Like all language, at some point, metaphors break down when describing or explaining a truth. Every metaphor reaches a threshold, a frontier where it no longer proves useful in illustrating the concept it’s trying to illuminate. Metaphors are self-limiting. They’re constrained in their ability to reveal the whole truth about anything.

I’d like you to consider something: that the world itself is a metaphor, and that it’s an imperfect and incomplete parable which tries to tell us something about ourselves, and about the divine. When the manifest content of the physical world and its cosmic backdrop, along with the world’s biological, cultural, societal, and other components are interpreted literally, the metaphor is relevant, but this level of interpretation is most divisive and least useful. Those who take the cosmos as a concrete reality valid only on its face will sooner or later probably become disillusioned, and see unmeaning. They may also fight one another over the correct interpretation.

Materialist philosophy and reductionist science fall into this trap, and those who advocate for them as exclusive explanations which propound the only and ultimate reality have very little to offer us in the end.  They show enormous promise as intermediate tools of applied science and technology, but reveal nothing of our ultimate origins or collective psychological makeup. They can tell us what, when and how, but now who we are or why we are. The proof of this is in the fact that, although humanity has made immense scientific and technological progress, we still can’t answer through reductionist means the fundamental questions of where we came from before we were born, of what existed before the universe was made,  of what takes place in and after our passing or what occurs at or after the end of the cosmos. These disciplines can’t tell us thing about why we’re here, about meaning. Using scientific means or materialist philosophy, we still don’t know who we are, what we’re supposed to do, or where we’re going. We can’t affix ultimate meaning, and these methodologies will probably never lead us to answers regarding these ultimate questions. We must admit that we’re lost, and that all the best efforts of science have merely given us the means to destroy ourselves just as much as they have to help us survive.

Yet when we interpret the cosmos based upon its latent, rather than merely as its patent content, even those who understand the universe metaphorically, as a dream, will find that the truth the cosmos stands for becomes mired in semantics, in variable interpretations of the symbols which we see about us. This is the problem of religion. No two observers see and experience the same reality. At some point, the universals of the metaphor break down and reality becomes impossible to explain on an absolute level. There is no universal interpretation of any metaphor, including the metaphor of the world. This is an inherent problem with symbols and demonstrates the limits of metaphor. Symbology is comparative only, because the observer’s experience is relative to her position in the universe and is thus relative to the symbol as well.

This is a problem of interpretation, made necessary by the use of any language, which includes the parabolic nature of the world. Metaphors are symbolic, and as a form of language, they are open to more than one understanding. We can never be certain that red means the same thing to you as it does to me.

Symbols are projected from the one who conceives them. They are language, and as such, they are invented. Everything I think I see reflects an idea, my unfinished business projected outward from my mind in much the same way that a dream represents an inward projection of the dreamer’s unprocessed, unmetabolized mental content left over from their waking world. This content originates from within, from inside the mind of the dreamer. Yet just as we can never be certain that this content means the same thing to you as it means for me, we can’t be sure that it isn’t universal from individual to individual, from dreamer to dreamer. In fact, Jung’s observation was that the contents of dreams repeat and are archetypal and therefore at least to a certain extent universal. A Course in Miracles holds that, although a universal theology – be it theistic, agnostic or atheistic – is impossible because of the relative position of each observer, a universal experience is both possible and necessary.

I believe this universal experience to be love. The Jesuits have a saying: We were made by love, for love, to love. And as the song says: The greatest joy is to love and to be loved in return. This truth lies beyond the metaphor. This love is what created the metaphor. It’s what preceded the creation of the cosmos, what underlays it as a fundament, it’s who and what we are and are sole reason for being and for being here. And just maybe, it’s what lives on after the universe is washed away.

© 2025 by Michael C. Just