lorenzop wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2023 9:48 pmAs I wrote elsewhere, metaphors and analogies are generally not the main point, but are used to clarify the main point.AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2023 9:13 pm I think we would love for the metaphors to be reproached - that would at least show some minimal attempt to understand the perspective from which they are issued and their meaning. But, as it is, there is no attempt to even understand them, let alone reproach them.
Usually one doesn't have to salute the metaphor but address the main point - which I thought I did.
Lucid dreaming is a huge topic on it's own. It's not clear to me why it's essential to the question or why I have to include it in my answer.
Yes, and metaphors themselves are a huge topic. They are so useful because the one thing that spans all worlds - the physical-sensory, the soul, the spiritual - is lawfulness. That isn't simply a postulate to take on faith, but it is the only thing that makes sense of the fact that we can speak about any of these realities and make analogies from lower to higher and vice versa - 'as above, so below and as it has been, so it will be'. There must be some continuity of lawfulness between the lower and higher worlds that is bridged through our thinking perspective. In fact, all the ideal worlds must be the same except, when viewed from different thinking perspectives, are given their unique experiential character.
Every spiritual culture has used symbols, metaphors, parables, legends, fairy tales, etc. to act as a portal for our spirit to fluidly traverse the vertical domains of experience, using the lower sensory domain to give our imagination a foothold from which it can relate its experience to the inspired and intuitive domains. They didn't do this to make things difficult and roundabout when they could have just told people the spiritual truths as a list of bullet points. Rather, it is how the lower consciousness can come to experience something of the higher within its own activity.
Even our antipathy for metaphors can be a useful lesson if we approach it honestly. You also expressed skepticism about DH's view that our sensory perception is not veridical but rather symbolic for deeper cognitive realities. Naturally, our thinking will reach these conclusions if it has simply forgotten that everything in its experience is a symbol for the deeper, more transpersonal layers of its own activity. Everything we have been speaking about and metaphorically illustrating is experiencing the point of contact between the realm of symbols/metaphors and the realm of 'main points', i.e. the ideal relations that are being symbolized. That point of contact is in the experience of our own willed thinking. This is something far more intimate, concrete, and vivifying than an itemized list of 'main points' to be passively absorbed.
