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Myth and Meaning:
Religious Truth is Our Inner Truth
by
David Richo, Ph.D. |
It is the role of religious
symbols to give a meaning to life….Modern people do
not understand how much their rationalism (which has
destroyed their capacity to respond to the numinous)…puts
them at the mercy of the psychic underworld. -- Jung
A child sees the divine-human archetypes as witches
and demons and easily believes in the literal truth of
them. Most of us were presented with a literal picture
of religious truth. We imagined that all the events in
Christ’s life actually happened in exactly the ways
the Bible describes. New scholarship in this century has
shown us that the Bible is a faith document and not a
news report. The Bible uses metaphor to tell about an
experience of faith. It was never intended to provide a
linear record of historical events in the western style.
Literalism is a defense against the depth reality of
religious experience. It reduces the mystery of a faith
experience to a story. Adults see through stories.
"Losing our faith" may mean simply losing our
literalism. Something remains for those who appreciate
and honor the depth of the psyche. It is the ground of
being that lives through and beyond story. In fact, the
story of our own life contains the mysterious revelation
that we are more than we seem. Dogen Zenji, the
thirteenth century Buddhist master and poet, says:
"This birth and death is the life of
Buddha." Our life story is the story of the divine
life. The divine is that which we contact in the
moment in which we touch the depth of our being, life,
and purpose.
All spiritual and religious truths are mysteries.
Literal descriptions do not have the capacity to
describe or even approximate the infinite. For that the
imagination is required. Only in figurative language,
poetry, and metaphor can the deepest human/divine
realities be presented. Once we appreciate the metaphors
in all the stories we remember, we expand our faith in
the divine life. We see it in a more expansive and
living way. For example, after the Resurrection, Jesus
appears to the disciples eating honey and fish (Luke
24.) This scene is a metaphor for aliveness without
having to be a proof that Jesus is alive in a bodily
way. So much of our religious education had to do with
proving the literal truth of our beliefs. These were
attempts to make ego-sense of something that is
ineffable. The emphasis on proving is an attempt not to
have to have faith.
The deepest reality uses symbols and images that
embody it more adequately than intellectual description.
The challenge of faith is to trust that there is
something in us that transcends our mind and its ways of
knowing. Faith relies on the depth perception in the
Self: intuition, vision, imagination, assent to
realities that defy explanation or even logical
comprehension. These are the vehicles of revelation. The
challenge of faith is to see with the eyes of the Self.
We then recognize that these eyes are both the divine
center and the human ground of reality.
Religion, like psychology, can produce only models of
a reality the infinite reaches of which cannot be
adequately measured. To codify it or define it as
permanently and finally expressed is to diminish the
mystery. A living mythologem cannot be expressed once
and for all or once completely. It is a too many-splendored
thing. We think of revelation as located in books, thus
limiting the limitless. It comes to us in every form of
human communication, including nature, life events,
etc., and is directed to us in a personal way. It
is not a book to read but a limitlessly expanding
cyberspace of human consciousness.
Archetypes are evolving, like revelation and
consciousness. We limit the evolutionary nature of human
development when we imagine that revelation is closed.
It is alive in every way that we are. It walks to us on
every avenue of understanding anything human, divine, or
natural. The source of this knowledge emerges from
within our consciousness not from elsewhere to it.
Tablets from Sinai contain the words of an inner Sinai.
Revelation happens in continuity and contact with our
interior life. The word of God is inner wisdom that
has found its way into external signs and messages.
Revelation is an encounter with the inner images that
arise from the unconscious and reflect higher
consciousness, i.e., a Higher Power. The fact that the
human psyche is the mediator of the divine does not make
it unreal anymore than two hands clasping in the dark
make one of them unreal. In fact, attachment to
orthodoxy can prevent access to a unique discovery of
divine life in the personal psyche.
Enduring religious doctrines contain a powerful and
archetypal kernel of truth. They reveal the larger life
of the psyche and how it evolves toward individuation
and enlightenment. If it becomes tied to one time or
culture or becomes fear-based and loses its lively
energy. That is how we lose out on the wonderful riches
in it. There are multiple and illimitable theophanies in
accord with the multiple capacities and multiple avenues
of accessibility in us. Revelation is contact with that
deepest level of our psyche where archetypal wisdom
rests. It also lies between the paws of the sphinx and
in the words of the Sutras and Gospels. The good news is
not a message from above or beyond but wells up from
deep within. It is more like an underground spring that
rises than like rain that falls. The equivalent of
revelation in Buddhism is the dharma, the teachings of
Buddha. The word dharma refers to the truth that is
inherent in all reality. In that sense all phenomena is
revelation.
When rituals and beliefs are taken literally they
lose their meaning as inner events. Dropping literalism
in favor of mythic, that is, archetypal meanings, is the
central task in the transition from childhood belief to
adult faith. How? By finding continuity with our
religious past not in its literal forms but in the
experiential meaning that underlies it. Biblical imagery
and sutra imagery then apply to every individual. Our
projections about it are the contents of our own fully
realized psyches. For instance, we are meant to be alone
in the wilderness and confront our destiny. The same
forty days was what was required for the alchemical
process and for Egyptian embalming. It is the sacred
number for the passover from limitation to
limitlessness, from Egypt to the Promised Land.
Incarnation, kindly love, healing, crucifixion of ego,
descent and ascent, rebirth: all the experiences of
Christ make up the story of the Self.
Since we perceive through limited senses we are
innately unable to see the full extent and meaning of
the divine. Faith is the complementary way humanity
knows its own deepest reality. Marcus Aurelius, in Meditations:
VII, says that we find religious truths in images
that arise from the depths of our souls. This is because
they describe a psychic truth that does not require a
logical or linear foundation. They are the archetypal
facts of life and of mankind’s vision of itself, of
nature, and of the divine.
"Symbol is essence and image is psychic
energy," wrote Jung. A symbol is our way of
conceiving the inconceivable. A true symbol not only
directs us to a hidden reality but reveals that same
reality in ourselves. A symbol thus creates immediate
contact with the transcendent/immanent Self. Paul
Tillich says: "A real symbol points to an object
that can never become an object. It points to
ourselves." Religious symbols can be appreciated
for their adaptive potential, a capacity to discover the
core of our inner world, something deeper than anything
psychological, something expressible only in symbols.
Such symbol-making might not have happened without
religion. Mythic art, poetry, and images indicate our
capacity for depth. They are not signs of regression but
of potential. Childhood religious images that comfort us
are retained within us and arise later in our
imagination when they are needed. Faith is actually the
transcendent use of imagination.
The Buddhist practice of devotion to Avalokiteshvara,
the Buddha of compassion is fourfold: to venerate his
image, to let it appear as both male and female, i.e.,
whole, to grasp that the image is a mirror of oneself,
and to act with a similar compassion in the world. (Avalokiteshvara
means "the Lord who is visible from within.")
The result of devoted imaging is that a "wisdom
duplicate" of the god becomes detectable in us.
Devotion is thus a path to self-realization. This does
not minimize the divine but grants it full purchase of
itself. Authentic religion thus does not repose in
adoration but opens into consciousness of inner divinity
and universal love.
The Chinese form of the Buddha of compassion is Kuan
Yin, a name that means "she who hears the cries of
world." She was so touched by the pain of those in
the hell realm that she emptied it in one moment of
boundless mercy. (It was refilled in one moment to show
the boundlessness of the shadow too!) Notice the
striking archetypal similarity between this story and
that of our Lady of Mount Carmel, the merciful patroness
of those in purgatory. In fact, she was pictured with
them in her icon. This was the first time the image of
the Madonna included other humans and it declared the
intense and indelible commitment of heaven to earthly
beings. The feminine presence of the transpersonal is a
caring reality.
Throughout human history, experience leads to
documentation which becomes orthodoxy of belief and
moral principles. Then institutional religion makes
anyone wrong and bad who does not follow the rules. The
mystics however, put the accent on experience not the
dogma. This animates rather than codifies the experience
of human-divine encounters. Dogma may put imagination to
sleep but an animating myth stimulates consciousness so
that buried truths can arise. Then we are ready for the
next experience, i.e., we progress, we evolve, our God
is marching on. This is a way of saying that the reality
of movement is contact with the Source. "Myth is
the revelation of the divine life in man," said
Jung. Religion works when it taps into our mythic roots
and the psyche cannot be fooled by patriarchal biases or
ego conceits.
If revelation touches base with archetypal roots, it
speaks to the depth of the psyche, the divine life
awakening, the God within. This cannot easily happen in
statements that are culture and time-bound or imposed
from without. An adult does not confuse a theological
formulation with the mysterious reality of the one
psyche-God that can never be adequately described and
hardly even approximated.
A human person is one moment of being that has become
aware of itself. The universe is being creating itself.
God is being in itself. This equation/ratio—God is to
the universe is to mankind— and its triune nature,
cannot be known logically. Our linear mind is only
equipped to know the forms being takes not being itself
since it is ineffable. There are, however, elements of
the psyche that transcend space-time linearity such as
dreams, intuitions, psychic readings, and synchronicity.
In mystical states or in mindfulness meditation we
dissolve limiting representations and contact essential
being. Meaningfulness is in that which has essential,
enduring unlimited, being. This is why spiritually
oriented people do not see the world as meaningless,
i.e., having no essential being.
There can be no name for the ultimate lest it become
reified and then become an object of fear and desire.
This is especially contradictory and confounding since
the spiritual path is about letting go of fear and
desire, the sports of the ego. Our collective
intrapsychic image of God may have become ego-designed
and ego-motivated. The word God is a way of describing
our vast potential for love. God within means that God
is whatever in us becomes more and more conscious, more
and more loving.
The vastness of the psyche is exactly congruent to
the vastness of the universe. Psyche reflects cosmos.
Our work is to experience something transcendent in
nature and to say: "This is familiar; I felt this
in the depths of myself." The meaning out there
matches the felt meaning we always find within. This is
how we realize that the sacred is not an object but a
continually unfolding reality that reflects itself in
us. We can see it as reflecting the vastness of our
psyche and stop there or we can say it has a foundation
transcendent of our psyche. Both are religious
statements since both acknowledge a transcendence of
that which the linear mind calls real.
In Hinduism, liberation happens when the atman, the
inner Self and the divine Self are recognized as one and
the same. Notice this same idea in the following words
of a western thinker, Thomas Merton: "The spark
which is my true self is the flash of the Absolute
recognizing itself in me. This realization at the apex
is a coincidence of all opposites...a fusion of freedom
and unfreedom, being and unbeing, life and death, self
and non-self, man and God. The spark is not so much an
entity which one finds but an event, an explosion which
happens as all opposites clash within oneself. Then it
is seen that the ego is not. It vanishes in its
non-seeing when the flash of the spark alone is....The
purpose of all learning is to dispose man for this kind
of event. The purpose of various disciplines is to
provide ways or paths which lead to this capacity for
ignition."
The True Self is the farthest reach of our potential,
i.e., God, the complete articulation of the best of our
humanity, the actualization of every potential for human
love, wisdom, and healing. This is not a person above us
as traditional theism teaches. God is the climax of
human powers that made an appearance in Christ and keeps
appearing in many other saints. It makes an appearance
in us every time we love. God’s presence is that
moment of love made human in any here and now.
The religion of the
future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a
personal God and avoid dogma and theology....It should
be based on a religious sense arising from the
experience of all things natural and spiritual as a
meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description.
--Albert Einstein
Copyright © 2000 David
Richo, Ph.D. This article is an excerpt from Catholic
Means Universal: Integrating Spirituality and Religion (Crossroad,
2000).
David Richo, Ph.D., M.F.T., is a psychotherapist, teacher, and writer in
Santa Barbara and San Francisco California who emphasizes Jungian,
transpersonal, and spiritual perspectives in his work. He is the author of:
How To Be An Adult (Paulist, 1991), When Love Meets Fear (Paulist, 1997),
Unexpected Miracles: The Gift of Synchronicity and How to Open It
(Crossroad,1998) , Shadow Dance: Liberating the Power and Creativity of Your
Dark Side (Shambhala, 1999) and Catholic Means Universal: Integrating
Spirituality and Religion (Crossroad, 2000). For
a catalog of David Richo’s tapes and events, please
visit www.davericho.com.
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