"It is the body that makes spiritual experience passionate, that brings to its intense desire and pleasure, pain, delight, remorse. Without all these things, spirituality is bland. In the world's spiritual traditions, sex and art and music and dance and the taste of food have been for millenia forms of spiritual experience just as much as ritual practice, meditation, and prayer.
The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, the intensity, and meaningfulness of ordinary experience becomes the basis of passionate spirituality. An ineffable God becomes vital through metaphor: The Supreme Being. The Prime Mover. The Creator. The Almighty. The Father. The King of Kings. Shepard. Potter. Lawgiver. Judge. Mother. Lover. Breath.
The vehicle by which we are moved in passionate spirituality is metaphor. The mechanism of such metaphor is bodily. It is a neural mechanism that recruits our abilities to perceive, to move, to feel, and to envision in the seevice not only of theoretical and philosophical thought, but of spiritual experience.
Cognitive science, the science of mind and the brain, has in its brief existence been enormously fruitful. It has given us a way to know ourselves better, to see how our physical being-flesh, blood, sinew, hormone, cell, and synapse-all things we encounter daily in the world make us who we are.
"This is Philosophy in the Flesh"
LAKOFF & JOHNSON
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