This point is tremendously important. Many of the images-which in our religion are dogmatically affirmed as having had historical reality-are very difficult today to interpret in historical terms. For example, the Assumption of the Virgin or the ascension of Jesus to heaven both lead us to a problem: where is heaven? Somewhere up in the sky? Our contemporary cosmology does not permit us to entertain that thought very seriously. We have a collision between these articles of faith and the historical and phys- ical sciences, which we have to admit are thing that we live by from day to ruling our lives, giving us every- day. This collision has destroyed people’s

belief in these symbolic forms; they are rejected as untrue. Now, since the primary truth is not the historical but the spiritual ref erence of these symbols, the fact that historical evidence refutes these myths on the level of objective reality should not relieve us of the symbolnd they symbols stem from the psyche, they speak from and to the spirit. And they are in fact the vehicle of communication between the deeper depth of our spiritual life and this relatively thin layer of consciousness by which we govern our daylight existences.

And when those symbols-those vehicles of communication between our greater and lesser selves-are taken away, we are left without an inter- com. This split leaves us schizoid; we live in a world up in the head, and the world down below is quite apart. We speak of schizophrenia when people, split in half like that, crack up: they plunge back into the night sea of the realities down there, which they had not been taught about. They’re terrified-by demons.

Myths derive from the visions of people who have searched their own most inward world.

Here is a basic theological formula: a deity is a personification of a spiritual power. And deities who are not recognized become demonic; they become dangerous. When you have not been in communication with them, when their messages have gone unheard or unheeded, and when they do, inevitably, break through, your conscious life is overthrown. There is, literally, hell to pay.

Carl Jung, in his analysis of the structure of the psyche, has distinguished four psychological functions that link us to the outer world. These are sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. Sensation, he states, is the function that tells us that something exists; thinking, the function that tells us what it is; feeling, the function that evaluates its worth to us; and intuition, the function that enables us to estimate the possibilities inherent in the object or its situation.Feeling, thus, is the inward guide to value; but its judgments are related normally to outward, empirical circumstance.

The wonderful thing about symbology is that it includes all four functions.

When the symbols are interpreted spiritually rather than concretely,then they yield the revelation.

God is not an illusion, but a symbol pointing beyond itself to the realization of the mystery of at-one-ment.