| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
What Exactly Is Reality? No Metaphor Can Describe It
How many times have you heard teachers use analogies to try to bring home a point? For example the common image of the self being like a wave in the ocean –experienced as separate, but where does the ocean end and the self begin. So “it’s all one.” But in many ways we actually use analogies to separate us from reality –to create the illusion that we “know” something mentally when it really needs to be fathomed much more deeply –with all of the senses.
Take for instance the experience of going outside on a clear night and looking at the stars. We can identify the moon, which is supposedly “close” and then begin to drift out, discovering a planet perhaps and a constellation, and then? Remember the Hubble Deep Field experiment which trained the supertelescope on a supposedly empty part of space, and discovered billions of galaxies –not stars, but galaxies?
Our first impulse is to use a word to “explain” what we’re seeing or experiencing.
Oh, it’s “infinite.”
Words are the first level of metaphor, after all, since they seem to be the brain’s “filter” for comprehending reality. But what does that word really tell us? We’re standing “here,” somewhere in the “universe,” and looking “out there,” but every time we think, what’s beyond that, we come up with… another WORD.
Source: http://philosophers-stone.co.uk/wordpress/2014/08/what-exactly-is-reality-no-metaphor-can-describe-it/
