Comparative cultural studies have now demonstrated beyond question that similar mythic tales are to be found in every quarter of this earth.
Traditionally, in the orthodoxies of popular faiths, mythic beings and events are generally regarded and taught as facts; and this particularly in the Jewish and Christian spheres. There was an Exodus from Egypt; there was a Resurrection of Christ. Historically, however, such facts are now in question; hence, the moral orders, too, that they support.
What happens to the children of a society that has refused to allow any such interplay to develop, but, clinging to its inherited dream as to a fixture of absolute truth, rejects the novelties of consciousness, of reason, science, and new facts? There is a well-known history that may serve as sufficient warning.
One of the most interesting histories of what comes of rejecting science we may see in Islam, which in the beginning received, accepted, and even developed the classical legacy. For some five or six rich centuries there is an impressive Islamic record of scientific thought, experiment, and research, particularly in medicine. But then, alas! the authority of the general community, the Sunna, the consensus — which Mohammed the Prophet had declared would always be right — cracked down. The Word of God in the Koran was the only source and vehicle of truth. Scientific thought led to „loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the Creator.” And so it was that, just when the light of Greek learning was beginning to be carried from Islam to Europe — from circa 1100 onward — Islamic science and medicine came to a standstill and went dead; and with that, Islam itself went dead. The torch not only of science, but of history as well, passed on to the Christian West.
In those so-called „developing nations” all social transformation is the result today, as it has been for centuries, not of continuing processes, but of invasions and their aftermath. Every little group is fixed in its own long-established, petrified mythology, changes having occurred only as a consequence of collision; such as when the warriors of Islam broke into India and for a time there were inevitable exchanges of ideas; or when the British arrived and another upsetting era dawned of startling, unanticipated innovations.
What would the meaning be of the word „truth” to a modern scientist? Surely not the meaning it would have for a mystic! For the really great and essential fact about the scientific revelation — the most wonderful and most challenging fact — is that science does not and cannot pretend to be „true” in any absolute sense. It does not and cannot pretend to be final. It is a tentative organization of mere „working hypotheses” („Oh, those scientists!” „Yes, I know, but they found the bones”) that for the present appear to take into account all the relevant facts now known.
What we all today surely recognize is that we are entering — one way or another — a new age, requiring a new wisdom: such a wisdom, furthermore, as belongs rather to experienced old age than to poetically fantasizing youth, and which every one of us, whether young or old, has now somehow to assimilate. Moreover, when we turn our thoughts to religion, the first and most obvious fact is that every one of the great traditions is today in profound disorder. What have been taught as their basic truths seem no longer to hold.
Yet there is a great religious fervor and ferment evident among not only young people but old and middle-aged as well. The fervor, however, is in a mystical direction, and the teachers who seem to be saying most to many are those who have come to us from a world that was formerly regarded as having been left altogether behind in the great press forward of modern civilization, representing only archaic, outlived manners of thinking. We have gurus galore from India; roshis from Japan; lamas from Tibet. And Chinese oracle books are outselling our own philosophers. They are not, however, outselling our best psychologists. And this, finally, is not surprising; for the ultimate secret of the appeal of the Orient is that its disciplines are inward-pointing, mystical, and psychological.
The famous conflict of science and religion has actually nothing to do with religion, but is simply of two sciences: that of 4000 B.C. and that of A.D. 2000.
Societies are not static; nor can the laws of one serve another.
The basic thesis of the so-called Kundalini yoga system elucidated in this fundamental work is that there are six plus one — i.e., seven — psychological centers distributed up the body, from its base to the crown of the head, which can, through yoga, be successively activated and so caused to release ever higher realizations of spiritual consciousness and bliss. These are known as „lotuses,” padmas, or as chakras, „wheels,” and are to be thought of as normally hanging limp. However, when touched and activated by a rising spiritual power called the Kundalini, which can be made to ascend through a mystic channel up the middle of the spine, they awaken to life and shine. The name of this power, kundalini, „the coiled one,” is a feminine Sanskrit noun, here referring to the idea of a coiled serpent, to be thought of as sleeping in the lowest of the seven body centers. In the mythologies of the Orient serpents generally symbolize the vital power that sloughs death, as serpents shed their skin to be (as it were) reborn.
This power is thought of in India as feminine… the feminine, form-building, life-giving and - supporting force by which the universe and all its beings are rendered animate. Sleeping coiled in the lowest of the seven centers of the body, it leaves the other six unactivated. The aim, therefore, of this yoga is to wake the serpent, cause her to lift her head, and to bring her up the mystic interior channel of the spine known as Sushumna, „rich in pleasure,” piercing at each stage of her thrilling ascent the lotus there located. The yogi, sitting cross-legged, erect, holding in mind certain thoughts and pronouncing mystic syllables, will be first concerned to regulate the rhythm of his breathing, inhaling deeply, holding, and exhaling to fix counts: in through the right nostril, out through the left, etc., pervading thus the entire body with pram, „spiritus,” „breath,” the breath of life, until presently the coiled serpent stirs and the process begins.
Now, of course, in order to experience what is before him, the artist has mainly to look; and looking, finally, is an unaggressive activity. One does not say to one’s eyes, „Go out and do something to that thing out there.” One looks, looks long, and the world comes in. There is an important Chinese term, wu-wei,” „not doing,” the meaning of which is not „doing nothing,” but „not forcing.” Things will open up of themselves, according to their nature. And so, just as a god might show himself to the meditating Indian artist, the world shows itself in its inward form to the eye of the Far Eastern.
I am told that in the old days a young person desiring to learn swordsmanship in Japan would be left by the master largely unattended for a time, doing chores about the school, washing dishes, and so on; and every now and again the master himself would come popping out from somewhere and give him a smack with a stick. After a season of that sort of thing, the victim will have begun to be prepared. But that will be of no use to him, either; for when ready for the blow to come at him, say, from over there, he will get it from back here; and next, from nowhere at all. At last the baffled youth will arrive at the realization that he will do best not to ready himself in any specific direction, because if one has a notion of where the danger may be lurking, he will be attentive in the wrong direction. The only protection, then, is to be in a perpetual state of centeredness in undirected alertness, every ready for sudden attack and immediate response.
The sin of inadvertence, not being alert, not quite awake, is the sin of missing the moment of life; whereas the whole of the art of the nonaction that is action (wu-wei) is unremitting alertness. One is then fully conscious all the time, and since life is an expression of consciousness, life is then lived, as it were, of itself. There is no need to instruct it or direct it. Of itself it moves. Of itself it lives. Of itself it speaks and acts.
Since you came to birth in this world at this time, in this place, and with this particular destiny, it was this indeed that you wanted and required for your own ultimate illumination.
And of course, as everybody knows who has ever played at games, the ones that are the most fun — to lose as well as to win — are the ones that are the hardest, with the most complicated, even dangerous, tasks to accomplish. And so it is that artists are generally not content, either in the Orient or in the Occident, with doing merely simple things — and much soon becomes simple for an artist that for the rest of us would be difficult. The artist seeks the challenge, the difficult thing to do; for his basic approach to life is not of work but of play.
Zen
In India two amusing figures are used to characterize the two principal types of religious attitude. One is „the way of the kitten”; the other, „the way of the monkey.” When a kitten cries „Miaow,” its mother, coming, takes it by the scruff and carries it to safety; but as anyone who has ever traveled in India will have observed, when a band of monkeys come scampering down from a tree and across the road, the babies riding on their mothers’ backs are hanging on by themselves. Accordingly, with reference to the two attitudes: the first is that of the person who prays, „O Lord, O Lord, come save me!” and the second of one who, without such prayers or cries, goes to work on himself. In Japan the same two are known as tariki, „outside strength,” or „power from without,” and jiriki, „own strength,” „effort or power from within.” And in the Buddhism of that country these radically contrasting approaches to the achievement of enlightenment are represented accordingly in two apparently contrary types of
religious life and thought.
Jiriki, on the other hand, the way of self-help, own-doing, inner energy, which neither begs nor expects aid from any deity or Buddha, but works on its own to achieve what is to be achieved, is in Japan represented pre-eminently by Zen.
There is a fable told in India of the god Vishnu, supporter of the universe, who one day abruptly summoned Garuda, his air-vehicle, the golden-feathered sunbird; and when his wife, the goddess Lakshmi, asked why, he replied that he had just noticed that one of his worshipers was in trouble. However, hardly had he soared away when he was back, descending from the vehicle; and when the goddess again asked why, he replied that he had found his devotee taking care of himself.
Now the way of jiriki, as represented in the Mahayana Buddhist sect known in Japan as Zen, is a form of religion (if one may call it such) with no dependence on God or on gods, no idea of an ultimate deity, and no need even for the Buddha — in fact, no supernatural references at all. It has been described as:
a special transmission outside the scriptures;
not dependent on words or letters;
a direct pointing to the heart of man;
seeing into one’s own nature; and
the attainment thereby of Buddhahood.
The word zen itself is a Japanese mispronunciation of the Chinese word ch’an, which, in turn, is a Chinese mispronunciation of the Sanskrit dhyana, meaning „contemplation, meditation.” Contemplation, however, of what?
Where are you between two thoughts?
There is a favorite story, frequently told by the Zen masters, of the Buddha, preaching: of how he held up a single lotus, that simple gesture being his whole sermon. Only one member of his audience, however, caught the message, a monk named Kashyapa, who is regarded now as the founder of the Zen sect. And the Buddha, noticing, gave him a knowing nod, then preached a verbal sermon for the rest: a sermon for those who required meaning, still entrapped in the net of ideas; yet pointing beyond, to escape from the net and to the way that some of them, one day or another, might find.
Perfection in life does not exist; and if it did, it would be — not lovable but admirable, possibly even a bore. Perfection lacks personality. (All the Buddhas, they say, are perfect, perfect and therefore alike.)
All my life, as a student of mythologies, I have been working with these archetypes, and I can tell you, they do exist and are the same all over the world. In the various traditions they are variously represented; as, for instance, in a Buddhist temple, medieval cathedral, Summerian ziggurat, or Mayan pyramid. The images of divinities will vary in various parts of the world according to the local flora, fauna, geography, racial features, etc. The myths and rites will be given different interpretations, different rational applications, different social customs to validate and enforce. And yet the archetypal, essential forms and ideas are the same — often stunningly so. And so what, then, are they? What do they represent?
The psychologist who has best dealt with these, best described and best interpreted them, is Carl G. Jung, who terms them „archetypes of the collective unconscious,” as pertaining to those structures of the psyche that are not the products of merely individual experience but are common to all mankind. In his view, the basal depth or layer of the psyche is an expression of the instinct system of our species, grounded in the human body, its nervous system and wonderful brain. All animals act instinctively. They act also, of course, in ways that have to be learned, and in relation to circumstance; yet every species differently, according to its „nature.”
Watch a cat enter a living room, and then, for example, a dog. Each is moved by impulses peculiar to its species, and these, finally, are the ultimate shapers of its life. And so man too is governed and determined. He has both an inherited biology and a personal biography, the „archetypes of the unconscious” being expressions of the first. The repressed personal memories, on the other hand, of the shocks, frustrations, fears, etc., of infancy, to which the Freudian school gives such attention, Jung distinguishes from that other and calls the „personal unconscious.” As the first is biological and common to the species, so this second is biographical, socially determined, and specific to each separate life. Most of our dreams and daily difficulties will derive, of course, from the latter; but in a schizophrenic plunge one descends to the „collective,” and the imagery there experienced is largely of the order of the archetypes of myth.
Now with respect to the power of instinct: I recall once having seen one of those beautiful Disney nature-films, of a sea turtle laying her eggs in the sand, some thirty feet or so from the water. A number of days later, out of the sand there came a little multitude of tiny just-born turtles, each about as big as a nickel; and without an instant’s hesitation they all started for the sea. No hunting around. No trial-and-error. No asking, „Now what would be a reasonable place for me to head for first?” Not a single one of those little things went the wrong way, fumbling first into the bushes, and there saying, „Oh!” and turning around, thinking, „I’m made for something better than this!” No, indeed! They went directly as their mother must have known they all would go: mother turtle, or Mother Nature. A flock of seagulls, meanwhile, have screamed the news to each other, came zooming like dive bombers down on those little nickels that were making for the water. The turtles knew perfectly well that that was where they had to get, and they were going as fast as their very little legs could push them: the legs, by the way, already knowing just how to push. No training or experimenting had been necessary. The legs knew what to do, and the little eyes knew that what they were seeing out in front of them was where they were going. The whole system was in perfect operation, with the whole fleet of tiny tanks heading clumsily, yet as fast as they could, for the sea: and then. . . Well now, one surely would have thought that for such little things those great big waves might have seemed threatening. But no! They went right on into the water and already knew how to swim. And as soon as they were there, of course, the fish began coming at them. Life is tough!
There is another impressive example of the infallible rule of instinct; again of some tiny things just born: a brood of chicks just hatched, some even with fragments of their eggshells still adhering to their tails. If a hawk flies over their coop, they scurry to shelter; if a pigeon, they do not. Where did they learn the difference? Who or what, shall we say, is deciding when such determinations are made? Experimenters have fashioned imitation hawks of wood and have drawn these across such coops on a wire. The chicks all scurry to shelter; but if the same models are drawn backward, they do not.
Both the readiness to respond to specific triggering stimuli and the ensuing patterns of appropriate action are in all such cases inherited with the physiology of the species. Known as „innate releasing mechanisms” (IRMs), they are constitutional to the central nervous system. And there are such in the physical make-up of the species Homo sapiens as well.
This, then, is what is meant by instinct. And if you should still have to be shown, if you are from Missouri and still doubtful of the governing force and wisdom of sheer instinct, just read in any biology book about the life cycles of parasites. Read, for example, about the hydrophobia parasite, and you will ask yourself whether a human being is worthy to play host to such a prodigy. It knows exactly what to do, where to go, and what to attack in the human nervous system, how to get there and just when to get there, to convert what we have been taught to believe is the highest creation of God’s hand into its abject slave, rabid to bite and so to communicate the virus to the bloodstream of the next victim, whence it will proceed again to the salivary glands for the next event.
Now in every human being there is a built-in human instinct system, without which we should not even come to birth. But each of us has also been educated to a specific local culture system. The peculiar thing about man, which distinguishes us from all other beasts of the kingdom, is that we are born, as already remarked, twelve years too soon. No mother would wish it to be otherwise; but so it is, and that is our problem. The newly born has the wit neither of a newly hatched turtle, size of a nickel, nor of a chick with a piece of eggshell still adhering to its tail. Absolutely unable to fend for itself, the infant Homo sapiens is committed for twelve years to a season of dependency on parents or parent substitutes; and it is during these twelve dependent years that we are turned into human beings. We learn to walk as people walk, as well as to speak, think, and cogitate in terms of the local vocabulary. We are taught to respond to certain signals positively, to others negatively or with fear; and most of these signals taught are not of the natural, but of some local social order. They are socially specific. Yet the impulses that they activate and control are of nature, biology, and instinct. Every mythology is an organization, consequently, of culturally conditioned releasing signs, the natural and the cultural strains in them being so intimately fused that to distinguish one from the other is in many cases all but impossible. And such culturally determined signals motivate the culturally imprinted IRMs of the human nervous system, as the sign stimuli of nature do the natural reflexes of a beast.
And so we have this critical problem, as I say, this critical problem as human beings, of seeing to it that the mythology — the constellation of sign signals, affect images, energy-releasing and -directing signs — that we are communicating to our young will deliver directive messages qualified to relate them richly and vitally to the environment that is to be theirs for life, and not to some period of man already past, some piously desiderated future, or — what is worst of all — some querulous, freakish sect or momentary fad. And I call this problem critical because, when it is badly resolved, the result for the miseducated individual is what is known, in mythological terms, as a Waste Land situation. The world does not talk to him; he does not talk to the world. When that is the case, there is a cut-off, the individual is thrown back on himself, and he is in prime shape for that psychotic break-away that will turn him into either an essential schizophrenic in a padded cell, or a paranoid screaming slogans at large, in a bughouse without walls.
Let me now, therefore, before proceeding to an account of the general course or history of such a break-off — the inward journey (let us call it) of descent and return — just say one more word about the functions normally served by a properly operating mythology. They are, in my judgment, four.
The first is what I have called the mystical function: to waken and maintain in the individual a sense of awe and gratitude in relation to the mystery dimension of the universe, not so that he lives in fear of it, but so that he recognizes that he participates in it, since the mystery of being is the mystery of his own deep being as well. That is what the old Alaskan medicine man heard when Sila, the soul of the universe, said to him, „Be not afraid.” For, as beheld by our temporal eyes, nature, as we have seen, is tough. It is terrible, terrific, monstrous. It is the kind of thing that makes reasonable, existentialist Frenchmen call it „absurd!” (The wonderful thing about the French is that they have been so imprinted by Descartes that anything that cannot be parsed to Cartesian coordinates must be absurd. Who or what, however, is absurd, we may ask, when judgments of that kind are set forth as philosophy?).
The second function of a living mythology is to offer an image of the universe that will be in accord with the knowledge of the time, the sciences and the fields of action of the folk to whom the mythology is addressed. In our own day, of course, the world pictures of all the major religions are at least two thousand years out of date, and in that fact alone there is ground enough for a very serious break-off. If, in a period like our own, of the greatest religious fervor and quest, you would wonder why the churches are losing their congregations, one large part of the answer surely is right here. They are inviting their flocks to enter and to find peace in a browsing-ground that never was, never will be, and in any case is surely not that of any corner of the world today. Such a mythological offering is a sure pill for at least a mild schizophrenia.
The third function of a living mythology is to validate, support, and imprint the norms of a given, specific moral order, that, namely, of the society in which the individual is to live. And the fourth is to guide him, stage by stage, in health, strength, and harmony of spirit, through the whole foreseeable course of a useful life.
And now, to say just one more nasty thing about our religious institutions: what they require and expect is that one should not leave the womb that they provide. It is as though young kangaroos should be required to remain in their mother’s pouch.
There was a prophetic medieval Italian abbot, Joachim of Floris, who in the early thirteenth century foresaw the dissolution of the Christian Church and dawn of a terminal period of earthly spiritual life, when the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, would speak directly to the human heart without ecclesiastical mediation. His view, like that of Frobenius, was of a sequence of historic stages, of which our own was to be the last; and of these he counted four. The first was, of course, that immediately following the Fall of man, before the opening of the main story, after which there was to unfold the whole great drama of Redemption, each stage under the inspiration of one Person of the Trinity.
The first was to be of the Father, the Laws of Moses and the People of Israel; the second of the Son, the New Testament and the Church; and now finally (and here, of course, the teachings of this clergyman went apart from the others of his communion), a third age, which he believed was about to commence, of the Holy Spirit, that was to be of saints in meditation, when the Church, become superfluous, would in time dissolve.
It was thought by not a few in Joachim’s day that Saint Francis of Assisi might represent the opening of the coming age of direct, pentecostal spirituality. But as I look about today and observe what is happening to our churches in this time of perhaps the greatest access of mystically toned religious zeal our civilization has known since the close of the Middle Ages, I am inclined to think that the years foreseen by the good Father Joachim of Floris must have been our own.
Are we today turning mythology into fact?
