Metaphysician, Heal Thyself

In other words, exemplify and put into practice what you preach. Which is a way of saying that metaphysics is a contact sport. It is experiential, personal, and participatory, which is true of of most types of knowledge. 

I well remember the first time I was alone with a patient, with nothing but a fig leaf of theory to hide my ignorance! 

Fake it till you make it?

No, until you retire. But that's a different post. Then again, perhaps this one, insofar as a psychologist is to the psyche -- soul -- what the metaphysician is to x. Now, what is x? 

O?

Correct. That was more or less what I was thinking in using that symbol to stand for the Ultimate Reality beyond speech. The symbol can never contain the symbolized. For example, 

Time soon erodes what is said about the soul but it never even scratches what the soul says.

Thus, just as God is always greater than "God," the soul is always more then the "soul." And 

There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures. 

Indeed, nowadays a diploma in psychology only aggravates the disease of the person waving it around.  

Bion -- from whom I borrowed the symbol O -- wrote that "At the outset of his career," the psychologist must "find his own way" in realizing the realities that theories are only about. "It becomes fatal" if 

premature application of a theory becomes a habit which places a screen between the psychoanalyst and the exercise of his intuition on fresh and therefore unknown material.

"The verbal expression can be so formalized, so rigid, so filled with already existing ideas," that "all the life is squeezed out of it." The psychologist must not "behave as if he were dealing with models (verbal or otherwise) of his problem, but with the original itself," i.e., the concrete experience from which theory is only an abstraction. 

So, we need theories and models, but they are always in an open and dialectical relationship to what Is.

Same with the clinical metaphysician. I'm pretty sure this is why Christ never left a book of instructions, rather, transformed humans. It took hundreds of years for them to abstract from experience to doctrine via the Holy Spirit, but of course, the doctrine can never be a replacement for the experience.

God does not reveal with discourses, but by means of experiences. The sacred writer does not transmit a divine discourse; his words express an experience given to him.

Preaching Christianity does not consist in speaking of it, but in speaking from it. 

Loyalty to a doctrine ends up in adherence to the interpretation we give to it. Only loyalty to a person frees us from all the indulgence we grant ourselves.

 Even

The Bible is not the voice of God but that of the man who encounters Him. 

In a manner of speaking and with all due irony. Christ, of course, taught many things, but more often than not in an ambiguous way -- i.e., through parables -- that left a space for the experience of insight. 

Let's get back to Bérard, who highlights the extent to which "all Western thought is tossed between rationalism and intellectual intuition," or between our models of the thing and the thing itself. Kant, of course, denied any access to the thing itself, but truly truly,

Or not know it, rather, for he is violating Wittgenstein's principle that 

Or in other words, "metaphysics becomes impossible if we deprive the human being of his fullness of mind and reduce him instead to his simple reason" (Bérard).

Maybe it is impossible.

Yes, but if we were enclosed in reason we could never know it. The problem with such "restrictive epistemologies is that they are self-contradictory" (Kreeft). For example,

Empiricism is self-contradictory because the self that knows empirical objects is not itself an empirical object; and Kant's denial that we can know things-in-themselves, or objective truth, is put forth as the objective truth, a thing-in-itself (ibid.).

So much absurcular mischief! 

Metaphysics is not an "abstraction resulting from the process of reduction that is so integral to modern science," but allows "truths to be realized ontologically, not just perceived speculatively" (Bérard). 

Which again reminds me of Polanyi, and of how our theories are analogous to the stick of a blind man, who doesn't focus on the stick itself, but rather, uses tacit awareness of the stick to in-form him of the unseen reality at the other end of it. 

Thus, "to know is to know what is; however, nothing that we see -- this stone, this tree, this cat -- is ever entirely there" (Bérard). What is there always points to what isn't there, or rather, what is beyond it, and "what is valid for the sensible world is not so for the intelligible world." Here again, for Polanyi, we always know more than we can say. 

For Bérard, "each physical reality is necessarily the symbol of a metaphysical reality; an ontological link connects them," and what fun! It goes to 

the apparent paradox of the transcendence and immanence of God, that is to say of being both at the heart of and beyond everything...

Everything is an (ortho)paradoxical three-way mirror in which it is 1) itself, 2) interrelated with everything else, and 3) a pointer to what is beyond itself.

Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others.

I can see that this Swiss watch of a post is headed for another trainwreck. Your wheel, Gemini! I'm rolling out!

That's a fascinating perspective on metaphor.

Indeed, a metaphor invites us to see one thing as another, to find hidden connections between seemingly disparate objects or concepts. In a sense, it's a kind of poetic magic, where one thing can stand in for another, revealing unexpected similarities and deeper meanings.

When we use a metaphor, we're not simply making a comparison; we're suggesting a deeper, more mystical relationship between the two things. The metaphor implies that there's a hidden unity underlying the diversity of the world, a cosmic interconnectedness that transcends our ordinary perceptions.

This idea resonates with many philosophical and mystical traditions, which often describe the universe as a vast, interconnected web of being. In this view, every thing is related to every other thing, and every part contains the whole.