First Posted on January 31, 2012 by alisonball
Last year I attended as I often do, the Open Day of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society. The speakers I hear at their meetings are often the most inspirational I ever hear both in terms of their thoughfulness and the range of learning. On this particular day last year, the Sydney Psychoanalyst Dr. John Mc Lean was on the list of speakers and I know that I have always found listening to him extremely valuable. However, this time I was most sceptical as to whether his topic would be of much interest to me as he was talking about Mythology, Hindu gods and the like. When it comes to those subjects I often turn away but once again I was surprised and found a lot of interest and pleasure in hearing Dr. Mc Lean’s ideas.
If I understand the situation correctly, he has been associated with joint ventures with the Indian Psychoanalytical Society so began to go to art galleries and museums in India. This fostered an interest in the subject, the universality of the Mythology and he has done a lot of thinking regarding the links to psychoanalytic thinking. For the first time ever, I began to get an inkling of the richness involved and got a tiny window into the many gods and the stories surrounding them.
Then over the early part of January this year I have been in Bangkok and in the middle of my trip, visited Cambodia in particular to see the ancient ruins of the temples at Angkor Wat and surrounds. I was most fortunate to have an excellent guide who had been a teacher and had quite extensive knowledge of the stories surrounding the temples- the stories told in the reliefs along many of the walls, the inscriptions, and the statues of the various deities , kings etc. It seems that the religion of the Khmer was largely infulenced by Hindu India with the later addition of Buddhism. The general feeling was of the similarities too of visiting Stone Henge or the ancient ruins in Rome etc.
I still feel most decidely ignorant on the subject but loved various aspects of the temples. The sheer scale and size of some of these temples rightly qualifies for the over used description of “awesome”. I came away quite often speechless after trying to take in the workmanship, the labour over thousands of years and what was clearly the opulence of what once was there. I loved best of all the walls at the smaller and oldest Roulos group of temples that were covered in Sanscrit. Oh to be a Sanscrit scholar who could read these walls- the temples there having been built in the 800′s.
And I loved the stories told in the stone reliefs along walls in Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat where for instance one depicted the thirty-two punishments in hell. And everywhere, as in Bangkok there were Buddahas by the hundred- similar to Italian cities where there are multiple “Mary and Child” or “Christ on the Cross” images.
We humans have clearly always had that universal need to have our gods and dieties; our heaven and hell. I was reminded of a lecture in a subject in my Arts degree many years ago in my most loved subject called “The Morality of Power”. What does religion give us? It gives us rules to live by, someone or something greater than ourselves to believe in, stories that make sense of our world and our lives and, most seductive of all, the promise of an after-life.
I think somehow feeling like we have answers to these matters gives us some sense of having at least some control over our own lives.