Symboleering and Perspective: The View

It is not a good idea to look for signs and portents when you are feeling all crazy. No matter how desperate you might be for answers, when you are engaged in the full frontal focus of emotions, you can’t, as we old folks say, see the forest for the trees.  It’s not that your mind can’t make the unique comparisons required by symbol and allegory, it is that the emotion you are feeling colors your interpretation, so that your signs, like light through a prism, are predestined to bend, to lead you down what is not necessarily the right path.   

The problem, of course, is that it is those times when you are in the throes of intense situations when you need answers most; when you most want to find a sign or a clue to choose a direction. Humans have a rich history of stargazing and augury.

My own approach to this is not to avoid symboleering when inebriated, but to make sure that I take time when I am sober to do the same – ask for signs and portents with no more motivation than a sunny day. Without the nearsightedness of emotional distress, I try to expand my view of myself, fly higher for a larger perspective on my various situations and experiences. I often even concentrate on a bird to follow up a tree or into the sky so that I can see myself from a better distance, where each of my problems seems smaller in relation to the whole. In this condition, images or synchronicities that impress me as signs and portents refer to the whole and in fact give me the perspective to oversee the more emotional decisions and choices I have made when drunk with emotions.  I can keep myself in check by remembering my better goals and my broader design; who I am and what do I really want.

Meditation of any kind can do this, tune you in to your broader self; I am only advocating that whatever method you choose,  it happen with some regularity.  If I go too long without these contemplative episodes I begin to forget that I need them, and in not very long I am lost again.