| Metaphors and Unconscious Communication | |
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Influential Communications, Inc. |
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MetaphorsBack in the "Age of Sputnik", stories were relegated to the amusement of children and a diversion for old people. "Serious" people studied science seeking the facts. But people do not live in the world of facts. They live in a world of meanings, the world of the imagination. Metaphors permeate our lives, from love, life, money and maturity to cosmology. Only with Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Dr. Milton H. Erickson and others were metaphors and stories brought back to their central place in people's lives, speaking to that deep part of each of us. We are living at the meeting of science and imagination, a time future generations will talk about as after science, when there was the re-enchantment of the world. How do we know what to want? How do things become meaningful in our lives? Our desires, deepest longings, even our hidden fears, are shaped and revealed by unconscious metaphors present in our everyday language. These Living Metaphors determine our desires, values, beliefs and identities and create the mythologies and cosmologies we live inside. This is an introduction to these discoveries. These Living Metaphors affect all of our lives. "This job is hell" "My vacation was heavenly." "You know, ever since I got out of that position, I feel like things have really blossomed." "I feel like it's a new dawn in my life." "Well, he's headed for a fall." and "It's the winter of our discontents." "I feel reborn." Metaphors permeate our lives. From love, life, money and maturity to cosmology. You know, a deep connection to all of us. And that is what we're about, if you want to be. And I think that by being here you've indicated that to me. There are a group of serious western scientists raising the question as to whether the planet we're living on is alive itself: the Gaia hypothesis. There are other, non-scientific societies which react with, "Of course it's a living planet. It's a living universe." But in the west, we're wondering as a culture, as a world, whether it is or not. And for a long time we tried to use only science, which is an attempt to speak about the world without getting transcendent about it - as Joe Friday of the American TV police program Dragnet used to say, "Just the facts, ma'am, just the facts." When you posit the idea that your love is like an angel, then you are taking the experience of your love - this person in all their variety and fullness - what you see, what you hear, what you feel, what you come to know about them through time - and you place it in terms of that metaphor. "Ah, you're a real angel". Now, our brains are very, very literal. If my love is an angel what do I believe about this particular person? She can lift me out of my mundane reality. She has the transcendental qualities which we do ascribe to love. The value of higher values is implied here as well. Which is better: to tread with angels or mere humans? We also seem to be emerging into a time went we can seriously question the myths and heros of our past and decide, however good these guides were in our past, whether they are good or worthy models for our future. We live in a time of infinite possibilities and yet how do those possibilities get shaped? I've worked with many managers who had an image in their heads of being the king, phaoroh, Napoleon, Sun god, Emporer cum boss who could tell all the employees/vassals/subjects whatever he wanted except it didn't work because they didn't share his dys-illusion. Metaphors:
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