I NEVER METAPHOR I DIDN’T LIKE
I’m trying to finding you, thank you. Not literal but bodily our minnows shimmy through the nets.
Images found in a dream
Things may only be what they seem
The world is a poem.
The world’s delights and sorrows are to be lived. If we take them literally, on the single prosaic level, our lives seem yet limited. When we take them poetically and paradoxically, as metaphors springing from the Beyond-form, when we peer through difficulties and honor it all, then we bridge Being and becoming, and open out to the infinite continuum that leads us around to the everpresent Renewed World.
The world is on a screen We decode the symbols High and low, dark and light, near and far,
great and small, yes and no diversions of X the unknown quantity We each have our own time and space
Your “sound” may be my “scent” My straight may be your bent
We’re here because we’re the Beyond-form going through a process of seeming separation and return, so the One can Appear As many beings who love and are loved, the Infinite increasing in ever greater Love.
Our home, our sensory world is entirely composed of metaphors. “X,” the unknown, Is the sun, the ocean, time and space, nature, people. Forms are solely our communications, each thing’s a poetic creation, and conveys an aspect of holy Being.
Our unknown substance, God the reality in the midst, is an “X” seen differently by each creature’s interlocking standpoint and perception. (And a metaphor makes puns to operate in every sense modality. So we can understand each other, saying “high and low,” though our senses of something could vary as radically as high and low in my visual field differs from your high and low sounds.)
It doesn’t matter how slightly or how basically my perception varies from the encompassing Divine. A nexus, a planet of commonly shared forms can only exist because it’s glimpsed through our partial peepholes. Our differing perceptions and viewpoints make complementary opposites, living paradoxes, unique individual worlds, fabulous diversity of a rose window balancing out from zero, No Thingness. So Wholeness acts through the sensory media to launch the struggles and striving we need, to transmute into Sacred Relationship.
The punning ability of Earth: It contains as many worlds as there are people.
Every object, each story, yields countless metaphors at once, a multi-leveled inexhaustible teaching. Hebrew devar: word, thing. Things are words of oceanic fullness. All the images of this world are God speaking to Itself as us, on the growing edge of holiness.
We leave our spy holes in our moments of divine contact, and feel the Totality, which in meditation can translate into a new array of enwrapping senses.
And This is a spiritual universe, ever and only a spiritual universe, in infinite variety and shape, everything Consciousness (waking, dreaming, the unknown body). See awesome beauty, feel compassion and love, witness miracles: Sometimes we build to climaxes spirally, stirring things up, embracing our world more deeply.
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Poets give service with a simile.
Metaphors: A horse is a natural vehicle, a car’s a mechanical vehicle, while like our feet, all vehicles, all vehicles of expression, are our own Self outpicturing.
Our actions take place in a vision, a story. Their value is more than concrete, it’s metaphorical. The good shepherding of one student is the shepherding of one city. The saving of a world is the awakening of one person. There is never anything to worry about, everything is invested in the supreme Consciousness, inviolate yet touchable and comforting.
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This Spiritual Universe: The Metaphorical Principle
No Thingness Exists; in the midst of prayer, utterly beyond our sense experience or identity, It Is Being; then we return with tremendous peace. Meanwhile, the universe is inherently metaphorical, manifesting and Appearing As forms.
The Simple Principle: Using opposite poles which balance out to zero, Nothingness opens out by expressing As unfolding complementary opposites reconciling unto love, God’s evolving relations in oneness.
The Metaphorical Principle: There is only indirect perception, for there is No Thing to perceive.
This land emerging around us is dreamed up and reshaped, as rocks crystallize from liquid solution, by the mythologizing action of our mass psyche, our human vision.
Miraculous fruitage awakens us. It doesn’t “thin the veil” by uncovering a single “objective” spiritual universe. Rather the epiphany reveals a statue within the stone of our moment, unique and migrating.
This spiritual universe comes through us in beauteous events and calamity too. Each of these metaphors could be put in an infinitude of other ways. All embody movements, directionalities, vectors, intents, energy, feelings, that which is “less” and “more” than shape, and must needs fulfill Itself, coming into Artistic Expression.
In union with the Imperceptible, the world melts. Insofar as this ineffable Communion is reflected to our senses, whether inwardly in our meditative senses or outwardly, it’s like a possible composition in the endlessness of art. In prayer we may grasp a Principle, feel an assurance, sunbathe in the Love, hear celestial song. There are no better forms unseen in this Moment---whatever our experience, however humble, it’s divine marvel, as good as it gets while moving through metaphors.
This Is a spiritual universe, composed of holy Consciousness, and self-complete: The happy ending is here, even as we’re suffering and figuring it out. It’s translated into forms when it’s perceived, within/outwardly. From the evolving movement of our greater Self, miraculous salvations or an inspired poem or painting land whole in our awareness, like spotting a fish leaping from a brook in newness and surprise.
This is a spiritual universe. We perceive it when we dig deep. Healing fruitage: we feel the miraculous universe regardless of the mass of seemingly human details everywhere. God’s behind the earth, which is always opening to the page we need, pouring forth metaphors whose meanings we can intuit.
The perceptible, and the underlying intention of God beyond form:
To use a metaphor, of which science has many: Light is made of sine waves. Any karmic vignette is likewise carried on mathematical waves (as we sow, so we reap). The fleshed-out life of God in loving relationship lies in apprehending, inwardly and outwardly, not merely these primal wave actions, but the metaphors that overlay them.
So the metaphors we see don’t stand for another set of hidden metaphors underlying this world, such as heaven, Olympus, or Plato’s world of forms. (We’ll discuss this world’s afterlife extensions later.) Knowing this is the only spiritual world, our myths are freed to surge outward. Everything is miraculously transmuted, our loved ones transformed, all supposed limits dissolved. And everything is more vibrantly itself than ever.
The more we acquaint ourselves with our spiritual universe, the more that we unshell our senses at the further level of awareness, the more wonderful its revelations to us. We judge a scene wearing blinders, then we find paradise in the same place. As we live and move and have our being in glory, we commune with our Self.
The perfection residing in everyone shines forth when we’re centered. The miracle often appears as the direction in which things are going, a force felt beneath the surface, the venous blueprint in the tree as leaves come and go. We’re inhabiting strings in a celestial harp, each satisfied by vibrating in tune with the entire instrument of expression (while we’re never mere instruments). The song holds by its changing: The rhythmic plucking of each string outlasts many lives, while its tuning permutates.
Our mind is an iceberg that dissolves into the vast sea of Consciousness, a hidden doorway in the wall of Omniscience. Our spiritual universe far outdistances any particular forms. As we rise, singly or together, from human to spiritual awareness, the appearances within our mind’s view are reinterpreted. Subtly and terrifically, metaphors shaped by desire and fear shift to the pattern shown us on the mount, enlightened images of the real world while metaphors still.
Through the expression of this spiritual universe we fall into step with the divine Activity, sense It, rest within It, living as It and It living as us. Inwardly, we may experience the Beyond-form as a vision, music, a truth, a conversation, well-being. Still It remains a realm beyond any metaphor, shape or limit, everflowing.
“Too bad, we’re only catching a facet of God.” But that’s actually the blessing, a process of ever-different, spontaneous, variegated new encounters.
The spiritual universe skips and dances, flowing fluidly. In meditation, its nature is glimpsed variously by inner sense.
Asked if God spoke to her in French, Joan of Arc answered, “I hear Him in French.” Yet within we perceive truly, perfectly meet for us for this moment. And again, when the Earth melteth, we pass beyond all form.
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The movement of God As us towards awakening always acts under veils of metaphors, of appearances. It’s not that God needs to guide the surgeon’s hand, the soldier’s rifle, but the Unformed is moving beneath the layers; the Almighty is the only power. The belief systems of our mass psyche yield visions that garland us with divine qualities, such as the doctor’s competence or the fighter’s courage, impossible to develop without our foray into the joys and sorrows of humanness.
Every face and body, every natural thing, has utter holy beauty. If we look without stereotype glasses or judgment, the one who has suffered is beautiful. We may open to a very sick or sinning person and the disguise thins away to our eyes, our assumptions fade, the boundaries drop, we dive in, the inconceivable beauty flares out.
The multiple layers of meaning in the stories and images of life, the multiple and paradoxical meanings within words go to tiers which we only grasp in our encompassing Consciousness. Spiritual discernment detects the metaphors which plunge beyond the single deck of the literal.
Our discernment reaches past qualities or quantities to the omnipresent Invisible. From this fundament God expands, like transparent light which contains all the colors, expressing here As individual being.
Coming Attractions: Our human theatre breaks into physical and mental vision. Our
Awakening too is a vision and level of awareness, where this “physical” Substance and “mental” Experience, objective and subjective are felt as One Consciousness. Just so, our ordinary sense of the world, while metaphorical and indirect, is not opposed by our Renewed World (which is everpresent, while recurring and approaching like a spiral) but embraced and mended within It.
Metaphors will always be around, since holy Love is forever expanding. It bridges the lowest and highest, as all things in the world serve as figures transferring the intangible---breathing, eating, sensing, time and space, traveling, working, talking, sex, and all relationship. We can’t foretell just how the metaphors pan out and act on the spiritual plane in a Renewed World, different yet the same. With substance of loveliness, strength of flower petals, hand in hand within eternal arms, it’s a metaphor metamorphosis where we surprise ourselves.
It’s a deed to know something and say it outright, a deed to tell a myth and understand it, and a worthy deed to tell a myth and not understand it.
In living, we’re always accomplishing things we know not.
Heard in prayer: Be high. Be a sign unto thyself. Through compassionate and loving meditation, we come to understand ourselves, forgive ourselves, appreciate and honor the story of all our lives.
We utterly transcend each appearance, every passing fancy, yet we only exist As embodiments, forever and always pouring Ourself forth, our timeless Being nestled within our translucent shells, within the arch of the heavens.
When we have finished a meditation together, and see the shining faces, and everything in the room perfect, and traffic noise replaced by birdsong, this is a glimpse of the spiritual universe.
From division to depth of vision. The lambent perfection of the Unseen clicks into focus, one with Its metaphors.
We catch a ride with constant moving Consciousness into Really Being with You.