THE ART OF META-STATING METAPHORS

When you engage in the meta-stating process (bringing one state and applying it to another) one of the results that often occurs is the creation of metaphors. It actually works both ways. Whenever you create and/or use a metaphor, you are meta-stating and this unconscious process is true whether you realize it or not.

“Reading this article is like going on a journey. By the time you finish you will have seen and heard— visited— places in your mind and you could very well have experienced an exciting adventure.”

The metaphor above is “Reading is a journey.” But, of course, it is not literal. While reading this article, you do not literally go on a journey. You actually stay seated (if you are sitting) and you hardly took a journey anywhere. So to understand the words, you have to shift to metaphorical thinking and realize that I’m speaking about going on a journey in your mind. As I created that metaphor, I made it explicit and obvious. With the words, “it is like...” I was all but shouting, “Metaphor! Metaphor! Here is a metaphor!”

Of course, those words are two more metaphors. Formatting the idea that some words are “shouting” metaphorically pictures the words in that sentence as a person. Words don’t shout; people shout. The words “it is like” is like a person shouting. Then there is “a metaphor is coming.” Well, metaphors do not travel, go places, come to persons. People and animals do those kinds of things. Yet on a metaphorical journey in the mind, a metaphor, like a person, could approach you.

In all of this, I am asking you, inviting you, to engage in a different kind of thinking. I’m suggesting that you think of reading this article using the lens of a journey and thinking of the word, “like” as a person shouting. I’m meta-stating. I’m taking something empirical, see-hear- feel, something concrete like “a journey” or a “person shouting” and applying them to reading. In this, I have held the primary experience constant and have invited you to a meta-level. Bring what you know about a journey or a person shouting to reading or to the word “like.”

Now as you meta-state when you detect, understand, use, or create a metaphor, there is an incredible richness in the process. When you put X over Y, you set an X-frame and within that frame there are lots of things implied. What’s implied, but not stated when I put journey over reading? Well, let’s see, what’s involved in a journey?

Starting one place, moving along a pathway, getting to another place. Journey implies change, development, there may be blockages, interferences, problems, dealing with these things, overcoming them, finding resources, solving problems, etc.

From the field of Metaphor, these are entailments. Metaphors entail much more than they say. Entailments come along with the metaphor as implications and to pick up on them, to understand them, you engage in inferential thinking. You infer what is implied in the metaphor. This makes a lot of what comes along with a metaphor covert and implicit. Lakoff and Johnson describe this as the inferential structure which is inherent in a metaphor (Metaphors We Live By, 1980; Philosophy in the Flesh 1999).

So, when you use a metaphor, think about a metaphor, you are meta-stating numerous covert implications. This explains why the frame structure of a meta-state like the ever-ready rabbit, keeps on giving. It has entailments, some of which are extremely useful, some not so much, and some very harmful.

Further, when you think or speak metaphorically, your self-reflexive consciousness is activated. About the first subject— the target of the metaphor, you are entertaining other ideas— hopefully ideas that will help you understand the first idea or at least to understand it in a new way. “What is reading an article like? That question invites you to use your self-reflexivity.

“It is like rubbing a magic lamp and wondering what will appear.” “It is like fishing in a deep pond and hope to catch something for dinner.”

These metaphors (magic lamp/ fishing) imply certain emotional states— curiosity, hope, wonder, etc. They will do you good unlike the following ones which will induce some unuseful states (drudgery, work, boredom).

“It’s like being back in school with a monotone teacher.” “It’s like trudging through deep mud.”

Accordingly, metaphors can be a blessing to your life or a curse, they can heal or harm. Most of the time we are unconscious of the metaphors that are all around us. It is when you become aware that you then have choice. Now you can ask, “What emotional state is implied by the metaphor of a journey for you?” When you know that, you will know what meta-state the metaphor is eliciting in you.