This book contains a collection of famous myths, legends and fairy tales of different ancient cultures interpreted by Medhananda. He gives us a new key to perceive the hidden messages of wisdom; wisdom in the sense of self-knowledge, an awareness of our different soul forces and their play and movements in us.
We recognise that wisdom is as old as mankind and has expressed itself in an early age through symbols, images, myths, dreams, fairy tales. Medhananda leads us to the psychological truth that all the different persons in the tales are parts of ourselves. When the myths speak of gods or creators, kings, princesses, animals or castles, fire and snow crystals, we have to perceive them as different force fields, functions, potentialities and archetypes in us. Instead of taking the stories literally, as fancy imaginations or tales of the past, we learn to understand them as mirrors and expressions of our own multi-faceted consciousness - a consciousness that is based on the oneness of being.
So the potter’s wheel on which the gods fabricate man out of clay can be seen as an image that shows us how self-awareness creates itself on the wheel of life, of death and birth. This new psychological understanding of the ancient texts helps us to deepen our self-awareness, to learn about the possibilities of our consciousness; it helps us to grow and to transform our little ego-formation into a greater self.
In India there is this tale: “The pupil observes that his Guru perceives things and events in a different way. So he asks his teacher: ‘Do we live in the same world’? The teacher answers: ‘Yes, but the difference is, that you see yourself as a part of the world and I see the whole world in myself’.”
This book contains a collection of famous myths, legends and fairy tales of different ancient cultures interpreted by Medhananda.
He gives us a new key to perceive the hidden messages of wisdom; wisdom in the sense of self-knowledge, an awareness of our different soul forces and their play and movements in us. We recognise that wisdom is as old as mankind and has expressed itself in an early age through symbols, images, myths, dreams, fancy tales. Medhananda leads us to the psychological truth that all the different persons in the tales are parts of ourselves. When the myths speak of gods or creators, kings, princesses, animals or castles, fire and snow crystals, we have to perceive them as different force fields, functions, potentialities and archetypes in us. Instead of taking the stories literally, as fancy imaginations or tales of the past, we learn to understand them as mirrors and expressions of our own multifaceted consciousness - a consciousness that is based on the oneness of being. So the potter’s wheel on which the gods fabricate man out of clay can be seen as an image that shows us how self-awareness creates itself on the wheel of life, of death and birth.
This new psychological understanding of the ancient texts helps us to deepen our self-awareness, to learn about the possibilities of our consciousness; it helps us to grow and to transform our little ego-formation into a greater self.
In India there is this tale: The pupil observes that his Guru perceives things and events in a different way. So he asks his teacher: ‘Do we live in the same world’? The teacher answers: ‘Yes, but the difference is, that you see yourself as a part of that world and I see the whole world in myself’.”
The articles were first edited by Medhananda in the journal ‘Equals One: ‘The Gospel of Herakles’, ‘The Birth of the Golden Child’, ‘The Iron Man’, ‘Ganesh, the Elephant God’ under the title ‘Eternal Religion’ (in 1975), ‘What is Wisdom’, ‘The Gospel of Thomas’ and ‘Briar Rose’ under the title ‘Wisdom’ (in 1968) and The Book of Gates’ under the title ‘Optimism’ (in 1968).
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