Tag Archives: Metaphor

What is a Meta For?

This morning I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about metaphor, and how it effects our language. We were arguing over the level of metaphor that exists in everyday English, he was saying that it is really only sporadically used in poetry and music. I argued that it is actually more widespread than that. For example, the whole slew of sci fi movies that came out in the fifties and sixties were really metaphors about impending nuclear destruction.

Which brings up another point. If a metaphor exists, meaning that it can be structurally determined to be a metaphor but it was not created as a metaphor, is it still a metaphor? In the example above, all those sci fi movies are looked at in retrospect as metaphors for the U.S. Soviet conflict, with the evil aliens representing the imminent destruction of nuclear weapons. But what if some of the film makers didn’t have the desire to convey any message of the necessity of global peace and harmony? What if they just wanted to tell a good story about evil aliens that you could watch on a Friday afternoon? Would it still be considered a metaphor?

There are some that believe that language itself is a metaphor for reality itself. Reality itself is completely out our reach. Our eyes can only perceive a small percentage of bandwidth that is electromagnetic radiation. Our ears can only hear a sliver of the sound waves out bouncing around. And several experiments have shown that tactile sensations around our body are dependent on the area of skin under investigation.

In this model, language itself is just a shared approximation of what we think we are experiencing. That fact that so many people agree on the same thing says nothing about the accuracy of what they agree upon. We all can agree on the color red, but it is only read to our particular set of sensing organs. Two different objects that both appear red to us might appear totally different to creatures with differently evolved sensing organs.

I participated in a seminar once. In the seminar we were all told to think of a duck. A simple noun that we all knew. Four letters. No chance of somebody mistaking the word for dog, or rhino or antidisestablishmentarianism. But guess what? When we shared our answers, we all had a different duck on our minds. One guy even thought of a rubber duck, and some other guy thought of the Aflac duck.

So if the seminar speaker hadn’t had us share all of our ducks, and she’d kept talking about ducks, we would have followed her as long as our ducks fit into her story. The guy that thought of the rubber duck would have been lost if she said to imagine our ducks flying.

Now that I think of it, metaphors are a lot more prevalent in our everyday conversations and thoughts that I’d imagined. Perhaps the best way to leverage this simple realization is to appreciate he breadth and beauty of language for what it is. An expression of that which cannot be expressed, because that which is being expressed is inextricably connected to the expresser. As the expresser changes his experience of his expression, he changes that of which he is expressing.

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How to Control Your Happiness

Once there was a tiny field mouse. He was scurrying around, hurrying up to catch up with all the other field mice. He lived kind of far from the main mouse activity center, so he always felt like he was running late. He would always show up on time, and even as he put his socks and shoes on, while his wife was telling he had plenty of time, he still felt like he was late.

One day he had a day off. It was a Tuesday, so he didn’t really get a three day weekend, but it almost seemed like it. Because Sunday night, instead of getting depressed like he usually did when he started to go to bed, he actually felt pretty good. Because even though the next day was Monday, it was really like a Friday. So he was in a pretty good mood. And he played a little extra with his kids, and they all had a fun Sunday night. Because the little mouse kids were in the same boat. For this particular week, Monday was the new Friday.

As he was laying in bed, he started having a conversation with his wife. Because like every other Sunday, he knew that he had to go to bed at the same time, and the kids knew they had to get up at the same time, but they all seemed a lot happier than a normal Sunday.  The little mouse couldn’t really understand it, because even the same programs were on TV that night. Everything was the same, but it felt different.

Of course his wife, being the wise mouse that she was told him that it was because of his state of mind. She was saying that when you have a state of mind based on positive expectations about the future, you can feel better and happier, and enjoy life more. It doesn’t really matter what the future brings, because the future actually never comes. It’s always now. Mr. Mouse seemed a bit puzzled by this, but Mrs. Mouse explained it thusly:

The future is only a guess of what is to come, and the past is only an incorrect memory. Most mice think that the past is solid and it happened just as you remembered it, but if you dig into your memories, you’ll realize that not only are they not entirely accurate, but sometimes they are completely made up. Which is why it’s good to always try something a little bit before withholding judgment.

But Mr. Mouse still wasn’t convinced. He said he was happy, of course, because he knew there was an unusual holiday coming up. That was why everybody was in a good mood, because they all had a holiday coming up on Tuesday, when they didn’t have to go to work or school.

Of course, Mrs. Mouse, not to be outdone, countered by asking Mr. Mouse why he allowed other people to tell him when he was permitted to feel happy or not. Why do you let a bunch of mice you never met before to decide on a holiday for you to be happy inside your own mind? Did they plant a robot chip inside your brain when you weren’t looking, so they could control your thoughts from a secret building outside of the Mice Territory? Of course not. Your thoughts belong to you, and you can think them any way you want. You can even choose not to think them, if you think that will help.

Mr. Mouse seemed a bit confused, but he knew better than to blame his wife. She usually knew what she was talking about.

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Plant the Right Seeds in Your Mind to Claim the Fruits of Life

I was watching my neighbor the other day work in her field. She has a small field that has a couple rows of cabbages, and some kind of long white turnip that only grows around here. She was spending a lot of time preparing the ground for the spring planting. She needed to start mixing this stuff into the soil, and then she goes out to add this other stuff. She explained it all to me, but it sounded really involved. I always thought that you just planted some seeds, and hopefully remembered to water them, and then like a month later you’d have an apple tree or an orange bush or a bunch of tomatoes or something. I guess growing stuff is kind of complicated. I’m sure glad some people know to do it, because I would get pretty hungry otherwise.

Which kind of reminded me of that old commercial for Carl’s Junior. It showed a guy in the supermarket looking for food, and he was wondering how to cook it. And then the tag line of the ad said “If it wasn’t for Carl’s, people would go hungry,” or something like that. I thought it was clever tag line, pretty funny. It’s amazing what ideas people can come up with to grab your attention. When you think about it, they have  really tough job. You’re sitting there, watching TV, and then the show stops, and you know a commercial is coming, so you automatically fire up your anti commercial defense shield. And every commercial you see is mixed in with every other commercial. These marketing guys know there stuff, because they can come up with something entertaining and capable of blasting through your anti commercial defense shield, all in thirty seconds for less. I don’t know if that is a wonder of modern advertising, or a result of the modern day short attention span.

I was hanging out at this yoga class a friend had talked me into going to. (Of course I was supposed to meet her there, and she didn’t show up, but that’s another story,) and he started talking about how important it was to cultivate your thoughts. He said underneath your everyday thoughts are base thoughts. These base thought contain your beliefs, values, how you think about yourself compared to the rest of the world. He was saying that these base thoughts are very powerful and can make life exceptionally easy and rewarding, or exceptionally difficult, depending on the quality of the base thought. The problem is that not only is your base thought difficult to change, but most people don’t even know that it’s there. He said the clearest indication of the quality of your base thought is the quality of your life. And like a gigantic ship, it takes a while to turn. And most people just don’t have the discipline to keep feeding your base thoughts consistent surface thoughts on a regular basis. He said these surface thoughts are like giving water to a plant. You have to feed your base thoughts with consistent surface thoughts in the direction you want your life to move. The problem is most people get this, and try to do this, but they give up after only a couple of weeks. He said it would be like planting a seed and then digging it up every couple of weeks to see if it had sprouted yet. You need to be patient, and most importantly, you need to be consistent with your surface thoughts that you feed your deeper self with positive ideas about your future that is coming true for you, now.

I especially like watching the Superbowl, specifically because they have such great commercials. And one of my favorite things to do when I’m bored, is look up good commercials on Youtube. You can see my current favorite if you go there and type in “Nike let your game speak.” I find that one especially inspiring.

And my neighbor was telling me that although now is the busy time, getting the soil ready, getting the seedlings ready, getting ready for the spring planting festival, the best part is the waiting. Because once they plant the right seeds in the right soil, it is inevitable that the right fruit will come up.

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