Creation Myths by Marie-Louise von Franz

Creation Myths by Marie-Louise von Franz

Author:Marie-Louise von Franz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2017-05-29T16:00:00+00:00


Here we are concentrating on the beginning of the story: the Purusha, the primeval being, is lonely and afraid and feels no delight. Again the motif of fear comes up, but it is very well characterized. It is not fear of something, fear of an object; he even argues about it and says that as there is no second person, why should he fear? He tries to rationalize his fear away, as we do when we are afraid. It is that deep, irrational fear which comes up when one is alone and which we all experience if suddenly left in complete stillness and loneliness, when most people get terrified without knowing why. One begins to fantasize that one is being watched, and one looks around. This is irrational fear, for one knows quite well that it is nonsense, that one does not fear anything, and yet, all the same, one is afraid. Actually, in us, the reason for this fear is the coming up of the unconscious.

If you are alone, a lot of your life energy, normally used up in relating to outer things, one could say the whole “social energy,” is suddenly dammed up and has no outlet and therefore flows back into and constellates the unconscious. That is why in all religions isolation is one of the means by which to meet the Gods, or the ghosts, or the spirits, or by which we become initiated into inner experience. The first step in most religions, whether shamanistic experience, or the sweat lodge experience of Native Americans, or the search for revelation of the North American Indian on the top of a mountain, or monastic life in the Far East and in Europe, or the first monks in Egypt, was always the impulse to isolate oneself, because then the inner experience wells up.

The fear of loneliness is at the bottom of prison phobia. Being imprisoned alone for a long time is something a lot of people cannot stand because it threatens to cause them to go off their heads. Those are the people who are not capable of letting the unconscious come up as “a something” to which they can relate. The only way to overcome such an irrational fear is to try to visualize the unconscious, or to let it speak as a voice and listen and let it tell you things; then you can overcome the first irrational fear of feeling that if you hear voices and so on, you are going crazy. If you can stand this first impact, which seems intolerable for the rational mind, then the prison phobia, or whatever it is, is easily overcome. It is a question of standing the first impact. But before the unconscious reaches that amount of load, so that it breaks through in a hallucination or a voice, or any of these manifestations, there is generally first of all a state of terrific tension where such an irrational fear gets one.

I myself many years ago could not do



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