The metaphor of life

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The metaphor is more true than the context of life, for the context no longer reflects the nature of our beings. Hence the validity of poetry, and allusion to better describe us to ourselves than reason and logic. Hence the dream-like quality underlying all existence; as in the drama of dream, nothing in life is linear nor arbitrary- it is all significant, and  replete with signs, symbols, omens, covenants, archetypes, and metaphor. These are more accurate, more representational, of our existence than the mundane field of linear understanding (i.e. if parables could be logically explained, they would not, in the first place, have been parables).

Which is to say, the ‘form’ of your being is not your whole being. Nor is it even a proper reflection of your being, unless it is viewed outside of the limitation of linear context. Only the sublime, symbolic, ethereal, archetypical drama is real, and it is this which is also, paradoxically, unreal (so you see how through it we may then come to the ‘dreamness’ of ‘beingness’.)

The symbolic and mythical realms are simply different forms of relation from the profane, though the data be seemingly the same; by seeing life in this way a bond occurs through myth and symbol which re-associates the disparate facts, or ‘things’ into the singular Play, The Dream, the ever-now oozing about in Oneness.

            For the manifest is God’s subconscious, and hence operates inherently as dream.

Now, think of any metaphor. Then think of it independent of the object of its meaning. By doing so it has now become inapplicably irrelevant, a string of meaningless words, neither linear nor symbolic; a disconnected allusion, a suspended idea, attached nowhere, which we can hardly approach nor ponder. Yet this strangeness must wholly concern us, because its meaninglessness is now its meaning, and because the closest metaphor, to this autonomous metaphor ...is modern man.

It is this unsupported leap which we must make if we are to attain to the vision of oneness. For, divorced from the profane reality, the metaphor reunites our separate parts- which are not separate except when viewed through the linear mind- within a new, holistic framework. The symbolic world is one where everything is joined, as opposed to the diabolic world, where everything is separate.

And so, taking a giant leap, it is not when your individual frequency fades out, but when it merges harmoniously into the great dream-symphony of life- when you are not a phony in the diaphonous cacophony- do you enter the realm of symbolic relationship, and so ‘become as one’, unseparated from the all.

Nothing exists unto itself. Everything is symbolic. All are just symbols for the unexplainable; no one knows what they symbolize, for wholeness lies not in the mind but in the soul. And so our life is only made whole through the destruction of contextual thought patterns, followed by the symbiosis of symbols.

Actuality, then, is simply an expression of the metaphor- that is its true actuality. Thus life is a ‘metaphorical actuality’ only. So even if events occur, they are real only symbolically, which is expressed in the actuality of the symbol.

            In fact, we are only symbols of our own consciousness.

All is symbol. Even ...all.

All-eluia!

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These fragments are taken from unpublished writings by Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.