Humans, as decoded over the ages by the social exemplars, philosophers and saints, have the tendency to learn by reflecting upon stories. All scriptures and spiritual texts are trying to teach us employing this formula of transformation through reflection. Earliest form of spiritual content known to us, were folklores in form of songs that can be easily committed to memory, as it was difficult to spread them around, in form of books. Not only that, the masses were also not educated enough to read and write a book. For ages this tradition continued until the script, paper and ink got invented and these songs eventually started getting preserved in the form of books. Today the same preservation and propagation task is carried out using magnetic chip and digital media. But if you look at the bottom line, it still remains the same: ‘Humans get inspired to change by reflecting upon the stories’.
Friends, before we move forward with the question let us make it clear in our minds that the scriptures are trying to invite us to explore the spiritual potential within us that is lying unexplored and unrealized. They are trying to help us experience something that can’t be seen by the human eye or represented as graphic. Hence they have to resort to metaphors and analogies to explain what can’t be represented in words. Another challenge that should be factored in, is the fact that thousands year old language used to pen down the scriptures is no more in use. So we can’t ignore the presence of subjective twist and missing of nuances in the translations that we read.
So, in my opinion we have to be both an ardent spiritual seeker and a linguist to benefit from the wisdom contained in our scriptures. If someone who is not elevated, in terms of level of consciousness, will either take this metaphorical text literally or read it like a ritual, without really caring about the meaning of the text or what is there in it for him. In both cases the reader may not benefit from the text as anticipated. There’s a fair chance that he may even misinterpret the hint by missing the context and suffer because of his faulty orientation (bringing the blame to the book he failed to understand). There’s another danger; he might become rigid about his interpretation and becomes a hardliner. Not flexible enough to other points of views about the same scripture. I often find people ever ready to debate, ready to die for a scripture that they can’t benefit from.