People think primarily in pictures. If I were to ask you: "Do you remember the very first car that you bought?", your mind will then dutifully create a picture of your car, from some specific vantage point. . .For instance, right now, as you do that, from what vantage point are you looking at your first car? Are you standing right next to it, noticing the ding on the lower passenger side door that you didn't take note of before you bought it? Or are you sitting inside of it, lovingly holding the wheel, thinking about that beautiful drive you might take that winds along the river? Maybe you're actually driving it right now?
And as you do that, you might also notice that these pictures start to conjure up feelings for you. Perhaps you feel a wistful longing for those less complicated days of youth of which being with this car right now reminds you. Or maybe you are reminded of how far you've come since then, and you sense a feeling of accomplishment and wonder at your growth.
In either case, the picture you hold in your mind's eye, and the associated feelings you hold in your body, may be broadly classified as energy patterns. Every thought you have, every feeling, every experience is registered within your personal space. I invite you now to also consider how you experience and define that space for yourself.
Because the human being's operating system functions in this way, (and for the purposes of this writing, we will not delve into the complexities of how or why it is set up this way), pictures turn out to be one of the most powerful languages of inner space. As in the ubiquitous " A picture is worth a thousand words", the power of one image, or symbol, communicates volumes of information to us in a way that more often than not transcends the word.
In this way, symbols also act as transformers. For instance, the electrical energy that is generated by the central power plant that services your grid is measured in tens of thousands of volts, far too much for your poor toaster and clock radio to withstand! Which is why the power infrastructure installs step-down transformers, and delivers a nice and consistent 110 volts to each consumer's household. 
The density of information that our minds have access to in the realm of consciousness is overwhelming. Symbols, acting as step-down transformers, allow us to access the massive information flow without blowing ourselves out, literally. It is the same mechanism that all spiritual disciplines and religions have employed through out the centuries, using symbols of god forms or angels as step-down transformer representations of primal energetic and information currents that run throughout the matrix of the Universe.
When working in this realm of inner space and personal internal representations, symbols arise as a means of communication, percolating up from the unconscious and superconscious realms to the conscious realms, in order to make their message known. It is also the language of dreams, of which all of us are so familiar.
Some symbols have far more power than others, depending upon what they represent and how much information is infused within their imagery. For instance, I was working with a client, and I perceived the symbol of a bicycle wheel with a stick stuck between its spokes. When I described that to her, she had an immediate deep understanding of the distillation of what the symbol was communicating to her, and proceeded to tell me a story of a co-worker who had sabotaged her at work, making her feel like someone had stuck a stick into her moving bicycle wheels to cause her to stop short, and fly up and over her handle bars. Her recognition of what this symbol was bringing to her attention in itself was already her first healing step in that session. We then proceeded to morph this symbol and the associated issues (feelings of competitiveness, insecurities, etc.) from her personal representational space, and in this way, the symbol had become the catalyst for an ultimately very profound healing for her.
That symbol was infused with a power that was custom made by and for her, so, if experienced by someone else, it may or may not have as potent an effect on them as it did on her. However, when you begin to interact with symbols that have been charged with centuries of human thought and emotional projections, (for example, the Christian cross) you are now dealing with a completely different order of magnitude. In some cases, it doesn't even require centuries of linear time to build up a certain societal charge around a symbol. Take, for instance, the swastika, which has been in existence for 3000 years and used by cultures as diverse as China, Japan, India, and southern Europe as a symbol for power, strength, and good luck. When Germany adopted it in the early-1900s, it still maintained the previous associations. In the short span of less than 30 years, from 1920 to the late 1940s, the negative associations with that symbol gained enormous power over the psyches of millions of people all over the world, and still holds that infusion to this day. To morph or diffuse that symbol the way I did with the client's bicycle wheel symbol would not be possible, given the huge amount of charge that has been infused into its imagery.
I have found that symbols arise frequently when working with people's energy, as their body's wisdom is wishing to communicate with me and with them in a way that their conscious mind is not able to put into words yet. However, it is not my place to interpret each individual's symbolism, but rather, my place to bring it to their attention, and allow them to come to their own understanding of what they are being guided to know at this specific time. In that way, their cognizance receives the learning in a much deeper way.
So, as you become more aware of your inner representational system, start to notice how it is communicating with you in ways that differ from your usual, rational chatter. Sometimes, these pictures, or messages in sound vibrations, or feelings, or knowings, come and go so fleetingly, that they can be difficult to catch in the midst of all your self chatter. The art of intuitive perspectives is grounded in inner calm and stillness, so to be able to catch these flashes of what most people call insight. Symbols are but one of many forms that insight can take, and one that holds immense power for all of us on our journeys of self discovery.
Copyright 2010 Intuitive Perspectives
"Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious."
Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)
"The symbol is therefore an analogy, 
more an equivalence than an equation,
and therein lies its wealth of meanings,
but also its elusiveness.
Only the symbol group,
compact of partly contradictory analogies,
can make something unknown,
and beyond the grasp of consciousness,
more intelligible and more capable of becoming conscious."
From The Origins and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann