Sutranovum Institute
The focus of wisdom and love is undoing illusions. As we grow we plan to create an institute that focuses on extolling the ideas we stand for. This section will expand as our vision develops, but the essential logic is covered below in the section on raising your inner child.
"MOYERS: Why myths? Why should we care about myths? What do they have to do with my life?
CAMPBELL: My first response would be, "Go on, live your life, it's a good life--you don't need mythology." I don't believe in being interested in a subject just because it's said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow or other. But you may find that, with a proper introduction, mythology will catch you. And so, what can it do for you if it does catch you?
One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We're interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour. It used to be that the university campus was a kind of hermetically sealed-off area where the news of the day did not impinge upon your attention to the inner life and to the magnificent human heritage we have in our great tradition--Plato, Confucius, the Buddha, Goethe, and others who speak of the eternal values that have to do with the centering of our lives. When you get to be older, and the concerns of the day have all been attended to, and you turn to the inner life--well, if you don't know where it is or what it is, you'll be sorry."
From the PBS Series, The Power of Myth
Something to remember here:
The lesson of the Jungian Institute...
Carl Jung did not want to set up the Jungian Institute. He let it happen around him. He neither pushed for it nor tried to stop it from forming. But when it did get set up it came with all kinds of challenges because the people who were teaching and studying in the institute were trapped in all kinds of projected complexes. Many of the lecturers were women and that was really groundbreaking for the day. But their egos would get in the way. Some of them couldn't even be in the same building at the same time and if they were their dogs would fight with each other. And all this is in one of the world's elite psychotherapy institutes.
This is a common problem in the world. Jung himself was trapped too. We all are or we wouldn't be here. Decades later, because of these inherent complexes, born of unconscious projections that were not ready to be seen through and dissolved, the institute split into two different factions. Such rifts are rife in the world. Academies, institutes, churches, and offices all have their cliques and petty mentalities vying for power and control over others. That is the nature of insecurity.
The landscape is no different today. Peter Kingsley, one of the most respected mystic scholars of the day, has poopooed many in the psychotherapy profession for being up their own asses full of themselves and lost in their psychological complexes; he might just be right. And lots of people got offended for what he said. Who knows if he was right? Who knows if he is wrong? But what is definitely true is this:
Psychotherapy is about ending the illusionary self that gets offended.
Living right ways up in an upside down world demands seeing through what condemns self or others in ourselves.
What would a Sutranovum Institute look like?
It would focus on these perennial issues clarified above. But, how would it function? What purpose in terms of outward goals would it serve? The inner purpose is clear but the answers to the other questiosn we do not know.
Kenneth Wapnick's teachings remain profoundly inspired. As do the schools that Krishnamurti set up. Ramana Maharshi was enlightened but he refused to take on the moniker of "teacher." Still, people became lifted in his presence. And there is that old story about the devil wherein he is walking with a friend and they both witness a man picking up a piece of the truth. The devil's friend says: "Your racket is up now! See what just happened." And the devil smiles whimsically and says: "Don't worry! I will just get them to organise it." This relates to the complexes that come with our unquestioned projections.
"While truth is simple, it must still be taught to those who have already lost their way in endless mazes of complexity. This is the great illusion.
The process of psychotherapy, then, can be defined simply as forgiveness, for no healing can be anything else. The unforgiving are sick, believing they are unforgiven. The hanging-on to guilt, its hugging-close and sheltering, its loving protection and alert defense,—all this is but the grim refusal to forgive.
Sickness takes many forms, and so does unforgiveness. The forms of one but reproduce the forms of the other, for they are the same illusion. So closely is one translated into the other, that a careful study of the form a sickness takes will point quite clearly to the form of unforgiveness that it represents. Yet seeing this will not effect a cure. That is achieved by only one recognition; that only forgiveness heals an unforgiveness, and only an unforgiveness can possibly give rise to sickness of any kind.
This realization is the final goal of psychotherapy. How is it reached? The therapist sees in the patient all that he has not forgiven in himself, and is thus given another chance to look at it, open it to re-evaluation and forgive it. When this occurs, he sees his misperceptions/sins as gone into a past that is no longer here. Until he does this, he must think of evil as besetting him here and now. The patient is his screen for the projection of his misperceptions/sins, enabling him to let them go. Let him retain one spot of misperception in what he looks upon, and his release is partial and will not be sure.
No one is healed alone. This is the joyous song salvation sings to all who hear its voice. This statement cannot be too often remembered by all who see themselves as therapists. Their patients can but be seen as the bringers of forgiveness, for it is they who come to demonstrate their sinlessness to eyes that still believe that sin/misperception is there to look upon. Yet will the proof of sinlessness, seen in the patient and accepted in the therapist, offer the mind of both a covenant in which they meet and join and are as one.
Psychotherapy Pamphlet, A Course in Miracles
Raising a Happy Inner Child
Abuse of authority goes on across all fields of endeavour; when you travel the planet you see so much corruption and deceit: in government, in organized religion, in commercial activity, in education. It is a story as old as the hills. Birthing a child into such a world, in the context of such horrors, is an act of courage. Birthing our innocent inner child is also an act of courage. It demands ending the attack and defence thoughts in the mind that are the engines of conflict. Everyone in search of the truth of their real nature must confront this. So much conditioning must be undone to navigate such an ocean of change. And everyone, whether consciously or unconsciously, does seek this transformation.
Each of us has this innocent happy child inside. Psychological maturity, not in the sense of one school of psychotherapy or another, nor the sense of one religious perspective or another, beyond all the veils of cleverness and delusion, universally, and actually, means awakening to this inner child; a child that cannot be hurt and cannot take offence, who has no interest in being offensive, who is supremely wise, rooted in the happiness of being and living in the present. Such a child of innocence embraces intelligence as it is needed to heal trauma, to come to innocence. And this intelligence is much more than intellect for it involves the fusion of love, reason, innocence and vision.
Awakening to the simplicity of our hidden innocence and weeding out the mind that is a victim and which victimises - uprooting the dominating narrative of such a mind - means a radical transformation of consciousness which is a supremely complex task. We must see through so much propaganda, indoctrination and educated ignorance, through our unquestioned prejudices and tendencies to find this all-encompassing quality of love at the very heart of our nature. We must throw out our personal history and be present, free of petty guile and a litany of grievances, while, at the same time, handling the facts of our situation.
Life for most human beings is quite challenging. It comes with pain and suffering and questions arise in response to this suffering. The right questions asked in the right way can open doors to deep and enriching meaning. This is the focus of sutranovum: to support such approaches. This is its primary goal. Yet we must be very careful about this: for the primary cause of disorder in our lives is the seeking of reality promised by others. If people had really understood the Buddha there would be no Buddhism. Yet the human being gets trapped in thought and tradition. Manmade laws and beliefs are needed to police the neurotic mind of man. To cut out the neurotic fearful mind we must embrace wisdom, we must end insecurity in the mind.
That is a very challenging problem because insecurity is such a clever master of disguise. Cut off one head of falsity and another more subtle one then sprouts up in its place. The world doesn’t care about you. It cares about its vested interests. And the mind of the human being is so pressured and distracted. However, all of this must be seen to crack the puzzle of love. These are not judgements; they are facts.
There is a way out of the insanity and the focus of sutranovum is to be a media company, an educational platform and a designer brand that supports such a focus.
Ultimately, we are a catalyst for holding a light up to the darkness of fear in the mind, for that is the way of love - to kindle the flame of who you really are, so that you might be a light to yourself in a world that has lost contact with meaning.
“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”
Socrates
