the microscopic, subatomic, infinitesimal regions of consciousness and at the same time we must expand our awareness outward to the macroscopic infinite reaches beyond our mundane consciousness to obtain our proper meaning and context of what is being said.

    One of the most dreaded questions I ever get from anybody is “Why do you say that?”  I seldom find an answer for that which satisfies my respect for the truth.  That is why I am a writer, to go much deeper into the question than surface level speech can ever hope to go.  

    “Why” or “reasons” for anything can only be answered by reference to infinity.  

    It is not a new idea that we all live at the very center of infinity, because it has been known for ages that there is an infinite distance radiating outward in all directions around us, from each and every human being and from every other tiny and large thing in the universe as well.  We are all at the very center, as is every star and galaxy in the universe.  The center of infinity, by definition, has to be everywhere at the same time because there is an infinite distance around every point in the universe at the same time.  I reiterate: this is not new information.

    We find ourselves more confused about the details when trying to express a subject so we transcend many of the pitfalls of communication by inventing analogies and metaphors, allegories and poetry to take the place of single words.  

    On the surface level of consciousness, in the material workaday world, the sticks and stones of single words, function well as signposts to point people's attention to important events during  daily life.  For examples: Look out for that bus!  Where is the bathroom?  How may I help you?  How much do you want for it?  These are useful for temporal human instants in traditional life.

    But take a moment to think about what we mean when we say "I love you" to someone we really do love.  Think about the entirety of that relationship with that beloved person.  Those three words are only a signpost to an indefinable infinite reality of feelings, memories and experiences which are unique and understood only by you and your beloved who shares this special entanglement, summed up in those three simple words.  “I love you.”

    The metaphors to communicate this are all the love stories ever written and the poetry and music; yet still they fall short of expressing the unique reality of your own particular love story, shared only by you and your soulmate.

    You see how impossible it is to express truth through language?  Those three special words mean many different things to different people, including old couple, young couple and even con artists. We can only point to our own truth through our analogies and metaphors and allegories and plain words and just have faith that our listeners will have empathy with the spirit and essence of what we are trying to say.

    Our loved ones do.  But it is doubtful than anyone else does.

    I love you, Honey Bun.

    One major drawback of our current primitive modes of spoken and written communication is that while we might express the truth in one moment, the constantly metamorphosing of the context of the eternal moment, the eternal now, often makes a lie out of what we said previously.  Not in the eternal spiritual essence of love but in the eternally transmuting contexts of physical life and the mentality associated with that life.

    The problem most of us encounter and suffer cruel consequences over is that it makes us, the author of this spoken or written word, appear to be inconsistent when life’s continuous change carries us into newer contexts.  We seem to contradict our own previous words when we say something that, on the surface level of primitive sticks and stones communication, seemed so true in the first case but now so false in the second case.

    What the critics fail to realize is that though the words may be the same the context has changed.  And context is the primary meaning of the words.

    I love you, Christel.  Let’s get back to work, okay?