You should care about symbols - here's why

Jonah Goldberg: “Symbolism — the way we reduce broad concerns, agendas, and visions to images or rituals — has played a defining role in human life since there have been humans. Try burning a flag or a cross in front of the wrong audience and then tell me symbolism is nothing.”

Just as a tool concentrates a large force into a small area, a symbol concentrates a large number of meanings into an elegant form. Bronowski: “The symbol is the tool which gives man his power, and it is the same tool whether the symbols are images, words, or mathematical signs.”

Should symbolism be a part of school curriculum? Manly Hall, a famous Canadian lecturer & mystic, says yes: “Symbolism should be restored to the structure of world education.” Symbols can be akin to physical laws: they can stay consistent across time and place.

Manly Hall said we use symbols to express “thoughts which transcend the limitations of language." Words have limited meanings, and sometimes the concepts we wish to express are too big or too subtle for the existing vocabulary. This is when we invent new words - or new symbols.

Hall: To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books. The young are no longer invited to seek the hidden truths, dynamic & eternal, locked within the shapes & behavior of living beings.

All art is symbolic. Art begins when the artist sees in Nature what “nobody else sees” (H.P Lovecraft). But if he is to express his insight in an understandable form, the artist must draw from a stock of universal symbols that he shares with the audience.

Let your symbolic imagination express itself concretely via art. Bradbury: During a lifetime, one saves up information which collects itself around centers in the mind; these automatically become symbols on a subliminal level and need only be summoned in the heat of writing."

Edwin Hubble: "All nature is a vast symbolism: Every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth." Certain ratios (the Golden mean), numbers (fibonacci numbers), and patterns (spirals) appear again and again in nature - perhaps hinting at a deeper spiritual truth?

When symbols do pop up in our life, dreams, and art, it’s important to let fresh meaning pour into them instead of letting their traditional meaning bog us down. Jung: "Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it when you are analyzing a dream."

The alchemical aim of transforming base metal into gold was a symbol for transforming one’s potential into reality. Jung: “the alchemist projected what I have called the process of individuation into the phenomena of chemical change.”