Metaself: A Journey of Self-Awareness Using Spatial Metaphor

By Peter Carleton and Douglas Smith

As speakers and readers of ordinary English, we have a terrific built-in model of the self. Familiar metaphors using spatial language, like “the front I put up” and “the back of my mind,” combine in a verbal/visual picture that fosters self-awareness and promotes empathy for others. I call it MetaSelf.
As you talk with people, your body in physical space and gravity can remind you that spatial figures of speech form a good framework for understanding your mind, your values, and your personal relationships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781312763227

Book preview

MetaSelf

A Journey to self-Awareness using Spatial Metaphor

Peter V Carleton

As speakers and readers of ordinary English, we have a terrific built-in model of the self. Familiar metaphors using spatial language, like the front I put up and the back of my mind, combine in a verbal/visual picture that fosters self-awareness and promotes empathy for others. I call it MetaSelf.

As you talk with people, your body in physical space and gravity can remind you that spatial figures of speech form a good framework for understanding your mind, your values, and your personal relationships.

Peter V. Carleton

March 2023

Copyright 2023 Peter V. Carleton

[e-mail]

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Boneyard of Dead Metaphors

Chapter 1

The Big Picture

Spatial Metaphor

A Picture Worth a Thousand Metaphors

The Eight Spaces of the Front/Back Axis

Four Bodily Contrasts

Contrasts Ass Metaphors for Abstraction

Recap

A Checklist Or Two.

Chapter 2

More About the Front/Back Axis

Keywords and Prefixes for the Front/Back Axis

Phrases that Mediate the Front/Back Axis:

Other Pictures of the Self

MetaSelf is Elastic

Four Points:

Spatial Organization

Summary

Chapter 3

More Structuring the Self in Figurative Space

The Up/Down Axis

Images of Bodily/Spatial Words

Some Up/Down questions to Consider

Keywords and Prefixes of the Up/Down Axis

The Left/Right Axis

The Inside/Outside Contrast

Chapter 4

Balance and Virtue

Different Meanings of Balance

Equality and Difference

Phrases And Ideas Incorporating Balance

Two Quotations about "Balance"

Some Important Spatial Words

Upright

Dictionary definitions of ‘upright.’

Straight

Level

Balance and Virtue

Balance on the Vertical Axis

Balance on the Left/Right Axis

The Middle Way Of Buddhism

Justice

Empathy and Compassion

Courage as Spatial Orientation

Integrity

Promises, Sincerity, Self-knowledge, and Truth

One Task of Philosophy

Contrasts and Image-Schemas

Chapter 5

The Backstory of MetaSelf

Early Family Rules

Economic Factors

Sex and Identity

Some Early Cultural Influences

College Years

Sociology and Philosophy

Gay Liberation

Humanistic Psychology

Chapter Six

A Bewildering Breakthrough

Artwork and Frames

Joy in Recognizing the Obvious

Why Such Intensity?

Audiences

Chapter Seven

Consciousness & Spirituality

Consciousness

Spaciousness

Spaciousness

Spirituality

Avoiding Over-Specifying the Transcendent

A Metaphor for the Spirit

Meta-

Summary

Chapter 8

Looking Back & Moving Forward

General Benefits

Looking Back

Missing: Early Supportive Criticism

Not Being a Mistake

Therapy and MetaSelf as Containers

Looking Forward

Looking for Meta-

Priorities

Benefits For Individuals

A Case Study

Benefits for Educators and Healers

Our Great Spaces: A Teaching Song

Benefits For Researchers and Theorists

Appendix

Artwork, Music and MetaSelf

Spatial Metaphor and Song

Primary Metaphors and Image Schemas

Score for Our Great Spaces

The Sound of Euclid

The Lyrics

Using the Eight Spaces of the Front/Back Axis

Some Ideas

In the Classroom

A Song Forum

Three practical steps forward

Miscellaneous Remarks from My Notebooks

Spatial Thinking

Quotations

The Great Frame of Being

Politics, Morality and the MetaSelf Model

The Up/Down −Top/Bottom− Vertical Axis

The Front/Back Axis and its Spatial Expressions

The Left/Right Axis

The MetaSelf Model

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

I want to express my enormous gratitude to great researchers in neurology, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and cosmology.  Over the last fifty years, they have revised and deepened our understanding of the mind and brain.  Two of their insights that particularly deserve to be combined and become more common knowledge are spatial thinking and conceptual metaphor. 

As a layman in the 1980s, I was unaware of these ideas and the clarity they could provide for ordinary, everyday thinking.  When a few familiar spatial phrases like the back of my mind and the front I put up snagged my attention in my art studio, I was thrilled by the overall picture that began to seem possible.  Could I, a solitary, untrained layman, have found a visual and verbal framework for thinking that was based on our shared bodily structure in space but that also left room for individual perceptions, feelings, and beliefs?  I felt confused and uncertain about my insights.

You can imagine my relief and gratitude when I learned about the ongoing cognitive research and saw how it supported my elementary ideas.  This book is my effort as a layman to set forth for other non-academic readers some ways that spatial thinking, expressed in familiar metaphorical language, can contribute to our self-awareness. 

I sincerely appreciate the work of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Gene Gendlin, Jean Mandler, Nancy Ellen Abrams, Antonio Damasio, Iain McGilchrist, and Barbara Tversky.  Their writing and talks have had a liberating effect on the entire second half of my life. 

I value four of their achievements in particular. First, they have at last convincingly outlined how the intangible thing we call the mind is structured by and emerges from the body.  This has substantially cleared away the four-century-old confusion over the so-called mind-body split that was our Western heritage, in one way or another, from Descartes. 

Second, these thinkers and researchers helped us reclaim our bodies and emotions, which now can more easily be seen as legitimate parts of an integrated self rather than as objects of ethical, philosophical, and religious suspicion.  This is a great gift to the life of the mind and the body. 

Third, by showing that much (not all) of our reasoning is a body-based and metaphorical process rather than part of a transcendent, disembodied realm of Truth, they have made us more conscious of the responsibility to be self-aware, clear, and skillful when choosing our metaphors. Fourth, I believe they have shown the way to a larger spirituality that far better accords with the physical sciences.

These researchers and thinkers deserve to know that their work can have a profound psychological, even spiritual impact on all our lives.  They have helped us face a difficult future as happier, more complete human beings.  My hope is that this book complements their work and can widen its impact.

By listening patiently for months as I thought through my ideas and some ways to present them, Muiz Brinkerhoff designed the third iteration of the MetaSelf website. Before that, Tod Abbott of Full Orbit Web and Marketing Inc. performed the same kind service in creating the second iteration. The name of the creator of the very first MetaSelf website is, unfortunately, now lost, as is the name of the cartoonist-illustrator for that site. 

David Nieh, now a noted architect, produced beautiful versions of my rough sketches to illustrate my early book on the MetaSelf model.

Everlasting gratitude goes to all my friends and therapists, who listened through the ups and downs of my philosophy and psychology.

My final and greatest honors go to my generous husband, Doug. As a gift for my 80th birthday, he offered to transfer the material on my website into a book if I made only minor changes. Inevitably, however, my understanding of the model and myself evolved, and my rewriting took more time. Doug made space for it all. We grew together, and that has been a very great gift.

Introduction

Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.

American philosopher Susanne Langer

Philosophy in a New Key (1942)

One day in my art studio, many years ago, an unexpected spark of insight changed my life. I suddenly saw a way to build a general model or picture of a person that I thought would clarify how we understand ourselves and the world. As my model, I would adopt the ordinary box-frame I used for my soft fiber art, as shown in this photo.  To many friends, this object must have seemed a strange choice. To me, however, it felt so intuitive, convincing, and fundamental that — barely knowing what I was doing — I dropped fiber art and turned all of my attention to understanding the frame itself and the meanings it began to have. What kind of spark could provoke such a radical redirection of my life? What sort of kindling had it fallen on that it could ignite such a mental bonfire?

Here is part of the answer that quickly began to emerge. The deep box-frame I used for showing artwork upright on the wall could become a model, picture, and metaphor for a person, a self, because pairs of spatial words that describe the box-frame in literal, physical, measurable space -- inside, outside, front, back, up, down, etc. -- also turn up every day in figurative spatial, descriptions of the mind and the self. "The front I put up and the back of my mind. The spatial character of the box-frame, the wall, and even the space outside the room or house were bursting with closely related meanings. The frame’s uprightness and balance had mental and moral significance. Its three axes at right angles were the same as those found in the viewer's own body and head. The shadow cast on the wall was both the dark side and the hidden potential at the back of the mind." The box-frame became a framework, a model of a person facing the world with skills and gifts, looking straight at the viewer in the room.

The metaphors I studied in high school were presented as isolated poetic descriptions or comparisons. We understood the meaning they were trying to convey, but we did not see them grouped in a systematic way that revealed anything about how the mind functions.

When the box-frame first came to life for me, I was in my forties, and the word 'metaphor’ was probably not in my active vocabulary. As a layman with no background in linguistics and little enough in philosophy, I didn't know what to make of the fact that spatial words could describe a person and their thinking and values in so many ways. Was it all obvious and just a waste of time? Or could it be profound and helpful for me or anyone else? I had to know. I had to investigate. I couldn't help sharing my amateur insights. If I was on to something real, it could be a mind-changing toolset for English speakers in general, and that was a scarily pretentious thought.

After working a couple of years on my own, I met a former student of my spouse who alerted me to Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By, published a couple of years earlier in 1980.

I realized that the picture I had of myself, and the world was turning upside down. Body-based spatial patterns made me. reconstruct my psychology, philosophy, and spirituality from the ground up. I felt disoriented, then re-oriented, shaken but thrilled

With designers and technical helpers, I created a website using the image of the box frame. My early workshops on using metaphor for personal insight were not well thought through. I had retired from doing counseling and no longer had a natural group on which to test my ideas. When trying to explain my model to someone new, I felt at times like a teenager explaining the virtues of a new crush to skeptical parents.

But the complex, unifying image of the box-frame kept me going. It was more than a guiding light; it was an entire meteor shower of ideas that returned year after year, asking me cosmic questions, and suggesting answers through the long nights.

It took many years of thoughtful reading in recent cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy to feel that my original intuitions were on the right track. In order to reach people for whom the box-frame was not an appealing metaphor, I changed the model’s emphasis to the contrasting spatial words and the axes of the body that the sides of the box-frame paralleled. At age 82, I’m tired of my website and leery of social media. I want to lay out my conclusions as an independent researcher and share my personal story in case it might help people connect with this material in their own way.

I have three possible audiences in mind and hope to give each of them something without taxing the patience of the others. First, I want to offer ideas about the self for regular readers who are coping with life’s difficulties and don’t have the privileges of time, money, and education that I enjoyed. I earnestly hope to organize the skills and tools I know they already have so they can better understand themselves, communicate, and empathize with others.

Second, I hope to reach therapists and body workers of many kinds who are already thinking about bodily and mental space in