Why Symbolism is Important

" My name is Parzival. I am on a quest; a quest for the Holy Grail. It is housed within a castle, called Mount Salvation. I must search for it until my body, mind, and spirit are purified. Then, will I find the great Castle, and take my seat at the table of Montsalvaeshe " .

This is the Mystic Quest, not for cup or stone, but for TRUTH.

There are literally thousands of volumes of illuminating writings, with ideologies ranging from Taoism to Stoicism; beautiful, meaningful ideas that are lost to many, simply because of lack of exposure or understanding to those outside that particular ideology; or because these ideas are couched in language that requires one to be familiar with the surrounding dogma. Yet, as precious metals are found among common ores, so truth, then, is truth regardless of the non-sequitors that might seem to envelop it. As General Albert Pike put it, all truth does not belong to or lie within just one religion.

Much can be learned from the philosophers and teachers of history, regardless of the religions of their various cultures. The Creator blessed mankind with a great and wonderful gift: the ability to perceive the Nature of things, to the extent that he is capable of understanding. We must look for truth, wherever it may reside.

Yes, there are those who reject the idea that there are truths to be learned from cultures and religions other than their own; as they might reject an orange because the skin is hard to swallow.

For those folks, narrow, well-defined, familiar dogma is not only desirable, but the ONLY form of truth extant. Paul Brunton put it thus: "They would die for the truth, but they would not think for it." <*15>

I am not not criticising; I am simply making an observation about how easy it is to reject otherwise valuable concepts. 

This said, however, we must recognize that there are others who are "open to joy and delight wherever beauty appears" (Wm Blake) <*2>

If this applies to you, then, you may find some value herein.

I would ask one favor, gentle reader, that you forgive those errors of grammar and verbal eccentricities you may encounter, and gauge not the writings' value by the unworthiness of the writer. In Walt Whitman's words, "... the words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing." <*32>

Where to begin?

Who are we, and why are we here? Where is the seat of our God?

Most of us deeply yearn for these answers. But, these questions are not the same kind of questions we're used to answering.

Any system of verbal language is completely inadequate for the task. Imagine describing the color blue to someone who's been blind from birth, and you might see what I mean.

Perhaps the closest man can get in communicating some truths is by using symbolism in language, parables, rituals, legends, and myth. Concepts such as immortality, insight, truth, re-birth, spiritual suffering, doubt; mere words that fall woefully short of expressing the ideas they represent on the symbolic / experiential level.

Many people are probably unaware the core teachings of all the major Western religions are expressed symbolically and are/were not intended to be understood literally, at least not by the priests and initiates. One lamentable characteristic of closed consciousness, however, is the propensity to turn symbols into deities, sacred ideas into Holy words, etc, and this has obscured the truth contained therein.

For instance, according to Talmudic and Kabbalah scholar Zev ben Shimon Halevi, the Jews' bondage in Egypt is an allegorical representation of the limited ego; the flight into Egypt represents the seekers striving toward enlight-enment; enlightenment itself is represented by entry into the land of milk and honey.<*16>

These beautiful ideas are wonderfully illustrated in a way that imparts the truths within DIRECTLY to the understanding, once correctly interpreted.

Ask yourself; Did Jonah literally emerge from the depths of a whales stomach after several days as a very light, and obviously indigestable, midday snack? Or does his story communicate some thing much more valuable? Was the extensive use of parables by Jesus of Nazareth his way of demonstrating the symbolic nature of the stories in the Old Testament?

Another example; in Taoism, the immortals reside on several island paradises, called Fang-hu (square urn); P'eng-lai (rampant weeds); and Ying-chou (world ocean continent); it is said that those few faithful who succeed in the search for these places become immortals themselves. (Fang-hu is said to lie at "the exact center of the Eastern Ocean") What could this mean to one who could understand?

A similar tradition in the Tibetan Mahayana sect of Buddhism describes such a Utopia hidden in the Himalayas called 'Shambhala' from which the Savior of mankind will emerge. (It's been called Xanadu/Shangri-La in some western mediums.)

Some may laugh condescendingly at these ideas; while others spend their lives and fortunes searching for them as physical, geographic locations.

Both approaches mistakenly & simplistically take them as representations of literal truth. So, the myths end up seeming either foolish or fabulous.

I recall a televised interview with the Dalai Lama, wherein the interviewer tried to coax the highest spiritual authority in Tibetan Buddhism to reveal where Shambhala was hidden! Only such a kind spirit as Tenzin Gyatso could have restrained himself from smirking a bit; one wonders what kind of outcry would be caused by demanding of the Pope the physical location of the Garden Of Eden, or Heaven.

In Zen, one encounters the idea of 'fukasetsu','the unexpressable' -some experiences and truths cannot be communicated conceptually.

This does not mean they do not have value; quite the contrary.

After attempting to describe a personal experience of spiritual enlightenment, Nagarjuna is quoted as saying: "Mre sam djod med"; "I should like to speak, but words fail me." (from the Pjajna Paramita)

Words are, by their very nature, limited to very narrow interpretation. "The experience of fukasetsu is the basis for the admonition so typical of Zen not to fixate on the words of sacred scriptures, which can only be the 'finger that points to the moon, but not the moon itself.' <*28>

In the Judaic tradition, the true name of God is considered to be 'ineffable'; and, although this word sometimes connotates "secret", (in terms of exoteric Jewish dogma, it is understood to mean just that...) it was intended to communicate the idea that God's NAME, (representing God's NATURE, PRESENCE, and ESSENCE) is completely inexpressable within the confines of vocabulary.

Imagine a trip from Miami to Seattle. If you were to take a jet, you'd get there in no time, and aside from the fact that Aunt Martha lives there, the trip itself would be of little personal value. But, a road trip is different. The experiences you have along the way change the way you end up looking at the trip, it's meaning, the destination, maybe even Aunt Martha!

You might even find that the journey itself meant more to you than the final destination. Thinking back on the trip, you will remember bits and pieces, (SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATIONS!) that carry with them conscious/subconscious feelings and meanings. In words, however, describing the trip might sound more like it was "2500 miles, taking 'x' amount of days, stopping here and there.." etc.

The words do not live up to what the trip actually means to you; no matter how many words you use, its meanings are left uncommunicated. How much more so, then, are words inadequate when describing aspects of spiritual/philosophical matters?

Put another way, many religious traditions represent truth on a different, deeper plane of understanding than literal reality.

Often times - that which is called the "esoteric" or "allegorical" meaning- is the ONLY one that was originally intended. The irony of literal "fundamentalism"* is that it lacks the fundamental understanding of what was really being conveyed.

A man who listens only for literal truth might as well be deaf.

(An interesting sidenote: Every major religion has had fundamentalist-"literal truth" movements; the Buddhist Society of India founded by Bhimrao Ramji, the Arya-Samaj (Hindu) founded by Svami Dayananda; also Shiite Fundamentalists, & assorted Judaic and Christian Sects. Such emphasis on doctrine over understanding is referred to in Zen as Gufu-shogyo-zen, or "fools Zen".)

So, a great deal of our hero's journey can only be understood in a non-verbal way; Gerhard Adler wrote: "Symbolic meaning- through amplification of myth and legend, dream and story, restores to individual life the numinosity it has largely lost." <*6>

>>Three exercises in working with Symbolic Representation:

The processes of personal awareness, understanding, empathy, and development have been symbolically represented in literature, sacred and otherwise, throughout the centuries; by names like Plato, Pythagoras, and Paracelsus, George Ripley, Francis Bacon, and William Blake, W.B. Yeats, J.L. Borges, and H.G. Wells.

In fact, once you start looking, there is so much of this type of symbolism in literature, it's hard to choose just a few as examples. But, as they cannot be fully reproduced here, we'll try and stick with the more readily available ones.

Take H.G. Wells' "The Door in the Wall"<*24>, for instance. In it, a green door leads to a path from whence one would never willingly return, if such return was possible. A brief glimpse begets an intense longing, and seemingly futile search, finally ending in the physical deathof the protaganist. And a rebirth? Yes, perhaps, but not of the previous "sum of the parts"; no longer an amalgamation of attributes and experience.

The myth of the "Holy Grail" dates from about the 10th century, with some aspects of it much older, but an illuminating version can be found in Wolfram Von Eschenbach's "Parzival" dating from around 1210. Here, the quest for the Grail is the quest for the realization of God and Self; the Grail itself not so much an object, as Divinity at work. Consider the location of the Grail Castle, so near the four rivers (Gihon, Phison, Tigris and Euphretes) flowing out of Eden-- "... that their fragrance remained unspent.."; the nature of the wound to the Fisher King; the meaning of the question left unasked. While you're at it, you might ponder the relationship between Schionatulander and the virgin Sigune; or the lineage of Feirefiz. Or, start with this one; what meaning would the Grail have without the Quest? Whom DOES the Grail serve? <@*25>

Jorge Luis Borges presents us with a startling and intensely visual tale of a momentary glimpse of Oneness, and what in Sanskrit is called 'Chamatkara' (or, 'Astonishment', a sudden instant of non-verbal, sub-ego understanding) in his story "The Aleph". He opens with a very appropriate verse from Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Oh God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space..."

Borges description of the Aleph is breathtaking; even more so because of its' mystical symbolism. In several ways, it reminds one of the story in the Avatamsaka Sutra that describes a seemingly infinite array of pearls hanging over the King of Heavens' palace, arranged so that upon viewing a single pearl, the reflection of every other one might also be seen, simultaneously.

In all three examples, the lack of attached religious dogma enables the reader free access to symbolic concepts that he may otherwise have mistakenly discarded without consideration, as contrary to his sect. Thus, once he has learned to recognize and interpret allegorical representation, he may then gain an understanding of his own faith that literality might have had previously denied him.

"We are symbols, and inhabit symbols." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

references:

2> William Blake, "Visions of the Daughters of Albion"

6> Segaller & Berger, "Wisdom of the Dream", 1989

15> Paul Brunton, "The Sensitives", 1987

16> Daniel Goleman, "The Meditative Mind", 1988

24> H.G. Wells, "A Hole in the Wall"

25> Wolfram Von Eschenbach, "Parzival"

26> J.L. Borges, "The Aleph", 1939

28> "Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion", Shambhala Publishing, 1994.

32> Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass"