The Symbol and the Reality
Tony Crisp
In certain areas of thinking and living, Western culture has brought about a radical shift in the way we see our personal life. Although this shift began with the Greek culture, it has developed beyond those beginnings. In older cultures, and still in much present personal assessment or religious thought, we see the use of symbolism. People writing about Native American beliefs for instance, still encourage the reader to explore and remain in symbolic worlds of experience.
Present religious teachings too still refer their followers to symbolic figures such as Christ or God. They suggest living in hope while suffering, sickness and deprivation eat away at people's lives. Symbols of holy figures hold people is systems of thought that are like a dangled carrot, keeping them chasing a rainbow, the foot of which they never arrive at.
In this way a whole lifetime can be spent living in misery that is excused, covered up, or explained away by religious faith, misdirected spiritual seeking, hope and trust. These are such subtle things and thus so deadly.
Such symbolic living, like dreams whose meaning we allow to remain hidden within their imagery, never confront us with the birth trauma, with childhood hurts and sexual abuse. They never really transform the base of our being where such real emotional and even physical pain exist buried and avoided. In fact symbolic living is a way of maintaining the avoidance.
As an example of the way we use symbolism to hide reality, it is interesting that both the Australian aborigines, and the American indigenous people, have a profound belief that they were born from the soil of the land they now live in. They believe that a Creator or creative process formed them out of the land in which they live. But findings arising from DNA sampling in regard to moving populations show that neither the Australian aborigines, nor the native American people were indigenous to the area in which they now live. So in this sense there belief is a symbolic one. Or if not symbolic, then it refers to a much earlier age in which all human beings, life itself in fact, emerged out of the substance of this planet.
But many such uses of symbolism are much more personal. St. Theresa gives a wonderful example of this in saying:
Now that I have recorded some temptations and secret, inner disturbances aroused in me by the devil, I will describe certain others which he inflicted on me almost in public, and in which it was impossible not to recognise his agency.
Once when I was in an oratory he (the devil) appeared on my left hand, in a hideous form. I particularly noticed his mouth, because he spoke to me, and it was terrifying. A great flame seemed to issue from his body, which was intensely bright and cast no shadow: He said to me in a dreadful voice that I had indeed escaped his clutches, but that he would capture me still. I was greatly frightened and made shift to cross myself, whereupon he disappeared, but immediately came back again. This happened twice and I did not know what to do. There was some holy water near by, some drops of which I threw in his direction, and he did not return again.
Here St. Theresa symbolises her inner psychological and probably sexual struggles as the Devil. Nowhere in past times was sexual struggle associated with experiences of meeting the devil. Yet in modern psychotherapy, when people are helped to meet their vision of the devil, they break through to a meeting with sexual repression and fears, or trauma occurring during their birth. Such early traumas, because they act as inhibitors on the full development of the person, also often inhibit sexual ease and flow. (For further information on this see Grof's Realms of the Human Unconscious by Grof.)
An interesting insight into what the avoidance of going beyond the symbol might lead to has been given by Ralph Frenken Ph.D. in his review of Christian mystics. He believes that, "The psychodynamics of mystics, their symbol formations and their actions are based on excessive early trauma. . . . There is evidence that medieval mystics were deprived and also emotionally and sexually abused as children."
To bring this more into the present times, Robert Van de Castle, in his excellent book Our Dreaming Mind, quotes from Norma Churchill's experience of using active imagination.
"Help me" I beg the serpent. He rears back, giving me a steely look with his mysterious sky-blue eyes. Then, he swiftly strikes my crippled foot and bites it with his powerful jaws. I nearly faint at the pain of it, and both my feet and legs turn black and rotten. I look at the serpent in astonishment.
One half of me glows with light, the other half is putrid and black with rot. Then in a flash, my legs and feet turn to diamond and light up my forehead.
This is typical of the way many people arrive at some form of symbolism about their inner life and seem satisfied to leave it in that form -- symbolic. What, in terms of Norma Churchill's everyday life, are diamond legs? What is the serpent she meets in personal human experience?
Often the things that emerge in a dream or in self observation of one kind or another, are very much like a myth or fairy tale. The person using the technique meets dangers and triumphs as in a mythological encounter. So in continuing their self exploration without going beyond the symbols, they may even create a sort of personal myth.
