https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=mbDdTk9awNs
Isn’t it important to keep in mind that symbolism opens up understanding to deeper meaning? I’m concerned about a tendency to want to pin down meaning using symbol as one uses straight pins for a butterfly connection. How can that danger be avoided? Well, the way that the danger is avoided is to always understand that symbolism only functions through analogy. Functions through analogy and it also functions through structure. So you always if someone’s talking about symbolism and isn’t ultimately talking about pattern and structure, but it’s trying to just say that this thing means that, then you can already stop paying attention to what they’re saying because it’s going to be extremely trite. It’s I mean, it’s fine. Like it’s fine to understand. I don’t know. It’s fine to understand that if someone has an iron cross, that it is an image of a prize that you win for a certain type of bravery in the war. Like, I mean, it’s not completely void of meaning. But if you don’t understand how it connects to a pattern, a pattern of ornament, the pattern of metal, the pattern of adding something to you to make you different from others, you know, although if you don’t understand this other aspect of symbolism or how the cross becomes glory, like all of that, then you’re going to miss out. And I mean, it’s fine. Like in normal life, you know, it’s good to know that the iron cross is given by this country to this type of person. But that’s the way to avoid it. The way to avoid it is to always make it’s always look and see if the person is connecting things to a broader pattern and is also able to see analogies with other things. If you’re not able to see analogies with other things, then that’s when the interpretation is in danger. If you notice, like if I every video I make, I mean, not every I hope every video I make, I’m always trying to give you the data pattern of a version of that pattern, the one that appears in scripture. And then usually I try to find a really, really surprising example, like something you hadn’t thought of would be connected to that so that you’re able to say, OK, yeah, OK, this really is a pattern because, you know, this stupid movie or this strange phenomena in culture is connected to the same pattern. So Jacob says, I have had many wonderful conversations about what a symbol is in the Internet. I found with the I found with the uncommon use of the of the definition there is like us use for symbol, others try to use a different word to make sense of these ideas. The most common has been metaphor, which seems that it’s rude to mean a transfer of meaning with no gathering. Gathering. Yes. Instead of talking once more on what a symbol is, could you riff on how metaphor might or might not be used to talk about meaning, purpose and symbol? I mean, look, I don’t really I don’t really care what word we use. I use the word symbol because in the word symbol, there is the meaning that I’m trying to refer to. And like you like you said, I think that metaphor can be a problem because it does indeed tend to to emphasize the distinction between the levels. And I and I myself, when I talk about things, I tend to want to to really create that distinction, because what happens is you have people and you’ve seen it all the time is that they they don’t see the structural meaning. They see the relationship between the coming together of the elements and the meaning as an arbitrary relationship, as a kind of weird jump that has nothing to do with the actual structure of reality. And so. And so I think that like I definitely prefer the word the word symbol, and that’s probably just you use that. But if someone uses the word metaphor, don’t get hung up about it. You know, that’s usually not helpful in the discussion. The best thing to do is to just try to see what they’re talking about and try to understand whether or not they believe that there are structural reasons like that. That something is an instantiation of itself, right? That that’s what symbolism is. Right. And so the branch of a tree is the instantiation of the same pattern as the tree itself. So that symbolism, it’s when the pattern, the thing that symbolizes the pattern is an instantiation of the pattern. It’s not just a it’s not just a random literary connection, right? It’s not a disconnected set of things.