Keys Through Analogies

When I look at life, I sometimes forget how I do so. This is the most important thing, really. If you do not know how to teach yourself, then you cannot learn. To me, it's important to get down the method or something like a method, of how I go about reflection and examining life. I usually begin a lesson with the most obvious questions such as :Why did this work? Why did this not? What could have been improved? Was this the best outcome? etc. These questions lead to other questions like: Is there some kind of balance within the world? What is the lesson to be learned here? and so on. These questions can be answered with words, but I feel analogies play a vital role in understanding things. I even have an analogy for my method of understanding It's something like this: Think of life mathematically. Every set of numbers has an equation. Just as the slope of a linear line is Y=mx+b, there is an equation for every slope, for every set of numbers. This relates to life because , in the example of fulfillment, we ask how do we reach fulfillment? Well I know what it takes in certain circumstances, but that's not what I'm looking for. What I am looking for is an ultimate rule, such as "fulfillment is always achieved through selflessness; always self-full through selflessness" according to Lao Tzu in the modesty verse from the Tao Te Ching. This let's me see the "equation" for a certain subject and not just one solution, a way to find a solution every time.-That is my way of looking at how I reflect (reflecting reflection itself, ha ha). However, this for me applies to for everything. Every equation I believe I find, I create an analogy for to completely understand it. Why create an analogy? It is easier to look at a smaller specimen and ask why, where rules are simple, than it is to look up, where rules are far more complex and ask why? Things, or equations rather, in life appear not just once, but many times, big and small and the same equation. Why work with bigger numbers (looking up where things are more complicated) when you can work with smaller, easier numbers (things are more simple)? To support my idea, I will add that Michio Kaku (a famous theoretical physicist), the co-founder of string field theory, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science, uses analogies to understand and explain as well. In his book, Hyperspace, he examines fish in a pond. After observing the way the fish have no idea about the world outside the pond because they are in the pond, and it is simple to us because we are beyond the pond, he concludes with what I would call an equation, that things get simpler when looking "down" rather than "up". He says that it is easier to travel "up" and look "down" on things because they will become more simple. This idea introduces the layman into the theory of hyperspace, and how the universe and it's many laws become simpler as we travel into higher dimensions. One final analogy of this is the ancients, which also belongs to Michio Kaku that resides within his book Hyperspace. To them [the ancients] the weather was a mystery but now, as we can travel "up" into space, we see the pattern of the weather and the answer becomes obvious to some extent. So you see, rather than explaining the theory of hyperspace with "ok well there's 10 dimensions and there are these big strings that vibrate up there..." and so on, he creates analogies. Through the fish-pond analogy we learn that things do become simpler as we travel "up", through an analogy of light he will explain why the theory of hyperspace concludes superstrings make up all the things we know, and so on. All can be explained and understood through analogy. Even when being lectured we should make analogies. In every class make analogies. In computer science, when learning about Object Oriented Programming the object is to learn why we create "check points" in programming. I create an analogy, which is templates, and conclude that we sometimes don't need to write code over and over again so we create check points, or within the analogy a template, to save time.
Nature repeats itself, big and small, black and white, old and new, eastern and western, the same rules apply.. just find a simpler way to express this and you will understand, not just know.
"Those who know, do. Those who understand, teach." - Aristotle
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