image: Wikimedia commons (composite of two images, here and here).
I am regularly amazed at the way that the teachings of some of the most cutting-edge healers in the field of trauma recovery describe their discoveries in language that reflects and illuminates the teachings of the ancient myths.
For example, Dr. Richard Schwartz, the founder of the Internal Family Systems paradigm and therapeutic approach -- through his work with thousands of patients -- has discovered that we each have within us a strong and compassionate and courageous and wise Self, but that we become alienated from our own Self through trauma, often to the degree that we are actually unaware of the presence of this Self whom we have suppressed and buried.
In his book Internal Family Systems Therapy, Second Edition, Dr. Schwartz says:
We are all born with a Self. It does not develop through stages or borrow strength and wisdom from the therapist, and it cannot be damaged. It can, however, be occluded or overwhelmed by parts. [. . .] The Self-led mind is self-righting and has plenty of room for all feelings, views, and parts. In addition, the Self is not a passive observer. Once parts differentiate, the Self is a compassionate, collaborative leader that can be active or still as needed.
[. . .] Everyone can access the active, compassionate leader we call the Self, which is characterized by clarity, perspective, compassion, and other qualities that constitute effective leadership. This is true no matter how severe their symptoms or how initially polarized their internal system.
[. . .] The one caveat in this process is that it requires at least some willingness to find out if the Self exists and some curiosity when experiencing the Self. 43 - 46
When we are alienated from our Self, we seek to assuage the pain of that disconnection through external distraction (anything to keep us from being alone with our own internal world), external acquisition of "stuff," external addictions to substances or to behaviors -- all of which can be seen as symptoms of the fact that we have lost that connection to the Self which has the actual solution to our problems, and who is present and available to us at all times -- but only if we show "at least some willingness to find out if the Self exists."
We already have within us that which we are seeking everywhere else. I am convinced that the reason that "western" culture in particular seeks external solutions (in wealth, in substances, in other people whether sexual partners or gurus or politicians) is because the original teaching of the ancient myths was deliberately subverted and replaced by a literalistic dogma.
Literalism, by its very nature, externalizes the teaching of myths that are actually esoteric, metaphorical, and talking about each and every man and woman (but when taken literally, as if talking about literal, historical figures, they are mis-interpreted as being about someone else, someone external to us, someone who lived many thousands of years ago in another place and another time and another culture, and this naturally leads to an externalization of their message -- and thus to the pursuit of external saviors and external solutions, in an inversion of what they can actually be shown to be teaching).
Because external solutions actually turn out to be false solutions, this leads to a great sense of emptiness, which pervades our culture today and which hardly needs to be described, so familiar is it to our modern experience.
Peter Kingsley describes this problem in powerful language in his 1999 book In the Dark Places of Wisdom, where he says:
And there's a great secret: we all have that vast missingness deep inside us. [. . .] the more we feel that nothingness inside us, the more we feel the need to fill the void. So we try to substitute this and that, but nothing lasts. We keep wanting something else, needing some other need to keep us going [. . .].
Western culture is a past master at the art of substitution. It offers and never delivers because it can't. It has lost the power even to know what needs to be delivered, so it offers substitutes instead. What's most important is missing, and dazzling in its absence. [. . .]
Even religion and spirituality and humanity's higher aspirations become wonderful substitutes. 34 - 35
But the ancient myths from around the world -- including the stories collected into what we call the Bible -- teach us that the solution we are looking for is not actually external to us: we already have the solution within us, in the person of our Essential Self, from whom we become alienated (often to such a degree that we are completely unaware of the existence of this Self, and even to the degree that we are actively hostile to the suggestion that we have such a Self).
This message can be shown to be present in the stories of the Bible, such as in the story of Doubting Thomas -- in which Jesus himself represents the "divine twin" of the Higher Self, and in which Thomas (who is known as "the Twin," as we learn in the Gospel according to John) is actually resistant to the sudden appearance of the divine twin who had been buried and locked away under the earth.
In the texts of the Nag Hammadi library, which were discovered in the mid-twentieth century after having been buried for centuries (probably because they were outlawed when literalist Christianity began to gain increasing power in the fourth century), Jesus explicitly tells Thomas that he is his twin, and that because Thomas is his twin, it is not right for Thomas to be unaware of his own Self (see for instance the Dialogue between Thomas and the Savior, in the Book of Thomas the Contender).
One of the most powerful parables which teaches us that we already have access to the solution which we are seeking everywhere else can be found in the text of the Gospel of Thomas (also included in the Nag Hammadi library but excluded from the canonical texts selected by the early leaders of the literalist religion).
There, in section 109, Jesus uses a parable about a field in which a treasure is hidden under the surface, completely unknown to the owner of the field. Unaware of the presence of the treasure, the owner of the field never makes use of this treasure, and when he dies, the field passes to his son, who also remains in complete ignorance of the treasure buried and hidden within the field. The son sells the field -- and the new owner of the field discovers the treasure while plowing the field.
This teaching is remarkably harmonious with everything that Dr. Schwartz is saying in the above-quoted passage from his book Internal Family Systems Therapy! We all are born with a Self -- and this Self knows how to heal, how to repair, how to lead, how to "self-right" our internal disharmony and bring it into balance so that we can express our unique gifts and talents and fulfill our true potential.
But like the buried treasure in the field, we can go through our entire life without even being aware of the existence of this marvelous Self -- indeed, we can actively suppress our Self for a variety of reasons that have to do with trauma and which Dr. Schwartz describes in his book and in his many resources on his website at ifs-institute.com and in his many interviews on podcasts and elsewhere on the web.
Like the original owner of the field, who did not know about this treasure that he already had, and did not even know how to tell his own son about it, we can be ignorant of the fact that we have within us the buried treasure -- the buried Self -- which can provide the very wholeness for which we often search (in vain) just about everywhere else but the one place it is to be found.
And, although these texts that were buried in at Nag Hammadi in ancient times were excluded from the canon of the literalist church, we can see the outlines of this teaching present in the scriptures which were included in the Bible, such as in the passage in 2 Corinthians which Alvin Boyd Kuhn (on page 47 of his masterpiece, Lost Light, 1940) calls Paul's "almost frantic cry to us: 'Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is within you?'" (quoting 2 Corinthians 13: 5, my emphasis).
But we cannot make use of this treasure if we are not even aware that it exists, as the parable teaches and as Dr. Schwartz states in his "one caveat." We have to have at least some curiosity and desire to recover our Self -- but the good news is that the world's ancient myths, from every culture on every inhabited continent and island of our globe, have as one of their central themes the recovery of Self.
And, today we have forward-thinking healers and therapists such as Dr. Richard Schwartz, as well as Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Laurence Heller, and others who understand the profound negative impact of alienation from Self and who have devoted their gifts and their talents and their professional careers to helping us learn how we can recover that connection to our birthright, our Self.
Like the owner of the field in the parable, we actually already have access to our Self. And that is a very powerful and very comforting teaching, which we find in the ancient myths and scriptures, as well as in the writings of modern pioneers such as Dr. Schwartz.
