Thanks starroute

A poster named starroute has articulated very well a stance on the ritual abuse phenomenon that I can agree with , at least for now:

“I’m still not convinced that all this stuff is literally true — or even that it would be healthy for me to believe that it was. But as I’ve suggested in comments here before, that doesn’t necessarily matter. The crucial fact is that we humans live simultaneously in physical reality and in mythic reality, and each of those has its own validity.

You might say that mythic reality is a set of metaphors which illuminate the true meaning of the somewhat muddled ongoing events of physical reality. Or that mythic reality is the Platonic ideal of which physical reality is the imperfect representation.

In either case, mythic reality can be thought of as a state of being whose nature is (as my son once said to a classmate who asked if he believed in dragons) that it doesn’t exist but it *is* real.

Most of us are capable of experiencing mythic reality directly with the aid of hallucinogenic drugs, but not otherwise. However there are certain individuals — call them natural shamans — who inhabit mythic reality as easily and automatically as they do physical reality. The poet William Blake was one. Many of the individuals discussed at this board are as well, from UFO contactees to ritual abuse survivers.

It’s possible that all the strange events these individuals report are shamanistic hallucinations, though I doubt it. I think it’s more likely that the dissociation caused by childhood abuse triggers the shamanistic ability in some of those who survive it, and that their memories thereafter are a mixture of the mythic and the physical.

But in either case, the important part is that their accounts have to be taken very seriously, because they are mythically — which is to say, metaphorically — absolutely true. These people see more deeply into the heart of things than the rest of us do, and they bring us a message that we very much need to hear.

For example, I don’t know if certain individuals of great worldly power are literally black magicians. But I do believe that we will understand their activities and motivations far better if we think of them in those terms than if we dismiss them as mere politicians or mere businessmen.“

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