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A few words about Avaton

Henry Miller

“Probably the most perfect place on earth I’ve seen to date. The day is beautiful to a superlative degree, the blue sky even more electric than usual, the hills cut the sky with their edge…

I think of my psychoanalyst friends – Otto Rank, Dr. Renee Allende, Dr. E. Graham Howie; I think of Jung, Freud, Steckel, and others. They work only with the wreckage of humanity, with old shit and remnants, with body trunks and severed heads.

In Asclepius’ time man was still a single being. You approached it through the spirit. Body and spirit were one. The key was metaphysics, the opener of the soul.

Today not even the greatest psychoanalyst cann’t restore to man what he has lost. Every year there should be a congress of physicians in Epidaurus. First the doctors would have to be cured! And this is the place for healing. First I would give them a month of total silence, total relaxation. I would ask them to listen to the birds or the sound of goat bells or the rustling of leaves. I would have them sit in the huge theatre and meditate – not on disease and its prevention but on health, which is every human being’s right. I would ban cigars, the heavy cigars of the Freudian school, and above all books. I would recommend the cultivation of a state of superior and blissful ignorance. I would give everyone a rosary, a gift. And grapes warm from the glow of sun.

Then the shepherd would come with a broken flute and play some furious oriental notes…”

Henry Miller, 1939.

First Impressions of Greece“.

What do you think the avaton is? The dictionary tells us the following: avatos -η -ο [ávatos] : 1. (Of a place or space) that cannot be traversed; impassable, inaccessible: impassable land. Avaton was called in antiquity the final destination of a patient who resorted to Asclepios for treatment. There, and after he had performed all the proper procedures to qualify for entry into the sacred space (fasts, purifications, libations, sacrifices) and after he had successfully passed all the tests set by the priests/physicians, then and only then was he entitled to pass through the abaton to taste the final stage of initiation. The aim of initiation was to bring about insight, that is, enlightenment about the treatment that a patient should follow in order to regain health. The onar was a dream coming from a god (according to Artemidorus etiomaticon or theopempton), usually from Asclepius or his assistants, containing the specific “recipe” for the restoration of health. The sense of ‘finding’, of insight, of enlightenment was the common denominator of this experience. Enlightenment was therefore the means to reach ecstasy, healing and catharsis.

Is there anything beyond the abyss? One might say the sanctum sanctorum, that is, that part of the temples to which access was not permitted except to the penitent initiates.

In my opinion, the “avaton” is not on the top of the highest and most inaccessible mountain, nor on the deepest cliff of the deepest ocean. The avaton is within us, it is an inner state that we could reach (i.e. access) if we enter into altered states of consciousness. Hypnoscopesis is perhaps today the state most akin to the ancient practicce of enkoimisis. By using hypnoscopesis we may be able to bypass the impassable and then access images, experiences and emotions that do not relate to our current biography but, if I may say so, to our psychography. In ancient times it was the initiates and overseers who had access to the primordial knowledge of the eternal cycle of life, death and rebirth. Today, in the age when the dictatorship of rationalism reigns supreme and the spirit of “enlightenment” prevails, there is no room for the concepts of soul and spirit. In fact and in my opinion, the Enlightenment should be called endarkenment because it dogmatically rejected the ancient knowledge of the existence of the soul and its recuperation. The Eleusinian Initiates knew what existed beyond their limited senses, they knew what death was and what the afterlife was. Our ancestors knew what was beyond the abyss. The question is what are we doing about this?

Many people ask me what that is in my own healing technique. So basically I activate an internal ‘search engine’ that identifies the source of the client’s problem. If and when the root cause of the problem is identified, then I can move on to the next step, i.e. reprogramming the “internal software”, essentially removing the influence of our “limiting beliefs”. The truth is that I have a deep trust in the human body’s ability to heal itself. Colleagues call my new space a “sleep-in room” because the process I follow resembles the enkoimisis practiced in ancient times in the abaton of Asclepios, dreaming chambers and necromancy practices. I think that my colleagues are exaggerating, I wish we could even slightly reproduce what was done during the initiation. I hope that one day we will be able to reproduce exactly that. That to me is a dream to come true.

Traditional psychotherapy is euphemistically called that. Psychotherapists by definition do not accept the existence of the soul. They regard the psychic world as a derivative of biochemical and bioelectric processes of the brain. As long as psychic manifestations are considered epiphenomena then psychotherapy has no hope of reaching the essence of human existence. Would you ever go to a cardiologist who did not believe in the existence of the heart? A dentist who doesn’t believe in the existence of teeth? Of course not! Psychology has trapped itself since the 19th century in a reductionist model overlooking surprising manifestations of the human psyche. In order to resemble and imitate the “robust” natural sciences, it put on blinders and refused to see phenomena that are known and mentioned in all the written traditions of all cultures that have left their footprints in time. And in order to exorcise them even further, it baptized them as parapsychological phenomena and left some persistent “crankies” to deal with them. Unfortunately, however, even these crankies are not so concerned with the question of the survival of human consciousness and the soul after physical death.

So that’s why we regression therapists are placed in the “box” of alternative therapies, because we are considered “metaphysical” by the establishment. We are not only concerned with the present existence, but also with what happened before our incarnation and what happens after it, but to them all these are trivial pursuits.

Not to be unfair and not to be misunderstood, of course psychotherapists help their patients and get them out of dead ends, it’s just that their arsenal is limited only to approach through reason and the cognitive processes. But in my opinion this is not enough, it is like having two hands but using only the right one because that is what I write with. And of course not everything can be reduced to the usual suspect either, that notorious “childhood trauma” or “parental responsibility”. One really has to wonder why we should be so mutilated when we have so many more avenues of access to the subconscious at our disposal.

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