Elsewhere, we explored how food preferences and eating rituals are saturated with symbolic meanings. The domains of work, sports, compulsions, and games, also involve an interpenetration of practical needs with symbolic meanings. These symbolic activities give us the kick of "being" that gets us through an average day replete with al of the nonbeing of modern existence, and allows us to endure
Baseball: The Journey Through Life and Home Again
How do sports get us through the day? Sports promise us the renewal that we crave so badly, the renewal from the fallen condition that seems intrinsic to modern secular existence. After all, the word "recreation" literally means re-creation. The world has been recreated anew. This is the same desire that lies behind our hopes, during the New Years Festival, that all our past sins can be washed away and that we can start fresh with a new year.
Can sports succeed in renewing us? A sporting event is a ritual drama or contest. The contest is a repetition or reenactment of the archetypical battle between good and evil. Evil is never permanently subdued in this symbolic realm, which is why the contest is endlessly repeated.
If a ritual succeeded the first time in accomplishing what it promised, there would be no need to repeat it. Thus it has the same compulsive quality of many foods, such as potato chips. In sports, there is always another game, and next year is an an entirely new season. A sporting event gives us a taste of renewal, but it quickly fades, and so it must be repeated.
Baseball, in particular, possesses this re-creational dimension. The symbolism of baseball centers around our journey through life. In baseball, this journey is taken by the batter, who runs around the bases and returns to home plate. Home symbolizes original unity with the world, Eden, paradise. The departure from home begins the hero's journey through life. What is discovered at the end of this journey, paradoxically, is home. You cannot see home unless you first leave home. As T.S. Elliot felicitously expressed it:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
What does it mean that we do not know home initially? It means that we do not know ourselves initially. To leave home is to to leave childhood, unconsciousness, the security of one's established values. In becoming homeless, we can for the first time see what those values and beliefs were. Thus in seeing the place for the first time, a person sees himself for the first time.
In seeing himself, a person becomes real, becomes Self-realized. because to be real means not only to physically exist but to be seen. We have discussed the recognition requirement for selfhood, in our earlier discussion of the demand for fame. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy leaves home (her immediacy and innocence) and completes the heroic journey to Self-realization. Only then can she declare: "There is no place like home." The same journey of the Self in search of itself, is the basis of Hegel's philosophy. Self-realization means that the Self, which was "in-itself," unknown to itself, has become visible to itself, "for-itself." It is this deep truth about our journey to Self-realization that excites interest in baseball's symbolic leaving home and returning home.
In baseball, the ball simultaneously symbolizes our self, as well as the opportunities that life offers to us. As in life, the opportunities are limited. Opportunities are useless unless we can "connect" with them. Once we do connect with them, the ball symbolizes our actions in the world. To hit the ground is to exist; we have a chance begin the journey to Self-knowledge.
We know that our actions in the world have consequences. In Greek mythology, the Furies represented those forces in life that apprehend us and pin us with the results of our actions. Like the chickens that come home to roost, or the bills that come due, the consequences of our actions demand payment either practically or in terms of conscience. In baseball, this dimension of life is symbolized by the opposing men on the playing field who seek to catch the ball (our actions) and tag us out with them; they are the Furies.
Baseball's symbolic power is based on the wish to return home, to completeness, without getting caught. One solution is to hit the ball out of the ball park. This symbolizes that the way to avoid the karma that comes from being in the world is to keep the ball out of play, by hitting it into the heavens, above and beyond the good and evil consequences of our actions.
Wholeness in One
Detecting the symbolism of character of our everyday doings in the world is difficult because symbolic activities carry a double valence. They are simultaneously practical and symbolic. It is the practical dimension of what we do that blinds us to the outlandish character of the symbolic.
For example, if we play golf, we maintain both to ourselves and to others, that we do it for exercise, or for the pleasure of being outdoors on a nice day, or for social or business reasons, or simply because we enjoy the skill involved in hitting a ball to a target several hundred feet away, and so on. These explanations are really an effort to maintain a seamlessness between the conceptual and symbolic layers of our awareness.
We avoid seeing the inner meaning of our interests and desires, because of the jarring incongruity between our practical objectives and our unconscious symbolic motivations. It reveals that we wander through life like somnambulists, which belies our assumption that we have free will. Secondly, we would see that we are double-minded, that our life lacks integrity, wholeness and unity. Of course, most people's lives are a disunity. At moments of insight, we see that it is so. Seeing the disunity is unsettling, and can precipitate a crisis. Is it any surprise, then, that we hesitate to consider seriously the inner meaning of what we do?
As in many sports, the golf ball symbolizes our self, and the route through the eighteen holes symbolizes the journey through life. The "fairway" is literally the fair way, the moral life, "the straight and narrow." In other words, the moral life is always under certain limits.
The goal is to to tee-off and to hit the ball in such a way that it never touches the ground before going directly into the hole. Naturally, of course, this is an inner image which cannot be effectuated; but it can be minimized. What is wrong with touching the ground? To hit the ground is to exist, to enter time and space, conditions and finitude. Our goal in life, is to attain "wholeness in one," to go from the wholeness at the beginning to wholeness at the end without having to suffer in existence. And this is achieved symbolically with a hole in one.
The obstacles on the golf course -- the sand-trap, the rough, the water, etcetera -- symbolize life's obstacles. Efforts in life to resolve conflicts with others, although well intentioned, can get us all the more dug in, like the sand trap. A couple, attempting a calm discussion of their marital conflicts can easily ignite another quarrel. What is required to free the participants of such an imbroglio is a gentle but liberating lob, by the "sandwedge" of insight. As difficult as such a move is in golf, it is all the more formidable in real life.
In all sports, there is always another game because what was supposed to happen did not really happen. Such rituals are like a recurring dream that tells us what we must do. Dreams of this sort will only cease to recur when we finally accomplish what the dream demands of us. There is a demand that we journey to Self-realization, and it is being represented by our interest in baseball. There is a need to lead the moral life by facing all of its obstacles, and it is being represented in golf. It is our failure to accomplish these demands in real life that make these dream images recur for us.
Some dream images demand that we accomplish the impossible. Jean Paul Sartre analyzes the appeal of skiing as being symbolically able to create without getting caught by the limits of our creative act. The mark that we make on the snow is our creation, but we quickly glide past it. Skiing, then, is an image of individual freedom from responsibility. Here is an image that we cannot successfully effectuate in real life. But we can awaken from the contradictory demands of our "being project."
Straitening the Inner Dresser
How can we detect if something is symbolic? There is a clue. If we cannot honestly give a practical reason for why we are involved with the interest or activity, it is symbolic. Does it make practical sense to spend 45 minutes every morning straightening out our bedroom dresser? I heard of a man who did exactly that. Furthermore, every evening, before going to bed, he would mess up the arrangement of objects on his dresser.
It is common for a person to straighten up his desk, his house, or something similar, when what he feels that he really needs to straighten up is his life. As we have seen, what a person has difficulty doing to satisfy the contradictory requirements for selfhood, he will attempt to carry out symbolically. This particular fellow divided his dresser into four sections. One section contained things that represented his life as a business man. This included, among many other objects, the keys to his car, an address book of important contacts, pocket calculator, and so on. On the other side of the dresser were objects representing his domestic life as husband and father. This included a gardening glove. The bottom section, representing his independent life, included a golf spike, a baseball autographed by Duke Snider, and so on. The top section of the dresser, representing his religious life, included a cross and other such objects. The morning ritual involved an effort by this man to "get his life together," a life which he and many people experience to be continually threatening to come apart. One may ask, "Why not leave the dresser ordered; why the need to mess it up in the evening?" When we are perceiving from the symbolic plane of awareness, we intuitively know that chaos must precede order. We must overturn the existing creation before there can be a re-creation. Similarly, the New Years Festival must be preceded by the ritual orgy in where all values are overturned, just as the Mardi Grass precedes Lent.
This problem of how to arrange a life, that cannot be arranged, is the theme of the comic film, Multiplicity. The film is about a man who finds himself so hassled and harried by the demands of modern life that has three clones of himself produced. The fact that there were four of him was a metaphor for the film's protagonist's sense of schizophrenia, indeed the schizophrenia of many people attempting to fill multiple roles today. Multiplicity has a typical Hollywood happy ending, but not really a convincing ending. This is because the film's protagonist was not any better able to find a satisfactory resolution to the problem of multiple and conflicting roles.
The man with the compulsion to straighten his dresser every morning also could not find a way to "get it together." His ritual was not a very satisfying solution, but it did serve to get him through the day.
Reflections through a Rear View Mirror
Here again is an example of the symbolic underpinnings of a compulsion. A few years ago, a man consulted with me because a paralyzing fear had made it impossible for him to drive extended distances. On long trips -- half way to his destination -- he would be overcome with fear that he might be compelled to drive all the way back home in reverse, navigating by looking through the rear view mirror. A few times he had to actually pull over to the side of the highway and regain his senses. Finally, he stopped taking long car trips altogether. What was the meaning of this fear?
Reviewing his background provides us with necessary clues. A little over a year before his driving problems began he had requested a demotion from his job. For over 19 years he had worked as an engineer for a large company. Because he was very competent he rose up the ranks to become a senior engineer To his bosses repeated surprise, he tried to turn down each promotion. He explained to me that he did not enjoy his role as a manager or administrator; he always felt very uncomfortable telling people what to do. Finally, not being able to endure the managerial pressures any longer, he insisted that he be allowed to be an engineer again without any managerial responsibilities. His company reluctantly agreed.
What, then, does the fear of being compelled to drive backwards have to do with all of this? What this unhappy fellow really feared is the dark consequences that come from heeding the siren song of regression. He feared that once he started retreating from his responsibilities (symbolized by driving his car in reverse) he would not stop; he would be tempted to go all the way chucking everything including his job, his house, his family, his sanity. It is significant that the infection of his waking life with this fear was concurrent with his request for a demotion. Unconsciously, he perceived the demotion, with its easier work schedule, as a retreat; he dreaded being tempted to give up everything.
Driving in reverse -- looking through the rear view mirror -- also symbolizes the self-reflection that should occur in the second half of life. A person then sees where he has been, what he has done, who he is. This journey inward might seem regressive to people with extroverted habits of mind, but it is a necessary stage in our Self-realization.
His ambivalent feelings about "shifting gears" and making this voyage of self-discovery was the real origin of his -- symbolically expressed -- fear of regression. If only the AAA supplied road maps for inner journeys!
The Real Mystery of the Chinese Linking Rings
There was a fellow who knew from an early age that he wished to become a cellular biologist. One problem interested him. How does the cell know what to let through its walls, what to block from entering, what to retain and what to remove? He was fascinated by the transport vehicles in the cell.
He spent four years as an undergraduate and five as a graduate student and research assistant, studying biochemistry. He graduated, acquired research funding, and his own laboratory. But all of a sudden he lost all interest in cellular biology! The symbolic appeal was gone forever.
Why? Sometimes symbols are like a mirage. As we approach them, they disappear. Often this involves the image of a new situation. It might be a vision of the happiness I will experience when I am married, or the satisfaction that I will feel when I land the perfect job.
Sometimes, the symbol involves the fantasy of accomplishing something specific. For example, I once met a championship bowler whose dream had been to score a perfect game. The day arrived when he did score a 300. A week later he suffered a nervous breakdown. The meaning of the perfect score disappeared when he accomplished it. Then he experienced a sense of meaninglessness, for there was nothing left for him to accomplish. Certain symbols burst like a bubble when they collide with actual reality. Apropos is Oscar Wilde's remark, "When the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." Cellular biology was, for my friend, such a symbol.
What, though, had been the appeal of cellular biology? It was the picture of a deeper question that he needed to answer. The question was how to be an individual, maintaining his integrity and separateness, while still being open to others and to his environment. He wanted to be an individual but not in a way that isolated him and cut him off. He did not wish to be an atom or monad. He wanted to be open to his environment, but not in a way that sacrificed his individuality.
Individuality is the assertion that one is a separate entity and that as such one is also complete. Individuality is comparable on a metaphysical level to atomism. An atom is taken to be simultaneously self-identical and also self-sufficient. But viewed from the standpoint of the surrounding field of manifestation, the atom is isolated, cut off from relation to the whole, and is therefore finite.
The problem of the cellular biologist, how to be in the world as self-sufficient and yet open to other people, appeared to him symbolically as the scientific problem of how the transport vehicles in the cell (a symbolic projection of himself) know what to allow to enter and to leave the cell.
When he got this own laboratory, cellular biology no longer appeared to him as the domain in which he would answer the real question that he had. His real question, how to be an individual in the world, loomed into his awareness. There is much to be said for locating the real questions behind our symbolic desires; a lot of time and energy could be saved by doing so.
A friend of mine, with a concern similar to that of the cellular biologist's, saw her question symbolized in a dream. She dreamed of her ex-husband performing the famous Chinese Linking Rings magic trick. With its beautiful linking and unlinking of apparently solid rings, the magician symbolically demonstrates the ability to maintain individuality and wholeness (each ring remains unbroken) while joining with others (each ring links and unlinks with the other rings.)
In my friend's dream, her ex-husband demonstrated mastery of the classic illusion. This symbolized that he had learned the art of integrating individuality with being open to others, and was demonstrating the secret to her. But, this was a dream, and it did not really reveal to her the solution. The value of the dream lay in revealing to my friend her essential question. This was a great advance. Now, instead of struggling with her ex-husband, she was struggling with a deeper question. The latter enterprise has a far greater promise of bearing fruit.
Ms. Meltdown
A client of mine, a Shiatsu Masseuse, felt frustrated. What she wanted to do through her work was not happening. But she didn't know what she wanted to happen. Practically speaking, her customers were happy with her work and she had a very successful practice.
She explained to me that the purpose of Shiatsu was to free people of blockages in their flow of energy. In time, it became clear to both of us that in freeing people of their energy blockages, she was freeing them, symbolically, of a more fundamental limit. Selfhood for my client was something oppressive; individuality was not something that she cherished. It blocked the flow of the infinite energy. She said that if she could drop bombs that could melt down individuality, without actual killing anybody, she wouldn't hesitate.
I asked her why this concern to free others of their individuality? Their limits made her feel limited. She had a recurring dream in which she became a mountain clear lake. First she (the lake) was clear, but then she would become polluted by all sorts of aggressive fish. She made a connection between her dream and her interest in massage. After the massage, she felt that the person's energy was able to flow freely and that the person was thus free of his limits, his blockages, of his constricted ego awareness. And she was free of him; the fish had magically transformed into water, and she, the lake, was clear and free again.
But what she hoped to attain through the symbolism of massage did not happen. Although their bodily tensions were gone -- if only for a few hours -- her customers were still there with all the limits of their oppressive egotism. Secondly, even if she were able to free anybody through massage, there are still five billion people on this planet. The task was hopeless.
The cellular biologist and the Shiatsu masseuse are pursuing, through their work, opposite visions of reality. The cellular biologist wanted to maintain individuality but remain connected. The masseuse wanted to be rid of individuality altogether. In the first case, identity is real and needs to be preserved, but in a manner that permits interaction with the world. In the second case, identity is a limit to be removed so that the flow of infinite energy can be realized.
We see here again the two different metaphysical visions expressed symbolically: the masculine, in which the identity principle is primary; and the feminine, with the sufficiency principle in the form of an indeterminate and free energy.
A Seven Letter Word, Starts with "D" and Rhymes with
"Repair"
We have already discussed Rubik's Cube. The present example also involves a game that reveals deeper symbolic meanings. As in the case of the fellow who sandblasted floors for a living, this too involves an attempt to satisfy religious demands within the plane of everyday secular life.
I once had a client, about 35 years old, who worked as a foreign currency trader. Every morning he would take the Penn Central Railroad into New York City. While riding the train to work, he would always do the crossword puzzle. If he didn't finish the puzzle, he was unable to work. He became depressed, irritable, and blew up at people. He did only the New York Times crossword. The crossword puzzle books did not interest him. During a newspaper strike, he felt he was falling apart emotionally. He lost a lot of money, and almost lost his job.
I asked him if he could remember a time when he was able to work effectively without having completed the crossword puzzle. He recalled two or three occasions which had followed a crisis. Each crisis had evoked deep religious feelings. For a few days following, he rode the train with a sense of inner peace, and felt no need for the puzzle.
The horizontal and the vertical lines of the crossword puzzle are a modern form of the religious cross. The cross is the intersection of heaven (the vertical spiritual dimension of reality) and earth (the horizontal, finite dimension of reality). Man, unique creature that he is, is inwardly called upon to live neither as an angel, nor as an animal. He is required to mediate these two extremes by living at the intersect of the vertical and the horizontal. To live on the cross is to seek to embody spiritual values in an unspiritual world, to be willing to suffer this contradiction, and if necessary to die in the service of this contradiction. Jesus on the cross is the paradigm of this task, and of the spiritual renewal that it promises. Although it comes to the fore in Christianity, the cross is not solely a Christian symbol. It appears throughout the world's religions.
The foreign currency trader felt called upon to accomplish this task of encountering the cross. He attempted to fulfill it symbolically by completing a crossword puzzle. To bring the horizontal lines into conjunction with the vertical was to transform the profane world into a sacred cosmos. Only in such a sacred cosmos could he be at peace. He could not "get it together" to work unless he had completed this secular form of a religious ritual. This explains those occasions when he did not need the crossword puzzle. For those few days he was genuinely open, in a religious sense, to being on the cross.
It is not insignificant that he saw his task as involving a puzzle. Our discussions revealed that he was torn between the need for religious faith and the philosophical quest for knowledge. Faith versus knowledge is a conflict at least as old as Saint Augustine. How to resolve the conflict is a puzzle. The hope, for the currency trader, was that man's task to be on the cross could be completed, not by a dreadful Kierkegaardian leap of faith, but by an act of knowledge. This act of knowledge was symbolized by completing the puzzle.
What is the significance of the fact that this fellow was a foreign currency trader? He told me that he was only in it for the money and he intended to quit once he had enough money. I asked him what he intended to do once he had what he considered to be enough money. Would he start a family? A business? Pursue a hobby? He told me that none of these images had any significant appeal to him. Rather, he insisted that when he was rich enough he would lead the good life. The surprising thing is that he did not mean "good life" in the material sense. He actually meant it in the spiritual sense. He would always laugh when he told me this, for he realized the absurdity in imagining that affluence was a prerequisite for the good life.
He was at a loss as to why he needed to defer the good life until he had the money. But it became clear, through our discussions, that the money was intended by him to insulate him in some way. It would protect him from what he perceived to be the dark side of the spiritual life -- poverty and sacrifice. If his fate was to devote his life to helping others, he wanted to hedge his bet, to keep a nest egg for himself. He had, in essence, what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called a Jonah Complex; he was in flight from what he perceived to be his true calling in life.
I recently received a letter from this man, informing me that he had resigned his job at the currency exchange. He added that he had completely lost interest in crossword puzzles. He went on to say that, thanks to our discussions, previously unimagined possibilities of how life could be lived had appeared to him. He tormented my curiosity by not stating what these new possibilities were, nor did he say, more concretely, how he intended to express these new possibilities. Was he pursuing a new career? Was he getting married? This former currency trader concluded his letter, appropriately, with a quote from Plato's Phaedo: "Is there not one true coin for which all others ought to be exchanged? -- That true coin is wisdom."
The Failure of Symbolic Solutions
Symbolism cannot satisfy our fundamental longing to be a real self in a real world. It cannot overcome the conservation of suffering principle. We cannot attain self-renewal by watching somebody run around the bases, or by doing it ourselves. Nor can eating potato chips make us free. Nor can driving fast allow us to overcome our sense of finitude. A football star is not truly heroic, for his life outside the playing field may reveal quite a different person.
The miraculous thing about symbolism is that it does succeed, for a time, in doing what it promises. If it did not, no one would engage in it. While we are eating the potato chips, or playing tennis, the symbolism seems to be working. But when we finish the bag of chips, or we put down the tennis racket, the negativity of life, our dissatisfaction, returns. Suffering has been conserved.
We should have been suspicious of the lure of symbolic and mythic thinking all along. Consider what happened historically. If the symbolic strata of human awareness had produced satisfactory answers to man's fundamental questions and concerns, conceptual thinking would never have emerged. But it did emerge, around 500 BC, in Greece. It emerged as Philosophy, the effort to discover the truth through conceptual thinking.
Philosophy began as an effort to clarify the reason for the repeated failure of symbolic thinking -- the mytho-poetic tales of the gods -- to satisfactorily explain why we were suffering, what was lacking. Philosophy sought to extract the meaning of symbols and myths from their physical representations. This is akin to the task, required by our English teachers, of extracting the theme of a story from the situations and characters that embody the theme.
Philosophy, of course, does not provide better answers than did the ancient myths, if by better we mean able to overcome the conservation of suffering. By extracting meaning from its physical embodiment, philosophy creates new dualisms. Platonic dualism would be an example. Here the meaning dimension of reality -- the world of Forms -- is in a realm apart from the physical world. Dualism means the loss of oneness. As we have discussed in Chapter Three, oneness is a fundamental criterion for us of what it means to be.
But philosophy is an advance on a different level. It is able to reveal to us, in a more essential way than can symbolic images, what we are fundamentally seeking. That is another story. The road to the philosophical plane of inquiry lies in first clarifying the symbolic strata of our awareness.
The World is My Inkblot
The possible success of symbolism is its marvelous ability to reveal to us who we are. We are able to read the symbolic dimension of our life, as would a psychologist read an ink-blot or an art-therapist read the canvas of a patient. We can then discover our "mode of being," how we specifically attempt to satisfy the contradictory requirements of "being." By illuminating our mode of being, we become free of its vice grip on us.