Responses to Reading Group 3

“Mixing it All Up”

Response By Alan R. Neal

to Challenging The Literal

By Daniel Chandler

I find this article extremely fascinating. Explaining Metaphor and Metonyms in such a way explains a lot about language, thought, theory, and practice. It brings into focus the esoteric ideas of reality, which state that nothing is real. Things SEEM to be real because we have been told, all of our lives that, they ARE real because we can feel a thing, or taste a thing, or smell a thing. But in reality, everything we experience is nothing more than vibrations. Many esoteric theorists put forth the idea that our entire universe is nothing more than a collection of vibrations, and that it is nothing more than our interpretation of these vibrations that make them seem real to us. Much of our reality may very well be programming supplied to us very early on by our parents and siblings. One persons reality may be completely different from another persons, and we have no way of understanding their reality because we can’t be them, we can’t get inside of their heads. All we can do is empathize with them, and we can only hope that our feelings are a reasonable facsimile of theirs. It is, of course, true that we are all the sum of our experiences. And that each of us have vastly different experiences. As we live our daily lives, we become accustomed to a certain geographical or spatial area or region, and we accept that our reality is similar to those who experience their lives with us. But how do we really know?

Even identical twins have different experiences, because they do not occupy the same space at the same time in the same way. Rosicrucians teach that a candle, when lit, is not really a candle at all. And if you were to meditate on that candle for an extended period of time, trying to force your mind to believe that it is something other than a candle, then you can convince your brain to believe that it actually is something other than a candle. When I was a kid, I had a friend who was a certified genius, and he used to challenge me by asking what if my parents weren’t really who they appear to be? That maybe they were secretly extremely wealthy, and had paid each and every person I see every day to play a role in my life, even if it is just as a passerby or a face in the crowd. And what if everything that had happened to me had been planned by them, according to some grand design that had been laid out for me before I was born, in order to achieve the results that is me now. How would you know? We see in movies all the time that reality can be something other than what it appears to be. The movie “Inception” is a prime example of it.

This article explains that language is all metaphor, and that even explaining metaphor has to use words that are metaphorical in nature. That there is no absolute way to portray accurately any idea or concept without comparing it to something else; that each sentence is relational to some other sentence or idea. I believe this is true. And applying these ideas to our art is only natural, or even necessary, thanks to the nature of truth in representation. If art is another language, one full of emotion and fear, of desire and repulsion, of every feeling humankind has ever had, then even art is a metaphor, or a metaphor of a metaphor, and can also be described as the “suspension of disbelief”, thereby rendering it only an expression of the artists language, which may not be the same as yours, but is, nonetheless, a language of validity, since all language is actually a lie, an untruth that we create the concept of truth with. 


Existential theories aside, if we touch a table, are we really touching a table? Or are we touching something that we’ve been told is a table our whole lives, and we just THINK we are touching a table? Just because it looks like, or feels like, or taste like a table, doesn’t necessarily mean it IS a table. Essentially, it boils down to energy being transferred via your network of nerves, arriving at your brain, telling you that you are correct to think, with all your knowing, that it is a table. Yet, it is nothing more than a metaphor of a table, as is everything in our present reality. Since nothing is real, what is keeping our imaginations from creating new realities, new existences, and new dimensions that we people with our own creatures and things? Understanding this is actually vital to understanding everything in the universe. We were all made the moment the big bang occurred. We are made up of the stuff that stars are made of. We are our own universe, living inside of a universe, that may or may not be a tiny part of a much larger universe, that may be a part of a much, much larger universe, that is really in the midst of an even larger universe….where nothing is real, and everything is just a vibration of energy!