Symbolic thinking: Getting water from the rock

A talk presented at the Tullahoma Unitarian Church on September 16, 2001.

This is a short introduction to what might be called useful irrationality. In order to live successfully in the world, cross the street, earn our living, buy groceries, etc., we have learned to think in a more or less linear way. If A comes first, B comes second, and C follows that. If I have $2 and a can of peas costs $1, I can buy only 2 cans. And this kind of thinking is very successful for dealing with normal everyday problems. It permits us to build cars and planes and to catch one for the far corners of the Earth with some reasonable expectation of arriving there. We call this ‘rationality’. That it is not totally reliable has been made tragically clear to all of us this last week.

And there are also times when such linear thinking isn’t even useful – and times when it is positively counter-productive. And these are usually the times when we are most under stress and at our least flexible. So to prepare us for these times – even perhaps to make them less likely to occur – it may be useful to explore another mode of thinking, once very widely used, but now no longer fashionable. This is what might be called "Symbolic thinking."

Using this kind of thinking we can obtain teaching useful for our daily lives from old stories, rituals, legends, and symbolic pictures. This can be done fairly easily, but it requires that we use our minds in a way that may be foreign to many of us, particularly those trained in the sciences or technology or business. The reason is that it’s not direct and linear, but rather allusive and suggestive, leaving much unstated, to be filled in by the listener. Learning this mode of thought can be really useful as it can provide extremely valuable tools for solving life’s problems and living a more conscious life. It can even provide directions for making contact with what may be termed "higher forces", one’s "guardian angels", or perhaps God.

I believe that we are here for some purpose, and that there is a higher force, or forces, to which we can become more transparent in order to accomplish that purpose, or at least move in the right direction. It’s like we are all completely different and wonderfully beautiful stained glass windows in bad need of cleaning. Until we clean ourselves up a bit, the light that is meant to show us off to best advantage can’t get through. Indeed, there’s more: once we are transparent to the light, we can move the whole "building" around until the Sun shines through us directly.

But this "window cleaning" is hard to do. Not only because it’s uncomfortable, but because we’re used to the way we operate. We operate from our habits, automatically. The windows have become obscure so slowly or so painfully that we hardly notice them anymore. This ‘symbolic’ thinking is a way to begin to see the dirt and also to find out where the Windex is kept. But since we are creatures of habit, particularly in our thinking processes, the process may seem very unnatural at first.

There’s a joke that circulates among physical scientists from time to time. It restates the 3 laws of thermodynamics, namely the conservation of energy, the increase of entropy and the unattainability of absolute zero temperature as "You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game." Somebody has remarked that the major religions are based on contradicting one or more of these statements.

Of course, life itself has been described as an anti-entropic process: life makes order out of disorder, produces information rather than degrades it. This is possible without contradicting the thermodynamic laws because we are not in a closed system – which is the only place where these laws can be rigorously demonstrated. We exist in the flow of energy from the Sun and other sources. In order to make water flow uphill, we need outside energy sources. But in this sense life might be described as the old Alchemists described their Work – as the work against nature. Another way they put it was, "Nature unaided always fails." This simply meant that without the use of our intelligence, things will go "naturally", that is, down hill, and if we wish them to go uphill, we must be prepared to do something different – something "unnatural", if you will. The "unnatural" thing I want to talk about today is using our minds in a different way than we normally do.

The second part of the title is chosen as not only appropriate but to illustrate the method. Twice in the Old Testament (Exodus 17:6 and Numbers 20:11) when the Israelites were wandering in the desert and very thirsty, Moses struck a rock with his rod, and water gushed forth saving them all.

If we are to make this story useful for ourselves, we cannot interpret it literally. We need to think symbolically: to extract truth from the literal words is to extract water from the rock. Here the rock is the literal meaning of the words in the story. To think literally is to be confronted with rocks on every hand, and to be in the desert, parched for truth. In these stories water is truth, not the kind of truth that we mean when we tell someone where our car is parked, or confess that we did indeed drive over the speed limit, but the kind of truth that acts in our lives like water to someone lost and wandering in a desert. The kind of truth that we can live by - that we can live through. The kind of truth that we are told will set us free.

As seekers we are all Israel, and Moses is the part of us that is in charge of our lives. As we all have experienced, we don’t always follow our own good advice and best intentions. Israel is frequently unruly and chafing at the discipline required. But when we find ourselves in a desert of lack of meaning for our lives and parched for the truth that would give us that meaning, we must do as Moses did on those two occasions and strike the rock of naïve literalism with the rod of imagination so that the water of truth can come forth.

And this shows exactly how it is to be done. The rocks are the "hard facts", the obvious truths of our dry situation. If we leave it at that, we remain thirsty.

Here are some useful tips for understanding what may be hidden in such stories. (For more of these I can do no better than refer you to a wonderful book by Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, obtainable at By the Way Books, www.bythewaybooks.com.)

Generally, water is truth of the kind I have indicated. Shoes may represent what we use to protect ourselves from harsh realities – so that when we are directed to take the shoes from off our feet because we stand on sacred ground, we are being directed to view what is going on as clearly and as purely as we can, unfiltered by our usual assumptions and associations.

And if water is truth, what do you suppose wine is? And what is the meaning of the story of the wedding at Cana when Christ turned water into wine?

Or let’s take fairy stories: a common theme is the neglected and despised younger brother who goes off on an adventure after his older siblings have tried some task and failed. The younger person generally gets help from various animals, and from other humble figures that his brothers have treated with contempt.

These stories, whether the protagonist is male or female, represent the hero’s journey: seeking the pearl of great price or slaying the dragon. These tales tell us that what we most desire is not to be obtained by using what we are so expert at - by the means that we habitually use to make our way in the everyday world. Rather we must find and use those of our faculties that we normally despise and avoid – those repressed parts of ourselves that have been relegated to the shadow parts of our personalities, to use Jung’s terminology. Furthermore, we will need help from sources that are far from the respectable agents we are used to relying on in our normal lives. As has been said, "If you want to keep getting what you’re getting, keep on doing what you’re doing." If we are to venture on the quest for the Holy Grail, we must leave the beaten paths and wander in the wilderness. That doesn’t mean the Grail won’t be found at some consignment shop in the poorer parts of town – that’s wilderness to many of us.

The point is that we must begin to do what is not usual, what will feel unnatural, to do what is difficult and unpleasant – to look at those parts of our lives that we normally turn away from. The alchemists said that the first matter of the philosopher’s stone is found everywhere and despised by all.

By doing what is unexpected, the hero finds the treasure or kills the dragon that has laid waste to the kingdom. He listens to the animals and trusts them. The stupid hero triumphs by kindness, or heals by asking the right question, as in Parsifal, "What ails thee, Sire?" In the story of Parsifal, remember, he misses his chance to do this at his first encounter with the Grail because his mother told him not to ask personal questions. Parsifal had to learn to question and break some of the rules.

Of course, we all have different quests. This is a question of our stage of life and of our individual circumstances. Is there a maze we must find our way through? Is a dragon laying waste to our kingdom? Do we seek some great treasure? Each of us must ask and answer these questions. What do you want? "What ails thee, Sire?"

I want to close this talk with an old joke, originally a Sufi teaching story.

Late one night a policeman encounters a drunk crawling around under a street light, apparently looking for something. When asked what he is looking for, the drunk explains that he lost the key to his home and is trying to find it. The helpful policeman joins the search, but to no avail. After a bit of fruitless searching, he asks the drunk, "Exactly where did you loose the key?"

"Down that alley." responds the drunk, indicating a very dark alley half way down the block.

"Then why are you looking here?" asks the policeman, totally exasperated.

"Simple," replies the drunk. "The light is better here."

Let’s analyze this as we would a dream. What does it mean to be drunk? To have trouble navigating, to not be thinking clearly. Think about "in vino veritas." We may speak our true feelings but in the wrong place or at the wrong time or to the wrong person. Haven’t we all done that? Perhaps the drunk should have considered how to bring more light into that dark alley. As so should we. And what was the drunk seeking? The key to his home. What we seek when we undertake this work is the key to our home – to our true home.

© 2001 by Kenneth C. Turner