RSS SPIRIT

Metaphor is the most potent weapon of emotional intelligence. Metaphor provides perception and depth. It can properly be viewed as the third eye. It equips us with another level of measurement that allows us to sift, apportion and weigh.

Metaphor is most obvious in dreams. Here visual pictures are created from emotional energy to provide metaphorical apparitions of our internal and external worlds. Metaphor probably exists in some form for all mammals. All the ones that can dream anyway.

Things are like other things but not quite like them. One can argue that life is a metaphor, as it is like not-life but not not-life. The primary urge of life then, if it is a metaphor, is expression. To expend energy is the prime motivator. Nietzsche had some rants along these lines.

It is easy to envision all the prosaic but invaluable knowledge metaphor has provided human kind. But equally valuable is the spiritual and social information metaphor delivers.

If you think about it, there is something insidious and beautiful about the power of metaphor. There is that evolutionary sense about it, where something so simple and mindless can create incredible knowledge and power. It is almost mechanical in its universal efficiency, yet what it creates is overwhelming and unsettling.

Surely if one were to ask, what is the meaning of all this, they would do well to begin by mining metaphor, its subconscious and conscious veins. One might argue that all religious and spiritual impulses are born of metaphor.

The new way, if we do not poison ourselves into extinction, will be powered by a metaphorical engine. A rare born soul will use (used by) metaphor to figure it out and soon everybody else will have that same dream. Then we will get on to that stage of development where things not yet imagined will be created.

Until then, before you go to sleep ask your dreams, what does metaphor look like? Sound like? Smell like?

(tip of the pen to Ann Faraday who figured this stuff out before anybody.)