The Healing Power of Stories
When people, who having been resuscitated from clinical death, are asked to report their near-death experiences, they frequently say they can't put it into words. They say they cannot, because they have experienced something beyond time and space and their experience was no longer a story.
It is quite a significant observation that life is a story. As such, stories are always metaphors for life isself and the stories humankind has been telling for millenia contain a blue-print for life. To understand our stories means to understand life itself. But to understand our stories, we have to understand how they came about.
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God made man, |
At the dawn of history there were neither professional authors nor scriptwriters, but anthropological research has shown that virtually every indigenous tribe has used some form of altered state of consciousness. People didn't just dream at night, they also had ceremonies toentered trance state and experience visions. These visions were considered not less real than the every-day world: they were considered important from a spiritual point of view. The invisible world was understood as the world from which our material world originates from, and unto which we return after death. In that sense, the matters occurring in the invisible or spiritual realms were considered even more important, as they had effects not only on this life, but the life after.
Shamans or other members of the tribe practiced healing by going into an altered state of consciousness to find the cause and the remedy for all sorts of ailments. One shamanic technique is to find lost soul parts, which is surprisingly similar to modern psychology's understanding of traumatic experiences. When something traumatic is happening, to survive it, the individual dissociated from it: forgets it partly or completely, or detaches from the emotions involved. This is a great defence mechanism, but it comes with a great price: the loss of a bit livelihood, a bit of the energy flow, a bit of the soul. Shamans traditionally travelled into the spiritual realms to bring back and heal such fragmented souls. When they returned, the tribe sitting and waiting around the fire asked them what has happened while in trance.
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So, the shamans began to speak about things which do not occur in physical reality, only in dreams and inner (trance) states. They might have told the tribe about flying, shape-shifting into animals, using power objects with magical properties, meeting dragons and other mythic creatures, overcoming enemies, meeting guides and allies, in other words, telling fairy-tales. But these were certainly not fairy tales invented to entertain children or to pass time in some cute way. These were not made up or make-believe, these were a genuine tales: symbolic, archtypal expressions of very real inner events.
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To be continued...