“‘Everything transitory is but a metaphor.’ But equally, ‘Everything eternal is but a metaphor.’ For as already told, long since, in the Kena Upanisad: ‘That [which is beyond every name and form] is comprehended only by the one with no comprehension of it: anyone comprehending, knows it not. Unknown to the knowing, it is to the unknowing known.’” (From Joseph Campbell’s The Inner Reaches of Outer Space)

This is the power of the inner child, and why children — minds still yet unfettered by the overly-restrictive bounds of definition, logic, fact, and the all-consuming constraints of language — are the most spiritual of beings.

This, I assume, is also why the goal of meditation is in the clearing away of the mind — Vipassana meditation, that is, “to see things as they really are,” seems to be to peer through the crystal clear eye within that exists beyond the wall of language, word, and definition. It is raw experience, pure informational intake, without it being contorted by mental distortion!

Our eyes, and our minds, are like funhouse mirrors. They take the raw image, the pure visual input, and distort it into ugly and bizarre versions of reality.

Meditation is the smoothing out of the mirror so that we can see the reflection of reality all the more clearly, unobscured by distortion and contortion.

So-called “knowing” often takes us farther away from the actual object to be known.