Carrying Over
The Teaching
The word metaphor is itself a metaphor. It means to bridge, to carry over, to connect things that are normally not connected.
— John Vervaeke, 2019
In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a “metaphor” – a bus or a train.
— Michel de Certeau, 1980
We can point at the moon, a little bit.
— Ram Dass, 1980
Commentary
In Greek, meta means across and pherein means to carry, and in Athens the word still does that job: the buses are metaphorai. A metaphor is a vehicle, and what it carries is experience.
This site holds that metaphor does at the level of language what happens at the level of lived experience. It can put you back into a state you’ve already been through, or let you feel your way into one you haven’t reached yet. Nobody can hand over what they felt. What a teacher can do is give you an image that builds a small version of that state in you, out of materials you already have.
The traditions gathered here knew both sides of this. They taught almost entirely in images: a parable for the crowd, salt dissolved in water, a raft, a cave. And in almost the same breath they warned against the image: the finger isn’t the moon, the garment isn’t the Torah, one hand on the elephant isn’t the elephant. Peoples who mostly never met each other arrived at the same double rule. Use the image to carry you, and put it down when you’ve arrived.
How far a metaphor can really carry someone is the question the Edge’s Carrying Over takes to the evidence. The evidence can measure the engagement. It can’t measure whether what arrives is the thing itself. Ram Dass’s answer is the honest one: a little bit.