Mark 5

The Inner Drama of Deliverance and Restoration

Mark chapter 5 reads like a concentrated psychological drama staged entirely within human consciousness. The journey across the sea, the arrival in the region of the Gadarenes, the demoniac from the tombs, the herd of swine, the woman with the issue of blood, and Jairus with his dying daughter are not historical vignettes but symbolic movements of the inner life. Read this chapter as a sequence of shifts in attention, imagination, and belief, and the events describe how the creative power of consciousness acts to transmute inner states into outer experience.

Begin with the crossing of the sea. The sea is the vast, undifferentiated realm of the subconscious. The boat that carries the conscious self from one shore to another represents focused awareness crossing that subconscious. To arrive on the other side is to enter a different region of belief and feeling. The Gadarenes or Decapolis stand for a landscape of public opinion, entrenched attitudes, and learned patterns. When the conscious self disembarks into this terrain, unseen contents of the psyche immediately surface.

Waiting among the tombs is a man with an unclean spirit. Tombs are buried memories, repressed ideas, those parts of experience judged dead or shameful and sealed away. The unclean spirit indicates thought patterns that have become alienated and hostile to the self. They manifest as compulsions, self-harm, nightmarish talk, and behaviors that defy reasoning. That this man lives among the tombs and cannot be bound with chains shows how repressed forces are not controlled by intellect or external restraints. Chains and fetters are attempts at discipline or moralizing that fail because repression is a dynamic energy, not a passive corpse.

The demonized man cries, wounds himself, and lives in isolation on the mountains and among graves. Metaphorically, isolation and self-abuse are the fruit of internal fragmentation. He is outside the community of integrated thought, abandoned to a multiplicity of voices which answer to the question, what name do you bear? When the question is asked, the answer is legion. Legion communicates that the disturbing state is not one isolated belief but many: a crowd of negative self-definitions, anxieties, habitual thoughts, and inner critics. The psyche is riddled with numerous identities that claim control.

The arrival of the creative presence, called Jesus in the narrative, is the entrance of imaginative awareness that has the power to reframe and to command. The interaction between the presence and the demoniac is not exorcism in the sense of ritual removal but a reorientation of which internal agency has authority. The creative presence asks the demonic voices their name to make the multiplicity conscious. Naming is psychological: to bring implicit patterns into conscious articulation is to render them susceptible to transformation. The demand to leave the man is the insistence that identification with those voices cease.

The unclean spirits beg to be sent into the swine. Swine represent the instincts and appetites that are nourished by degraded belief. In the psyche, when negative voices are given permission to move, they seek outlets in lower tendencies, impulses, or behaviors that gratify the old story. The violent rush of the herd into the sea indicates that once the coherent imaginative center refuses to identify with the legion, those patterns rush toward dissolution when cast into the unconscious sea. Drowning the swine is not punishment but the ending of beliefs that were propping up destructive habits. The townpeople see the external consequence and are terrified. They prefer the familiar cost of the swine to the uncertainty of a transformed man, so they ask the presence to depart. This is the inner paradox: transformation frightens the social self because real change threatens the patterns that give a community its identity.

The healed man, clothed and in his right mind, becomes an emissary. He begs to stay with the presence but is told to go home to his friends and tell how compassionate the creative power has been. Psychologically, healing requires reintegration. The impulse to remain in visionary states is natural, yet the instruction to return is the call to bring the revelation into ordinary life. Testimony is practical integration: telling others is giving the transformed identity a social anchoring. The healed person’s evangel is not theological dogma but the simple report that his imagination no longer serves the legion and that his inner life is restructured.

The scene shifts back across the sea and we encounter two intertwined stories: the hemorrhaging woman and Jairus’s daughter. These narratives are braided to show two modalities of inner healing: private, furtive contact with the creative presence, and authoritative, public petition for revival. The woman who has bled for twelve years represents sustained depletion. Blood symbolizes life force; chronic bleeding is the slow leakage of vitality caused by long-held negative assumptions. For twelve years implies a long time invested in a condition that has become identity. She has tried physicians, remedies, and external solutions without relief because the wound is existential, located in belief.

Her solution is imaginative. In the press of the crowd she touches the hem of the garment. This touching is the simplest psychological technique: quiet, concentrated faith in the presence of imagination. The garment stands for the visible outworking of creative awareness; its hem is the boundary between ordinary consciousness and the manifesting power. Her act is clandestine because the release of creative power is intimate; it is a private act of appropriation rather than a public spectacle. Immediately she feels the fountain of her blood dried up. The language translates to the immediate realization, in the bodily sense, that the inner leak has stopped. The phrase that 'virtue went out' from the presence indicates that creative energy responds to focused attention. Conscious contact moves the power within and that movement accomplishes healing.

When the presence asks who touched him, the question is not surprise at a literal touch but an appeal to awareness. The creative power sensed a shift in attention and asked: who has appropriated this reality? The woman comes forward trembling and confesses. She is acknowledged and told that her faith has made her whole. Psychology here is explicit: belief enacted in imagination changes body and circumstance. The scene affirms that private acts of attention can reverse long entrenched loss.

While this is occurring, Jairus, a ruler of the synagogue, comes with urgent public authority. His daughter is at the point of death. He falls at the feet of the creative center and pleads. Authority figures in the psyche are the rational, controlling faculty that sometimes recognizes the need of the soul and petitions for revival. The crowd presses in; as the presence goes to Jairus’s house, the crowd delays and a report arrives: the daughter is dead. The pronouncement of death is the moment a possibility is declared impossible by consensus belief. But the response, be not afraid, only believe, defines the alternative: death is a state of mind, sleep is a metaphor. The creative power reinterprets death as sleep. Awakening is possible not by changing external facts but by a decisive act of imaginative command.

Only three are permitted to enter: Peter, James, and John. Psychologically, the accompaniment of a few trusted faculties matters; selective attention, sustained faith, and witnessing memory are enough. The presence dismisses the theatrical mourning of the crowd, calling it ado. The crowd’s laughter when told she sleeps indicates disbelief in inner revival. He takes the child by the hand and says Talitha cumi. That intimate command, translated, is 'little girl, arise'. It is the precise act of imagination that speaks to an inner function and calls it into activity. The child rises and walks, and is given food. Note the final detail: giving something to eat. Revival is not merely a spectacle; it requires provision. Newly awakened aspects need nourishment and integration. The feeding is the transfer of sustaining belief, habit, and routine to support the reborn state.

Taken together, these scenes depict a dynamics: attention crosses into the shadowed regions of the psyche; the creative presence addresses and names fragmentation; multiplicities of negative identity can be dislodged; lowered impulses fed by those identities collapse when the higher imagination refuses identification with them; private acts of faith claim power and cause immediate somatic transformation; public declarations of impossibility can be reversed by commands of waking imagination; and integration requires testimony and nourishment.

The chapter also underscores human resistance. The people prefer the herd of the old way to the changed man; they fear disruption and deny the power that healed. Likewise, the crowd laughs at the idea of revival. Transformation often meets social skepticism because it undermines the common ledger of identity. The prescription implied is simple and interior: operate the imaginative faculty as command and witness change by living it and speaking it. The creative power is not an external miracle but the organizing faculty of consciousness that, when assumed as sovereign, dissolves the legion and awakens the sleeping parts.

Finally, Mark 5 insists that this power is selective and requires consent. The healed one is told to return and report; the woman confesses and is affirmed; the raised girl is instructed to be nourished. The pattern is clear: imagination creates reality when attention names and claims it, when belief acts like a sovereign within, and when renewed parts of the psyche are treated with the care necessary for lasting integration. This chapter is a manual for inner transformation, staged as story, showing how the inner theater of consciousness births the outward world.