Metaphor

Metaphor

For individuals who are identified with the one dimensional world of forms, it is difficult if not impossible to understand that unlike a simile which is an intellectual thing which compares one thing to another thing, a metaphor is an effort of varying success to embody a non-dense, abstract truth, quality, or power like beauty, justice courage, empathy, within a form, a dense physical thing.

Art is the language of metaphor.  A few examples.

Sculpture> The Venus di Milo

Music> Finlandia

Painting> Guernica

Architecture> Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Literature> Absalom Absalom, Theater> Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Death of a Salesman, Poetry>The Wind Hover, The Mending Wall

And (depending on how one visions it) Math> e=mc²

All of these are metaphors. They embody non-dense or abstract eternal or "timeless" Cosmic Truths. If one has stood before Venus di Milo at the Louvre and actually registered the energy which flows from that sculpture, one has experienced Beauty. All of the intellectual lower mind analysis as to who, what, when, where, will not lead to this experience. Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn ends with a direct statement of fact. "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty-- that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”.

The intellect crumbles before metaphors. It simply cannot go there.  Metaphors lead the open mind, i.e. still, i.e. not data processing, i.e. not intellectualizing, into the heart of things, into meaning and then, if you hang in there, Significance, and finally Light.

No work of art regardless of the medium the artist uses to communicate has ever come even close to the actual experience which drives the artist’s effort. As Emily Dickinson observed, “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry”. That's getting pretty close to Truth.

The actual experience has nothing to do with intelligence. In fact, intelligence gets in the way of the Vision. And the "insight", the  "vision"  is more of a case of being the Ancient Mariner than reading about it. The Vision is a matter of the intuitive heart. Intelligence is the tool that the artist uses to try to convey to us what she or he experienced through the heart.

The fact is that as we became more and more focused on the forms or the symbols used by the Ancient Artist/Teachers to embody the invisible principles such as Beauty and Equilibrium that were the cause of the incredible phenomena that as infant humanity we saw surrounding us, the Truth became lost in that ever narrowing focus of the intellect on the dense forms. So, for example, the actual messages of the metaphor of the life of Jesus, kindness, gentleness, inclusiveness, "do unto others... love one another...", spiraled into a symbol of sin and guilt, of fear and terror, of grief and suffering, of the pitiful bleeding body of a man hanging on a cross and, "Priests in black gowns, ... walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires." Wm Blake "The Garden of Joy"

Thus was Religion man-ufactured, and thus did Science retreat into Art. And thus also did, what was science, become a one dimensional materialism that actually denied the existence of the Multidimensional Cosmos!