As a lover of language, I appreciate the attempts people make to express ineffable ideas and feelings through words. One of the best tools for such attempts is the metaphor. My favourite metaphors tend to be ones that make me think deeply or differently about the bigger things in life. With that in mind, here are some profound, insightful, and beautiful metaphors about life that I’ve either read in books or heard somewhere on YouTube. I’d like to share them with you and I hope they resonate.
Metaphors About Life
Just to refresh and clarify, a metaphor is a comparison or statement of the relation between two things that you wouldn’t normally associate with each other. Metaphors simply state the comparisons, while similes use “like” or “as” to compare things. The technical distinction here isn’t important—the comparisons themselves are where the insight lies.
Alan Watts: The Universe ‘Peoples’
Much of our anxiety in life stems from seeing ourselves as individual islands of isolation, completely separate from the rest of the world. We look up at the night sky in awe, and most of us feel even more isolated and alone, seeing the vastness of things that aren’t us. We appreciate the beauty, but we feel apart from it.
In one of his most popular metaphors, Watts tries to help us overcome our feeling of separateness by comparing our arising as conscious beings out of this universe similar to how apples come from apple trees. He cleverly turns the collective “people” into a verb; trying to get across this idea that we aren’t separate from the universe at all. We are a process of the universe.
Logically, the metaphor makes sense. We are all composed of atoms that didn’t come from anywhere else but the very universe we inhabit. The beauty of the metaphor is that it conveys this profound and hopeful truth in such simple language.
Michael Pollan: The Mind is a Snow-Covered Hill
Michael Pollan discusses this metaphor in his excellent book, How to Change Your Mind (which features on my list of favorite books on psychedelics). As he admits in the book, it wasn’t Pollan himself who came up with the metaphor, but I’m crediting him for bringing it to my attention.
The essence of the idea is that the mind is a snow-covered hill, and the thoughts we have are sleds going down that hill. Certain thought patterns become habitual over time, and they lead to grooves in the snow hill of mind. When certain thought patterns become ingrained in the snow, we can’t seem to think without going into those grooves; those habitual thought patterns.
We can become stuck in rigid ways of thinking, whether about the world around us, our relationships, our selves. What psychedelics do, according to the metaphor, is they add fresh snow to the hill. It is for this reason that psychedelics can so profoundly change the way we think. Pollan discusses the metaphor in this clip with Joe Rogan.
Lao Tze: The Ego is Muddy Water
The full quote, which comes from the founder of the Ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism, is as follows:
“Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?”
In this quote, the sage, Lao Tze, is saying our conditioned, egotistic patterns of thought are essentially muddy water. The path to peace and inner stillness from mental suffering comes when we wait for the muddy water of ego to clear. Many Eastern traditions emphasize the importance of sitting meditation as a path to help end our suffering.
Terence McKenna: Western Civilization is a Loaded Gun
McKenna had a tendency to delve into quackery at times, but a lot of what he said was intelligent and insightful. In this metaphor, the full quote is that “Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at itself.” This metaphor relates to the constant anxiety of living in a world dominated by individualism, consumerism, selfishness, and access to nuclear weapons.
Anyone who takes a moment to read the latest news headlines can inevitably see the truth of this statement. It constantly feels like the world is on the cusp of something utterly disastrous to humanity; some existential risk caused by our own idiocy or carelessness. Much of this anxiety stems from Western powers trying to assert their dominance over the rest of the world and over each other.
Yes, there hasn’t been an outbreak of humanity-threatening violence in a long time, but it always feels just around the corner, especially with people like Trump getting voted into power and populist mass movements like Brexit surging across the Western world.
Mooji: The Fire of Self-Discovery
Mooji is one of my favorite spiritual teachers. I know ‘spiritual’ is a loaded word for the modern thinking person who approaches life with the thinking approach of a scientist, but the truth is I am agnostic to spiritual ideas, particularly those that delve into the nature of self and consciousness. Mooji is a master of communicating about the ego and its false identity as who we really are.
The full quote is:
“Step into the fire of self-discovery. This fire will not burn you, it will only burn what you are not.”
The metaphor communicates to us that discovering the true nature of the self is to step into a fire. But the fire of this discovery is nothing to be feared; it won’t harm who we really are at our core. I think this is a powerful and profound metaphor because people, myself included, often resonate with self-inquiry; that there is something deeper to be found by looking within, but we find ourselves afraid to go that deep, lest we lose ourselves in the process.
Alan Watts: Be the Falling Cat That Lets Go of Itself
I can’t find the exact YouTube video in which I heard this Alan Watts quote, but its profundity always stuck in my mind as a cool metaphor. The fact I love cats also helps! Watts was discussing a Taoist approach to life and he used the way cats fall as a metaphor for how to live life in such a way as to be free of anxiety and in accordance with the Tao.
The reason cats can fall from quite impressive heights and not hurt themselves is that they completely relax their bodies on the way down. Watts advocated approaching life in that way. Resistance creates pain in life. If the cat clenches or resists when it falls, it hurts itself. If we resist the natural spontaneous flow of life and try to cling to it, pain in the form of mental suffering is inevitable.
That tops off my favorite metaphors about life. I really enjoyed writing this article and I will add to it over time as I remember more metaphors and become exposed to new ones, whether in literature or when going down a YouTube rabbit hole.