Prison of Our Minds

The need to ascribe meaning to new phenomena, experiences and encounters, virtually dominates every aspect of our tenure on this universe as human beings. The spiritual realm, in particular, has always been and shall always be fertile ground for leaps of symbolic imagination. For who can fault the almost poetic qualities of fantastical connections between natural phenomena and abstract concepts ranging from life to death? Paradoxically, a supposedly mystical approach to untangling mysteries of our existence eventually falls prey to our logical mechanisms of comparison, contrast, attribution and explication. How much more quintessentially human can humans be? Cynicism aside, it is nonetheless always interesting to ponder such manufactured symbolism. Why has fire come to represent spring? Why is water the element of summer? How does air amplify the secrets of autumn? Who has married the earth with winter? Have all the quadruples in the world, coincidentally or not, been engulfed in the tentacles of our magical cardinal points? With these imaginings, do we transcend the prisons of our logic? Or have we unknowing slipped the handcuffs back unto ourselves, foolishly dancing a jig of liberation only in our own heads?