The Rorschach Test - Continued

Back to the Rorschach...

'The Rorschach Test' went live on facebook and recieved a fair amount of feedback. See the previous post to this one to get an idea of what I'm talking about. It's a metaphor, yeah. But nobody bothers coming up with a decent extended metaphor these days, and so damned if I'm going to let go of this one until it's been proven to me that it's ineffective or wrong!


This was a little analogy I came up with in my spare time, I must admit - but so far it's holding up. Of the facebook comments, the most prominent one was along these lines:

Isn't the point of a Rorschach test to use your personal experience to find meaning, and therefore know yourself better? Detaching from the experience and calling it nothing but an inkblot is not fulfilling.

Knowing yourself better is indeed more or less the point of a Rorschach, but what one finds in it is a reflection of one's own psychology. It speaks nothing to the objective truth of the matter. We may see a butterfly, or two people having tea -but there really is only an inkblot.

This is not to say it's meaningless. Someone like myself sees the same thing as everyone else - we can see god, we can see lamas and the memory of water or what have you - but we don't stop at any one of those as the truth. It's important to us to realise that it is, essentially, a blot of ink. Not so that we can stare glumly into it and despair at the nothingness, but so that we may STOP staring altogether and look elsewhere, concentrate on more important things, and find meaning in reality.



Elusive Pantheism...

I have been meaning to get back to the topic of Pantheism for days now, and I owe a big apology to Mastermystery for delaying. It is coming, I promise, but the comments left by my guest deserve nothing if not my complete attention and effort after the detail he put into his response. My work is already cut out for me. So watch this space...