Healing and Hypnotherapy Volume 5, Issue -3, 1 September 2020 | Page 20

“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the
light.”
Long before there were hypnotherapists, there were poets. Poets were
some of the first hypnotherapists, and are still some of the finest. Here
are just a few examples:
Jesus Christ is well-known as having taught in parables (stories), but what
is not as well known is that he was also a poet. Christ’s famous Sermon on
the Mount, in its original language was written in a formal kind of poetry: a
chiasmus. In English, a chiasmus is a very interesting and challenging form
to write, with its repetitive, inverted parallelism, but it works naturally in the
Aramaic and in Hebrew. [1] Unfortunately, most of the poetry has been lost
in translation.
Lao-Tzu, an ancient Chinese mystic and philosopher, best known as the
author of the Tao Te Ching and regarded by some as a the founder of
Taoism, was also a poet. “As with most other ancient Chinese philosophers,
Lao-Tzu often explains his ideas by way of paradox, analogy, appropriation
of ancient sayings, repetition, symmetry, rhyme, and rhythm.” [2]
Among modern poets, there is Khalil Gibran, whose 1923 book of poetic
prose titled The Prophet, gained huge popularity in the 1960s. Gibran is the
third best-selling poet of all time, behind Shakespeare and Lao- Tzu. [3]
Then there is my Rilke, my personal favorite when looking for suggestions.
Maria Rainer Rilke was an accomplished German poet, but he is probably
most widely know and loved for a collection of poetic letters he wrote to an
aspiring poet who sought his advice. A good translation [4] of this small
volume can bring endless amounts of insight and suggestions for all kinds
of presenting issues.
Here are just a few short excerpts from Letters to a Young Poet:
“...many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be
transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important
to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly
uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so
much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it
happens to us as if from outside.” [5]