The Power of Symbols and Living a Life of Meaning

 

People search for meaning and purpose in their lives.  In order to progress through various stages of personal development and beyond and into living a transformational life you need to understand the power of symbols. In the first half of life that meaning and purpose is largely dictated by outside authority and the collective authority called culture.  We grow up from being a child into an adult and we make a living, form relationships, maybe raise a family and follow a career path.  Then for many there is the experience of midlife.  This is often accompanied by what is called The Midlife Crisis.

 

Most of our lives we spend using symbols although we do not call them that.  We use symbols called words, called numbers and symbols called letters.  Many of these symbols have lost their power and thus they have lost their meaning.  What does it mean that a symbol has power and meaning?  A symbol should be distinguished from a sign.  A sign is a clear instruction.  It is short and concise.  A stop sign at a road junction doesn’t have more than one meaning.  It’s meaning is clear.  It tells you to stop.  A symbol is different from a sign in that it is multi-layed and multi-dimensional.  You tend not to get to the end of its meaning but its meaning deepens and expands as you give it your  attention and your commitment to its revelatory power.

 

 

The midlife crisis, which is a period of transition, is often painful and confusing.  Where it not that the educational system was so focused on simply making everyone a good corporate citizen and consumer we might realise that such a period of transition is not necessarily a crisis but an opportunity.  Midlife and beyond is not a time of looking toward a period of old age and decline but the opportunity to harvest the fullness of who you are here to be and to share.  It means having the courage to become an individual and live what is symbolic within you.  The word symbol comes from the root of the word creed.  This is not simply a creed that is defined in words but is the living statement that you live from.  It is a living inner state.  Symbolically speaking it is the magical land within you.

 

 

Those of you who read this blog on a regular basis will know that one of the spiritual practices that I practice on a regular basis is dream work.  This is the way in which I invite my dreams to come true.  Dreams are the language of the symbolic.  They are the language of the imagination and invite meaning.  They are not just something that happens to you when you are asleep.  The power of dreams and thus the power of symbols are an important part of your life and are especially important to the life of the imagination.  To live a life of meaning and purpose is to live a conscious life.  Most of the energy that drives our lives is unconscious.  Meaning and purpose arise when the unconscious and the conscious mind are in alignment.  This alignment is facilitated through the understanding of the power of symbols

 

 

One of the best ways to work with this alignment is through dreamwork.  When you work with your dreams you will have any number of symbols made available to you that you can choose to become an invitation to revelation.  Revelation here means that you have revealed to you what your unconscious knows but which your conscious mind does not know.  You will know that a revelation has occurred when you feel a sense of awakened energy.  There will be a sense that something new has been opened up.  This gives you some, little or large, sense of excitement. Or it may simply be a feeling that something has clicked with you.

 

 

I am presently working with a symbol from a dream that I sense to be potentially revelatory.  It is the symbol of a round table.  Upon this table a magician has placed plans for the building of a nursing home.  At this point I choose this round table symbol because I do not know what it means.  I know this symbol has a connection to the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.  This is something that most people will know about this symbol of a round table.  Yet this is not insight.  This is not meaning and this does not thus allow for action – the manifestation of purpose that moves from within.  It doesn’t have drive.  It doesn’t have power which is inherent in finding the meaning within the symbolic.

 

 

 

You can begin to work with the power of symbols of your choice you tend to do so using your intellect.  This is OK but working with the power of symbols is more like working with a Zen Koan. This is a device used by Zen Masters to take you beyond mere intellectual understanding.  The most well known Zen Koan is “What is the sound of one hand clapping.”  This question cannot be answered by the intellect.  Symbols have power.  They have the power to change who you are.  They do not change what you are at a soul level but they reveal to you who you are and why you are at a soul level.  They are the patterns of meaning held within form.  They inform you but this is not more information.  This is a kind of uni-form.  They invite you to live as a unified form.  They invite you into a living paradox of sacred unity arising from the alignment of opposites.

 

 

You don’t arrive at an answer.  The invitation from a symbol is an invitation to a journey.  It is the hero’s journey because to become an individual takes courage.  It takes courage to become all that you are here to be.  This invitation often arises from what is called the midlife crisis but which can become a real opportunity if your invite the symbolic to reveal to you who you are to become.  The poet David Whyte in his poem What to Remember When Waking,

 

 

 

where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the new day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.       From What to Remember When  Waking  – David Whyte

 

 

Much of one’s personal development planning tends to be ego driven.  Movement from meaning is more than simply a plan.  That which created you does not plan.  It dances.  While this is a dance in form it is an informal dance.  It is never the same dance.  You are a unique dancer and the dance is easier to follow when you align yourself with the way in which the Dancer loves you as its dance.

 

 

To begin to use the power of symbols begin by taking a dream symbol.  Take one that you feel you don’t know much or anything about.  Trust that your still small voice within knows how to guide you through this symbolic invitation.  Dreams are not just nightly flights of fantasy.  They are the lost language of unity and imagination.  Meaning isn’t simply found through intellectual understanding and does not thus lead to purposeful action.  Purposeful action is not action that is simply moving from ego goals or plans.  Ego driven plans tend to be the focus of the first part of life.  However, such plans become dry and meaningless as you move through midlife and beyond into the second half of life.

 

 

You find meaning and purpose from revealing who and why you are.  This meaning is invited through your intimate connection to symbols that speak to you even if you do not as yet understand them on a conscious level.  This understanding of symbols is an art and it is the art of revelation.  It takes time, commitment, patience, humility and practice.  It means you begin the journey of real discipleship.  This is the discipline of revelation and the revealing of meaning out of which purposeful, rather than simply productive activity arises.

 

 

All hero’s and heroines are representations of the symbolic.  Your work is to become the living symbol of Love dancing in form in the unique way you are here to be.  Why not choose the life of the hero  or heroine and begin to reveal a life filled with meaning and purpose.  Then you might have revealed  what W. B. Yeats shares in his wonderful poem what he experienced in the second half of his life.

 

 

 

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.                           Vascillation by W. B. Yeats

 

 

 

I invite you to discover through your dreams the symbols that can be lived so that you find meaning and purpose in your life and they find the way that you know that you are blessed and that you can bless others.

 

Let it be so.

OTHER GREAT CONTENT Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.

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