"a window into the soul"

Stephen Pinker in his wonderful The stuff of thought explains a paradox of the meaning of metaphors: the metaphor provides an illustration for an elusive idea yet the metaphor can only work if the user or hearer already understands the analogy being applied. It's the key to how metaphors work. Is it a skeleton key? A brass key or a wooden one? A master key? An worn one? Somehow, we already know which properties of a key are relevant and which won't be. 

So what's the point of using a metaphor if we already know the relevant properties at play? Consider a drug experience. It is difficult to describe such an experience. "I saw colors" doesn't say much -- I see colors everywhere without drugs. But describing the experience as a "trip" immediately tells me something meaningful. The experience took you from the familiar, normal, everyday "place" to an unfamiliar, maybe even exotic "place" of wonder perhaps or uncertainty, and definitely difference, and then after a while you returned to the normal everyday familiarities, maybe with a slightly different perspective on it. Yet all this work that the metaphor does, could equally be done by a detailed analogy like the one in the previous sentence. Is a metaphor then just a shorthand that selects a few characteristics and describes them economically with a word? 

There may be a bit more to it. The typical way to explore a metaphor is to expand it. The drug trip left me with jetlag (had a hangover). But another way to explore the metaphor is a kind of reverse engineering. A trip is essentially a removal from the norm. The use of "trip" applies then to drug experiences in which the goal is escape from normal reality, as distinct from a drug use for the purpose of escape from unhappiness or stress or social constraints or personal inhibitions. The schema of a trip used for a drug tells us something that might have been hidden by our tacit assumptions. 

Consider "window into the soul". 

The metaphor tells us what we believe that we don't even cognize -- that we believe that the soul is an interior, not a continuum with the world. The mystics might see it differently, but the rest of us view the soul-- or in the discourse of science, consciousness or awareness or qualia -- as an interior, a me-excluding-all-else. 

In where is the mind I showed that the soul -- the mind -- is not inside, it's all out there in our experience. The notion that we're living inside ourselves may be just an epiphenomenon of having an experience that is uniquely tied to the borders of our bodies. What we are able to do is limited to the control of our bodies, especially our limbs -- our legs and hands, legs that take us places and hands that manipulate. This notion of insideness is the sadness of our separation from all the rest of us, even those we most love and know. This insideness divorced from the outside implies that we have control of ourselves and not the outside. But do we really? There's plenty evidence that we don't control our own mind, especially our conscious mind. We are not integral. Each of us includes many personalities despite the selective stories about ourselves.