symbols

As Henry Corbin points out in his deep and abiding commentary on visionary recitals (stories that show the path, the stages, the phases of spiritual birth and rebirth), symbols are not designed for rational explanations and their inevitable hardening into dogma, but for transmorphing into, merging, and becoming. One becomes the Cross. One becomes the Caduceus. One becomes the Tao Sign. In doing so, one has moved into invisible realms far beyond the world of so-called ordinary (ordinal, linear) consciousness into the Poetic, the Imaginal -- the realms the ordinary call phantasy and the unreal (if bothering to call them anything at all). Yet for those who have made the transposition, who have become those symbols of eternal energetic flow, for whom the ordinal is a desiccated cocoon they have shed, nothing is more real. One does not bow at the foot of a symbol and worship it. One becomes that symbol.