Using pictures, diagrams, figures, charts, and elaborate "scientific" explanations for spiritual or religious subjects is a mistake. Spirit is a different way of knowing than reason. It's intuitive, emotional. "Bigger than life" people sometimes say; operatic and dramatic. It's language is poetry, story, song, myth. It's a misuse of the rational intellect to try to force the spiritual into it's mold and language, and therefore whatever babble you come up with will neither be accurate nor will it even contain any truth. If you find yourself being compelled to be rationalist (not actually rational, which is impossible with something as fundamentally irrational as spirituality) you should stop, and then go find yourself a more appropriate venue for your mental gymnastics.
By the same token, those who try to understand a rational issue with a fundamentally religious approach are as doomed to silliness and never being able to discover what is actually true as their counterparts are. A perfect example is the kind of literalist religious "intellectual" (so called) who tries to "prove" that the myths of their religion are literal facts (one example are the creationist opponents of evolution). Their childish, intellectually impoverished attempts are doomed to failure in the face of even the most modest critical inquiry, unless the inquirer is as willfully delusional as they are.
It's almost as if these are separate worlds, each with it's own language, culture and even physics, worlds that tenuously join within us. We can be in both worlds, and, while some of us might have more of an affinity for one than the other, we need both. But we need to approach each realm appropriately, respecting their respective ways of being and thinking. As the Tao teaches us, it's by finding this balance - this moving balance - that we become whole and find peace.
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