In the past few weeks I have been reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And honestly, he is writing very interesting things about the interpretation of not only classic mythology and fairy tales, but also about traditional religious stories from the Bible, Bhagavad Gita, etc. He adds the link to the streams of psychotherapy that were popular in his time, mainly hose of Freud and Jung and links our dreams to the same source as the mythical stories in his book.

There are a few points that struck me in the book, as shown in the following quotes.

“Wherever the poetry of the myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out o it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.”

That is certainly what has happened. I also took part in an Internet forum that dealt with the question if Jesus ever existed as a historical person and if anything in the Bible should be taken literally or not. The opponents were those typical rational, science-only people who don’t believe anything that cannot be externally proven. The proponents had a hard time getting their opinion heard, as they were mostly of the type that were raised in traditional Christianity and just replicated what they were told.

The great message that Campbell has to offer for a useful reinterpretation of the stories in the Bible and that should make the discussion on the Internet forum unnecessary is as follows:

“To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose against permanent human meaning.”

My interpretation of this quote is that we should look at the texts in the Bible and other religious books within the context in which they were written and from the psychological level of development at which they were written. We simply cannot read them with modern eyes, but need to read them with the eyes of the people who wrote them thousands of years ago – the ones that had no idea about what we nowadays call science, but lived in a much more symbolic world. For these stories talk in symbols. It is not relevant to ask whether Jesus or Krsna or Buddha ever existed in reality, it is only relevant to ask what their stories tell us about ourselves. To say it in Campbells’ own words,

“...according to this view it appears that the wonder tales – which pretend to describe the lives of legendary heroes, the power of divinities of nature, the spirits of the dead, and the totem ancestors of the group – symbolic expression is given to the unconscious desires, fears and tensions that underlie the conscious patterns of human behaviour. Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.”

So let’s honour the old scriptures and learn to read them in a different way. Not as a historical account of some external events, but as a psychological and spiritual account of what exists inside us. It is then that respect for religions can be found back and the wisdom of ages be re-applied to our everyday lives.

When I read the Q&R question yesterday, I was experiencing an intense sadness.
Reason is, that I had been playing Bach's St. Matthew's Passion on my car stereo when driving to work and got to the part "Erbarme Dich" ("Have Mercy"), which is one of the most emotional parts of the whole piece. It also was one of the favourite pieces of music of my mother's. As you may know my mother passed away last December, so listening to that music brought back strong memories of her, which made me sad.
It did reconfirm my feelings about the situation, though, as it is often hard to find the appropriate time to deal with the mourning process.
The question also makes me think about "experiencing right now" and its relation to the Witness of the causal state. More about that in the next blog entry.

The following is an excerpt of my book The Healing Elephant. The previous entry of my blog inspired me to write about it, as it seemed applicable to the question asked there.

What has been described in the book as the attitude of the therapist has a lot in common with what Gestalt Therapy calls the Fair Witness. Gestalt Therapy was developed in the middle of the twentieth century by the German Fritz Perls, his wife Laura and by the American Paul Goodman. Gestalt Therapy uses as a starting point a description of man as a Gestalt, which is an organic, self-regulating organism that strives for a biological balance. Someone’s Gestalt can be either open, in case that balance has not been found yet, or closed once the balance is achieved. When new needs arise, a new Gestalt will open, that again strives to be closed by meeting its needs. In therapy, Gestalt focuses a lot on what happens between the therapist and the client and deducts most of its information from that interaction to get to the core of the problem.

The Gestalt brings along with it the notion that the only thing that actually exists is the here-and-now. At any given moment we find ourselves in a specific location at that specific time. That state of being (i.e. that Gestalt) is gone in the next moment, because time and location change continually. This is similar to the ancient Greek principle called Panta Rhei, i.e. everything flows, nothing is stable. The emphasis is then put on realising the awareness of the here-and-now, coming into contact with yourself and with the world around you, for that is the only reality that exists. In order to get that awareness, you need to ask yourself some questions. What are you exactly aware of at this moment? What do you think, feel, do now? How do you do that? What exists around you? How are you positioned in the World? What is happening right now? In order to be able to answer these questions, you need a great amount of attention and awareness (which is being aware of what your existence consists of). This aspect of Gestalt Therapy comes close to the attitude of the therapist that I described in the previous chapter as an expansion of the principles of Almaas.

The Fair Witness from Gestalt Therapy can be described as that aspect of ourselves that observes our experience and the world around us: both what observes the own experience (physical, emotional, rational and spiritual) of the therapist and what observes that same experience of the client and everything that happens in the here-and-now. By sitting down and just pay attention to what is happening in the present, what you observe, what your thoughts are, what your (physical and emotional) feelings are without getting distracted, the Witness can already be experienced. This is already a pretty difficult task, as you can experience once you try to do the procedure I just described for a minute or so.

The Witness is something inside us, not outside ourselves, that does nothing else than observe, that absorbs everything we are aware of in itself and has no judgment about it. The Witness is the core of our consciousness that can be touched by what it experiences, but will not react from a personal history: it is strictly transpersonal. The Witness stays neutral, fair, shows empathy if it is touched and simply is there for ourselves and for the other. Getting into contact with the Witness is getting an state of consciousness of continuous attention, objective observation, non-judging awareness, sensitivity and being in contact with yourself and with the other in the here-and-now.

The Witness is already present universally from birth: after all, a baby observes the world around it as well. However the level of access to it is a separate line of development that is called the causal development. Causal means in this context that the Witness is the cause of awareness, attention, of the Essence of man and of the creative source of everything that is – in short, it is the cause of the presence of us. What I want to say with this is that the proper attitude is related to both the Witness from Gestalt Therapy and with the causal development of us. It turns out that this causal line comes to fuller development in the transpersonal stages of its development. The fact that this is in the higher regions of human development, confirms again that it is necessary to already have a significant personal development towards those stages in order to deal with the witness and at the same time it explains why the concept of the proper attitude is so hard to grasp. Still, it pays off if the right attitude can be found so that effective and beautiful communication and interaction can be achieved with other people.