As Within... ...So Without

"Every theological tradition sets up its own game rules, and no matter what experiences of a mystical or visionary order one may have, it will be necessary when translating them into speech to bring them into accord, so to say, with the game rules of the particular theology currently in play. Indeed, one of the really great problems encountered by Christian mystics through the centuries has been the conflict of these two contrary traditions of speech, the Hermetic or the Mosaic. The one that has prevailed from the fourth century onward has been that of God as a Being transcendent, not to be identified either with the substance of the universe or with one's own most inward form of forms."

"Mythic images—from the Christian tradition, or from any other, for that matter, since they are all actually related—speak to very deep centers of the psyche. They came forth from the psyche originally and speak back to it. If you take some traditional image proposed to you by your own religious tradition, your own society's religious lore, proposing it to yourself for active meditation, without any strict game rules defining the sort of thoughts you must bear in mind in relation to it... letting your own psyche enjoy and develop it, you may find yourself running into imageries, experiences, and amplifications that do not fit exactly into the patterns of the tradition in which you have been trained. What are you going to do about that? Are you going to let yourself go, following your own activated imagination? Or are you going to cut the run short at some critical point?"

"This world of life speaks within us when we let the active imagination function. That is why it is also a bit dangerous. Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward."

Joseph Campbell
Thou Art That

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Nona Daria Karnowska
devil inside