Metaphors and Symbols for Religious and Spiritual Experiences

By Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT

“How, in the contemporary period, can we evoke the imagery that communicates the most profound and most richly developed sense of experiencing life? These images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have any one absolutely fixed meaning. These images must point past all meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to that really ineffable mystery that is just the existence, the being of ourselves and of our world.”

“If we give that mystery an exact meaning we diminish the experience of its real depth. But when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make, past all categories of definition.” — Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor* Many years ago I attended a workshop on “The Essence of the Mystery of Life” led by Joseph Campbell. He pointed that the most important thing about any spiritual or peak experience is the experience itself. The second most important thing is what we tell ourselves the experience means and how we fit it into our beliefs and past experiences. The third most important thing is how we explain our experience to others. So I am perfectly aware that words cannot adequately describe a religious or spiritual experience because such experiences are, by their very nature, imprecise. Rather, they seem to be a collection of images that flow within a person’s body, mind, and heart. Attempting to use language to describe them is dicey because it gives the impression that the speaker is able to give a clear and accurate description of such events.

As Sam Keen points out in Hymns to an Unknown God:

“Language which authentically describes a spiritual experience transcends verifiable knowledge and is very imaginative, poetic, metaphoric and inexact. It is language stretched to the breaking point. In speaking about spiritual matters, we are always beating around the bush, albeit a burning bush.”

“. . . Authentic spiritual language about God does not confuse the map with the territory, the symbol with the thing. Literalism concentrates on the letter and misses the spirit; it gets the words but never the music, creates a spiritual tone-deafness. You can starve to death trying to eat a cookbook.”

Although direct and precise words aren’t adequate to the task of answering the question, I’d like to suggest that metaphors will do very well. In fact, some metaphors convey the essence of a religious or spiritual experience so well that they have been used by people throughout the world and in different cultures.

For example, take the metaphor of a sacred peak. Such mountains have been used as a cosmic axis for centuries—Mount Sinai, The Mount of Olives, Mount Olympus, Mount Meru, Hamey Peak, Mount Kailas. During the Second World War, a French mystic and writer, Rene Daumal, drew on this symbolism and wrote Mount Analogue, an allegorical novel of a supreme mountain where people may awake from the slumber of their usual state of mind and ascend to higher levels of consiousness:

“In the mythic tradition, the Mountain is the bond between Earth and Sky. Its solitary summit reaches the sphere of eternity, and its base spreads out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals. It is the way by which man can raise himself to the divine and by which the divine can reveal itself to man. . . . For a mountain to play the role of Mount Analogue, the ultimate symbolic mountain, its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature has made them. It must be unique, and it must exist geographically.”

After I had my own experience of connection with Spirit and tried to explain what had happened (see An Agnostic’s Encounter With God), I found that people who believed theirs was the right religion couldn’t accept that I had had a spiritual experience. How could I? My description didn’t match the map they used to get there. If they agreed that I had been touched by the Spirit, they said it was an evil spirit and they feared for my soul.

That’s when I came up with a metaphor of the spiritual realm as an island of infinite size in the middle of a large body of water. The island is called by many names, such as God, Yahweh, Great Spirit, Universal Consciousness, Allah, All That Is, and I Am. Like real islands where the geography of the shoreline varies considerably, when spiritual travelers visit this island some of them will enter easily and find no resistence to their explorations. Some will be caught in strong currents or and find it hard to land. Others will have thick brush and dense forests to get through before discovering more gentle terrain. Even so, the traveler can never explore all the way to the middle, let alone to the other side, of the island—and so may have no idea that the terrain has a great deal of diversity.

Unfortunately, some people have been told there is only one landing spot where people can enter the island. The instructions they’ve been given from others who’ve been there tells them exactly how to get there and what it will be like. Any experience that varies from that description must be wrong! “You can’t possibly have been there,” they will declare. “The map I was using says it looks exactly as I found it.” They confuse the map with the territory. And when we’re convinced a spiritual experience can only be seen from one perspective, we miss out on a great adventure. It’s as though we are afraid of the difficulties we’ll have to face if we proceed too far into the island and convince ourselves it’s safer to build a fence behind which we’ll feel safe—and let the books and lectures of experts describe the terrain beyond the safe boundaries we’re erected. No need to put ourselves in harm’s way. Of course, it is possible to get lost if you don’t keep an eye on your compass (see To What Should You Surrender? and Does Your Spiritual Compass Point in the Direction You Want to Go?)

Let me give you one more spiritual metaphor. In the workshop with Joseph Campbell that I mentioned at the beginning of this article, we met in the chapel of a convent near Santa Barbara, California, that has been converted into a conference center. In discussing the difference between living and dead symbols (and between living and dead rituals), he pointed to a dove in the stained glass windows on the wall through which light was flooding the room. “We use the dove as a symbol of spiritual and physical peace,” he noted. “Yet the essence of the symbol is not the dove itself. It is the light that shines through the dove. If we get caught in the symbol itself, we lose its essence.”

As long as we are aware that our metaphors are maps and not the territory, there are many metaphors and symbols we can use in trying to convey our religious and spiritual experiences.

© Copyright 2002, Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT