dancer to god

we have no problem nowadays seeing that the God-centered metaphysical universe of the religions suffered not so much an evaporation as a translocation. it was interiorized. we live in the translation, where what had been religious and centered on God is psychological and centered on an idea of the self -- albeit a self that remains a measureless if not infinite question mark.

nothing disrupted the basic arrangements. the translation was first class. an ordinary ego still has to sleep and wake with some other more or less articulate personality hidden inside it, or beneath it, who carries on, just as before, living its own outlandish life, and who turns out, in fact, to be very like the old poetic self: secularized, privatized, maybe only rarely poetic, but recognizably the same, mostly incommunicado, keeper of the dreams.

psychoanalysis redrafted the co-tenancy contract in the new language. it confirmed this other self in always possessing superior knowledge about what is happening and will happen to the creature in which it dwells; and, more important, and reintroducing with the heady higher gyroscope of a sacred creation, this other self represents and even contains in its vital and so to speak genetic nucleus, the true self, the self at the source, that inmost core of the individual which the Upanishads call the divine self, the most inaccessible thing of all.

the most ancient and formerly divine law of psychodynamic states:
any communion with that other personality, especially when it does incorporate some form of the true self, is healing, and redeems the sufferings of life, and releases joy.

one further well-worked law concerns the inevitability with which the true self, once it is awakened, and no matter how deeply and silently buried in the bones it may be, will always try to become the conscious center of the whole being.