I was looking to write the most masterful sentence I can imagine, a sentence that tells a story of deceit and betrayal, a story that’s at cause for questioning our very existence, a sentence that throws back at itself the madness and the beauty that is life, but it stays away, abstaining from revealing what I know lives within, the truth.
And now I continue to ponder other desires, like the knowledge that this is so lovely, that this life is incredible, that somewhere some kind of discovery will turn you into more of a magical being than you could ever imagine, but it’s not so and you are not you, but a reflection for a potential you. That bludgeons the truth of your existence and nothing will make you see what you can’t, like the seeing of the seen and all in all, we turn again.
TITLE: I Could Spend My life Playing With Metaphors
There’s a story of the mind, of our existence that twists our reality, the speaking of ourselves as bio chemical expressions, as if a chain reaction is all we are, a metaphor to construct ourselves into cracked concrete forms.
The metaphors we use are often silently pressed upon us by the latest mechanical understanding of our world.
Metaphors are a world unto themselves, and I have to believe, the more that I explore and understand their power, the more important they are for each and everyone of us to understand.
They can control our boundaries of what’s possible.
One example of this that you might be familiar with from the not to distant past comes to us in the form of genetics, “You are your genes.”
The toxicity of that lying metaphor, gave us lack of hope or an excuse to not take responsibility for our own being. “It’s in my genes. It’s genetic; that’s just how it goes. My mother’s mother… My grandfather’s father, so I am as well.”
Science has proven it’s so, so there’s nothing I can do.
The genetic metaphor hangs on, most likely because the populace is usually 20 to 30 years behind what science has shown to be wrong. Of course science, with a sweeping generalization, is often unaware of its own progress. Not to mention that more often than not there are arguments and discussions around what is supposed to be now known, by those who are supposed to know.
The metaphors of a mechanistic existence, handles and levers, pumps and valves, all we are, the ebb and flow of an inert substance moving through us, was not too long ago the standard view of what made up you and me, constituents of an organism.
Why do these metaphors capture our imagination with such force, because they are an almost accurate explanation of ourselves to ourselves. Nevertheless, they are not what we are nor we them.
Why this should matter to you?
We have a science of being, of human potential that is wide open to the unknown mysteries of possibility. We’re living and breathing in a world of belief making organic material that has the potential to transform every way we exist in the world, by way of information, not internet information, but the immaterial expression of thought and words, words that don’t exist outside of the thoughts and understanding we have of them.
Coupled to the words we have our environment as well, which has the potential to transform our very being without the individual putting any effort into the process other than existing within it.
If you think about all the metaphors we can and have used to describe ourselves you will start to reveal a framework for which we see ourselves and how we relate to the world around us.
In this way everything can become and is a metaphor if taken to be so.
Linguistically we could unravel a complete semantic conversation about all of the ‘proper’ descriptions of the use of speech, similes, analogies, synecdoches, and forever on, but its not my expertise and it misses the truth about metaphors and our reality, that metaphor is all, which is also a metaphor in and of itself. The circles we travel in, the spirals of understanding.
Perhaps the strongest weak metaphor we have at this time, is that the brain is like a computer, the thoughts and ideas as software, the brain itself as hardware.
And like all metaphors it says something somewhat accurate about us, while simultaneously being completely wrong.
But why is it wrong to say as such, when it’s just a description of what is, even though we know it isn’t the thing itself, and even if we reify the metaphor as so and then get stuck upon it, so what of that.
Truth and understanding is so what.
Knowledge of the the nature of reality is so what.
Infinite possibility is so what.
I’m postulating that we are continually creating physical representations of ourselves, so that we can come to understand ourselves. It’s as if consciousness is doing it’s best to create a self portrait of a kind, but in the process we confuse the portrait for the creator.
( Keep working it out. You get turned off so quickly from your work. But you know better than that. Turned On, it was Turn Me On Coaching… )
note to self…
Topic to touch upon: Flow states, performance philosophy, experiencing experiences... The preeminent thinker... Freedom flows from your restoration of the truth. You can send this. )
This Essay is about three ideas:
- Metaphors and stories we tell ourselves.
- How we reify ourselves with words without even knowing it.
- The metaphors of discovery and the freedom to create our lives as we desire.