Allegories

Two thirty. Strangely, now I’m back to the old dichotomy of good against evil, no matter what cognitive therapy had to say about it. Aaron Beck promotes the shades of gray rather than black and white, but life may be more like Christianity than he realizes. How can we have morals without the precept of smiles and frowns, of positive and negative, of good and bad? LOTR is a moral teacher, like most great literature. Monochromatic thinking about conduct is an ineradicable part of human nature. I left cognitive therapy behind long ago and just trusted the Vraylar for the psychosis. With grayness, there’s no direction one way or the other. With that, one might as well drink his life away. But I don’t. I analyze the allegory of Moby Dick and its similarities to LOTR and Star Wars, seeking a common Christian thread. So far it has borne fruit. What are the stories we tell about if not morality? In the time of Christopher Marlowe they had what were called morality plays, and they were always allegories of good and evil. Doctor Faustus was one of them. But notice that the same kind of allegories are produced by human imaginations by the millions now as ever before. They come about in the face of evidence based therapy, the Aaron Beck school. Why? It is an irrepressible human instinct to believe in good and evil and live our lives accordingly. The old stories are ever being made new again and again, spontaneously from the human spirit. I can’t agree with CBT anymore, knowing what I know about our mythologies and religions. Grayness and Christianity contradict each other and don’t belong in the same paradigm. For now, anyway, the latter has triumphed in my soul.

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