CHAPTER XIV
RELIGION WITH PSYCHOLOGICAL FOCUS
The religion is the oldest expression of the human soul and also the most universal. There don't exist people, no matter how primitive it is, or how isolated it meets, that doesn't have their faiths.
Through the phenomena of the nature that express power, danger, magnificence, beauty, harmony, the man foresees the existence of something larger than he. Not getting to identify, not getting to penetrate those phenomena with his mental one, not getting to reproduce then, he starts to fear that unknown and, that fear, gives emergence to the religiosity, that is uttered by an intern attitude of respect, of reverence, of dependence.
Along the times, as we saw, many beings, experts on the mysteries of the Nature, have been trying to reveal to the man aspects of this magnificence that is the Universe, teachings those that are contained in the Initiatory wisdom of the Ages, in other words, in the Oriental philosophy, close to the most primitive people.
While the man went on moving away from those origins, from those sources that explain the Universal Causes, more he went abandoning the true mystic, which would be the union between the objective being and what there is of imponderable inside him, he went on losing the capacity to penetrate the mysteries and went on in direction of the mysticism, that is the attachment to the external data, heading towards a blind faith that tends for the fanaticism.
When the scientific progress was enlarged, starting from the centuries XVII and XVIII, the lines of the thought that headed for the materialism and the rationalism, went tending to the non acceptance of the religious spirit, whose practices, at that time, already presented immaturity characteristics and, for extension, they started to discredit of the psychic phenomena in a general way. It means that they fell in the opposite end. From the fanaticism, they passed to the skepticism.
The man lost, with reason, the capacity to have faith, because of the propositions of the epoch, and he didn't find something that would substitute it.
We can notice that, to the scientific and technical development, it is representing a great lack of introspection.
How ever, in spite of the science to flatter of working with apparent facts, laws, frequently, because of the mental rational not to embrace the experiences, the facts, the objects in its totality, the science is confronted with countless unknowns on whom there is need of lifting hypotheses, so that the science gets to penetrate besides the immediately sensitive.
It is necessary, therefore, a certain care when refusing the reality of the psychic phenomena because the whole outline of the science is mounted on psychic images wakened up by the stimulation of our senses. The researcher creates a mental model. It is a type of draft on top of the future and then he passes to testify it.
With this attitude, the scientist may not have faith in the meaning that the religions lend to this term, but he is endowed with the true mystic spirit, once he is looking for to discover the laws that govern the part that is still constituted in mystery for the own science.
The science knows that is just in the threshold of the whole Universal magnificence. The most scientific attitude would be the one not of denying arbitrarily the validity of the psychic phenomena, but the one of proposing to an investigation, trying processes not related to scientific experiences as we understand today.
It happens that the psychic phenomena that involve religiosity are apparently subjective, for being expressed by ideas, but they go on turning objectives more and more, they go transforming in facts, in the measure that they are shared by a larger group of individuals, in the measure that they appear in a similar way or even identical in a big amount of people, just as it happens with the experiences paranormals - telepathy, premonition etc.
This comes to give to the psychology a possibility of being treated as science, with observation phase, classification and statistical rising.
The psychic phenomena are real for those who try them. As well as for the science realities remain without explanation, like this the explanation for the psychic facts still belongs to the imponderable.
In spite of a big percentage of men remain refusing to recognize the religiosity spirit, the presence of something supernatural inside of himself, percentage that comes reducing on these last decades because of the great interest wakened up by the parapsychology and by the hypnosis, though, those that still refuse to accept that existent supernatural part inside of us, they cannot impede that this innate tendency, that this something supernatural appears for instance in the symbolism of the dreams, in the archetypes so well studied by Jung. There exists in the human mind a capacity to reproduce images, configurations that express primordial principles, principles of collective character, because they appear repetitively in all of the traditions, be them chronological or geographically distant. The folklore, for instance, the myths and stories of the universal literature contain much defined themes that always reappear and everywhere - reappearing inclusive in the dreams, in the visions and in the individuals' imagination.
It is from those archetypal images, which are in the man's unconsciousness, that are taken the dogmas. They are those elements that came to constitute in the base of the several forms of religions. Dispersed through the several ethnic groups, we find such basic ideas as: flood, lost paradise, dragon, young man, villainous, man God sufferer that, according to Jung has more than 5 thousand years, trinity - that is still older etc.
They are words of Jung: "The dogma is as a dream that reflects the activity spontaneous and autonomous of the subjective psyche, that is, of the unconsciousness."
Because of expressing a totality, a much wider implicit content, that we could call of irrational, in opposition to what there is of rational in a scientific experience, is that the dogma lasts long through the centuries.
Theosophically speaking, the ideas contained in the dogmas were not invented. They were born when the humanity had not still learned how to use the mind. Before the men had learned how to formulate thoughts, these archetypical forms came until them, proposition this that is adjusted to the theory of the ideas of Plato, when he affirms that the ideas preexist in the human mind, just lacking to find the road to contact them. The man, not getting to understand his/her total meaning, because this was the unconscious form of communication between the inferior part of the being and his superior part, they conserved it with devotion, due to the impact that they caused in his psyche.
As time went by, the man began more and more limiting the universal sense of the symbology registered in the traditions and, so to speak, started progressively stratifying the ideas contained in the archetypical images.
Though, the own Catholic Church admits that the dogma is alive and, therefore, subject to a dynamics that involves modification, evolution.
An important point to be considered is that the scientific spirit tries to despise the emotional value of the personal experiences - the analysis has to be always cold, distant. It happens, however, that the symbologies of the dogma, or the archetypal forms, are deeply expressive. They are examples: the illustration of a pyramid, of a mandala, of the circle in their varied compositions, of the Pythagoric tetraktys, that represents the value of the four, of the quaternary, linked to the four alchemic elements, the vision of the cross, of the chalice etc. When those images arrive spontaneously and vividly to the man's mind, I don't say only in the thought form, but in a perception vivid, that can be only in the imagination or in the vision of three dimensions, colored etc., they produce an impression of mystic emotional order indescribable, capable to unchain processes that take to particular interior states, as passage for a dimension out of the space time, loss of the fear of the death, union with the whole, complete exemption of the feeling of separatism and of selfishness etc.
It is interesting to notice that the religious faiths, the dogmas, have great psychological function. It is easier to treat somebody that has faith in the dogmas; those practices soften the immediate psychic experiences, unbalanced and that could be superior to the individual's forces in that determined moment.
The confession, for instance, corresponds to a catharsis; it takes the person to put out feelings that are producing tension.
The prayer works as autosuggestion. It can, also, work as liberation of the guilty conscience, because it brings idea of pardon.
Crucified Christ's adoration provides reassurance because it brings, implicit, the certainty of the redemption through his blood. To compare the own pain and suffering with the one of Christ in the cross, it consoles, it turns the pain more sacrificial, heroic; it seems that liberates certain amount of energy.
That fact of the dogmas and faiths work as psychological resource can be considered as a knife of two edges. On one side, they can tranquilize, and that may happen with those it that have faith, but, on the other hand, they can take to a great dependence, dependence that can harm the introspection capacity, the capacity of looking for with autonomy the solution for the own problems. It can, also, harm the possibility of a penetration in the deepest sense, in the archetypical sense of the own dogmas.
The communion, for instance, for most of the people - not for all - is an external action, highly tranquilizing because it comes accompanied of a certainty of the divine protection, but, at the same time, it can provoke an accommodation in the sense of not looking for means and practices that take the man to the real awakening of the internal Christ, archetypical image that is contained in the communion.
The specialists are unanimous in affirming that the dreams come from the profundities of the person and they always try to express something that the conscious me didn't get to detect - it can be of the individual psychic plan, as well as of the collective unconsciousness, and of the spiritual plan.
With base in affirmatives of Jung, the psychological experiences have been showing that certain contents that appear in dreams, or in vivid visions, or in ideas in the imagination, without any logical deduction, they come from a part of the psyche widest than the conscious part. Frequently, those contents contain an understanding or a knowledge of superior degree than the one that could be elaborated by the rational mental. The most employed term to designate such events has been of intuition. It is interesting that those contents brought by the intuition are accepted by the consciousness and they bring a mark of inexplicable certainty.
We know perfectly that the discovery of great laws of the mathematics and of the physics were not fruit of the conscious reasoning, but they appeared in the discoverers' mind when they were not waiting for them. Henri Poincarč (1.854 1.912), mathematical, teacher of physical mechanics in Sorbonne and also of calculation of the probabilities and celestial mechanics, affirms that their best solutions appeared when he was riding in the trolley. Einstein insists, in a categorical way, that the theory of the relativity came to him by intuition; it was only after wards that he used the intelligence and the mathematical reasoning to demonstrate the accuracy of a cosmological conception about which no longer doubts existed for him.
Everything indicates that exists inside of us a perception capacity of the reality superior to the one of abstract reasoning, which mechanism is out of the reach of our vigil conscience.
The psyche is constituted by two departments: by the consciousness, observable and by an indefinable part, but whose existence we are forced to admit and that is usually designated by unconsciousness.
For ignoring what is besides the consciousness, the man, usually, is afraid of becoming conscious of him; he avoids entering in the heart of his personality, staying in the periphery of his reality.
So that the man gets to penetrate the deep content that the dogmas and certain perceptions paranormals contain, passing by experiences truly mystics, he needs a slow and progressive training, which takes him to an auto-knowledge and an auto-interior organization.