Road of Trials

(The following 3 need to be checked for reference issues – footnotes etc.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzhIQqVL6Vc&feature=related   Joseph Campbell--Initiation Through Trials

(put already)   “In every primitive tribe,” writes Dr. Geza Roheim (**), “we find the medicine man in the centre of society and it is easy to show that the medicine man is either a neurotic or a psychotic or at least that his art is based on the same mechanisms as a neurosis or a psychosis.  Human groups are actuated by their group ideals, and these are always based on the infantile situation.”   5  footnote different      1000 faces, page 84

Cont’d … The infancy situation is modified or inverted by the process of maturation, again modified by the necessary adjustment to reality, yet it is there and supplied those unseen libidinal ties without which no human groups could exist.6  The medicine men, therefore, are simply making both visible and public the systems of symbolic fantasy that are present in the psyche of every adult member of their society. 

Cont’d … “They are the leaders in this infantile game and the lightning conductors of common anxiety.  They fight the demons so that others can hunt the prey and in general fight reality.” 7 (footnote different)

 (already put - 2.94)  In the vocabulary of the mystics this is the second stage of the Way, that of the “purification of the self,” when the senses are “cleansed and humbled,” and the energies and interests “concentrated upon transcendental things”;8 or in a vocabulary of more modern turn: this is the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal  past.  1000 faces, page 84

“This is our problem as modern, “enlightened” individuals, for whom all the gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.  1000 faces, page 87

 (look for a pic - then add somewhere else if possible)

Inanna and Ereshkigal, the two sisters, light and dark respectively, together represent, according to the antique manner of symbolization, the one goddess in two aspects; and their confrontation epitomizes the whole sense of the difficult road of trials.  1000 faces, page 89

Cont’d … (put separately)

The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed.  One by one the resistances are broken.  He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.  Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh. (go to book and check out *)   1000 faces, page 89

The original departure into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiatory conquests and moments of illumination.  Dragons have now to be slain and surprising barriers passed – again, again, and again, Meanwhile there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies, and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land.  1000 faces, page 90

 Do you think that you shall enter the garden of bliss without such trials as those that have come before you - Koran            Moyers 1 - 16m

"The Lord is a good psychologist: he knows the way our minds run. Turmoil can be the Lord's way of tapping us on the shoulder and saying, 'Don't forget me.'"
 
-- Eknath Easwaran