Metaphor and Metamorphosis: The Symbolic Life as Creative Becoming

In the mythic imagination, transformation is never merely mechanical. It is symbolic. A frog becomes a prince, a mortal becomes a god, a tree becomes a lover, a world is remade through a whisper or a wound. Myth speaks in metamorphosis, and the grammar it speaks with is metaphor.

To live symbolically is to live in a world where things mean more than they appear. Where the visible is charged with the invisible. Where every form hints at its transformation.

Metaphor is not a surface ornament. It is the deep structure of symbolic life.

We tend to treat metaphor as a linguistic trick—a flourish, a flavour. But metaphor is a mode of thought, a form of action, and a structure of relation. To say this is that is not just to speak—it is to construe. To re-pattern experience. To hold one thing in terms of another is to invite new meaning, to enact new knowing, to open the world to transformation.

And so, metaphor is not just about likeness. It is about becoming.

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The Logic of Becoming

In a relational ontology, things are not static entities but dynamic unfoldings—patterns of relation instantiated in time. Meaning, too, is dynamic. It is not what a thing has; it is what a thing does in relation.

Metaphor is the engine of this doing. It moves us between domains of meaning. It maps structure across difference. And it is through this mapping—this symbolic folding—that new forms of knowing emerge.

Metaphor is metamorphosis in symbolic time.

Each metaphor construes a new pattern.

Each pattern actualises a new instance of self and world.

We do not simply describe the world with metaphor.

We remake it.

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The Mythic and the Metaphoric

Myth lives in metaphor. It unfolds as story, but it breathes through transformation. A hero enters the underworld, not to find information, but to become something new. A world ends, not for spectacle, but so that another world may be born. These are not literal events. They are patterns of experience made visible through symbolic form.

The dragon is not a lizard.

It is fear, chaos, potential—wrapped in scales and smoke.

To slay it is not an act of zoology.

It is a construal of meaning—a ritual of symbolic death and rebirth.

When we treat myth literally, we lose this.

We turn metamorphosis into mistake.

We confuse transformation with taxonomy.

But myth is not mistaken science.

It is a different kind of knowing—recursive, relational, becoming.

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Metaphor and the Self

The self, too, is metaphoric. It is not a point, but a pattern. Not a fixed identity, but a recursive construal—a dynamic grammar of becoming. We are shaped by the metaphors we live by.

When we say I am broken, or I am reborn, or I am a vessel, we are not just describing—we are performing symbolic acts.

And through these acts, the self is formed.

This is not a metaphor about the self.

It is the self, as metaphor.

To change the self, we must change its symbolic grammar.

To become otherwise, we must say ourselves otherwise.

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The Poetic Mind

Science models. Myth enacts.

Poetry bridges them both.

To think poetically is to allow meaning to breathe.

To feel the slippage between domains.

To let metaphor carry us where logic cannot go—

Not as an escape from reason, but as a dance with what lies beyond its edge.

Poetic thinking is not irrational.

It is supra-rational.

It folds cognition into symbol, symbol into sensation, sensation into form.

It is how the cosmos plays with itself—

Speaking in tongues, dreaming in patterns, becoming through symbol.

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Metamythic Living

To live metamythically is to live in the grammar of transformation.

It is to take metaphor seriously—not as fact, but as form.

Not as fiction, but as function.

The world is not what it is. It is what it means—in every act of construal.

And that meaning can change.

It does change.

Because we change.

We are not what we are.

We are what we become—

through symbol, through story, through the metaphors that bind and unbind us.

To become conscious of this is to enter the metamorphic spiral.

To become not just a bearer of meaning,

but a co-creator in the symbolic life of the world.