Everything is Symbolic

You live in a symbolic world. Even the words I am typing in here right now are symbolic. Just close your eyes and picture this: banana (hmm soft, yellow, sweet, tasty), chocolate (smooth, brown, tempting, bitter-sweet), lemon (ooh...sour and my mouth is suddenly starting to water). All of these images came up without having the real banana, chocolate or lemon by your side, I only used the symbolic equal of these items in the English language to summon their images. Each word that I used is already a form of symbol and yes they do have the power to evoke feelings, smells, sensations in you because you relate it to the object itself.

This takes us back to your our learning process. As a toddler, we were taught to relate banana with the real banana many times taking the real fruit and repeating a million times ba-na-na. So your amazing mind make the correlation between the word banana with that squishable yellow fruit you used to play with. Later on you were taught to spell the word and write it on paper and voila the magic of words the equivalent of the fruit was suddenly portrayed on your notebook by a magical combination of vowels and consonants. Now you don't need to carry the real banana around in order to let people know what you want, you either say or write the word that represents it. And so you learnt to do the same thing with most of the objects that you know, you learnt to convert everything you knew in your toddler world into a word accepted and understood by your environment.

Society creates symbols everyday and you can see it in the marketing strategies of companies, especially those who want to make a statement with their brand. Millions of dollars are invested to make a brand name successful, to make its symbol be recognized worldwide and what's more important to make the symbol and the special image of the product be remembered by consumers making the symbol an equal to all the qualities that the company wants to impress in the minds of consumers worldwide. This makes powerful symbols recognized around the world which have an importance, the importance of evoking an image in your mind whenever you see it appear in an advertisement.

Cultures and societies have in time made relation between the real thing and the symbol have been established and the same way that you would summon the sourness of a lemon just by thinking about a lemon the same thing happens with divinity. Christians do it a lot by using the cross which symbolizes Christ; yoga practitioners are familiar with the symbol of "Om" which is according to Sanskrit the sound of the Universe and Chinese are recognized to have symbolized the way masculine and feminine energies interact by portraying it in the ying-yang symbol. As it happens with any famous brand with effective campaigns, a word like Nike will be paired immediately to its motto: "Just Do It" and at the same time evoke the images of the latest advertisement, everything projected in a nano second on the screen of your mind. Shamanic symbols work the same way, they call for what they represent weather it is higher power, nature, knowledge, wisdom or an entity which the special symbol represents.

Symbols are part of us, as a way of representing what we perceive through our senses in our language. People are creatures of symbolism.