Читать книгу Close to the Bone - Jean Shinoda Bolen - Страница 26

Inanna's fate at this point reminds me of Jesus and the series of betrayals, humiliations, and punishments he suffered on the way to the cross and as he hung from it on Good Friday until he was dead; his body was put in a tomb, hers hung on a hook for three days. When illness strikes, people do feel betrayed and humiliated by their bodies, and pain is pain whether from a whip or being nailed to a cross or from some source beneath our flesh. In the midst of suffering, many people feel like Jesus, alone and in pain, on the cross crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Just as hanging on the cross was not the end of Jesus's story, hanging on a hook was not the end of Inanna and her myth. She too was brought back to life, significantly transformed. In the language of the soul, death is a major, recurring metaphor. On the spiritual journey, death of the old personality is required for an initiation, transformation, rebirth, or resurrection. On the medical journey, patients often feel like Inanna: the hospital feels like an underworld in which they are stripped and humbled, and then unconscious under anesthesia, they literally become a slab of meat on an operating table. Or after a series of tests and treatments, each of which takes them deeper into an unknown, fearful world, patients feel metaphorically left hanging on a hook awaiting news that they can come back to life.

In the bowels of the hospital, or the receding world that illness creates, or in the fearful half-light of the psychological underworld, patients enter the realm of Ereshkigal, when they reach the point of realizing that their old self and old life are dead, at least for now, perhaps forever. For the soul, this can be a turning point: facing the possibility of disability or death can be reorienting, it can bring about a massive change in priorities and bring to the forefront questions of meaning and meaninglessness about how we are living our lives, about what really matters, and whether we matter. For the ego that had maintained the illusion of control over fate, this is often the lowest point. For the person, if ego turns to soul to lead the way through the underworld, there will be unexpected discoveries. For it's not what happens to us, but how we respond that ultimately matters and shapes who we are from inside out.