1 result for (book:tps6 AND heading:"jane s note march 8 1981" AND stemmed:frighten)
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Part of me doesn’t want to contend with this material at all but last night I had one of the strangest, quite frightening experiences—all the odder because there are so few real events to hang on to. Anyway early after we went to bed I realized I was in the middle of an odd nightmarish experience, one terribly vivid emotionally, yet with no real story line. I only know that the following were involved: a childhood nursery tale or/and a childhood toy like the cuddly cat doll I had as a child named Suzie that I thought the world of. Anyway, the point was that the story.... and there I lose it; I don’t get the connections. All I know is that I awakened myself crying, my body very sore, sat on the side of the bed and made the following connections from my feelings at the time:
They were these; that the entire world and its organization was kept together by certain stories or one in particular—like the Catholic Church’s; that it was dangerous beyond all knowing to look through the stories or examine them or to look for the truth and that all kinds of taboos existed to keep us from doing this, since.... since on the other side so to speak there was an incomprehensible frightening chaotic dimension, malevolent, powers beyond our imagining; and that to question the stories was to threaten survival not just personally but to threaten the fabric and organization of reality as we knew it. So excommunication was the punishment or damnation.... which meant more than mere ostracism but the complete isolation of a person from those belief systems, with nothing between him or her and those frightening realities.... without a framework in which to even organize meaning. This was what damnation really meant. To seek truth was the most dangerous of well intentioned behavior then.... and retribution had to be swift and sure.
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I equate this with three events: a movie I saw on TV the night before last where Sean Connery sees through the god of his people after reading The Wizard of Oz; a Raggedy Ann doll Rob found in the yard and brought in that reminded me of my old Suzie; and a part of a review I read yesterday on a book about death. The book was based on the idea that nature was against man; and that religion was man’s attempt to operate within that unsafe context. The feelings I was getting went even further, that religion or science or whatever weren’t attempts to discover truth—but to escape from doing so, to substitute some satisfying tale or story instead. And I suppose that if someone persisted long enough, he or she would find the holes in the stories.... and undo the whole works. The idea of the stories was to save each man from having to encounter reality in such a frightening fashion.... the characters in the stories did this for him in their own fashion.... and if you kept it up.... you threatened the fine framework of organization that alone made life possible....