Some concepts are hard to explain, especially if the concepts are totally foreign to our readers and listeners.  But if we can tell our readers and listeners what the concepts are like,  then maybe they’ll get it.  That is the  job of the metaphor and analogy:  to build  bridges of understanding.  (How about that!  I just used a metaphor myself !)

1. Using metaphor and analogies to explain how to meditate:

Meditation is very hard — lots of  people try but quickly give up. It’s hard controlling our chaotic, unbidden thoughts.  So how can we explain some handy meditation techniques to someone?

In her best-selling memoir Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert used some clever metaphors involving of monkeys, slaves and row boats to explain  meditation.  The rowboat-analogy was personally very helpful for me in my primitive meditation attempts:

Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the “monkey mind” — the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined.  This in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking.  Happy thoughts make me happy, but — whoops — how quickly I swing again into obsessive worry, blowing the mood; and then it’s the remembrance of an angry moment and I start to get hot and pissed off all over again; and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly.  You are, after all, what you think.  Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

The other problem with all this swinging through the vines of thought is that you are never where you  are.  You are always digging in the past or poking at hte future, but rarely do you rest  in this moment.  It’s something like the habit of my dear friend Susan, who —  whenever she sees a beautiful place — exclaims in near panic, “It’s so beautiful here!  I want to come back here someday!” and it takes all of my persuasive powers to try to convince her that she is already here.  If you’re looking for union with the divine, this kind of forward/backward whirling is a problem…

But to stay in the present moment requires dedicated one-pointed focus.  Different meditation techniques teach one-pointedness in different ways — for instance, by focusing your eyes on a single point of light, or by observing the rise and fall of your breath.  My Guru teaches meditation with the help of a mantra, sacred words or syllables to be repeated in a focused manner.  Mantra has a dual function.  For one thing, it gives the mind something to do.  It’s as if you’ve given the monkey a pile of 10,000 buttons and said, “Move these buttons, one at a time, into a new pile.”  This is a considerably easier task for the monkey than if you just plopped him in a corner and asked him not to move. The other purpose of mantra is to transport you to another state, rowboatlike, through the choppy waves of the mind.  Whenever your attention gets pulled into a cross-current of thought, just return to the mantra, climb back into the boat and keep going.  The great Sanskrit mantras are said to contain unimaginable powers, the ability to row you, if you can stay with one, all the way to the shorelines of divinity. (From Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, p 138-9)

2. Using analogy and metaphor to explain how the brain changes with stimulation:

The brain Merzenich describes is not an inamimate vessel that we fill; rather it is more like a living creatures with an appetite, one that can grow and change itself with proper nourishment and exercise. (from The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, p 47)

3.  A clever analogy to  explain how hard it is to tease apart the separate contributions of our genes and our environment on how we turn out:

Do our genes or our experiences determine who we become? That debate turns out to be pointless, based on the fallacy that our genes and our environment are independent of each other;  it’s like arguing over which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, the length or the width. (From Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, p 150)

4.  A clever analogy to explain the pitfalls of an organization that pursues money as its only goal:

When I find [organizations whose only thrust is to make money], I also find a great deal of negative synergy in the culture, generating such things as interdepartmental rivalries, defensive and protective communication, politicking, and masterminding. We can’t effectively thrive without making money, but that’s not sufficient reason for organizational existence. We can’t live without eating, but we don’t live to eat. (From 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stepen Covey, p 302)

5.  Richard Feynman using a chess analogy to explain how scientists discover the laws of nature:

6.  A  computer metaphor:

But is that our fundamental nature? Or, to use yet another computer metaphor, is that our default setting? When we enter the world are we wired to be passive and inert? Or are we wired to be active and engaged? (From Drive by Daniel Pink, p 87)

7.FedEx days:

Where workers are given 24 hours to work to some up with their own solution to a problem and they have to deliver something overnight.

“Over the years, this odd little exercise has produced an array of software fixes hat might otherwise never have emerged. Says one engineer, “Some of the coolest stuff we have in our product today has come from FedEx days.” (From Drive by Daniel Pink, p 91)

8.  Goldilocks tasks: The sweet spot where tasks are neither too easy nor too hard. (From Drive by Daniel Pink, p 224)

8.  rewards and punishments = carrots and sticks.

It is suggested that, in the end, human beings aren’t much different form livestock–that the way to get us moving in the right direction is by dangling a crunchier carrot or wielding a sharper stick. (From Drive, by Daniel Pink, p 18)