THE HUMAN SUBCONSCIOUS

Some ways to understand

The problems with the subconscious are connected to our outlook on life

The human subconscious and the aboriginal spirit world

The subconscious as unconscious bodily relations

Memory is the memory of images in a dream, myth or fairy tale

An emotional bound turns into a possessing spirit

The spirit of the dead is mightier than that of the living

Connection to another person by subconscious associations

Some ways to understand

Among the great figures in psychology, Carl Gustav Jung, in particular, emphasized the independence of the subconscious powers. He observed that dreams bring along images which have an independent existence within the individual. He also noted that these same images appear in religious myths and legends, as well as in fairy tales, fables and folk tales. These images he chose to call ’archetypes’, as they are common to all mankind, having an independent existence of their own, irrespective of the individual they ’inhabit’. Later this sort of Jungian thought had been developed into a scientific discipline in its own right, namely archetypal psychology, which claims that archetypal characters constitute the basic elements for all human activity. It is only through them, according to this branch of science, that human action can be understood in a variety of situations - from the daily chore to the most elevated artistic and divine manifestations.

    The philosophic work of Martin Heidegger has also helped us to understand the independent nature of archetypal psychology. He has emphasized man as a place for human life and existence to take shape. It is not so much man himself that observes, thinks, experiences and fantasizes; instead he is a place where the world manifests itself as observations, where thinking takes place, where feelings and images lead a life of their own. In certain instances, this appears quite true. One only needs to close his eyes and follow the motions of his mind. Indeed, it is not I that think; instead, a certain stimulus appears in me in the form of thought. It is just like in a dream: I do not decide to imagine something. Dreamlike images lead a life of their own in this being called myself. I am but an onlooker and observer.

The human being is not acting after having first made conscious decisions. Our body is behaving directly. It has learned to behave mostly by imitating the behavior of significant others, especially the parents. This kind of silent knowledge is inherited from hundreds of years ago. The dreams, the stories, and the fairy tales help to make at least part of that knowledge conscious. They also help to move hints of that kind of behavior and knowledge from thousand years ago.

The problems with the subconscious are connected to our outlook on life

The human subconscious has been an area of mystical postulation during man’s scholarly existence. Its power, able to surprise, cruelty, violence, and love have upset many scholars. Frequent attempts have been made to evade this entire subject. Even the first and foremost guide to our insight into the subconscious, Carl Gustav Jung, was frightened by its power. The same fear is manifest in modern shamanism: an imaginary voyage into the realm of the subconscious appears as a frightening option to a number of sensitive individuals. One of the obvious fears is that of becoming and remaining a prisoner to a psychosis. Aboriginal people have a more definite view of the subconscious phenomena. This clarity appears to have been connected to the fact that mythical tradition gave them a key to the domain of the subconscious and traveling in it. For them, it was a well-known reality. They called it the world of the spirits and gods. The power and affect of grandparents and great grandparents was seen as spirits of them.  For us, in turn, our science poses a problem, as it cannot free itself from its tradition and venture to an open, unbiased encounter with the human mind.

    In psychology and psychiatry, understanding subconscious phenomena has often been regarded as something close to impossible. Hence, great numbers of individuals suffering from mental health are being kept as inmates of mental institutions, fully occupied by their imaginary worlds. Nobody seems to understand their life and imagination. Obviously, the lack of understanding mainly derives from the fact that even professional helpers appear to have lost their contact with mythical tradition. On the other hand, there are numerous sensitive and able therapists, who are capable of learning to interpret anyone’s subconscious messages. This ability will develop readily in the subconscious mind of such a therapist, only he or she allows it to happen.

    Apparently, the greatest difficulty lies in the fact that few therapists are really prepared for an open encounter with a client in the sense that they became wholly present to the client’s world. Instead, they tend to cling to their sensibility and analytical mind. While using this approach, they are not fully present to the client emotionally. Full presence is love, sharing feelings, some kind of spiritual atmosphere with another person. The therapeutic skills of a responsive therapist are ’telepathic’ in nature. On the emotional level, he understands the client’s feelings and the language he uses in expressing them. This, however, calls for forgetting oneself and entering into the client’s world using the ’memory’ of whole mankind infused in his body. Basically, all humans share this ability. More often than not, it is courage that fails. A therapist who fears insanity, lacks the courage to enter into a world that he experiences as frightening and threatening. A client who has been badly ’wounded’ (traumatized) in the psyche, however, needs support from a fellow-traveller to be able to face the mythical world of his subconscious mind.

    The subconscious is man’s most sacred and rich mental deposit, his treasury. However, this mental realm appears frightening, threatening, and destructive as long as its images and visions are foreign to one. Man’s body is his anchor to the outside world. Whenever the subconscious images are frightening, uncontrollable monsters, they have been imposed there by other people. As a rule, they are emotions transferred from father, mother, or other ’near and dear’ ones; emotions that the individual as a child was not capable of giving shape to. His own experience of the world was at least partly different from that of his parents. It is in this discrepancy that the world of foreign powers, in the shape of scary monsters, comes into being in the child’s subconscious mind. In earlier times, these powers were regarded as demons or evil spirits possessing a person, and were therefore exorcised, i.e. were by special rituals forced to leave the mind.

    In that we have alienated ourselves from the domain of mythical characters, the world of fairy tales, legends, and myths, we have come to miss the ability of getting rid of any of these foreign images. The process of getting ridding of means facing the monsters and fiends by means given in mythical tradition. In its genuine and unadulterated form, this tradition provides one with strong powers of the helping and supporting images. With these powers in his support, an individual can move in the world of the spirits, like the shamans of the aboriginal peoples. In that world, the demons - possessing spirits - can be met and let go. In dreams, the dreamer is doing this same work of a long tradition. He faces his inner demons and releases them from their ’duties’. Thereby peace is brought into his ’inner garden’, allowing admittance only to the good spirits, those of love and peace, who guide his journey in the world of his emotions.

    The therapist’s task is to set off with the client on a journey into the frightening world of the subconscious. To survive from day to day, a fearful person needs a confidant(e) from the outside to help him or her analyze the subconscious experience. In the earlier world, the shaman or the magi behaved in this job. Jointly, they can learn a more fearless and clarified way of meeting the erroneous imps molesting the mind. In short, to see clearly the ’sprites errants’ molesting the psyche is to see them off. This gives more room to the true layers of the soul, one’s genuine spiritual existence.

The human subconscious and the aboriginal spirit world

The subconscious layer of the human mind has been acknowledged by science for centuries. It has been chiefly held as a kind of auxiliary concept helping to explain certain phenomena in the psyche that have been otherwise difficult to understand. To define the subconscious in scientific terms has, however, proven a difficult task, as western science in essence must be capable of locating each phenomenon to place and time. Before the time of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, the nature of the subconscious as a powerful internal factor in the human psyche has been witnessed by some earlier philosophers, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche. He talks of wolves, howling within, or howling in the cellar. Also French psychoanalytical tradition, in connection with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, had well conceived the specific quality of the subconscious mind as man’s emotional basis, which also produces our language. In a way, it is a background structure which creates our language and life. In this view, man does not create language, but language speaks in him. The gap between this idea and the definition of the subconscious as the world of spirits is not unbridgeable.

    Our subconscious consists of a reservoir of all emotions and sensations experienced in our lives up to the present. Any experience that we might have will always be interpreted within the limits set by a given outlook. The subconscious is a field of understanding that we have not become conscious of; a field giving rise to the meanings that we attach to things. Yet, it is a field which has not taken a clear shape, at least not clear enough to become a part of our conscious understanding. Unclear and vague emotional charges can survive ’half-conscious’ only in the form of a myth or tale. We can tell stories about those emotions and experiences with the help of them.

     Without a sensible and meaningful connection, an experience cannot be sensed as an ’experience proper’, but turns into a vague sensation of anxiety. The child develops his ’emotional body’ through the mediation of his mother where mother helps him to ’analyze’ his unpleasant and oppressive feelings through her experiences, i.e. the child witnesses his mother’s reaction to them. Often when the child is distressed, he watches his mother’s eyes to thereby grasp what the matter is. In case the mother is emotionally responsive to the child, she is able to - often subconsciously, sometimes consciously - communicate to the child in such a way as to help him to connect the new experience to the existing emotional reservoir. This is how certain experiential patterns of reaction, common to a family - even ’running in a family’, so to speak, are established. And this is why these social patterns can originate from generations upon generations ago. The family understands and appreciates its inherited social patterns within the folklore of the prevailing culture. That is why emotional experiences can be transferred from parent to offspring also in a narrated form. Through the family folklore, a child becomes a partaker in the common ’family mythology’. He realizes his experiences to be a part of human life.

    Continued living in relationships with other individuals is an inherent part of human existence. The child grows in relation to his father, mother, and siblings. Likewise, the physical world and further experiences from the outside are internalized as relationships. The human self consists of a number of relationships. In addition, the outside world becomes a part of his internal world. This living in relationships takes place spontaneously and through all the five senses. All things are connected to these relationships. Food and nourishment, for example, are linked with the relationship of nurturing the body. To them are also connected other experiences mediated by the senses from the outside world; those of seeing, feeling, hearing, observing, sensing, thinking, and doing.

    In this way, a growing individual, when he, for instance, is having a meal, will ’eat’ also other ingredients from his cultural environment and thus gradually build up his ’social body’. Nourishment that has caused convulsions at any time will later carry along a message of distress. Food contains the social history of motherly emotions, as experienced by the child. In much the same way also other sensational experiences, whether olfactory, tactile, visual or auditory, will become an inherently social reservoir in the body, reflecting its relation to the living environment. As a result of this process of socialization, the human body will become an emotional body containing all personal experiences.

    Sensory experiences obsessing an individual can derive from the distress sensed by his or her mother in connection with food, for instance. As a result, the ’remnants of the mother’ in the child can manifest themselves as convulsions in the stomach. What is more, such sensations can be passed on to each new generation from each new parent. This is why a child can carry digestive problems originating from his great-grandmother’s undealt and unanalyzed emotions related to food. In such a way, tradition and sensations can be passed on to subsequent generations. The obsessive experiences documented in psychopathology are very often connected to ventral and intestinal reactions.

The subconscious as unconscious bodily relations

Since the emotional body is gradually accumulated as experienced relationships, it is unresponsive to the passage of time. It simply immortalizes everything and is hence capable of recollecting the whole past. If a person is taken back to the past - by means of hypnosis, for example - his personal life story becomes retrievable, in other words, it can be called back to his remembrance. In fact, there is some evidence suggesting that even probably future experiences could be in this way retrieved into the conscious mind. This is enabled by the special facility of our emotional body to record all our experiences as a continuing life story. A dream may, for instance, bring to the fore a hotel room No 16, which an intuitive interpretation will refer to a memory of something significant having occurred at the age of 16. It is in this way that a dream or story stops the flow of time at a figure signaling a particular occasion. The ’law’ of connections is based in associations. This can start for example as a chain: hotel room number 16 -in own room at age 16 - mother approaching interrupting the first kiss.

    It seems that the timelessness of the subconscious carries an immense importance to us. It frees man from the chains of time, rendering him an eternal being. In the world of the subconscious, any instant of time will be transformed into the present. The ability of recollection is thus rendered timeless and unrestricted. All the past is present in the form of experiences. If a person is by hypnosis brought back to an upsetting experience, which can now be felt as a real bodily sensation, it may give rise to a tremendous shock. The shock itself, however, is no part of his present reality. Is is a thing of the past and upsetting only to the self of that particular time. In short, when the time difference (distance between now and then) is eliminated by hypnosis, a shock may result.

    A gentler and more discreet method of witnessing such past experiences is to allow one’s inner reality to bring about a story of a possessing spirit or experience, and then examine it against the background of mythical tradition. In fact, this occurs spontaneously in our dreams. All experiences recorded into our inner self always have a relation with the situation in which they occurred. Stories and dreams help us by creating a scene in which we can safely watch and witness a past occurrence in the form in which it now appears to us.

    What is often called someone’s ’poor memory’ represents their means of repressing any upsetting memories of a conscious, time-related experience. By eliminating the illusion of time-relatedness the subconscious mind can preserve an individual’s relationships for ever. Thus he has access even to the memories of the past generations within his family. This helps to eliminate a great deal of restrictions to human creativity, opening up new mental territories and opportunities, as well as giving rise to new qualities that are next to divine.

     The subconscious consists of sensations and experiences. Man’s existence, which is always related to his environment is, in this view, extended to an existence in, or rather, responsiveness to, the past and even the future. Our past life lives on in our present life in the guise of sensations, airs, and 'atmospheres', so to speak. These sensations can be retrieved into the consciousness by calling forth, intensely enough, the past situation to which they are connected. Being a human individual means existence in constant relationships with surrounding reality, things and beings, into which the personal history, past experiences, will add the dimension of time-relatedness, which is but one way of experiencing reality.

Memory is the memory of images in a dream, myth or fairy tale

The human ability of memory has been seen as a process of recording material into the brain. This traditional view helps us in no way to understand the nature of human experiences. An engram, or memory track, put into the brain, cannot be equated with an experience. The tracks imprinted by memories in the workings of our brain are comparable to a computer program, a circuit activated in a certain way. This program can help to retrieve a past experience to our present consciousness, but it is not the experience itself. An experience called back to life will be retrieved into the conscious mind as a live picture. A variety of live pictures can be revived by activating various parts of the body. Memory is present everywhere in the body. An instantaneous break of man’s power supply by a deficit of oxygen, for instance, appears to activate, intensify his experiencing power; not to diminish it. This has come out in a number of documented witnesses of persons who have gone through a near-death experience11. In a matter of few seconds or minutes, they may have witnessed their entire life history as a ’film going before their eyes’.

    What is essential is to try to understand the special nature of the past recorded into the brain. A human being is inseparable from his environment. At any given moment, he exists, lives and experiences only as an integrated part of it. It is seldom, in fact, that he is actually aware of watching the world that he lives in. His existence is of world-watching; indeed, he is of world-watching. Moving open-eyed in that world, he is a part of it and therefore his awareness can be equated with it. Equally seldom, he is in his self, even by means of his thoughts. Thus if he is, he is also then in himself only as a part of his true self. A human being is his way of being bodily, and not a ’given package’ within his body. Also, the concept of interactiveness is illusory. A person is not first within his own self and then start to affect his environment in order to meet with response from it. Or let the environ first influence him, and then to start to affect it, in turn. The very term ’interaction’ is an illusion created by scholars and researchers. Man’s fundamental existence is being in relation with everything. In his subconscious mind, man exists all the time to everything.

    Man’s memory is also in a certain way, in a relation that never ceases. His waking consciousness is an attempt to localize in time and place, and thus only a small part of his total memory. Through mythical tradition a family’s collective experiences can be recorded into its memory. Memory and subconscious are collective in essence. When I return to the neighborhood of my childhood, I can suddenly observe that my old sensations with their related images and sights are there, present to me through my five senses. This memory is fully alive to me. I can see myself running around and playing in the yard of home.

    Things from the past are present as pictures, images, airs, and 'atmospheres'. They can be relived with the help of a story, fairy tale, and myth. They can be restored into the conscious mind, to be re-experienced by ’casting a spell’, ’invoking’, and ’conjuring up’ a situation from the past. Such an ’invocation’ can be represented on the physical level simply by a word, expression or touch on a part of the body. The methods of working on the human mind used by aboriginal people are still viable to modern man. By speaking, imagining situations and showing, objects the revival, re-invocation of powers from the past is equally viable as it has always been. So, the memory is based on associative connections. Story telling and dreaming is letting those associations come in mind. To remember a certain situation is at the same time remembering the other things which happened there.

    Man’s continued existence in relation, and only in relation with his environment - his interrelatedness - becomes manifest in us in the form of stories, archetypal myths. Remembering equates with reviving the airs connected to past ’spirits’, or the characters related to our memories; bringing these sensations back to the present. For man’s way of recording sensations is recording them in the shape of these archetypal characters. It is the aborigines that refer to them as ’spirits’, and I have also come to adopt this term. Each spirit living in us can be called back to any life situation and make it ’re-livable’, just as it were ’alive and kicking’ at that very moment. Spirits live for eternity, sharing the potentiality of becoming manifest. They represent the subconscious, hidden realm within us, an underworld which is collective by nature, not unlike the collective character of these spirits, common archetypal patterns.

The archetypal patterns can be understood as a group of associative links, which let emotions and experiences inhabit the the body. They occupy the holy body. When all memories connecting with mother takes the body, he starts to behave like mother. So the spirit of mother has taken him or her.

    Each person’s experiences in these spirits, or archetypal actors or patterns, differ from those of another person. Observations of them are therefore practically different. This applies to conscious observations in particular. Our conscious ability of analyzing the surrounding world is individual, whereas our experience on the subconscious level, experience of the spirits, or archetypes, is of more collective nature. That is why the symbols it uses are collective, and the archetypal characters or patterns are almost universal.

    If each and every second of our lives can be retrieved into our consciousness, it becomes impossible to imagine memory as a reservoir. Instead, it is more like a recorder with images. It can function through associations aroused by stories, myths and dreams. What is generally thought to be found in our brain as recorded engrams is only a connection to archetypes, to associative complexes. Once this connection is gained through dreams, for instance, it can bring our all our experiences by means of its associative and collective nature.

An emotional bound turns into a possessing spirit

The subconscious goes beyond the confines of time and place. It has the same features as the domain of gods among aboriginal people. The subconscious world resides in eternity. Everything within it merely is. They are relationships and connections. The nature within us is the same as the one without. By way of comparison, a brook coming down the mountainside is not counting moments or days, all it does is runs.

    That a person puts the past off his awareness does not mean that it no longer exists for him. Man’s way of recording things and relations is to remain in constant relations with his surroundings. This interrelatedness can, by several means, be activated in the brain layers producing consciousness. In a dream our whole past is readily available to us. In this lies the ageless wisdom of dream.

    Something, however, happens to the earlier experience; it is converted over a period of time. This conversion seems to be controlled by the emotional bindings of the experience. If, for example, the experience has been repressed into oblivion because of its upsetting nature or some other similar reason, it is as it somehow gains extra energy of attachment; it turns into a foreign power possessing the person. In this way, experiences of old gain a ’new lease of life’, start living a life of their own, irrespective of their ’carrier’. In this process, reality is turned into a realm  in which mythical tradition is given the frightening name of ’underworld’, the threatening domain of the spirits of our ancestors, the abode of gods. This underworld, however, can also be an abode of peace and tranquillity, without any possessing spirits. The language of the myth has also termed the subconscious as an ocean with a ruler, the subconscious powers are churning on its dominion.

    The essence of these submarine or underworld powers may be exemplified by the ’Spirit in the Bottle’, one of the best-known fairy tales in the ’Arabian Nights’. An evil witch closes the spirit into a bottle and hurls it into the sea. During its long bottled captivity the spirit first contemplates the various ways of rewarding its releaser. As there comes no sign of one for centuries on end, it grows angry, then furious, and eventually intent on killing its future releaser. In this way, all untreated occurrences from our past cry to be let out, and if denied their freedom, in the course of time turn into vexing spirits. The mythology of a nation or community is their way of giving form to experiences that have become ’bottled’. Their exposure and treatment is most rewarding; growth towards independence means exposing treasures hidden in the subconscious. Paternal and maternal archetypes direct the development of abilities. If an unreleased, angered spirit is ’forgotten in the bottle’ for too long, it turns into a possessor, a demon destroying its master.

    The Greek fashion of describing spirits is much similar. In essence, their spirit is a mere shadow, a latent opportunity. This opportunity can find its realization only through man, and its hidden power then become manifest in its ’carrier’. Spirits are forgotten patterns. As such, they are dead, non-existent. Only man, through his tendency to form a community, can bring them back to life. A myth will survive only when ”two or three are gathered”. Man’s power lies in his ability to sense, his exposure to emotions, predominantly to erotic ones. For instance this aspect has been studied in detail by Norman Brown and Herbert Marcuse. Sensibility is brought out in a community and creates communal patterns. To survive, the spirits ’need human blood’, as the Greek mythical tradition depicts it. The abode of the spirits of the deceased is called the underworld, where they go after death. Power abides as a dormant opportunity in dead patterns. By invoking suitable situations for their manifestation, this power can be harnessed.

    In an attempt to suppress a spirit that has been activated in the subconscious, man evokes a demon. The spirit is then turned against its carrier. In addition, a spirit is repressed into oblivion and now, revived, will gain its power from the individual carrying it. The spirit of the bottle resides in the ocean of emotions, at the bottom of the sea. There it lets out its anger, because a ’witch’, the subconscious part of one’s self, has evoked it and repressed its manifestation. It has hence become a rampant monster. The subconscious possessing spirits are the untreated relationships of the past. Those with parents, grandparents, and siblings are the most important. In the helplessness of childhood these relationships leave to everyone some emotions that are difficult to get rid of.

    It is well-known fact in psychology that it is only the experiences which are constantly gaining energy from us, that are possessing and harassing us. Once an experience has been witnessed anew - ’seen off’, as I have chosen to call it - it leaves and vexes us no more. The dream is a way of seeing off such sore emotions and painful situations in order to release them and rid them into their lifeless existence. In this lifeless state, they can be watched and witnessed as well, and invoked to come to our aid, if need be. In other words, they have their lifeless existence, which no longer molests us. In the Greek ’Tartaros’, the deepest layer of their underworld, are found those who have become the worst fixated with reproach. This layer is the very sludge and dregs which is the most difficult to rid oneself of. Mythical tradition surface into our view such spirits that are worst attached. As soon as they have ’done their duty’, they are released. The spirits - more commonly called archetypal characters and patterns - of the ’Arabian Nights’ are also ones that have a task to do; they exist to release their master, the experiencer, from his possessors.

    Spirits are shadows from the past within us, emotional bonds left within us by our ancestors, parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, as well as, our own offspring. What disturbs us most in their presence is their foreign origin, their remoteness to us. If a person is uncap-able of relating the spirits from his past to his experiences, these are turned into possessing demons, since they remain foreign to his essence. Archetypal characters can be ’controlled’ only by means of genuine experiences. An individual is disturbed only by untreated experiences from such relationships with his parents as have been difficult to ’digest’, to connect to his existing experiences. These untreated emotions are created especially in intra-family relationships. That is why the dream images carry features that are identifiable with the parental archetypes and these same patterns are to be found in mythical tradition.

    Spirit world, the world of religion and myth, contains collective subconscious energy. The disturbing spirits and gods within its pantheon are the experiences we have no courage to confront. The Christian tradition is well aware of this causal connection. Jesus himself expelled possessing spirits. He broke off the relations binding him to his parents and at the same time released contemporary culture from a wealth of gods and spirits. The stern paternal god was replaced by a gentle, loving one. The spirits of the deceased do not rise from the grave on their own accord; it is only those that molest us that have turned into ’zombies’, the dead that are alive - only because we, subconsciously, lend them of our own energy.

    Good spirits, in turn, are those free archetypal actors that support our true existence, our soul. They are such internalized sensations, airs and feelings that can be made use of in a given situation. The Christian tradition wishes to emphasize genuine experiences. Jesus is also the archetypal champion of truth, as well as Martin Luther and Paavo Ruotsalainen, great reformers of faith in the 16th century Germany and 19th century Finland. They battled against the heavy burden of past generations. A death on the cross and journey into the underworld, so as to encounter  one’s possessors, will release one from the burden of the past.

The spirit of the dead is mightier than that of the living

Students and scholars of religions past and present are familiar with the fact that religious founders and leaders will become much more important after their death than they ever were during their lives. This stereotypical pattern is connected to our subconscious reality. If either parent dies, the children will very lovingly treasure his or her memory and hold it in high esteem. That memory, or spirit, will then turn invisible and remain so, since there is no other person in their reality on whom to reflect that spirit. In present scientific culture, he cannot be seen or heard of, or in any other way rendered ’open to senses’, available and experience-able to our senses. His shadow, ghost, will therefore become ubiquitous: he is seen as a ghost or phantom, and his power increases in proportion with the increasing awe shown for him by the people. It is here, in facing the awesome dead that the myths and rituals of aboriginal peoples - as well as our dreams - will help. In our dreams, we, fortunately enough, encounter ghosts.

    In a therapy situation, this awesome power of being possessed by the dead has become manifest. The dead will, as a rule, be kept as idealized and esteemed images. ”De mortuis nihil nisi boni”. Nothing defamatory is allowed in a discussion related to them, and thus no negative or realistic elements are allowed into the conscious mind. During many a therapeutic session, the fact has surfaced that despite the idealized image bestowed upon the deceased, he or she has been problematic to his immediate family, due to alcoholism or other similar affliction. Fortunately enough, it is possible for the surviving members of the family to meet the spirit of the deceased in a dream and talk with it. The encounter, even if by means of a dream, brings great relief. Perhaps so, because in our modern time a person’s spirit - our soul of a living person - is much ’more real’, i.e. comes into its own, better in a dream than in day-consciousness.

    Invariably, upon the death of the spouse, the same situation arises for the remaining person, now widowed. The love for his or her deceased companion is transcendentalized and life is carried on in an unrealistic fantasy world along the lines ”My late wife/husband was my only true love; there never was or will be other such a lovable person in the whole wide world”. In such circumstances the spirit of the deceased can ruin the life of the surviving spouse, as the only viable way of living seems to be that of dwelling in a fantasy world. No new companion can come close to such a person, as the ghost remains alive between them.

    Sociological evidence gives further support to such tendencies; by creating a martyr, new patterns of political and religious power can be established. Due to its growth into the realm of the supernatural, the power of the deceased will grow stronger than that of a living person. Helsingin Sanomat, our principal daily, very neatly headlined the chief idea of Mr Georg Schmid, a Swiss professor specializing in violent religious organizations as the ”Irresistible Call of the Dead Guru”. The article was about the present state of the ”Knights of the Temple of the Sun”. This organization is but one of the many; a great number of religious orders hold to ceremonies associated with the adoration of the dead. It is a proven way of ensuring support from those willing to give themselves to ’sacred’ spiritual reality, even if profanely created. It is true that spirits are always worthy of true esteem, but is equally true that it is advisable to examine such spirits that are used as tools for power and exploitation. All voodoo cults exemplify this: they are the life of the dead in the world of the living.

    Inability to encounter the deceased creates, even among us, religious groupings where contact is sought to the spirit world. Such encounters, as such, are good, but they will grow problematic whenever power or financial exploits are sought through them.

    The process of a deceased person turning into a possessing spirit is supported by strong subconscious fears associated with death. If death appears as something unspeakable, invisible, terrifying, and final, any of us will be fully powerless before such an apparition. This is especially true of our western culture, which refuses the existence of a world of spirits whatever their form, even if these are seen everywhere. Even everyday conversation will continually bring out instances of inexplicable violence, wild stories of unseen but perceived creatures, acts of insane fear. The masses are attracted to films showing, for example, terrifying aliens arriving from outer space or vampires wielding great terror.

    Our world is full of ghosts, which gain a hold on us only because they have been made invisible by means of our science. This is especially manifest in diseases. There are times when our entire existence is threatened by sexually pervert savages from Africa (AIDS), or made bedridden by an unprecedented influenza virus from Asia, when broken nuclear plants pose a lethal threat in the form of radioactive leaks, when our health is jeopardized by a variety of new forms of cancer. Virtually every food nutrient has been stamped ’unwholesome’, not to say toxic, and virtually each new sexual contact has been made the source of deadly contamination. The stomach is threatened by bacteria, liver by alcohol, circulation by fats and salt. Drugs, violent videos, and upsetting films, even computers, pose a threat to our young. All these and other ghosts are given power, because the phantom of death is hovering everywhere, invisible19.

    There will always be someone who can, consciously or unconsciously, make use of the ghost of a deceased. In this way, one’s ancestors will gain a greater influence on a person’s life than his or her own parents. On the other hand, this ancestral influence comes through one’s parents. Via this link, unprocessed things from ancestral life, in the shape of ghosts, will arrive into the lives of the grandchildren. Perhaps, one of the chief functions and importance of the myth and fairy tale lies here: fathers and mothers can transfer the matters that remain below the boundary of unconsciousness in their own lives over to their children in the form of a story or myth. This is an ingenious way of doing it. As the parents tell their own story to the child, they simultaneously hand over within their story the ghosts that molest them. In this way, the story carries with it invisible images and makes them visible to the soul in the likeness of dreams. Naturally enough, this process presupposes that free room be given by the parents to the thus transferred stories and fairy tales so as to help them turn into stories of their own, in the mind of the attentive child. Today, offspring will hear their fairy tales read from a book. This makes it somewhat more difficult for parents to present their own spirit patterns on display for their children. To an extent this is compensated by the fact that parents will choose the fairy stories that please them. On the other hand, children are able to ask for the stories that touch them.  Their wishes demand always to be heard - the child is asking for a story that he needs. In his parents, he is troubled by the aspects that appear dead, unexpressed. Through the fairy tales he can restore them alive and experienceable for himself. A child forsaken by his mother will demand ’Hansel and Gretel’, as he has to live forsaken by his mother.

Connection to another person by subconscious associations

An individual will always grow up as a member of a family. Without the presence of an adult he will not grow into integrated adulthood. The experiential performances of archetypal patterns are common to all members of a community. This makes it possible to share things. By joining in a communion the spiritual reality of a community, each member can attain a world common to all of them. The alienness and isolation that have bothered them will disappear. There is the risk, however, of becoming detached from one’s personal bodily experience. Quite often, religions create conceptual systems that have become too distant from individual experience. The defenders of faith tend to negate and invalidate all sensual experience. Any followers who show such tendency will obviously not so readily comply with their strivings, or the interests of power and control exercised by their leaders and conservative supporters.

    True life is possible only in reverence for the individual experience and sensuality. Man is an assembly of sensations and feelings, or spirits, in short, located within a sensitive and sense-able body. The emotions will stay alive only if their ’carriers’ will lend them their energy. This energy is the energy of man’s similarly sensitive and sense-able relationship with the environment. That is why the basis for all that is divine lies in love; love, which is part of man’s sensual bodily experiences. The spirit of love must be allowed the opportunity of becoming flesh in the human body. It is only then, that a true, full man and woman, are alive within us. Love and genuine male and female spirits constitute our true spiritual essence. It is for this very reason that they are to be granted the greatest room in the mythical garden of the soul.

    Archetypes represent the eternal within us. By identifying them, one can free himself from the molesting images and find his own genuine experiences and his own genuine (archetypal) actors. Man’s power lies in his sensual, incarnate spirits. The will that arouses us to take action, is the will of these spirits. Moreover, the molesting spirits from the past that are possessing us, wield their power over us, as long as we allow them to live within us. ”Our own will” is often limited to that of our father, mother, brother, or sister wielding control over us. Consistently with this, the ’good riddance’ of their will means the killing of their molesting emotions within us. The typical myth or fairy tale is the very story of killing these foreign powers within one’s self. The more independent, genuinely personal, way of life seeks to overthrow these ages-long restricting and possessing spirits. This quest for independence has given rise to an endless number of myths and stories on the lines of classical Greek Oedipus and Orestes, as well as, those seeking to defeat also the fraternal and sororal spirits churning in our minds. Each night's dreams will bring out material for a ’good riddance’; for us to see them off on the lines of the phrase ”You have been seen, you can go”.

Family is the best and the worst

The story of man is a story of an animal growing up in a family. The more one familiarizes himself with and gains insight of Greek mythology, the world of fairy tales and folklore, the clearer it is manifested the immense wisdom included in them. The Greek pantheon represents a most complex and intricate network of human relationships with all its inherent assistant spirits, actors and disturbing spirits. It amply shows what shape the life of a person growing up in a family can take. Once we identify a Greek god or goddess as our kindred spirit, we are given the tools of finding our own problems and prehistories in the mythology.

    Family is the best and the worst at the same time. Every human individual is an 'animal' being growing up under the aegis of a family. Within this family, the loving and caring presence of the father and mother leaves us with an indelible imprint of the beautiful, the profound, and the eternal. Brothers and sisters lend us courage to live. And yet, this very family also leaves us with the obsessing spirits that vex us until the end of our lives. After growing up in a family and gaining courage for life, an individual must also be prepared to die to his family identity and to be reborn to a personal life with no clear selfhood, his identity only being shown by his soul. The very essence of growth is to grow up into adulthood, breaking free from the swaddling clothes of childhood.

This article is out of the book Find Your True Self through Your Fantasies and Dreams by Olavi Moilanen, Ph.D, published by Atophill in USA 2009