De Bono: Its tail follows the crocodile
If I were writing an article about achieving enlightenment, I’d be stressing distinguishing the Unknown from the known and leaving the known aside.
But, as a lightworker, I work with people and people work within the known. And so, to serve, I also work within the known – not my first inclination.
One of the ways knowledge is extended and expanded in the domain of the known is through the use of metaphors. (1) Let me spend a moment on their usefulness.
Until now we’ve chosen our metaphors for their aptness in some respect. That is an established way of working with them.
But, inspired by Edward de Bono’s “lateral thinking,” (2) I’d like to suggest another way.
It has to do with one of de Bono’s methods that impressed me.
He was asked to solve an African nation’s problems creating more teachers on limited budgets.
De Bono addressed it by opening the dictionary, looking at the first word that caught his attention. This time it was the word “crocodile”.
He asked himself how that answered the problem. After pondering the situation, he advised that teaching assistants be assigned to follow teachers around for a set period (say, two years), like the tail follows the crocodile, and, after that period, be accredited as teachers. His solution was accepted.
I’d like to suggest that we can do what he did – invite new meanings and new solutions by freely and arbitrarily choosing any thing, event, or relationship and then seeing what aspects of it can tell us about our own way of being, operation, or organization. In a way, it turns problem-solving around.
For instance, take a tree. I can allow a tree to inspire reverence in me in that it’s always raising its arms to the sky as if in adoration of God. It reawakens memories of sacredness in me.
A Canada goose flies across the sky but leaves no trace. It draws up in me the remembrance of the soul traversing life but leaving no trace.
Or the way the ocean laps the sand. It takes some sand back out with it when the tide retreats but even that sand falls out of solution to the bottom of the sea floor.
The two, together for a while, return to their natural elements. Similarly, the body and soul mix for a time but eventually fall out of solution (death) and return to their native domains.
Whether our aim is to know or unknow, to learn or unlearn, we can use metaphors to trigger remembrance – first of spiritual verities and later of our identity.
Finding a particularly apt metaphor seems to firm up our understanding and increase our confidence in our direction. It dispels confusion and promotes clarity. And clarity builds peace of mind.
We are taking the ordinary and making it serve the spiritual, the everyday and making it serve the divine.
Footnotes
(1) A metaphor is a thing or event that we compare to something else. A winter storm is like a raging warrior. A quiet sea is like a glassy mirror. A metaphor helps to ease understanding by comparing the unknown to the known. But, since the truly Unknown is beyond meaning and cannot be made an object of thought, it can only take us so far. Its true usefulness lies in extending knowledge, rather than in realizing the Unknown.
(1) Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking. London: Penguin, 1970.