Never mind the symbolics?

Symbolism, rather like faith, gets a bit of a rough ride in Western culture. The phrase "just a symbol" is in widespread use (608,000 Google hits when I checked), suggesting a lot of us believe that any symbol is distinctly second-rate, and that it would be far better to get hold of the literal thing that it symbolises. And when I hear someone speak of something being "symbolically true", I sometimes wonder if what they're really saying is "I don't think this really is true, but it makes me feel good, so I don't want to let go of it".

By symbols, I mean those mysterious, allusive, numinous, paradoxical and apparently nonsensical metaphors, images and impressions that continually surface in our individual and collective dreams, prayers and imaginations, and that we can never exhaust or pin down. For me, they are what makes life worth living, and I think it is high time we reinstated them as first-class citizens. Here are my hard-nosed, rational reasons for that claim.

Our brains have been shaped by millions of years of evolution to one "purpose" only: to help us survive and pass our genes on to the next generation. As a result, your brain and mine -- or, if you prefer, your ego and mine -- are exquisitely tuned to the tasks of surviving and prospering in the world. We have good reason to expect that faced with any problem out there in the physical world, we should at least be able to make a good stab at solving it. An essential part of that problem-solving process is to understand how things are: to grasp the (literal) truth about them.

But there has been a near-universal consensus among human cultures -- with our own standing out as the only partial exception -- that there is more to reality than the everyday, mundane, outer world. There is what one might call a "spiritual dimension". But that dimension does not exert selectional pressures on our brains; or at least, not nearly to the same degree as physical realities do. And therefore we should not be surprised if our brains, or our egos, are not particularly good at comprehending the spiritual.

An analogy may be helpful here. Our eyes have limits, just as our brains do. Optical microscopes allow us to see small objects "as they really are" -- i.e. roughly as they would look to us if they were many times bigger. We can see how they literally look, as it were. But that only works for objects larger than the wavelength of visible light. For smaller things, we have to use radiation with smaller wavelengths which we can't directly see. To figure out the structures of crystals, for example, the preferred technique is X-ray crystallography. It gives us diffraction patterns, images that we can see -- but those images are not pictures of the crystal structure. Rather, they are data from which the structure can (sometimes) be inferred indirectly after a lot of head scratching and computer work. One could say that the diffraction images symbolise the true structure.

In other words, if we want to engage with things beyond mundane reality, we should expect those things to impress themselves upon us symbolically, not literally. Our brains have just not evolved to be able to grasp the literal truth about such things. And it's not that the symbols are some kind of code which, if only we could break it, would enable us to grasp that elusive literal reality; that's where the X-ray analogy breaks down. In the case of things that transcend the limits of the brain, rather than just those of the eye, the symbols are themselves the best understanding we're ever going to get, at least in this life.

In fact, it's not just that we shouldn't be surprised when the spiritual comes to us in symbols. We should actually be very suspicious of any claim that it ever comes to us literally. Having it arrive precisely on the "wavelength" to which evolution has tuned our brains would be a coincidence so amazing as to be thoroughly suspect.

So we're left with two possibilities. One is that symbolic truth is absolutely genuine and supremely valuable, because it's the best and the only kind of truth available to us about the most important things in life. And the other is that there is no role for symbolic truth, or only an inferior role, because there is nothing of any consequence beyond mundane reality; and then we are living in what Ken Wilber calls "Flatland", where the dimension of depth or spirit is collapsed out of existence.

Therefore, an encounter with the divine in the realm of symbols is the ideal; a life limited by a rationalistic world view to literal perceptions of the mundane is tragically constrained, but at least logically consistent; but fundamentalism of any kind -- any claim to a literal understanding of the spiritual -- is out, for good evolutionary reasons. Though I expect any fundamentalists who've read right down to here would take that as just one more reason not to believe in evolution.