Now, when individual persons are responsibly responsive, perhaps we could say that those persons were moved. However, for individual persons to be responsibly responsive, they need to engage in discernment of spirits within their psyches that are prompting them to move. But such discernment of spirits involves a measure of separation of the person from the known (the spirits in his or her psyche that are known to be prompting him or her).
Now, in the book NOT A SERPENT, NOT A ROPE (Juhu, Mumbai: Zen Publications, 2015), Clifford W. DeSilva, a former Jesuit who was born and raised in India, follows in the footsteps of his former teacher and Jesuit friend Anthony de Mello, who was also born and raised in India.
In my estimate, Anthony de Mello's most important book is his posthumously published book of meditations titled THE WAY TO LOVE (1992). (The original title of the edition published in India in 1991 is CALL TO LOVE.)
The Buddha was also born and raised in India, and so was Jiddu Krishnamurti. So let's hear it for India: "Bravo! Bravo! Bravo! Thank you, India, for the cultural riches you have bestowed on the world, including the Buddha, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Anthony de Mello."
I would categorize Clifford W. DeSilva's first book as a self-help book in spirituality. I would also categorize the SPIRITUAL EXERCISES of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Roman Catholic religious order known as the Jesuits, as a self-help book in spirituality.
At a certain juncture, Clifford DeSilva quotes something that Anthony de Mello says in the introduction to his book of stories titled THE PRAYER OF THE FROG (1987): "Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, says that if you listen carefully to a story you will never be the same again. That is because the story will worm its way into your heart and break down barriers [inside you] to the divine [inside you]" (quoted by DeSilva on page 22).
Note how Anthony de Mello's imagery of "worm its way" is connected with Clifford W. DeSilva's imagery of a serpent.
Concerning the so-called divine inside each human psyche, see Mircea Eliade's famous book THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE: THE NATURE OF RELIGION (1959). All people at all times live in the ordinary experience of the profane world. However, at times, certain people have the extraordinary experience of the sacred within their psyches (also known as the divine). Perhaps you've heard of the conceptual construct known as the Child Within (also known as the Inner Child). In a similar way, we can speak of the sacred within our psyches.
In the preface to the English edition of his novel THE FORBIDDEN FOREST, translated by Mac Linscott Ricketts and Mary Park Stevenson (1978), Eliade discusses how intensively he studied Sanskrit at the University of Calcutta from January to the beginning of the summer of 1929.
So let's hear it for India again: "Bravo! Bravo! Bravo! Thank you for all of your cultural riches, India, including Sanskrit and the Mahabharata."
The Mahabharata is the great oral epic of India -- comparable to the oral epics the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY that Havelock writes about so perceptively in his fine book PREFACE TO PLATO (1963).
Listening carefully to a story involves holistic participation. For this reason, in the book THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT: THE MEANING AND IMPORTANCE OF FAIRY TALES (1976), Bruno Bettelheim urges parents and other adult caregivers to tell young children stories orally -- instead of reading them stories from a book. In Bettelheim's estimate, when adults read aloud from a book to a child, their voices do not have the evocative resonance that their voices have in oral storytelling unmediated by a text. Of course professional actors are trained to read texts aloud evocatively in what we refer to as oral performance.
But both Anthony de Mello in THE PRAYER OF THE FROG (1987) and Clifford W. DeSilva in NOT A SERPENT, NOT A ROPE (2015) present us with stories to read and contemplate in the hope of perhaps evoking a delayed response in our psyches. Granted, we could read their stories out loud to ourselves. But the live oral performance of the Mahabharata, or the live oral performance of the Homeric epics, or the live oral performance of the ancient Greek tragedies in Athens, came closer to the evocative quality that Bettelheim attributes to live oral storytelling than reading their stories out loud to ourselves would.
It takes two to Tango.
No doubt the psychodynamic that it takes two to Tango was involved in the ancient healing practices that Pedro Lain Entralgo discusses in his book THE THERAPY OF THE WORD IN CLASSICAL ANTQIQUITY (1970).
No doubt the psychodynamic that it takes two to Tango is involved in all forms of talk therapy today and in all forms of spiritual direction -- when the two persons involved have a certain rapport with one another.
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