Anything can serve as a symbol of the Psyche, just as anything can serve as a symbol of anything–because the meaning of anything is the meaning we subscribe to it. It is what we say it is. This is true of everything from the beginning of things. Nothing means anything of itself. Everything means what it means to whomever is ascribing meaning. We are Meaning-Makers. And we make it up right out of our own imagination. It has always been this way.
Knowing that this is so and that it has always been so, flips things beautifully, so that everything becomes a reflection of our self/Psyche, showing us who we are in the moment of our saying what something is. We speak ourselves into our own consciousness, into our own awareness. To say “We are Meaning-Makers,” enable us to see ourselves visualizing ourselves as visualizing everything into existence. Nothing exists until we say it into being. And what we say something is says as much about ourselves as it says about the thing we say what is.
This is “simultaneous arising” that the Buddhists like to talk about. We speak ourselves into existence as we speak whatever we are seeing/visualizing into existence. Everything is a mirror reflecting ourselves into being, into reality, exhibiting who we are to ourselves and all others who may be listening to us, though they will be expanding us to fit their understanding, interpretation, realization, projection of who we are, just as we are fitting our own understanding, interpretation, realization, projection of who we are. Making projection the foundation of reality. Everything we see is our projection of what we take it to be. We don’t see anything, only our projection of everything.
There is no “objective” reality. It is all “projective”–filtered through our associations and presumptions, assumptions, conjecture, surmises, etc. that happen to be the case with us in the moment we perceive whatever we are looking at in the moment we are looking.
So we have to take it all “with a grain of salt.” Which means we have no business taking anything more seriously than it deserves to be taken. And how will we ever know that? I take THAT to mean that we have no business taking anything seriously. Unless, of course it happens to be an elephant walking along the path toward us. In that case, it behooves us to “get off the path.”
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 