[Australian Aboriginal Painting by Claude Carter]
“God said: …A metaphor is the magic carpet you ride on. A metaphor switches you from one subway to another in midstream. One moment you were lollygagging along, and the next you are transported.
…Is it a metaphor that the sun is your heart, or that your heart is the sun? Is it a metaphor that your cheeks become roses? Is it a metaphor that you sail across a sea of life? Are metaphors perhaps more true than that the grass is green and the sky is blue?
Facts are details, and you seek Wholeness.
…You seek a greater horizon because you are bound to have it. If you must be bound, be bound to that which is boundless. Break boundaries. Break even the boundaries of words.” HL 3211
“God said: …Poets take words that are not seen as of similar meaning, and they put the two words together, and, click, there is a deeper look, and a deeper insight, and dross becomes gold.” HL 4241
“There is only one way out of the world’s thinking, just as there was only one way into it. Understanding totally by understanding totality” ACIM 7-7
THE TOWER OF BABEL
«In the Beginning Was the Verb». There must have been a point in time or no-time where Language was One. It probably didn’t need any dictionaries, any words, nor grammar, nor syntax rules because it was One, hence there were no boundaries, no space, no time to define and delimit, and the Totality was known. This means that questions did not exist because there was no need for them to be, everything being totally understood because totally known. Language was probably closer to breathing, music, and painting. The Verb was setting Itself into motion, lightening Itself with sounds, colors, and shapes and letting Its Ideas define themselves and have an autonomous life of their own, singing and signing the Glory of their Creator. A hand was writing itself.
Oneness does not have to question Itself because there is nothing to question in Being, in I AM. But, at a certain point in time, or perhaps this is what we call the « beginning of time », there might have been a Big Bang in Language where a potential multiplicity of languages arose. The Big Bang marks the birth of questioning. The Big Bang is perhaps by itself an exploding question mark of which, now, we hear only the echo. The very instant angels decide to experiment with self-creation, the sound and the light of the Big Bang created instantly the dark void of question. Fear rose as the first and only question, being the essence of questioning. This fear took the shape of “who am I”, the inverse of I AM. Instead of being light, these angels began to look at light as a particularizing device. Light and Sound were no longer perceived as a Source but rather as effects. From the subject, everything became an object. The continuum, infinity of light became metaphorically the finite of quantum particles. Einstein saw Max Planck coming. Electromagnetism saw the quantum particles coming.
Human languages are the reflection of the fragmentation of the light-mind into language
particles. These particles now bear the name of informations, ultimately zeros and ones. Since this fragmentation was born from introducing the darkness of questioning Oneness, different languages could not understand each other. They became heteroclite objects that lost the thread that united them.
The passage from the Oneness of the Verb to the plurality of languages marks the end of the Metaphor and the beginning of the discursive speech, the passage from the Language of Creation to the language of information, that is the language of reasoning and making. This is what the Tower of Babel is about.
THE LANGUAGE OF INFORMATION AND THE LANGUAGE OF METAPHOR
Words are nothing by themselves. Notes are nothing by themselves. Colours are nothing by themselves. It is the relationships we create between them and our consciousness that bring them to Life.
In the relative world, we treat words as we treat objects. We try to connect them or assemble them with knots and bolts that have nothing to do with what they connect or assemble. These knots and bolts are the laws or rules of phonology, grammar, and syntax. We assemble thoughts the same way with logical knots and bolts. The result is a technological device: a computer, an aircraft, a pair of boots, a language, etc.
This is what we call the « factual world », the world of facts, the world of details, and the world of proof. But what is a proof if not the attempt to establish that something is true with the help of something else? A fact is proven by another fact which is proven by another fact. Information is information, not matter nor energy (Shannon). it is not Knowledge.
We consider the world that surrounds us as a fact characterized by a plurality of details, as something that exists by itself outside of us, independently from our own existence.
In this world of information, the language of poetry seems to be a wanderer. It does not fit in a factual world. But perhaps we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.
Poetry is a greek word that means «creation». And the process of creation goes through the metaphor. Metaphor, which means literally to carry (greek ‘phor’) beyond (greek ‘meta’) through participation or communication, is what holds words, colours, notes, objects, and people together. If the language of information expresses facts, details, separate objects, the metaphor expresses Wholeness, the connectivity of every part with the whole, and the whole with each and every part. “Are metaphors perhaps more true than that the grass is green and the sky is blue?” Metaphoric language expresses Oneness, information language expresses twoness. In its twoness mode, the mind separates, which is useful technically, but in its Oneness mode, the mind, through the Metaphor, unifies and injects the breath of Life to those separate entities. Metaphor is the true meaning of people and things. So to speak, we are a metaphor for ourselves. It unites what seems to be irreducible opposites. It sees the whole in the part and the part in the whole.
Words, colours, sounds, even us come from the single pinched Chord of Oneness. In architecture and in music, if we divide a unit line or chord into the ratio of 2/3, we create the golden proportion (in architecture) or, in music, the fifth note (one part of five equal parts) upon which we generate all the notes of the musical scale. Each individual note acquires its meaning when interacting with the other notes according to a certain pattern. Interestingly enough, a musical note like G, which on a unit string (C string) is 2/3 of the length of the C string vibrates 3/2 faster than the C string. Length and frequency are in an inverse relationship. The aim is to produce Harmony. Poetry is Music, is Harmony.
The difference between the VERB and the language of information is that, in the Mind of the Creator, words, which are vibrations, come to life through their sequence and yet their prearranged harmony. And it is only the Harmony that we are really looking for because Harmony is the Whole, the Source. God is not a Word, a Thing, a Note, a Colour, a Person, He is a Pure Relation, pure Harmony. And Metaphor is Harmony in action and eternal expansion.
THE INVISIBLE THREAD AND THE TAPESTRY OF THE WORLD
The metaphor is the invisible thread, invisible intrinsic light, that connects two seemingly opposite or dissimilar things to express there intrinsic likeness or unity. It is like when two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen unite their “dissimilar” natures to create water with the aid of a sparkle. They unite in a particular sequence and according to a prearranged creative pattern of harmony. Natural chemistry expresses the Oneness process of analogy and equality: “Poets take words that are not seen as of similar meaning, and they put the two words together, and, click, there is a deeper look, and a deeper insight, and dross becomes gold”. H2+O2=2H2O. Chemistry is truly a metaphoric language.
The Truth is that everything in the world is One, that differences and disparities are only perceptions, hence illusions. Information is division, hence a perception. If everything is One, then the whole world must be a metaphor as well as we are individual metaphors of the Only One.
There is nothing in life that is not connected to another. Loneliness is a fantasy, it is totally meaningless. We don’t see the thread. Metaphor is the thread. It takes all lives and all aspects of all lives in all universes and weaves a never-ending and ever-growing tapestry. This tapestry is Awareness of Oneness.
It is more like a musical composition or a painting than a “real world” of discrete objects and individuals. There are calls and there are answers. Even if sometimes the answers seem unheard or unseen, or delayed, nothing is left behind. Everything is brought to its Summit. In Oneness, we are the weavers, the tapestry, the thread, and the act of weaving itself.
One of the great teachings of the metaphor is that instead of questioning the universe, we co-create with it.
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What if in Oneness, we are not the weaver, not the tapestry nor the thread? What if that in Oneness, We would be the weaving?
This reminds me of the Shiva Samhita where Shiva says to his beloved, something like, “I am not the food nor the mouth that chews it, nor the one that tastes it. I am the tasting”.
The tasting cannot really be defined. From whatever angle I look at it, the tasting or the weaving appears to be the master of the moment.
We are the weaving and the complete process:
“Take heart. Someone who pleases you is also yourself that you are seeing. There is an aspect. You are on stage, and you are in the audience watching yourself.” Heavenletter (to be published)