“Myths, Facts and Healing”
Only myths, and never facts, have the potential to raise our Life Energy. Only myths can help us to love more. I can give you all the facts in the world, and they will not help you to love more. But I can give you one good myth, and you will change.
Artwork by John Diamond, M.D.
I was once working with a woman and her mother. The woman was yelling, “You hate me so much! You did [whatever it was] when I was a child!” and so on, and so on. But then her mother hugged her, and said, “Darling, I love you now!” with such sincerity that the woman instantly changed. She said, “Yes, I see it”—and she really did.
She had been changed not by the facts of what her mother had said, but by the mythology that had been created within her now of this good mother, of this Mother of Love. That was what had produced the change.
Whenever I work with someone, I am trying to help them to become more loving. But it never works with facts. It is always, in one way or another, creating a myth that makes the change—and this is why music and the arts are so important. They never work with facts: instead they create a myth, and it is this, and only this, which can raise the Life Energy of the sufferer.
Excerpt from Art for Healing: Guided Painting Then and Now
