Multimodal semiotics of spiritual experiences--论文代写范文精选

信徒如何保持一个可行的概念，尽管和周围的世界看似矛盾。在这里我想表明,认知语言学可以提供一种新的回答,关注更多有意义的概念,提出隐喻和转喻通常并不明显。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

INTRODUCTION 
  One of the scopes of religious texts cross-culturally is to express and explain the faith of the religious community by revealing the Divine. Islamic texts, for example, teach that any way of speaking about God is but a metaphor, that is, a way to talk about God in a viable manner so humans can understand. In this sense, metaphor is conceptual, which is consonant with Cognitive Linguistics. When the Qur’an, or the Bible, or other sacred texts talk about Divinity in human terms, they all use metaphors, and essentially they make use of the higher-level conceptual metaphor ABSTRACT IS CONCRETE.

  My fundamental question is how do the modern devotees and faithful, and not just the theologians, how do today’s people relate to certain metaphors transmitted by their faiths, and what can these metaphors tell us about the individuals’ concepts of themselves. Moreover, how does the faithful keep a viable representation of themselves and the world around them notwithstanding seemingly contradictory aspects of their representations? In this presentation I intend to show that Cognitive Linguistics can provide a new focus on answering these questions, and that those metaphors that concern more “meaningful concepts”, such as personhood and the transcendent, are deeply and rigidly enrooted in our individual conceptual system, bringing forth metaphorical and metonymic associations which often are not as evident. 

  My research, which is still in progress, intends to analyze metaphors found in religious and spiritual texts and discourse by using Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor theory and Fauconnier and Turner’s Blending theory, and I won’t discuss these since you already know of both. I’ve chosen to study how people represent spiritual experiences through speech, gestures and colored drawings. Today I will be concentrating my talk on a couple of my informants, one a street preacher and the other a street missionary, both Christian and from the streets of Berkeley, California.

  The main premise for analyzing gestures is that gestures can reveal more information on the thought process than what speech alone could. Gesture studies of the last few decades (cf. McNeill, Kendon) has revealed that co-speech gestures are tightly integrated with speech, in that they are temporally co-timed and semantically co-expressed. However gestures are structured differently from speech by virtue of the nature of the semiotic channel, encoding in space imagistically abstract thought not encoded in speech, which is temporally linear. In this way, we can imagine a person talking about knowledge and faith using the CONTAINER image schema. So a devotee might talk about “my faith” (up-inward motion) or “my faith” (self-upward motion) and this could indicate where the prime agency of faith comes from. 

  I have also asked my interviewees to perform pictorial representations of themselves, of the Divine, of heaven and of what happens at the moment of death. The colors they use and the shapes they draw, and the order in which they draw them potentially provide further insight into how they think. My study intends to be qualitative, and so I’m not interested in whether one spiritual belief system uses more or less metaphors over another, but rather to see what can be said about the phenomenology of spiritual experiences, about personhood and the transcendent using cognitive linguistics as an instrument of analysis. I will start by discussed why spiritual experiences are so interesting to study, and then I will discuss some metaphors used to describe religious and spiritual concepts first in sacred texts and then in everyday life. I hope to show how the faithful keep a viable representation of themselves and the world around them notwithstanding seemingly contradictory aspects of their representations.

 WHY ARE DESCRIPTIONS OF SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES SO INTERESTING? 
  Spiritual experiences are similar to all other experiences: Each experience is lived through the body, whether it is sitting through a colloquium or having a divine vision. These experiences are based on concepts and categories, which bridge the mind and the world, and are constructed by our interaction with and encyclopedic knowledge of the world. Many scholars from Merleau-Ponty on would agree that perception of any type is not passive reception of data, but an action-oriented restructuring of the world. As subjects we have a continuing identity of ourselves, and memory plays an important role by reconstructing past events on our present context and not simply by retrieving data stored like a computer might do. This continuous reconstructing of past experiences gives way to coherence and plausibility in our narratives, relating them to future plans and goals. In this sense cognitive sciences see the self, or the person, as an ecological system, a multileveled psycho-somatic unity, and Blending Theory, as I understand it, would say that conceptual integration is a continual process. Each experience, whether it’s meeting a friendly face for the first time or having an epiphany of what you should be doing in a given situation, is never experiences if not relationally and contextually, because as humans we embody all our experiences, including the most abstract.

  However, spiritual experiences are different from other experiences: Within spiritual experiences, what “appears” paradoxically is often different to what really “is”, yet people have a sense of great conviction, to use the term following William James, and that is probably because of the way the narrative self works. Intuitively spiritual, mystical or religious experiences do seem to have a different quality from other profane experiences. The effects of visions, revelations and divine encounters often have great impact on the persons experiencing them, both psychologically and socially. Usually there is a sense of self (awareness), cognition (revelation, knowledge) and emotions. 

  People change their lifestyles, and the effects often endure time. Rarely do people do so with mundane experiences that have no physical or directly social causation. Subjects often describe these experiences as objectively real, and more “intense” experiences are considered “ineffable” (although I would argue that “ineffability” does not exist in most cases, unless you’re completely dumbstruck, because people in fact use metaphors to communicate and represent their experiences). For my study, a spiritual experience can be identified with anything in relation to the transcendent, for example anything from feeling the presence of God in one’s everyday life to having visions. Before presenting you some of my interview data, I will talk just a little about metaphors of God in Sacred Texts and the cognitive origins of anthropomorphism in religious thought.

 METAPHORS OF GOD IN SACRED TEXTS 
  DesCamp and Sweetser in an article published in 2005 analyze a total of 44 metaphors from the Hebrew scriptures and 50 from the Christian scriptures, for example God is a Father, God is a Shepherd, a Rock, and so forth. Their analysis points towards relational metaphors between God and Humans, for example Father-child, Lord-servant, and so on, which show “a two-way, loving relationship, with asymmetric power but symmetric love” (p. 233). Elsewhere I’ve claimed that one very pervasive conceptual metaphor of the Bible is GOD IS A LOVER (Evola 2004, 2005) and you have the blend on the handout. This metaphor permeates the Sir Hassirim, or the Song of Songs, as well as Psalm 45. In this metaphor, God and devotee are seen as LOVER and BELOVED, and there is symmetry, albeit illusionary or temporal for the devotee, to the point that the devotee, because of his or her experience of mystical union, can profess “I am God”. 

  What is interesting about the Song of Songs is that God is never mentioned once, which is probably why this metaphor was not taken into consideration in the aforementioned essay; yet, at least as far back as Rabbi Akiba in the 2nd century, this book was already traditionally seen as an allegory of the love of God, and many saintly figures have used this conceptual metaphor to talk about the Divine Love and Mystical Union (for instance the Spanish mystics Teresa de Ávila and Juan de la Cruz). The same conceptual metaphor manifests itself in other theistic religious systems such as Judaism, Islam and Hinduism. This doesn’t mean that this particular metaphor is acceptable or present for all devotees. （essay代写)

  In a bit I’ll try to show some evidence for the fact that each individual has a “preferred” way of representing God, motivated by their own life experiences. But it does seem rather surprising that eroticism should be used to talk about God at all. This is not platonic love: it's the typical language used in the poetry of passion, where the beloved lusts for the kisses and caresses of the lover, fearing separation, giving up one's own family and social dignity to be with the lover. In fact there's a whole genre of mystical literature, cross-culturally, which is based on erotic metaphors, and many people consider these writings as the greatest, not only poetically, but also devotionally. Now, isn't it contradictory that a religious system, whose laws concerning sexuality are so rigorous and whose punishments are so harsh, would even admit more or less explicit descriptions of those same acts to talk about the Sublime? Why should people even talk about God and the Divine in terms of a human source domain? Why not use other non-human domains, like clothing or mechanical objects, especially when for so many religious systems it is a sin to represent God, in particular as a human?（essay代写)

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