Hillman is not offering comfort here. Metaphor as the soul's mode of speech — not image, not symbol, not concept, but metaphor specifically — means the psyche never speaks in literal terms, never arrives at a stable ground. Every statement about the soul is already a comparison, already held in the tension between what is said and what is meant, and that tension does not resolve. What he calls abandonment to the given is the consequence of following this all the way: when you stop reaching past the metaphor for the thing it supposedly represents, what remains is an immediacy that has no transcendent shelter above it. The mysticism he names through Avens is not the warm mysticism of union, not the pneumatic current that promises the suffering will end when you ascend high enough. It is the mysticism of pure immanence — of finding that the image is not a door to something else, that the given is already it, already complete in its own ache. That is why this move is harder than it sounds. The soul that has been running on the logic that enough spiritual depth will finally dissolve the tension reads "approximates mysticism" and hears relief. What Hillman means is the opposite: you are handed back to exactly what you were trying to leave.