A Joseph Campbell

Companion:
Reflections on the Art of Living
Edited by Robert Walter

Conceived by Diane K. Osbon

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF JOSEPH CAMPBELL

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A Joseph Campbell Companion:
Reflections on the Art of Living

Copyright 1991, Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF.org)

This electronic edition, copyright © 2011, Joseph Campbell Foundation
Published by Joseph Campbell Foundation

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ISBN 978-1-61178-006-2
 Table of Contents
Foreword

In the Field

Living in the World

Coming into Awareness

Living in the Sacred

About the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell

About Joseph Campbell

About Joseph Campbell Foundation

 Foreword to the Electronic Edition

W ELCOME to the first electronic edition of one of

Joseph Campbell's most popular works. A Joseph
Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of
Living has long been one of our favorite Campbell titles, and
it is perennially one of this quotable man's most quoted.
This book was drawn from transcripts of a month-long
series of workshops that Joseph Campbell gave at the
Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California in March, 1984—the
year of his eightieth birthday. The idea for the book was
conceived by workshop attendee Diane K. Osbon in 1990,
some three years after Campbell died. The text was edited
into its present form by longtime Campbell editor and JCF
president Robert Walter.
Filmed segments from this same month-long celebration
of Campbell and his work are available in The Hero's
Journey, which is available as part of the Collected Works of
Joseph Cambpell series in both video and print formats.
A Joseph Campbell Companion was originally published
by HarperCollins in 1991. In addition to this edition, the
book is currently available in a paperback edition published
by HarperPerennial.
This electronic edition was published in August, 2011. It
contains the complete text of the original print edition, with
some minor changes in style and spelling, except for an
introduction to the print edition, which has been omitted.
The photograph used in the cover art of a
yamabushi conducting a Shintō fire ceremony was taken by
Joseph Campbell in Kyōto, Japan in 1956.
Campbell intended that his essays spark thought and
discussion. To comment or discuss this book locally, we
encourage you to find one of our local Mythological
RoundTable® groups, meeting regularly in small towns and
big cities around the globe. To discuss mythology,
psychology, religion, art, and just about everything else
under the sun (or over it) with readers from around the
world, visit the Conversations of a Higher Order, the on-line
forums for Joseph Campbell Foundation. The [Discuss] links
at the end of each chapter lead directly to a forum
dedicated to the discussion of this book.
We want to take this opportunity to thank you for
maintaining this ebook for your personal use.
If you have received this ebook gratis, we hope that you
found it inspiring and thought-provoking. We invite you join
our associates in supporting our on-going efforts to bring
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David Kudler, Managing Editor

Mill Valley, California
August 1, 2011
In the Field
T HE privilege of a lifetime
is being who you are.
What you have to do,
you do with play.

Life is without meaning.

You bring the meaning to it.

The meaning of life is

whatever you ascribe it to be.

Being alive is the meaning.

The warrior’s approach
is to say “yes” to life:
“yea” to it all.

Participate joyfully
in the sorrows of the world.

We cannot cure the world of sorrows,

but we can choose to live in joy.

When we talk about

settling the world’s problems,
we’re barking up the wrong tree.

The world is perfect. It’s a mess.

It has always been a mess.

We are not going to change it.

Our job is to straighten out

our own lives.
We must be willing to get rid of
the life we’ve planned, so as to have
the life that is waiting for us.

The old skin has to be shed

before the new one can come.

If we fix on the old, we get stuck.

When we hang onto any form,
we are in danger of putrefaction.

Hell is life drying up.

The Hoarder,
the one in us that wants to keep,
to hold on, must be killed.

If we are hanging onto the form now,

we’re not going to have the form next.

You can’t make an omelet

without breaking eggs.

Destruction before creation.

Out of perfection
nothing can be made.

Every process involves

breaking something up.

The earth must be broken

to bring forth life.

If the seed does not die,

there is no plant.

Bread results
from the death of wheat.

Life lives on lives.

Our own life

lives on the acts
of other people.

If you are lifeworthy,

you can take it.

What we are really living for

is the experience of life,
both the pain and the pleasure.

The world is a match for us.

We are a match for the world.
Opportunities
to find deeper powers
within ourselves
come when life
seems most challenging.

Negativism
to the pain and ferocity of life
is negativism to life.

We are not there

until we can say
“yea” to it all.

To take a righteous attitude

toward anything is to denigrate it.

Awe is what moves us forward.

As you proceed through life,

following your own path,
birds will shit on you.
Don’t bother to brush it off.

Getting a comedic view

of your situation
gives you spiritual distance.
Having a sense of humor saves you.
Follow your bliss.
The heroic life is living the individual adventure.

There is no security
in following the call to adventure.

Nothing is exciting
if you know
what the outcome is going to be.

To refuse the call

means stagnation.

What you don’t experience positively

you will experience negatively.

You enter the forest

at the darkest point,
where there is no path.

Where there is a way or path,

it is someone else’s path.

You are not on your own path.

If you follow someone else’s way,

you are not going to realize
your potential.
Eternity
is a dimension
of here and now.

The divine lives within you.

Live from your own center.

Your real duty

is to go away from the community
to find your bliss.

The society is the enemy

when it imposes its structures
on the individual.

On the dragon there are many scales.

Everyone of them says “Thou Shalt.”

Kill the dragon “Thou Shalt.”

When one has killed that dragon,

one has become The Child.

Breaking out
is following your bliss pattern,
quitting the old place,
starting your hero journey,
following your bliss.

You throw off yesterday

as the snake sheds its skin.
The goal of the hero trip
down to the jewel point
is to find those levels in the psyche
that open, open, open,
and finally open to the mystery
of your Self being
Buddha consciousness
or the Christ.

That’s the journey.

It is all about finding

that still point in your mind
where commitment drops away.
It is by going down into the abyss
that we recover the treasures of life.

Where you stumble,

there lies your treasure.

The very cave you are afraid to enter

turns out to be the source of
what you are looking for.
The damned thing in the cave
that was so dreaded
has become the center.

You find the jewel,

and it draws you off.

In loving the spiritual,

you cannot despise the earthly.

The purpose of the journey

is compassion.

When you have come past

the pairs of opposites,
you have reached compassion.

The goal is to bring the jewel

back to the world,
to join the two things together.
The separateness
apparent in the world
is secondary.

Beyond that world of opposites

is an unseen (but experienced)
unity and identity in us all.

Today, the planet is

the only proper “in group.”

You must return

with the bliss
and integrate it.

The return is seeing

the radiance everywhere.

Sri Ramakrishna said:

“Do not seek illumination
unless you seek it
as a man whose hair is on fire
seeks a pond.”

If you want the whole thing,

the gods will give it to you.
But you must be ready for it.
The goal is to live
with godlike composure
on the full rush of energy,
like Dionysus riding the leopard,
without being torn to pieces.

A bit of advice
given to a young Native American
at the time of his initiation:

“As you go the way of life,

you will see a great chasm.

Jump.

It is not as wide as you think.”

[Discuss]
Living in the World
 G OD had a garden, and he needed a gardener, so he
created Adam. Adam was bored. He was doing the
job, but it was no fun. God saw that he needed
entertainment, and so he created the animals to entertain
him. All Adam could think of to do with the animals was to
give them names.
Then God said, “Well, here goes.” So he put Adam to
sleep and pulled Eve out of his rib—as Joyce said, she was
“the cutletsized consort.” Then the trouble started and we
were in the game.

Male and female, life and death,

good and evil: problems of opposites.

The trouble that began was the discovery of duality.

That was the Fall. There was no real recognition of duality
before this. How did duality take place in this garden? There
were two trees that were forbidden trees. “You can eat the
fruit of any tree in the place but not of this or of that one.”
Tree number one was the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil, of duality. Tree number two was the tree of the
knowledge of eternal life.
The serpent—who represents lunar consciousness and
life in the field of time, where there are pairs of opposites—
saw Eve and thought she must be bored, as most wives are
when their husbands are working all the time. When that
happens, there’s always a friend that appears, and this one
was a little serpent.
The serpent said: “Look there’s an interesting thing
about this tree. Don't mind that old buzzard—have a taste
and you will really know something.” Well, she had a taste,
and when Adam came along, she said, “Look, this is okay.”
So, he had a taste, and then God, who walked in the
cool of the evening in the Garden, saw the pair of them
wearing fig leaves, and he said, “What’s this? You’ve got
leaves on.”

The female activates the male;

then he is the action,
and she has to take the results.

They told God what happened, and that ran the usual
way: the man blamed the woman, and the woman blamed
the snake. God then cursed the lot of them in increasing
degrees. Man got it fairly easy: all he had to do was to work
and sweat. The woman had to bring forth children in pain,
and the serpent had to crawl on his belly for the rest of his
life. God kicked them out of the Garden and put at the gate
two cherubim, door guardians, with a flaming sword
between them. And that’s the explanation of why we’re out
here in the cold and not in the Garden.

Christianity and Judaism

are religions of exile:
Man was thrown out of the Garden.

It seems impossible today, but people actually

believed all that until as recently as half a century or
so ago: clergymen, philosophers, government
officers and all. Today we know—and know right well
—that there never was anything of the kind: no
Garden of Eden anywhere on this earth, no time
when the serpent could talk, no prehistoric “Fall,” no
excl-sion from the Garden, no universal Flood, no
Noah’s Ark. The entire history on which our leading
Occidental religions have been founded is an
anthology of fictions. But these are fictions of a type
that have had—curiously enough—a universal vogue
as the founding legends of other religions, too. Their
counterparts have turned up everywhere—and yet,
there never was such a garden, serpent, tree, or
deluge.7

The serpent
was the wise one in the Garden.
Adam and Eve
got thrown into the field of time.

“…in the beginning this universe was but the Self in

the form of a man. He looked around and saw
nothing but himself.…

“He was just as large as a man and a woman

embracing. This Self then divided himself in two
parts; and with that, there were a master and
mistress.—Therefore this body, by itself, as the sage
Yajnavalkya declares, is like half of a split pea. And
that is why, indeed, this space is filled by a woman.
—He united with her, and from that mankind
arose.…

“She became a cow, he a bull and united with her;

and from that cattle arose. She became a mare, he
a stallion; she an ass, he a donkey and united with
her; and from that solid-hoofed animals arose. She
became a goat, he a buck; she became a sheep, he
a ram and united with her; and from that goats and
sheep arose.—Thus he poured forth all pairing
things, down to the ants.”—Bṛhadāranyaka
Upaniṣad8

Marriage is reconstruction
 of the androgyne.

If you marry only for the love affair,

that will not last.

You must also marry on another level

to reconstruct the androgyne,
to make the perfect whole,
male and female.

…consider the allegory in Plato’s Symposium, where

it is said by Aristophanes—playfully, yet in the form
of the same myth—that the earliest human beings
were “round and had four hands and four feet, back
and sides forming a circle, one head with two faces
looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and
precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members,
and the remainders to correspond.” According to
this Platonic version of the great theme, these
original creatures were of three kinds: male-male,
male-female, and female-female. They were
immensely powerful; and since the gods were in
fear of their strength, Zeus decided to cut them in
two, like apples halved for pickling.… “After the
division the two parts of man, each desiring his
other half, came together, and threw their arms
about one another eager to grow into one, and
would have perished from hunger without ever
making an effort, because they did not like to do
anything apart… : so ancient is the desire of one
another which is implanted in us, reuniting our
original nature, making one of two and healing the
state of man. Each of us when separated is but the
indenture of a man, having one side only like a flat
fish, and he is always looking for his other half.9

When seeking your partner,

if your intuition is a virtuous one,
you will find him or her. If not,
you’ll keep finding the wrong person.
How does one talk about whether or not there is a destiny
between couples? I feel it, but I don’t believe it. In my case,
at Sarah Lawrence College I was teaching all these beautiful
girls, and there were certain classes when I’d feel a little
hopped up. It took me six months to locate the one who was
responsible for this, and when I did, I knew I was gone.
When I first saw the woman who is now my wife, I felt
like that and didn’t know it. She was in the class, and I was
hopped up—who the hell is doing this? Then I finally located
who she was, and there was a whole constellating of
relationship that I didn’t let her know about until I gave the
mildest sign: she was about to leave school, so I gave her a
book: Spengler’s Decline of the West. It was a little present,
but a loaded one.
There was something behind that projection of mine.
Why does this projection come out of me instead of
someone else? Because it’s based upon my deep life
experiences, and that’s where one’s destiny is. It is
structured by your own life. It is my life that put the
projection that way—experiences that I’ve had of the
female, even in my infancy.
So that’s what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the
potentialities of the energies in your own system. The
energies are committed in a certain way, and that
commitment out there is coming toward you.

The projection-making factor [in the male] is the

anima, or rather the unconscious as represented by
the anima. When-ever she appears, in dreams,
visions, and fantasies, she takes on personified
form, thus demonstrating that the factor she
embodies possesses all the outstanding
characteristics of a feminine being. She is not an
invention of the conscious, but a spontaneous
 product of the unconscious. Nor is she a substitute
figure for the mother. On the contrary, there is every
likelihood that the numinous qualities which make
the mother-image so dangerously powerful derive
from the collective archetype of the anima, which is
incarnated anew in every male child. —Jung 10

The woman’s body

is the first world to the newborn.
The child’s projections of anima
will be of her from then on.

Just as the mother seems to be the first carrier of

the projection-making factor for the son, so is the
father for the daughter.…Woman is compensated by
a masculine element and therefore her unconscious
has, so to speak, a masculine imprint. This results in
a considerable psychological difference between
men and women, and accordingly I have called the
projection-making factor in women the animus,
which means mind or spirit.…when anima and
animus meet, the animus draws his sword of power,
and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and
seduction. The outcome need not always be
negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in
love (a special instance of love at first sight). —
Jung11

You know about your anima or animus

by your response to the opposite sex.

There’s a fundamental image in the old Babylonian

mythology of the God Marduk, the great sun god, the shaper
and creator of the world. What does he create the world out
of? His grandmother, Tiamat, who comes as a monster, and
he carves her up.
She would have cut herself up anyhow, but she lets him
become the agent of this deed, because one has to have
that kind of confidence in action out there in order that the
world can live. So, this is a generous woman, who lets the
little boy think he is doing the job, when she could have
done it herself.
That’s the way the animus is: it is a projection of
something the female could do but instead allows the male
to do for her. Though not half so vital a presence, he is a
machine with a body that’s specialized, so he can do these
things. The realization that the power is within you is one
thing; but to realize that the action implied by that power is
more adequately rendered by the male than by you as a
female is to recognize relationship.
When a woman realizes that the power is within her,
then the man emerges as an individual, rather than just
being an example of what she thinks she needs. On the
male side, when a man looks at a woman and sees only
somebody to go to bed with, he is seeing her in relation to a
fulfillment of some need of his own and not as a woman at
all. It’s like looking at cows and thinking only of roast beef.

Falling in love is nature coming in.

It starts with being carried off
by the opposite sex.
It is amazing, but our theologians still are writing of agape
and eros and their radical opposition, as though these two
were the final terms of the principle of “love”: the former,
“charity,” godly and spiritual, being “of men toward each
other in a community,” and the latter, “lust,” natural and
fleshly, being “the urge, desire and delight of sex.”12 Nobody
in a pulpit seems ever to have heard of amor as a third,
selective, discriminating principle in contrast to the other
two. For amor is neither of the right-hand path (the
sublimating spirit, the mind and the comm-nity of man), nor
of the indiscriminate left (the spontaneity of nature, the
mutual incitement of the phallus and the womb), but is the
path directly before one, of the eyes and their message to
the heart.
There is a poem to this point by a great troubadour
(perhaps the greatest of all), Guiraut de Borneilh:
 So, through the eyes love attains the
heart:
For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,
And the eyes go reconnoitering
For what it would please the heart to
possess.
And when they are in full accord
And firm, all three, in the one resolve,
At that time, perfect love is born
From what the eyes have made welcome
to the heart.
Not otherwise can love either be born or
have commencement
Then by this birth and commencement
moved by inclination

By the grace and by command

Of these three, and from their pleasure,
Love is born, who with fair hope
Goes comforting her friends.
For as all true lovers
Know, love is perfect kindness,
Which is born—there is no doubt—from
the heart and eyes.
The eyes make it blossom; the heart
matures it:
Love, which is the fruit of their very
seed.13

Troubadour love was born

with the meeting of the eyes.
The eyes are the scouts of love.
If it is a gentle heart, love is born.
At the moment of the wakening to love, an object,
apparently without, “passes [in the words of Joyce]
into the soul forever.…And the soul leaps at the call.
To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out
of life!”14

Love is not only a life experience,

but also a mystical experience.
In courtly love, the pain of love,
the impossibility of fulfillment,
was considered the essence of life.

For when a heart insists on its destiny, resisting the

general blandishment, then the agony is great; so
too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set
in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses.
Sequences of events from the corners of the world
will draw gradually together, and miracles of
coincidence bring the inevitable to pass.15

The distance of your love

is the distance of your life.

Love is exactly as strong as life.

The loss of a love and the pain of a broken relationship is
an overload of projection. That’s all it is. In youth, your
whole life is this wonderful dream that “This is It”: this
relationship is the fulfillment of my fantasy and I can’t
imagine life otherwise. No argument can quell this feeling of
total projection, of everything in the other one. I guess we
can all recall an episode of an adolescent relationship that
seemed to be the all-in-all and then went to pieces for some
reason.
When a relationship breaks off, it takes a person a little
while to settle and find a new commitment. It’s after the
breakoff, when there is no new commitment and life has
been divested of all of its potentials, that this painful
reaction takes place. For some people this is a dangerous
period.
The psyche knows how to heal, but it hurts. Some-times
the healing hurts more than the initial injury, but if you can
survive it, you’ll be stronger, because you’ve found a larger
base. Every commit-ment is a narrowing, and when that
commitment fails, you have to get back to a larger base and
have the strength to hold to it.
Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a
certain moment in his life,the idea came to him of what he
called “the love of your fate.” Whatever your fate is,
whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It
may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an
opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment—
not discouragement—you will find the strength is there. Any
disaster you can survive is an improvement in your
character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This
is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a
chance to flow.
Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that
the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by
wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have
now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to
you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at
the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws
you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it
comes.

The dark night of the soul

comes just before revelation.

When everything is lost,

and all seems darkness,
then comes the new life
and all that is needed.
Jean and I have been married for forty-six years, and we
have a kind of back and forth of feelings and intelligences,
so that we’ve experienced “the one that is two and the two
that are one.” We do not have to theorize about it, we know
what the hell it means. It’s what Goethe calls the “Golden
Wedding,” and it is beautiful when that feeling becomes a
fact in your life.

Mythology helps you to identify

the mysteries of the energies
pouring through you.

Therein lies your eternity.

It is nice to know enough about mythology to realize

how beautiful such an experience can be. A lot of people
could have the experience and not know they had it. One of
the wonderful things about these age-old realizations that
are constellated in the mythic images is that they let you
know what it is you are experiencing.

Mythology is an organization of images

metaphoric of potentials of experience, action, and
fulfillment of the human spirit
in the field of a given culture at a given time.

The goal of the Golden Wedding is implicit in the first

moment of a relationship. Old age is implicit in the
generation of a child: the child’s old age is there waiting.
Similarly, the older you get, the more you realize that you
are still a kid, and your early experiences are the ones that
are now just opening out. It is one system all the time.
This is one of the big themes in James Joyce’s Finnegans
Wake. He has this image of the heroine, Anna Livia
Plurabelle, as being the personification of the River Liffey
that flows through Dublin.
The River Liffey rises in the hills south of Dublin as a
little girl, those dancing little rivulets that are going to form
the river. Then it flows north to a lovely suburban area,
where you have the mother with her family: the mid-point of
life. The river is the same river. Then it turns and runs
through Dublin and becomes an old, dirty, city river,
carrying all the rubbish of the city back to the ocean, the
Father Ocean. The sun then brings the vapor up to the
cloud, and it’s now a little cloud in the Mother Womb of the
blue sky. It floats over the hill and discharges the rain on the
mountains.

The first half of life

we serve society—engagement.
The second half of life
we turn inward—disengagement.

She is the same person, the same river, all the time.
Joyce makes it so you can feel the old woman in the little
girl and the little girl in the old woman. It's marvelous. And
it’s the way you actually feel as you get older, if you are
paying attention to the experiences you’re having inside.
You know, they say that old people can’t remember
what happened yesterday, but they can remember with
great vividness what happened fifty years ago. This is really
true. In old age, you are relaxed from the immediate
occasion of the day’s summons, and you’re sinking down
into your memory system, which is as alive as can be.
Moments with your parents that were crisis moments are
right there with you. They become important. They’re
determinate moments that help illuminate what the
relationship was.
Sometimes when I look back, I think, “Son of a gun, you
missed everything.” It’s funny how, at a certain age, all I
could see were the negatives in the way I lived: I missed it
that time, or another time I was a stupid boob. Now, I try not
to think about it. I’m wanting to get to heaven, where they
tell me that you don’t remember all those things.

In the age of decrepitude,

you look back over your life
with gratitude,
and forward to death
as a return home.

When Dante passed out of Purgatory, he drank at the

river where all of his sins were wiped out of his memory. The
first river from which he’d drunk forgave all of his sins, but
that wasn’t good enough, because then he still had to forget
them.
In Hinduism, the religion of the god Viṣṇu is that of love. In
the Viṣṇu way of analyzing love, there are five degrees of
love and a model that represents each of these different
stages. The whole discipline of seeking and achieving
illumination can be conducted from the energy of this
channel.
The first degree of love, that of servant to master, is a
low degree of love: “Oh Lord, you are the master. I am the
servant. Tell me what I am to do, and I shall do it.” This is
the way of the religion of law, where there are a lot of
commands—ten commandments, a thousand
commandments, a hundred and ten thousand
commandments. It is a religion of fear. You have not
awakened to the divine presence. It’s out there, and you are
here. This way is principally for people who have not had
much time to devote themselves either to religious thinking
or to love.
The model that represents this first stage is that of the
little monkey king, Hanumān, who is the servant of Rāma. I
don't know whether there is a specific example of this stage
in the Christian tradition, but there doesn’t have to be,
because the Christian tradition is nothing else for most
people: obeying ten commandments here, ten
commandments there.
Degree number two, the relationship of friend to friend,
is the awakening of what we would call love. Here, one
thinks of one's friend more than in the first situation. The
model of this second stage of love, friend for friend, would
be that of the apostles to Jesus, or of anyone who really is a
lover of anything or anybody.
Sri Ramakrishna, a wonderful Hindu saint of the last
century, once asked a woman who said she did not love
God, “Is there nothing in the world that you do love?” And
she answered, “I love my little nephew.” “Well then,” he
replied, “There He is. Your service is there.” Whenever there
is an experience of love as a spontaneous act, rather than
as the following of a command, you have moved out of
stage one and into stage two.
This is worth thinking about. How much religious service
reaches that level? I’d say very little. Yet this is how it ought
to be. Religious experience is greatly lowered when it’s only
a fulfillment of laws and commands, and you are but a
willing or non-willing person doing or not doing as you are
told. When it comes to a spontaneous relationship of love,
you’re in another category.
The third order of love is that of parent for child. It is a
more intimate and intense affair than that of friend to
friend. The image of this third order of love in the Christian
system is the Christmas crib, in which the babe represents
the coming to us of the Christ in our own hearts. This is
symbolic of the awakening in your heart of the realization
that the divine power is within you. It’s the dawn of the true
religious life. You are fostering the spiritual child within
yourself. The model for this stage in the Hindu tradition is
the love of the Gopis for the little boy Kṛṣṇa, the naughty
butter thief.
There’s one very amusing Kṛṣṇa episode, in which his
foster mother is told that her little boy is out-side eating
mud. She goes out to clean the mud out of his mouth, and
when he opens his mouth, he reveals to her all the heavens
and hells and gods and demons in himself. She is , of
course, stunned by this display, and her relationship to him
would be pretty well damaged from then on if she
remembered it, so he very kindly erases it from her memory.
How we know that this event happened—since she was the
only one who had the experience and then she forgot it—I
do not know. But that’s the way religious things are.
The fourth level of love is that of spouse to spouse, and
here there is the business of the androgyne, of identification
with the Other. You have found the god in your heart, and
now the god is found in this intimate and most enduring
kind of relationship. That’s why marriage is regarded, in
such traditions, as a permanent affair. There is only one
chance to have this type of experience. Nuns wear a
wedding ring, because they are brides of Christ. Their
relationship is to this invisible spouse, which, on the spiritual
level, is good enough.
Then we come to the highest order of love, the fifth, and
that is compulsive, uncontrollable, illicit love, where there is
nothing but love and you are totally ripped out of yourself in
relation to God. You are le fou, the crazed one who’s gone
mad with love.

In courtly love,
the man goes crazy, not the woman.
When the man’s been moved like this,
he is capable of incredible feats,
but he’s on a narrow path.

When you follow your passion,

society’s help is gone.
You must be very careful.
You’re completely on your own.

In marriage, one is still harmoniously related to society

and to the neighborhood, but with this fifth stage of love,
everything except love drops away, and there is just a one-
pointed attachment to the other. All else is forgotten, and
nothing else matters. I am sure some of you have had this
experience. If you haven’t, it’s too bad.
In this little scale that the Hindus give—first servant to
master; second, friend to friend; third, parent to child;
fourth, spouse to spouse; and then fifth, just this total love—
one is always in danger of over-valuing the sheer love
experience. You feel that you are losing something if you
pull the experience down, but you have got to pull it down.
All you have to do, really, is know what the possible
relationship can be.
If you’re already married and this rapturous experience
happens, then you’re not going to have a marriage, because
you’ve got to have some other kind of relation-ship to the
person. The way to pull down the sheer love experience is to
take very deep pleasure of some kind in the concrete
aspects of the relationship that you are establishing. Sheer
rapture has no relationship to life, but there are
relationships in life which also have value. Begin to cultivate
those, and this total rapture can be pulled down and not
lost. It’s not necessarily lost. And this is the trick in
marriage.
There are lots of joyful experiences in marriage that
have nothing to do with total rapture, but these experiences
absorb that energy system and make it possible for one to
stay married and not think it’s only about taking out the
garbage. Anyone who gets married is going to have
problems with daily chores, because the problem of a
household is on you whether you are a male or a female.
But you can make wonderful little ritual experiences out of
the things that have to be done, and life can ride beautifully
on these events. I think it is a failure to accept the
tangibilities of two people living together that makes
marriages break up.

Marriage is not a love affair,

it’s an ordeal.
It is a religious exercise, a sacrament,
 the grace of participating in another life.

There is another kind of breakup that takes place late in

marriage, and this one just baffles me: people who break up
when the kids are out of the house and launched. I have
seen this happen in five or six cases to people whom I never
would have thought would have had that happen. They are
well on in their fifties, they have been living together,
they’ve brought up a family together, had life together, and
it goes to pot. The only thing holding them together had
been the children.
This is the failure of what I called the alchemical
marriage. They have had a biological marriage, but there
has been no realization of the interlocking of the psyches
and the mutual education that comes out of that
acquiescence and relationship. It’s a damned shame that
there has been no preliminary notion of what the
possibilities are of that second half of life.

If you go into marriage with a program,

you will find that it won’t work.

Successful marriage
is leading innovative lives together,
being open, non-programmed.
It’s a free fall: how you handle
each new thing as it comes along.

As a drop of oil on the sea,

you must float,
using intellect and compassion
to ride the waves.

It seems to me, you have to think of significant things to

do together that require both of you. The medieval idea of
the gentle heart is very much a part of this. If what you’ve
been calling love is really lust, that is a state alright: one
that can die. Love doesn’t die.

For the gentle heart,

marriage must first be spiritual,
then comes physical consummation.

It's hard to talk about anything as sensitive as this, but

that term “gentle heart” to me is a clue to what love is. The
idea of the gentle heart involves a sense of responsibility to
the person. If that is not there, you have not got love,
you’ve got something else. If that is there, it will last. Lust
doesn’t, no responsibility there. In marriages that go when
the children go, the parents’ sense of responsibility was to
the children, not to each other, and when that was gone, the
link was gone.
Before there are any children or even before there is a
marriage, the crucial question is: “Is this the gentle heart?”
Is the person seeking a possession? Or is the person feeling
a responsibility to the one with whom the relationship is
taking place? If there is feeling of responsibility, then I think
you are in danger.
What I am saying is, not that responsibility constitutes
love, but that love without a sense of responsibility is not
love. It’s taking possession. Are you trying to possess
somebody? Or are you in a relationship?
Talking about what one has done in one’s own life, I
wouldn’t have thought of marrying anyone unless, in
committing myself to the marriage, I understood that I was
taking that person’s life in my hands. I can’t under-stand
that other feeling of possessing somebody. It is a failure to
take responsibility for what the hell you are doing. One can
have love affairs and all the weeping that goes on in all that,
but that is very different from moving into a marriage.
In the first place, you have to know what you are doing.
I think a lot of people don’t know what they are doing, and
they don’t know what they’re doing to that other person. If
you don’t have the maturity to control your compulsive
passions, it seems to me that you are ineligible for
marriage. I think what I am saying probably comes from my
Catholic upbringing. In Catholicism, marriage is a destiny
decision.
Beyond that, there was an omen in our marriage. I had a
little twenty-dollar-a-year house in Woodstock, on a road
called Maverick Road. We were driving up there for our
honeymoon, and as we approached that road, a hearse
came from the other side and drove before us. I had never
seen a hearse in that neighborhood, and I read the omen as
meaning we would be together until death. There it was.
What I see in marriage, then, is a real identification with
that other person as your responsibility, and as the one
whom you love. Committing yourself to anyone, turning
your destiny over to a dual destiny, is a life commitment. To
lose your sense of responsibility to the person who has
given you that commitment because something comes
along that enables you to think, “I'd like to fly off in this
direction and forget that which has already been
committed”—this is not marriage. I do not think you are
married unless your relationship to your spouse has primary
consideration in your life. It’s got to be top.
Compulsive erotic relationships can break in on this.
One is not in perfect control of oneself. I don’t mean that
everything outside of the marriage is lust. It can be love
also. When you cut off a love that comes to you outside of
marriage, you have cut off a part of yourself in the
marriage.
But then you have the problem of relating with
responsibility to that love affair and to the marriage that
you’ve already got as your prime relationship, and that is
not an easy thing to do. You have to develop a number of
different ways of relating to people, not just one.
Sometimes, if there is a mutual sense of the nature of the
relationship and its value, then something can be worked
out; but I would understand that, no matter what happened,
the marriage would have to come back together again. It’s
prime. It’s number one.
If the marriage is toxic, you have to decide whether
there is a possibility of transforming the situation. If you feel
that there can be a transformation, then you can go through
the ordeal of effecting one. You can exert the necessary
energy on the other to effect the transformation. That is to
say, you can, as a kind of personal discipline, increase the
atmosphere of love and confidence and cooperation. On the
other hand, if your life is threatened, or even your love of
life, and the situation cannot be transformed or you don’t
think it is worth the commitment, then you have got to clear
out.
All of this depends, of course, on the individual case and
one’s own judgment. There are no basic rules that can be
applied right across the board because the conflict situation
differs in intensity and in character from case to case.
When I was a student in Germany, an old German
professor said that the way to choose a wife is to look at her
mother. If the mother is a good woman and the kind that
you regard as ideal, then marry any one of her daughters,
and she will shape a life for you.

In marriage,
the woman is the initiator,
and the man rides along.

That idea of the wife being the one that shapes a life for
you is one that I took to heart, and it's a good idea. The
woman is the energy, the śakti, of life. The male must learn
to ride on that energy and not dictate the life. I'm certain of
that. He is the vehicle of the woman's energy. That’s what
he is. When the male won’t disintegrate, you do not have a
marriage. You have a living-together, perhaps, for practical
or erotic reasons, but a marriage requires the dissolution of
the male initiative.

Marriage can’t work without

a psychological guiding of both people.

There must be disintegration of ego

for the two to combine.

The uniting process involves

fermentation, amalgamation, disintegration, and
putrefaction
in their psyches.

When I married Jean, I felt it was a crucifixion. The

bridegroom does go to the bride as to the cross. The bride
gives herself equally. It’s a reciprocal crucifixion.
 In marriage
you are not sacrificing yourself
to the other person.
You are sacrificing yourself
to the relationship.

That’s the problem with getting married. You must ask

yourself, “Can I open myself to compassion?” Not to lust,
but to compassion. I don’t mean you have to have
unconditional love. Committing yourself to a person
unconditionally is very different from having unconditional
love for everybody in New York City. I’m not the Dalai Lama,
who’s suppose to have unconditional love for everything in
the world. Even God doesn’t have unconditional love. He
throws people into hell. I personally don’t even think that
unconditional love is an ideal. I think you’ve got to have a
discriminating faculty and let bastards be bastards and let
those that ought to be hit in the jaw get it. In fact, I have a
list. If anybody has a working guillotine, I’d be glad to give
them my list.

When I look
in the faces of my enemies,
it makes me proud.

I think perhaps unconditional love is the Grail. The Grail

is between God and the Devil, and it does not judge the way
God judges. It goes past God—a pretty big picture. Love,
which is unconditional in marriage, is specific; it is focused.
It is for that person and not for somebody else.
Unconditional love goes right through everything, and it’s a
breakthrough in spiritual life. Do not look for it outside of
yourself. The only place to look for it is inside. If it is going to
be unconditional love, what’s out there doesn’t matter.

The key to the Grail is compassion,

 suffering with, feeling another’s sorrow
as if it were your own.

The one who finds

the dynamo of compassion
is the one who’s found the Grail.

The question is: “Can I open myself to compassion?”

Compassion for me is just what the word says: it is
“suffering with.” It is an immediate participation in the
suffering of another to such a degree that you forget
yourself and your own safety and spontaneously do what’s
necessary.
I think this has something to do with what’s meant by
the image of the Grail, since the thing that effected the
healing of the Grail King was the spontaneous act of asking
that question and not withholding it. Often you feel that
such a spontaneous act will make a fool out of you and so
you don’t do it—I will look like a fool if I do that. That’s the
failure in the Grail Castle.

“How is it possible that suffering that is neither my

own nor of my concern should immediately affect
me as though it were my own, and with such force
that it moves me to action?” —Schopenhauer16

And in the third chapter of Ulysses, Joyce writes that

Stephen, as he walked along the seashore, asked himself
essentially this question: Would I forget my own self-
protection to the extent of risking a swim out there and be
at the mercy of someone whose power out there I wouldn’t
know anything about? When you rescue someone from
drowning, you never know if they’ll pull you down with
them.
 “This is something really mysterious, something for
which Reason can provide no explanation, and for
which no basis can be found in practical experience.
It is nevertheless of common occurrence, and
everyone has had the experience. It is not unknown
even to the most hard-hearted and self-interested.
Examples appear every day before our eyes of
instant responses of this kind, without reflection,
one person helping another, coming to his aid, even
setting his own life in clear danger for someone
whom he has seen for the first time, having nothing
more in mind than that the other is in need and in
peril of his life.” —Schopenhauer17

There was an article in the New York papers a few

months ago about a kid who dove into the Hudson River to
save a drowining dog and then had to be saved himself.
When asked why he’d dove in, he said, “Because it was my
dog.” Then there was the girl who went into a burning
building—twice—to save her little brother and sister, and
when she was asked why she’d done that, she said,
“Because I loved them.”

Such a one is then acting, Schopenhauer answers,

out of an instinctive recognition of the truth that he
and that other in fact are one. He has been moved
not from the lesser, secondary knowledge of himself
as separate from the others, but from an immediate
experience of the greater, truer truth, that we are all
one in the ground of our being.18
 That’s the power. These people didn’t know if they had
the strength or not. It’s not duty, not reckoning. It is a flash:
a breakthrough of the reality of this life that lives in us. At
such moments, you realize that you and that other are, in
fact, one. It’s a big realization.

Survival is the second law of life.

The first is that we are all one.
IT is possible to observe, in the earliest phases of
the development of the infant, symptoms of a
dawning “mythology” of a state beyond the
vicissitudes of time. These appear as reactions to,
and spontaneous defenses against, the body-
destructive fantasies that assail the child when it is
deprived of the mother’s breast.19 “The infant reacts
with a temper tantrum and the fantasy that goes
with the temper tantrum is to tear everything out of
the mother's body. …The child then fears retaliation
for these impulses, i.e., that everything will be
scooped out of its own inside.”20 Anxieties for the
integrity of its body, fantasies of restitution, a silent,
deep requirement for indestructibility and protection
against the “bad” forces from within and without,
begin to direct the shaping psyche; and these
remain as determining factors in the later neurotic,
and even normal, life activities, spiritual efforts,
religious beliefs, and ritual practices of the adult.21

The myths are clues

to unite the forces within us.

And so we have…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.22

Myth makes a connection between our waking

consciousness and the mystery of the universe. It gives us a
map or picture of the universe and allows us to see
ourselves in relationship to nature, as when we speak of
Father Sky and Mother Earth. It supports and validates a
certain social and moral order. The Ten Command-ments
being given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai is an example
of this. Lastly, it helps us pass through and deal with the
various stages of life from birth to death.

We have, consequently, the comparatively complex

problem in educating our young of training them not
simply to assume uncritically the patterns of the
past, but to recognize and cultivate their own
creative possibilities; not to remain on some proven
level of earlier biology and sociology, but to
represent a movement of the species forward.23

Basically, everyone needs a father. The father has a

vital role. The mother represents nature, but the father
introduces the son and daughter to social relationships.

From your mother you get your body.

From your father you get
your role in the social world.

The son has to play a role like that of his father, so the
father is a model, either a positive or a negative one. You
may be disgusted with the kind of life your father lives, but
you have that model, and responding negatively to it will be
your life. If he’s not there, it’s almost impossible to relate
effectively from where you are in your family to the outside
world.
For the girl, the father is the first intimate relation-ship
to the male principle in some way or other. With the father
gone, the mother must play both roles, and I think the child,
down deep, blames the mother for there being no father
there. It’s a sense of “you have deprived me of the person
who would have been absolutely my guide and my
messenger.”
 M ONEY is congealed energy and releasing it
releases life possibilities. You realize that the
possibilities of life in an economically oriented
society are really a function of how much money you’ve got.
On the other hand, money has never meant any-thing to
me. I got back from my student years in Europe three weeks
before the Wall Street crash. The only money I had was what
I’d made playing in a jazz band in college. I’d earned several
thousand dollars—which was a lot in those days—and that
was what I had until it disappeared. I didn’t make another
cent for five years. I found that, if you had no
responsibilities, you could live wonderfully without any
money. In fact, I thought anybody who worked for money
was a fool. I took a vow never to do anything for money.
Now, that does not mean that when I do something for
somebody I don’t ask for money. I want as much as I can
get, but that’s the secondary part of the game. My life
course is absolutely indifferent to money. As a result, a lot of
money has come in by my doing what I feel I want to do
from the inside. If you do that, you are doing things that
attract money, because you are giving life and life responds
in the way of its counterpart in hard coin.

If you follow your bliss,

you will always have your bliss,
money or not.

If you follow money,

you may lose it,
and you will have nothing.

Being as I was, and given the field I was interested in, I

had a certain disdain for people who gave their lives to
making money. Now that I have made money, in dealing
with it I’ve had to be in touch with people whose business is
money, whose whole life has been in that field, and I’ve had
an interesting and surprising experience: I’ve met some
magnificent people.
Money experienced as life energy is indeed a medi-
tation, and letting it flow out instead of hoarding it is a mode
of participation in the lives of others. There’s a beautiful
thing that can grow out of a life devoted to money that
surprised me.
In the living of a life today, money is a facilitating
energy source. With money in the tank like gasoline, you
can get places you other wise couldn’t go.
You’ve got to use the advantages that you have
cultivated. Otherwise, if you drop those, you are going to
have a negative reaction in ten years or so. What I mean is,
as you go from threshold to threshold, it must be the same
you that makes the jump. You don’t go down again, you
start from where you are. From that, more and more will
blossom. The potentialities from your center are used for
further extrapolation in the next venture.
From what I have seen in the history of the arts in New
York, when money is poured on something it flowers. With
money there has to be a flow. I had a beautiful experience of
a man with money when I was a trustee of the Bollingen
Foundation, which was founded by Paul Mellon, an
enormously wealthy man. He and his wife had been in
analysis with Carl Jung when the war came and they had to
leave Switzerland. They asked Jung what they could give
him in the way of a gift to express their gratitude for what
he had done. He suggested they establish a foundation for
the interpretation and study of symbols. That’s what they
did, and it is an example of a lot of money being put to the
right use. The influence of that Bollingen Series on the
literature and science of America has been enormous.
Without that money it would never have happened.
You have to have not only the energy, but also the
capacity of mind that gives the model of the channel—with
that, life really flowers. When you put the money in the
wrong place. it can be devastating. Where is the money
going and where is it coming from in the economy of a
nation, the economy of a city? That’s one of the big
problems. You can turn a flowering culture into a desiccating
culture just by wrong channeling.
I always think you can translate sociology into
psychology. It has to do with energy distribution. What are
you going to do with your money? What factor in your own
consciousness are you going to favor in the spending of the
money? For instance, I have a seventy-five-dollar book
coming out. Some people will say that is expensive, but
those same people will spend one-hundred-and-fifty dollars
to have dinner in a restaurant with another couple. So, is
the money going up here in your mind or is it going down
here in your stomach? Up here, you can’t replace the book I
would have given you; but down here, you could have
bought cheaper food that would have been just as
nourishing.
IF you’re getting a degree to compen-sate for an inferiority
complex, give up the complex, because it’s an artificial
thing.
When you’re going for a degree, you don’t do what you
want to do. You find out what the professor wants you to do
to get the degree, and you just do it. If you want a degree so
you can teach, the idea is to get the degree in the quickest,
easiest way. When you have it, then you can expand and
get your education.
I was given a fellowship to go to Europe, and I went to
the University of Paris. I was working on medieval French
and Provençal and on the troubadour poetry. When I got to
Europe, I discovered Modern Art: James Joyce, Picasso,
Mondrian—the whole bunch of them. Paris in 1927–28 was
something else. Then I went to Germany and started
studying Sanskrit and got all involved in Hinduism. I
discovered Jung while in Germany. Everything was opening
up—this way, that way. Well, my question then was, “Am I
going to go back into that bottle?” My interest in Celtic
Romance was gone.
I went to the university and said, “Listen, I don’t want to
get back into that bottle.” I had put in all the hours
necessary for the degree; all I had to do was write that
goddamn thesis. They wouldn’t let me move into another
place and continue my education, so I said to hell with it. I
went up into the woods and spent five years reading. I never
got the Ph.D. I learned to live on absolutely nothing. I was
free and had no responsibilities. It was marvelous.

It takes courage
to do what you want.

Other people
have a lot of plans for you.
 Nobody wants you to do
what you want to do.

They want you to go on their trip,

but you can do what you want.

I did. I went into the woods

and read for five years.

It was from 1929 to 1934, five years. I went up to a little

shack in Woodstock, New York, and just dug in. All I did was
read, read, read, and take notes. It was during the Great
Depression. I didn’t have any money, but there was an
important book firm in New York called Stechert-Hafner, and
I would write to them for books—the books of Frobenius
were expensive—and they’d send me copies, and I wouldn’t
pay. That was the way people behaved during the
depression. They waited until I got a job, and then I paid
them. That was noble. I really appreciated that.
I read Joyce and Mann and Spengler. Spengler speaks
about Nietzsche. I go to Nietzsche. I then find you can’t read
Nietzsche until you’ve read Schopenhauer, so I go to
Schopenhauer. I find you can’t read Schopenhauer until
you’ve read Kant. Then I go to Kant—well, okay, you can
start there, but it’s tough going. Then Goethe.
The exciting thing was to see that Joyce was actually
dealing with the same material. He never mentions the
name of Schopenhauer, but I can prove he was a major
figure in Joyce’s construction of his system. Then I read
Jung, and I see that the structure of his thinking is basically
the same as that of Spengler’s, and I’m putting all this stuff
together…
I don’t know what it was during those five years, but I
was convinced I would still be alive for a little while. I
remember one time when I had a dollar bill in the top
drawer of a little chest, and I knew as long as that was there
I still had resources. It was great. I had no responsibilities,
none. It was exciting—writing journals, trying to find out
what I wanted. I still have those things. When I look into
them now, I can’t believe it.
Actually, there were times when I almost thought—
almost thought—”Jeez, I wish someone would tell me what I
had to do,” that kind of thing. Freedom involves making
decisions, and each decision is a destiny decision. It’s very
difficult to find in the outside world something that matches
what the system inside you is yearning for. My feeling now is
that I had a perfect life: what I needed came along just
when I needed it. What I needed then was life without a job
for five years. It was fundamental.
As Schopenhauer says, when you look back on your life,
it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it,
it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you
see it was perfect. So, I have a theory that if you are on your
own path things are going to come to you. Since it’s your
own path, and no one has ever been on it before, there’s no
precedent, so everything that happens is a surprise and is
timely.
In the midst of my time in Woodstock, I decided I would look
for a job. I had a little Model A Ford, and I drove it across the
continent right in the middle of the Great Depression. I will
never forget that drive. I’d pass automobiles on the road
that had broken down with whole families in them. It was
awful. People of today have no notion of what went on at
that time.
When I started driving to the west coast from New York
in that car, I drove down through Virginia and stopped at a
beautiful natural bridge. I spent two hours just walking back
and forth in that natural bridge area, thinking how George
Washington was a surveyor here and all that kind of thing.
Somehow I felt that it was teaching me something, that I
was learning something. I put it in my diary as a very
important experience.
When I arrived out here, there was no job, and when you
get to California, you can’t keep driving west. On a boat
back from Hawaii in 1925, I had met a girl who was living in
San Jose. We’d kept a long-range correspondence, little
postcards from here and there. I was going down to Carmel,
so I thought, “Why not drop in on Idell and just say ‘Hi.’” So I
dropped in—“Hello, hello, hello.” “You’re going down to
Carmel? Let me go down with you. My sister Carol’s down
there. She’s married a chap who wants to be a writer. I’ll
introduce you.”
Her sister was married to John Steinbeck, so I met him.
And I discovered a world of wonderful people sitting around
wondering what to do next. The people in this crowd were
John and Carol Steinbeck, Rich Lovejoy and his wife, Natalya
—“Tal,” who was doing Steinbeck’s typing—and Ed Rickets
—”Doc” in John’s novels. Rich and Tal are the couple in
Cannery Row. By the way, that party in Cannery Row was
given for me—Steinbeck put another cast of characters in it.
Nobody, except Ed, had a job or anything of the kind.
Everybody was “without any strings,” you know, just
flopping around. Steinbeck was writing and writing and
writing. He’d just finished a book called Pastures of Heaven
and was starting To A God Unknown. When I arrived, the
first thing he said was, “Come, let me read you the first
chapter of my book.” I was twenty-eight, and he was about
thirty-four or -five. He found me a place to live, a tiny little
house on 4th Street called the Canary Cottage, right next to
a house owned by Ed.
When you’re at a loss, you’re really at a loss. I had no
philosophy. I had no anything after Columbia—we had been
studying John Dewey for God’s sake. In the Carmel library,
my hand went up to a book in two volumes, Decline of the
West by Oswald Spengler, and, boy, that was the
thunderbolt. Spengler says, “Young man, if you want to be in
the world of the future, put your paintbrush and poet’s pen
on the shelf and pick up the monkey wrench or the law
book.” I said to Stein-beck, “Listen, you have to read this
thing.” When I had finished the first volume, I gave it to him.
He came back a little while later and said, “Oh, I can’t read
this. Oh—my art.” He was knocked out for about two weeks
and couldn’t write.
One day, after he had recovered from the paragraph in
Spengler, he was walking around, rubbing his sides, saying,
“I feel creative.” Steinbeck was always going around
rubbing his sides. He loved to rub his sides. Another day, he
came in and said, “I’ve sold Pastures of Heaven, and they
want my next two books.” Well, I know now that every
publisher who takes your first book wants your next two,
because they’re not going to advertise you and then lose
you to somebody else. That was a great day, so we had a
party.
After I’d read Spengler’s book, which was a major
experience for me, I said to Ed, “Say, Ed, you know, I’ve
been saying ‘no’ to life all my life, and I think I’d better
begin saying 'yes.’” He said, “Well, the way to do that is to
get drunk. Let’s have a party." It was in the middle of, not
only the Depression, but also Prohibition. He said, “I’ll use
my laboratory alcohol, and we’ll put something together."
Jesus, that was a night! He mixed this concoction of fruit
juice and alcohol in a bowl. Then he put that bowl in a larger
bowl, and put salted ice around it to keep it cold. We started
the party around four in the afternoon, and at three o’clock
in the morning, a police car pulled up to the front door and
two cops came in. They said, “What's going on here?” Well,
Steinbeck knew them, so he said, “We’re having a party.
Here, have a drink.” Now we had stopped drinking about an
hour before, and meanwhile, the center bowl had shipped
salt water, so it was now alcohol, fruit juice, and salt water.
Well, when those two cops tasted that drink, they just
looked at us as if to say, “What the hell are you people
drink-ing here?” And that was that.
Ed Rickets was the only one who had work. He had a
laboratory and collected sea cucumbers and little jellyfish
and so forth for schools. He’d fertilize a group of starfish
eggs, and then cut them off at different stages to show the
whole series for a biology class. When the tide was low
where there was good catching—for instance, up at Santa
Cruz—we would all go off to collect these damned things for
Ed.
He was great with animals. He had two rattle-snakes in
a box in the lab, and he invited us all down one day to see
him feed white mice to the snakes. Well, this was
something. Steinbeck actually wrote a short story about it.
Here’s this snake that’s been asleep for weeks—snakes with
nothing to do are like that. Ed drops this white mouse in the
cage with the snake, and we’re all gathered around to
watch. Somehow, you’re automatically on the mouse's side.
The little mouse sniffs around and goes up the length of the
snake, and finally he gets the idea that this isn’t a good
place to be, so he goes into the corner and sits there. The
rattlesnake looks at the mouse, moves over, and—“Bing!”—
hits it. Two little red spots appear on the mouse’s nose, and
it just spins up and flops back. So, the mouse is dead, and
the snake is alive, so now you’re on the side of the
rattlesnake trying to eat that mouse—the mouse is bigger
around than the snake’s diameter.
Ed says, “Now watch him. He’s going to unhook his
jaws.” He unhooks his jaws and begins injesting the mouse
—you could see it changing shape in the snake’s mouth,
because the saliva has digestive qualities. I tell you, you felt
it right in your throat. The most absurd moment was when
the rattlesnake got tired, and there was nothing left but two
legs and a tail sticking out of its mouth. But presently that
went down too.
Every detail of those years stands out in my memory. In
Goethe’s wonderful book Wilhelm Meister’s Student Years,
and again in Wilhelm Meister’s Wander Years, there’s the
idea of bumping into experience and people while you’re
wandering. You really are experiencing life that way. Nothing
is routine, nothing is taken for granted. Everything is
standing out on it’s own, because everything is a possibility,
everything is a clue, everything is talking to you. It’s
marvelous. It’s as though you had a nose that brought you
into the right places. You are in for wonderful moments
when you travel like that—for example, my putting up my
hand in the Carmel library and finding a book that became a
destiny book. It really did! That rambling is a chance to sniff
things out and somehow get a sense of where you feel you
can settle.
The poor chap who gets himself in a job and goes down
that groove all his life.… A friend gave me a list of things
that let you know you are old. Some of them are silly, others
are serious. One is “…when you sink your teeth into a juicy
steak and they stay there.” Another is “…when your back
goes out more often than you do.” “…When you see a pretty
girl, the garage door flies open responding to your
pacemaker.” The really serious one is “…when you’ve
gotten to the top of the ladder and find it’s against the
wrong wall.” And that’s where so many people are. It’s
dreadful. And then, Jesus, to descend the whole ladder and
start up another… Forget the ladder and just wander, bump
around.
I spent eight months rambling. I studied Russian for no
reason except that it was the next language to learn after
I’d learned Spanish, French, and German. I read War and
Peace in Russian. I can’t read two words in Russian now, but
it got me into the Russian community in Los Angeles, where
there were lots of people who’d come here after the
revolution. It was wonderful Then I got into my car and went
somewhere else.
After a year in California, I returned to New York to take
a job in a prep school. I was paid nine-hundred dollars for
teaching the boys corrective German and French, Ancient
History, and English. Meanwhile, I was their nursemaid: I put
them to bed at night, got them up in the morning, made
them obey, and then took them out on the athletic field. I’ll
tell you, that was another kind of life, and I couldn’t take it. I
was in a beautiful school, a beautiful job, but I knew I was
off the rails. I went right back on the Depression.
Oh, those were grand experiences. I was just flop-ping
around, sniffing out what I would do and what I wouldn’t do.
I only wanted to do what made sense to my interior. I don’t
see how one can live otherwise. And nothing is better than
reading when there is nothing else to do.
When you wander, think of what you want to do that
day, not what you told yourself you were going to want to
do. And there are two things you must not worry about
when you have no responsibilities: one is being hungry, and
the other is what people will think of you. Wandering time is
positive. Don’t think of new things, don’t think of
achievement, don’t think of any-thing of the kind. Just think,
“Where do I feel good? What is giving me joy?”
I mean it. This is simply basic. Get those pressure ideas
out of your system, and then you can find, like a ball on a
roulette wheel, where you are going to land. The roulette
ball doesn’t say, “Well, people will think better of me over
there than over there.” Take what comes and be where you
like. What counts is being where you feel you’re in your
place. What people think is their problem.

“What will they think of me?”

—must be put aside for bliss.
 My parents never pushed me around. I had special luck
there. By the time I was invited to teach at Sarah Lawrence,
I had decided that I didn't need a job and did not want one.
It would interrupt my reading. But when I saw that school
full of gorgeous girls, I thought, “Well this is alright.” When I
finally got that job, I was thirty years old, and Dad said, “Joe,
I thought you were going to be a literary bum.” But until I
got the job, he never said a word. He was a good father.
When The Hero with a Thousand Faces came out, he said, “I
prophesy this is going to be a wonderful book.” He hadn’t
read a word of it, but he knew his boy had done it.
I know that wandering might seem a strange form of life
to someone with a science background, which tends to give
you a prospect out ahead of what you’re doing, but while
wandering, you experience a kind of mysteriously organic
process. It’s like a tree growing. It doesn’t know where it’s
growing next. A branch may grow out this way, then that
way, and then another way. If you let it be that way and
don’t have pressures from outside, when you look back,
you’ll see that this will have been an organic development.
Just remember: Parzival blew the job when he did what
people expected him to do.
 T HE Grail Hero—particularly in the person of
Perceval or Parzival, the “Great Fool”—is the
forthright, simple, uncorrupted, noble son of
nature, without guile, strong in the purity of the
yearning of his heart. In the words of the poet
Wolfram von Eschenbach…describing his Grail
Hero’s childhood in the forest: “Of sorrow he knew
nothing, unless it was the birdsong above him; for
the sweet-ness of it pierced his heart and made his
little bosom swell: His nature and his yearning so
compelled him.”24 His widowed, noble mother, in
their forest retreat had told him of God and Satan,
“distinguished for him dark and light.”25 However, in
his own deeds light and dark were mixed. He was
not an angel or a saint, but a living, questing man of
deeds, gifted with paired virtues of courage and
compassion, to which was added loyalty. And it was
through his steadfast-ness in these—not
supernatural grace—that he won, at last, to the
Grail.26

Parzival makes two visits to the Grail Castle. The first is

a failure. The Grail King is a wounded man, whose nature
has been broken by castration in a battle. Parzival
spontaneously wishes to ask him, “What is wrong?" But
then, he has been told that a knight does not ask questions,
and so, in order to preserve the image of himself as a noble
knight, he restrains his natural impulse of compassion, and
the Grail quest fails.

…in the end, as in the case of Parzival, the guide

within will be his own noble heart alone, and the
guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of
divinity, that wakes in his heart amor: the deepest,
inmost seed of his nature, consubstantial with the
 process of the All, “thus come.” And in this life-
creative adventure the criterion of achievement will
be…the courage to let go the past, with its truths,
its goals, its dogmas of “meaning,” and its gifts: to
die to the world and come to birth from within.27

The twelfth century

is the follow-your-bliss time.

What the Holy Grail symbolizes is the highest spiritual

fulfillment of a human life. Each life has some kind of high
fulfillment, and each has its own gift from the Grail. The
theme of compassion is part of the clue about how to get
there and where it is. It has to do with overcoming the same
temptations that the Buddha overcame: of attachment to
this, that, or the other life detail that has pulled you off
course.
What pulls you off from spiritual fulfillment? I know
when my life is not in the center. I get desirously involved
with my relation to some achievement or system that is
tangential to the real centering of my life. And I know when
I’m on track—that is, when every-thing is in a harmonious
relationship to what I regard as the best I’ve got in me.
In the Grail legends, the land of people doing what they
think they ought to do or have to do is the wasteland. What
is the wasteland to you? I know damned well what the
wasteland would be to me: the academic approach to my
material; or a marriage to someone who had no thoughts or
feelings for me or my work. Living with such a person would
be the wasteland.
I find working for money to be the wasteland—doing
something that somebody else wants instead of the thing
that is my next step. I have been guided all along by a
strong revulsion from any sort of action that does not
correspond to the impulse of my own wish.
 The person of noble heart
acts spontaneously
and will avoid the wasteland,
the world of “Thou Shalt.”

“I will not serve that in which I no longer believe

whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my
church.…And I am not afraid to make a mistake,
even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and
perhaps as long as eternity too.” —Stephen
Dedalus28

The crucial thing to live for is the sense of life in what

you are doing, and if that is not there, then you are living
according to other peoples’ notions of how life should be
lived.
The opposite to doing what you think you ought to do is
compassion. The one who finds the Grail is symbolic of the
one who has come to that place and whose life is of
compassion. The one who finds as his motivation the
dynamism of his compassion has found the Grail. That
means spontaneous recognition of the identity of I and
Thou. This is the Grail center.

To become—in Jung’s terms—individuated, to live as

a released individual, one has to know how and
when to put on and to put off the masks of one's
various life roles.…The aim of individuation requires
that one should find and then learn to live out of
one’s own center, in control of one’s for and against.
And this cannot be achieved by enacting and
responding to any general masquerade of fixed
roles.29
 Parzival achieves the Grail Castle, and Galahad beholds
the Grail. These are two totally different Grail traditions.
Parzival is the fulfilled, secular man. Galahad is the
monastic, chaste knight, who has insulated himself from life.
In the story of Sir Galahad, the knights agree to go on a
quest, but thinking it would be a disgrace to go forth in a
group, each “entered into the forest, at one point or
another, there where they saw it to be thickest, all in those
places where they found no way or path.”30 Where there is a
way or a path, it’s someone else's way. Each knight enters
the forest at the most mysterious point and follows his own
intuition. What each brings forth is what never before was
on land or sea: the fulfillment of his unique potentialities,
which are different from anybody else’s. All you get on your
life way are little clues.
In that wonderful story, when any knight sees the trail of
another, thinks he’s getting there, and starts to follow the
other’s track, he goes astray entirely.

“In the last analysis, every life is the realization of a

whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this
realization can be called ‘individuation.’ All life is
bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is
simply inconceivable without them. But every
carrier is charged with an individual destiny and
destination, and the realization of this alone makes
sense of life.”—Jung31
 In all traditional systems, whether of the Orient or
of the Occident, the authorized mythological forms
are presented in rites to which the individual is
expected to respond with an experience of
commitment and belief. But suppose he fails to do
so? Suppose the entire inheritance of mythological,
theological, and philosophical forms fails to wake in
him any authentic response of this kind? How then
is he to behave? The normal way is to fake it, to feel
oneself to be inadequate, to pretend to believe, to
strive to believe, and to live, in the imitation of
others, an inauthentic life. The authentic creative
way, on the other hand, which I would term the way
of art as opposed to religion, is, rather, to reverse
this authoritative order.32

As in the novels of Joyce, so in those of Mann, the

key to the progression lies in the stress on what is
inward.…In the words of Joyce’s hero: “When the
soul of a man is born in this country there are nets
flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me
of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by
those nets.”33

For what to the soul are nets, “flung at it to hold it

back from flight," can become for the one who has
found his own center the garment, freely chosen, of
his further adventure.34

What kind of action and life experience would be

appropriate for one who has had this fulfilling moment of
the Grail experience? There are no rules for what you do.
Buddha came back and taught for fifty years. To answer
such a question, one would have to predict the
circumstances of the life that one would enter.
Once you’ve achieved the experience, you have to
achieve it the next second and the next second also. The
process of achievement comes in translating the
experiences of life into that eternal elixir, which is the
“happy with Him forever in Heaven” part of the answer to
the penny catechism question: “Why did God make you?”
The answer I learned was: “God made me to know Him, to
love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy
with Him forever in Heaven.” Translating that into metaphor:
Heaven is the symbol of the eternal life that is within you.
It’s a basic aspect of yourself for-ever. That’s the rapture.
And then, temporal life asks for “knowing, loving, and
serving… God,” the generating energy of the life that is
within you and all things.
My experience is that I can feel that I’m in the Grail
Castle when I’m living with people I love, doing what I love. I
get that sense of being fulfilled. But, by god, it doesn’t take
much to make me feel I’ve lost the Castle, it’s gone. One
way to lose the Grail is to go to a cock-tail party. That’s my
idea of not being there at all.
My sense of it is that you have to keep working to get
there. It may take a little while. Even when you have gotten
there, it’s easy to get flipped out, because the world has
things it wants you to do and you have decided not to do
what the world wants. The problem is to find a field of action
to give you that inner satisfaction so that you’re not thrown
out.

…not all, even today, are of that supine sort that

must have their life values given them, cried at
them from the pulpits and other mass media of the
day. For there is, in fact, in quiet places, a great deal
of deep spiritual quest and finding now in progress
in this world, outside the sanctified social centers,
beyond their purview and control: in small groups,
here and there, and more often, more typically (as
anyone who looks around may learn), by ones and
twos, there entering the forest at those points which
they themselves have chosen, where they see it to
be most dark, and there is no beaten way or path.35
The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or
another, a guide must come to say, “Look, you’re in Sleepy
Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your
consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So
you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you
there.” And so it starts.

The herald or announcer of the adventure…is often

dark, loathly, or terrifying, judged evil by the world;
yet if one could follow, the way would be opened
through the walls of day into the dark where the
jewels glow.36

The call is to leave a certain social situation, move into

your own loneliness and find the jewel, the center that’s
impossible to find when you’re socially engaged. You are
thrown off-center, and when you feel off-center, it’s time to
go. This is the departure when the hero feels something has
been lost and goes to find it. You are to cross the threshold
into new life. It’s a dangerous adventure, because you are
moving out of the sphere of the knowledge of you and your
community.

The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in

a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to
the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat
from the desperations of the waste land to the
peace of the everlasting realm that is within. But
this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is
precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm
that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves
forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our
nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And
 more important, all the life-potentialities that we
never managed to bring to adult realization, those
other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden
seeds do not die.37

When one thinks of some reason for not going or has

fear and remains in society because it’s safe, the results are
radically different from what happens when one follows the
call. If you refuse to go, then you are someone else’s
servant. When this refusal of the call happens, there is a
kind of drying up, a sense of life lost. Everything in you
knows that a required adventure has been refused.
Anxieties build up. What you have refused to experience in
a positive way, you will experience in a negative way.
If what you are following, however, is your own true
adventure, if it is something appropriate to your deep
spiritual need or readiness, then magical guides will appear
to help you. If you say, “Everyone’s going on this trip this
year, and I’m going too,” then no guides will appear. Your
adventure has to be coming right out of your own interior. If
you are ready for it, then doors will open where there were
no doors before, and where there would not be doors for
anyone else. And you must have courage. It’s the call to
adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.
When you cross the threshold, you are passing into the
dark forest, taking a plunge into the sea, embarking upon
the night sea journey. It involves passing through clashing
rocks, narrow gates, or the like, which represent yes and no,
the pairs of opposites. There will be a moment when the
walls of the world seem to open for a second, and you get
an insight through. Jump then! Go! The gates will often close
so fast that they take off the tail of your horse. You may be
dismembered, lose everything you have. This is Christ
leaving the Mother, the world, and going to the Father, the
Spirit. This is Jonah swallowed by the whale, its jaws being
the pairs of opposites.
What this represents psychologically is the trip from the
realm of conscious, rational intentions into the zone of those
energies of the body that are moving from another center:
the center with which you are trying to get in touch.
As you now go towards the center, there will come more
aids, as well as increasingly difficult trials. You have to give
up more and more of what you’re hanging on to. The final
thing is a total giving up, a yielding all the way. This is a
place directly opposite to your life experiences and all that
you’ve been taught in school. Psychologically, it’s a shift
into the unconscious; otherwise, it’s a move into a field of
action of which you know nothing. Anything can happen,
and it may be favorable or unfavorable.
The deeper you go, and the closer you get to the final
realization, the heavier the resistance. You are coming down
to those areas that are the ones that are repressed, and it’s
that repression system that you have to pass through. And
there, of course, is where magical aid is most required. The
hero may here discover for the first time that there is
everywhere a benign power supporting him in his
superhuman passage.
You come then to the final experience of discovering
and making your own that which was lacking in the place
from which you departed. This experience can be rendered
in four different ways.
One rendition is the Sacred Marriage, the meeting with
the beloved which brings the birth of your own spiritual life,
with the bride being whatever the life is that your relating
to: male/female, I/Thou, this/that.
Another rendering is Atonement with the Father. The
son has been separated from the father, meaning he has
been living a life that’s inappropriate to his real heritage.
The son is the temporal aspect, and the father is the eternal
aspect of the same being. The father represents the natural
order from which you have been removed. You are trying to
find your character, which you inherit from your father.
Atonement is bringing your own personal and contemporary
program into accord with the life momentum out of which
you have come.
Then there is Apotheosis, the realization that “I am that
which all these other beings are.” The hero knows that he is
It, the Buddha image, the knower of the truth. “The
Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do
not see it.” That’s the illumination that comes with
Apotheosis. You are not allowed that realization in
Christianity, except in Gnostic Christianity. You can’t say,
“The Christhood is in me.”
Finally there’s the Elixir Theft, an entirely different sort
of realization. Instead of a slow progress through the
mysteries with the good will of the powers, there is a violent
pressure through and a seizing—the fire theft by
Prometheus or the use of LSD in the 60s—and you flee from
the powers that you did not appease on the way. This is the
transformation flight, where the hero, with the powers after
him, carries his goods back to the light world as fast as he
can. Or one can have a schizophrenic crack up and stay
down there.

The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be

pictured only as distinct from each other—different
as life and death, as day and night. The hero
adventures out of the land we know into darkness;
there he accomplishes his adventure, or again is
simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his
return is described as a coming back out of that
yonder zone. Nevertheless—and here is a great key
to the understanding of myth and symbol—the two
kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is
a forgotten dimension of the world we know.38
 An image of the return that amuses me is that of a
young man who comes from Wisconsin to New York to study
art. He’s gone into Greenwich Village, the underworld of
Manhattan. He has a number of nymphs to help him and a
master with whom he is studying. He finally achieves an art
style. Then, having achieved his style, he comes to 57th
Street with his paintings, and he meets the cold eye of the
dealer.

The great problem is bringing life

back into the wasteland,
where people live inauthentically.

Bringing back the gift to integrate it into a rational life is

very difficult. It is even more difficult than going down into
the underworld. What you have to bring back is something
that the world lacks—which is why you went to get it—and
lacking it, the world does not know that it needs it. And so,
on the return, when you come with your boon for the world
and there is no reception, what are you going to do? There
are three possible reactions.
One answer is to say, “To hell with them, I’m going back
to the woods.” You buy yourself a dog and a pipe and let the
weeds grow in the gate. You have come back to the world
with your gift, and people look at you with glassy eyes, call
you “a kook,” and so you retreat. This is refusal of the
return.
The second way is to say, “What do they want?” You
have a skill. You can give them what they want, the
commercial way. Then you have created a whole pitch for
your expressivity, and what you had before gets lost. You
have a public career, and you have renounced the jewel.
The third possibility is to try to find some aspect of the
domain into which you have come that can receive a little
portion of what you have to give. You try to find a means to
deliver what you have found as the life boon in terms and in
proportions that are proper to the world’s ability to receive.
It requires a good deal of compassion and patience. Look for
cracks in the wall and give only to those who are ready for
your jewel.
If all else fails, you can get a job teaching and introduce
your message to the people who are studying with you. If
you can get one little hook into the given society, you will
find presently that you are able to deliver your message.
Artists who teach are an example of this: they are doing
their creative work, but they are being sustained by
something that is secondary to their primary job. They are
receiving adequate income and gradually build up a
following.
You do not have a complete adventure unless you do
get back. There is a time to go into the woods and a time to
come back, and you know which it is. Do you have the
courage? It takes a hell of a lot of courage to return after
you’ve been in the woods.
Those are modes of having this realization, and the final
thing is knowing, loving, and serving life in a way in which
you are eternally at rest. That point of rest has got to be in
all of it. Even though you are active out there in the world,
within you there’s a point of complete composure and rest.
When that’s not there, then you are in agony.

When the world

seems to be falling apart,
the rule is to hang onto your own bliss.
It’s that life that survives.

Freedom to pass back and forth across the world

division …is the talent of the master. The Cosmic
Dancer, declares Nietzsche, does not rest heavily in
a single spot, but gaily, lightly, turns and leaps from
one position to another.39
 THERE is a Japanese saying I recall once having
heard, of the five stages of a man’s growth: “At ten,
an animal; at twenty, a lunatic; at thirty, a failure; at
forty, a fraud; at fifty, a criminal." And at sixty, I
would add (since by that time one will have gone
through all this), one begins advising one’s friends;
and at seventy (realizing that everything said has
been misunderstood) one keeps quiet and is taken
for a sage. “At eighty,” then said Confucius, “I knew
my ground and stood firm.”40

Jung speaks of the curve of a lifetime being divided in

half: the first half is the time of relationships, and the
second half is the time of finding the sense of life within; or,
as the Hindus say, “following the marga”—the path, the
footsteps of the human experience you’ve had—to your own
inward life. And then, total disengagement. going through
the last passage without anxiety, with-out fear.

You go to your death singing.

“As a physician I am convinced that it is hygienic…to

discover in death a goal toward which one can
strive; and that shrinking away from it is something
unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half
of life of its purpose.”—Jung41

It is important to know how old you are in spiritual

development, where you are on this path. The function of
initiations is to commit one’s whole psychological pitch to
the requirements of a particular stage in life. The big
initiation is when one has to leave the psychology of
childhood behind: the death of the infantile ego, which is
dependant and obedient, and the birth of the self-reliant
adult participating in the society.
The first quarter of life is that of student, and the ideal
there is obedience—“comeliness of appearance and
sweetness of conduct,” according to Dante—and this would
mean conforming generally to the patterns required by the
society. This interval is what Nietzsche calls the period of
the camel, for the camel gets down on his knees and asks to
have a load put on him.
The second quarter is that of householder; that is to say,
you have moved into the responsibilities of adult life. In the
Indian system, your responsibilities are dictated in terms of
the dharma, the law of your social order. In our society, you
voluntarily choose your responsibilities, and it is through the
assumption of those responsibilities, whatever they may be,
that you achieve your position, name, and fame in the
world. Making such choices involves a development of the
ego function, the function of independent evaluation, and
your assumption of tasks and positions is relevant to your
own value determinations. This period is the age of the
dragon on whose every scale are emblazoned the words
“Thou Shalt.”
Midlife is typically the period, not of achievement, but of
realization, and it should be the period of fulfillment. In
Nietzsche’s stages, when the camel is well-loaded, it gets to
its feet and goes out into the desert and turns into a lion.
The lion’s job is to kill the dragon named Thou Shalt. When
it has been killed by the lion of self-discovery, all the energy
that had been caught up in the dragon is now yours. People
in mid-life who are still expecting benefits from being good,
or punishment from being bad, are delayed. Their infantile
egos are still operating in midlife, and this is not
appropriate.
When you come into Jung’s second stage, the last half of
life, the quest is for the import of the OM that you’ve heard
in the heart cakra, so that it will become the forming and
structuring energy of your life, without care for
achievement, without care for prestige.
Almost anyone making a transition would have an
experience of shedding the old skin. Suppose you have shed
the serpent’s skin but want to leave some tagged on the
end. This is a major problem. It is an anxiety that has to do
with what’s back there. You have to know enough to cut it
off. You have to know what it is that’s hanging on: the old
skin that is being peeled away gradually, bit by bit, like
taking off a bandage without pulling all the hair.
Sri Ramakrishna, talking about this fundamental stage
of renunciation—“going into the forest,” in the Indian
system—speaks of three kinds of renunciation.
The first is gradual renunciation. That’s where you know
the time is coming, you take advice from your guru or
chaplain or whatever, you think it out, make arrangements
for the place you’re going, and so on. If you are a man, you
transfer your dharma to your son. He is the one that now
has to carry on the dharma of the family, and you are
released from that. Then you are nobody, no longer in caste.
It’s a real, real quittance.
The second is sudden renunciation is. Ramakrishna
gives the example of a man who is on his way down to the
stream to wash one morning, when he has an argument
with his wife. The man says to her, “Now you shut up, or I
will go into the forest, become a yogi, and you’ll never see
me again.” She says, “Oh, you would never do that.” And he
says, “I wouldn’t? Watch.” And he walks into the forest with
his towel on his shoulder. That’s sudden renunciation.
Then there is what he calls “monkey renunciation,”
when a man who has gone away into the forest finds a nice
comfortable ashram. He writes back to his family that he
has gone to the ashram, and it’s going fine. That is not
renunciation.
The recommended one is gradual renunciation. That
means getting quit of what you can in a decent, organic
way. You can even take with you a few little responsibilities,
with the understanding that they are terminal—you’re not
going to add to them. The responsibilities that you add will
be those of your own new condition, whatever that may be.
Now in my case, I leave for the forest, as it were—
actually, for Hawaii—with three volumes of a book to do, but
it’s still renunciation: I’ve cut off my lecturing, and I’m
settling in out there with my library and my notes, and I’m
just digging in. Renunciation is literally a death and a
resurrection. It wasn’t easy writing letters to people I’m fond
of, people I like working with, and saying I wouldn’t be able
to go on these lecture trips.
I like Hawaii. It’s nice to be in a place where every-
body’s having a good time. No children are allowed in the
building, so all around us are people of about our own age,
all still married. It is so nice to be with people still in love
with each other after all the rough water of the years past.
It’s like ships that have come into harbor and are now just
floating with all kinds of sea stories.
I work out on a veranda—they call it a “lanai” out there
—with my back to the ocean and to what’s going on. What’s
going on is usually a startling bikini walking past. I couldn’t
write about anything but the Goddess if I were looking in the
other direction. So mine is a nice sort of forest to retire to.
 “In primitive tribes, we observe that the old people
are almost always the guardians of the mysteries
and the laws, and it is in these that the cultural
heritage of the tribe is expressed.”—Jung 42

In old age, your only relationship to the world is your

begging bowl, which in our culture is your bank account.
That’s what you’ve already earned, and it has to support
this relatively carefree last stage of life. Since I am myself in
that stage now, I can tell you that it is the best part of life.
It’s properly called, in this wonder-ful language that we
have, the “Golden Years.” It is a period when everything is
coming up and flowering. It is very, very sweet.

…the old in many societies spend a considerable

part of their time playing with and taking care of the
youngsters, while the parents delve and spin: so
that the old are returned to the sphere of eternal
things not only within but without. And we may take
it also, I should think, that the consider-able mutual
attraction of the very young and the very old may
derive something from their common, secret
knowledge that it is they, and not the busy
generation between, who are concerned with a
poetic play that is eternal and truly wise.43

The image of decline in old age is a bit deceptive,

because even though your energies are not those of early
youth—that was the time of moving into the field. of making
all the big drives—now you are in the field, and this is the
time of the opening flower, the real fulfillment, the bringing
forth of what you have prepared yourself to bring forth. It is
a wonderful moment. It is not a loss situation, as if you’re
throwing off some-thing to go down. Not at all. It is a
blooming.
“When he comes to weakness—whether he come to
weakness through old age or through disease—this
person frees himself from these limbs just as a
mango, or a fig, or a berry releases itself from its
bond; and he hastens again, according to the
entrance and place of origin, back to life. As
noblemen, policemen, chariot-drivers, village-heads
wait with food, drink, and lodgings for a king who is
coming, and cry: ‘Here he comes! Here he comes!’
so indeed do all things wait for him who has this
knowledge and cry: ‘Here is the Imperishable
coming! Here is the Imperishable coming!’” —
Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad, 4.3.36–3744
 P EOPLE ask me, “What can we have for rituals?”
Well, what do you want to have a ritual for? You
should have a ritual for your life. All a ritual does is
concentrate your mind on the implications of what you are
doing. For instance, the marriage ritual is a meditation on
the step you are taking in learning to become a member of
a duad, instead of one individual all alone. The ritual
enables you to make the transit.

Ritual introduces you

to the meaning of what’s going on.

Saying grace before meals

lets you know that you’re about to eat
something that once was alive.

When eating a meal, realize what you are doing.

Hunting peoples thank the animal for having given itself.
They feel real gratitude. The main rituals of mature hunting
tribes, like those of the Americas, were addressed to the
animal. On the Northwest Coast, the principle rites were
when the first wave of salmon came in, and they were
intended to thank the salmon.

The life of the animal that you’ve taken

is given back when you recognize
what you’ve done.

And so, sitting down to eat, realize what you are doing:
you are eating a life that has been given so that you might
live.

…man, like no other animal, not only knows that he

is killing when he kills but also knows that he too will
die; and the length of his old age, furthermore, is—
 like his infancy—a lifetime in itself, as long as the
entire span of many a beast.45

When I was working on the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, I

had a lot of meals with the monks. Their grace before meals
is the most beautiful invocation. It goes like this: “brahman
is the cosmic, universal, life consciousness energy of which
we are all manifestations. brahman is the sacrifice. brahman
is the food that we are eating. brahman is the consumer of
the sacrifice. brahman is the ladle that carries the sacrifice
to the fire. brahman is the process of the sacrifice. He who
recognizes that all things are brahman is on the way to
realizing brahman in himself.”
The meaning of this grace is that taking food into your
system is like putting a libation into a sacrificial fire: the fire
of your digestive apparatus consumes what you eat, so
eating is the counterpart of a sacrifice.
The communion ritual is an extension of this idea, a
motif that came into the world with the dawn of agriculture:
“If the seed does not die, there is no plant.” It dies as seed
and yields to the sprout. Now, since we are composed of
spirit and matter—the two substances are what live in us—
we need two types of food. The food that nourishes our
material part—vegetables, animals, whatever it is we eat—is
earthly food, but we must also have spiritual food,
nourishment for our spiritual part. And communion, the
eating of Christ, is a symbolization of the imbibing of that
spiritual nourishment, a concretization of the idea of
meditation, But in order to eat anything, it has to be killed,
so again we have this notion of the sacrifice.

You should be willing

to be eaten also.
You are food body.
 Every ritual is of that order, properly putting your mind
in touch with what you really are doing. And so, we should
realize that this event here and now: our coming together to
help each other in the realization is a beautiful, beautiful
ritual.
You can ritualize your entire life that way, and it’s
extremely helpful to do so. The whole thing of compassion
comes in there. What helped me was waking up and
thinking of my penny catechism: “to know, to love, to serve
God.” I don’t think of God as up there. I think of God as right
here in whatever I’m knowing and loving and serving. “To be
happy with Him forever in heaven” means to recognize your
own compassion, your own participation in that creature or
person you’re with. That seems to be the goal of the
journey.
The principle ritual in most puberty and initiation rites is a
death and resurrection ritual in which your name is
changed. You die to the name you had and are resurrected
with a new identity.
I once saw a film of the consecration of a group of
young men who were becoming monks. They were standing
in the aisle of a church, and then they all prostrated
themselves, and a great canvas emblazoned with the cross
was laid over them. When the canvas was removed, they
were monks.
The experience of boys being initiated in Australia and
New Guinea is of death. Their eyes are covered, and they
hear the bullroarer coming, and they are told that the
dragon is coming to consume them. When itis right over
their heads and they’re about to be eaten, their eyes are
uncovered, and now initiated, they see that it’s Uncle
Charlie with the bullroarer.
In another such rite, described in a book about the Ona
of Tierra del Fuego, the boy is in the men’s house, where
there are these masked forms that he believes to be deities
and punishing powers. One of them comes forward, and the
boy has to wrestle with him. The man whom he's fighting
almost puts the boy down, but then he yields. He lets the
boy defeat him and pull off his mask. Then the mask is not
simply regarded as a fake. It is both conquered and
worshiped, because it represents both the bounding and the
bonding power of the society. The boy puts the mask on
himself, and he is now that power. What was feared is
transformed into what is now supported.
I was very much interested in the work of George Catlin,
who did hundreds of paintings of American Indians. He
traveled among the Mandan Indians in 1832 and painted a
series of pictures depicting their initiation rites. The young
men are hung from the ceiling by spikes through their
chests and spun around until they collapse. One young man
said to him, “Our women suffer, and we must learn to suffer
too.”
That was, to me, a very interesting observation,
because suffering overtakes women. There is nothing they
can do to avoid it. When a girl has her first menstruation,
she's a woman.
Now the fear of menstrual blood, which is almost
biological in the male, is in primitive cultures emphatic.
There is a real fear of it that incorporates the whole mystery
and power. Consequently, the girl’s initiation at that time
usually consists of her sitting, isolated, in a little hut,
realizing that she is a woman. Next thing she knows, in most
societies, she’s a mother.
I’ve been told by some women that the first crash-
through of this blood is a shock and a fearful thing. It’s a
threshold-crossing that you’ve been pushed across. You
don’t have to strive for anything. What you have to do is
come to know what’s happened: appreciate the implications
of the biological change that’s taken place without effort.
After listening to many women, I have had the realization
that the woman’s characteristic experience is having to
endure something, and that the prime requirement is
tolerance, the ability to endure.
The man, on the other hand, has to go out to seek the
problem. The boy, accordingly, has to be systematically
withdrawn from the women and put in the men’s camp in
order to find his action field. As a man, he will have to
endure only moments of great pain and struggle and
difficulty with things just out of sight, which is what gets
thrown at him in the initiation rites. The boy has to enact
being a man. The girl has to realize that she’s a woman. Life
overtakes her.
The man never has a comparable experience. That's
why many male initiation rites are so violent—so that the
man knows for certain he is no longer a little boy. And that’s
also why a young man has to be disengaged from his
mother. In our culture, there are mothers who understand
this and assist in the separation. A clinging mother is a
terrible weight on the life of a young man. In the primitive
cultures, they are definitely separated.
I was just reading of a Hindu rite in Bengal, where the
woman’s condition is extremely blocked. As a girl, she has
to do what her father tells her to do; when she marries, she
has to do what her husband tells her to do; when he dies, if
she doesn’t throw herself on the funeral pyre, she has to do
what her oldest son tells her to do. She’s never her own
boss. Her only strong emotional connections are with her
children, and the strongest is with her son.
So, there is this ritual to enable the woman to let her
son go. Over a series of years, the family chaplain, the guru,
comes and asks her for some valuable thing that she must
give him. It starts with some of her jewelry—about the only
possessions she has—and then she has to give up certain
food that she likes. She has to learn to be quit of that which
she values. Then comes the time when her son is no longer
a little boy, and by then she has learned how to say that the
most precious thing in her life can go.
Have I ever told you about the ritual in Kentucky where I
had to give up seven things? It was one of the most
interesting group experiences I’ve ever had. We were a
group of about forty-nine people in one of those meetings of
some society for the transformation of consciousness. Two
couples from the University of Vermont, professors and their
wives, had arranged a ritual that we were all going to
undertake. We were divided into seven groups of seven and
told to spend a day thinking of the seven things without
which we’d not want to live: “What are the seven things for
which you feel your life is worth living?” Then you were to
gather seven little objects, small enough to hold in your
hand, which were to represent your seven cherished things,
and you were to know which was which.
In the evening we went down a wooded road in the dark
to the mouth of a cave. The cave had a wooden door on it
which could be opened. In front of the door was a man
wearing the mask of a dog: Cerberus at the gate of hell. He
put his hand out and said, “Give me that which you least
cherish.” When you gave him one of the little objects you
were holding, he opened the door and allowed you to enter.
Then you proceeded forward through the cave, an
enormous place, holding the six remaining things you most
cherished. On five further occasions, you were asked to
surrender that which you least cherished, until you were left
with one object that represented what you treasured most.
And you found out what it was, believe me. You really, really
did. And the order in which you gave up your treasures was
revelatory: you really knew what your order of values was.
Then you came to an exit, where there were two people
between whom you had to go. But before you could go
through that guarded exit, you had to give up that which
you most cherished.
I can tell you that ritual worked. All of the participants
with whom I’ve talked had an actual experience of mokṣa,
“release,” when they had given up their last treasure. One
damned fool was the exception. He did not give up
anything. That’s how seriously this ritual was taken. When
he was asked to give up something, he just stooped down,
picked up a pebble, and handed that over. That’s the refusal
of the call.

…every failure to cope with a life situation must be

laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness.
Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of
ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.46

The exciting thing to me was the actual experience. It

was a feeling of joyous participation. Watching your earlier
bondages go really did change your feeling for the treasures
you’d given up. It increased your love for them without the
tenacity. I was amazed.
 T HE meditation associated with catastrophes like the
end of the world is on this process of coming and
going, coming and going, and settling yourself at
peace with the fact that things come and go.

Apocalypse
does not point to a fiery Armageddon,
but to our ignorance and complacency
coming to an end.

I’ve been feeling that a terrific amount of the anxiety

associated with the fear of an impending atomic explosion
and the dissolution of the universe is a projection of anxiety
coming from a world of people who have never found the
center beyond coming and going. If you are at peace with
eternity, the blowing up of the universe is perfectly
acceptable—just as your own death has to be acceptable. It
is going with organic processes. Everything that comes…
goes.

…the hero would be no hero if death held for him

any terror; the first condition is reconciliation with
the grave.47

Chief Seattle, of the Indians that inhabited the Seattle

area, wrote a wonderful paper that has to do with putting
oneself in tune with the universe. He said, “Why should I
lament the disappearance of my people? All things end, and
the white man will find this out also.” And this goes for the
universe. One can be at peace with that. This doesn’t mean
that one shouldn’t participate in efforts to correct the
situation, but underlying the effort to change must be an “at
peace.” To win a dog sled race is great. To lose is okay too.
The world of human life is now the problem. Guided
by the practical judgment of the kings and the
instruction of the priests of the dice of divine
revelation, the field of conscious-ness so contracts
that the grand lines of the human comedy are lost in
a welter of cross-purposes. Men’s perspectives
become flat, comprehending only the light-
reflecting, tangible surfaces of existence. The vista
into depth closes over. The significant form of the
human agony is lost to view. Society lapses into
mistake and disaster. The Little Ego has usurped the
judgment seat of the Self.48

Let us imagine ourselves for a moment in the

lecture hall. …Above, we see many lights. Each bulb
is separate from the others, and we may think of
them, accordingly, as separate from each other.

…just as each bulb seen aloft is a vehicle of light, so

each of us below is a vehicle of consciousness. But
the important thing about a bulb is the quality of its
light. Likewise, the important thing about each of us
is the quality of his con-sciousness. And although
each may tend to identify himself mainly with his
separate body and its frailties, it is possible also to
regard one’s body as a mere vehicle of
consciousness and to think then of consciousness as
the one presence here made manifest through us
all.49

If the body is a light bulb, and it burns out,

does that mean there’s no more electricity?
The source of energy remains.
We can discard the body and go on.
We are the source.
“For that which is born, death is certain, and for that
which is dead, birth is certain. You should not grieve
over the unavoidable.…The Supreme Self which
dwells in all bodies, can never be slain.…Weapons
cut it not; fire burns it not; water wets it not; the
wind does not wither it. Eternal, universal,
unchanging, immovable, the Self is the same
forever. …Dwelling in all bodies, the Self can never
be slain. There-fore you should not grieve for any
creature.”—Bhagavad Gītā50

“All things are in process, rising and returning.

Plants come to blossom, but only to return to the
root. Returning to the root is like seeking tranquility.
Seeking tranquility is like moving toward destiny. To
move toward destiny is like eternity. To know
eternity is enlightenment, and not to recognize
eternity brings disorder and evil. Knowing eternity
makes one comprehensive; comprehension makes
one broadminded; breadth of vision brings nobility;
nobility is like heaven.”—Lao-tse51

We go down into death for refreshment.

“Nothing retains its own form; but Nature, the

greater renewer, ever makes up forms from forms.
Be sure there’s nothing perishes in the whole
universe; it does but vary and renew its form.”—
Ovid52

An Aztec prayer to be said at the deathbed…“Dear

Child! Thou hast passed through and survived the
labors of this life. Now it hath pleased our Lord to
carry thee away. For we do not enjoy this world
everlastingly, only briefly;

our life is like the warming of oneself in the sun.53

How one comes to accept that life follows death is an
individual problem. There are a lot of meditation disciplines
that open one to the experience of death, the acceptance of
death. It is a motif that is absolutely universal in initiations.
There is always a death aspect and a birth after it.

Death and begetting

come at the same time.

Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the

old thing again, but of something new. Within the
soul, within the body social, there must be—if we
are to experience long survival—a continuous
“recurrence of birth” (palingenesia) to nullify the
unremitting recurrences of death.54 For it is by
means of our own victories, if we are not
regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought:
doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace
then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare;
permanence a snare. When our day is come for the
victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we
can do, except be crucified and resurrected;
dismembered totally, and then reborn.55

Sometimes the death is, as it were, enacted. In primitive

puberty rites, there is often an enactment of dying or the
young person thinks he’s about to be killed and actually
experiences a going into death. I know of a number of
examples in contemporary life of people who have been in a
blocked situation and then have actually experienced death.
One case I know was a woman caught in an automobile
accident where two trucks collided with her in the middle,
and she thought she was dead. When she came out of it,
the whole life that she had been living just dropped off, and
she had an entirely new life. So it is a valid psychological
theme, this one of death out of which life comes.
Among primitive hunting people, where the men
continually kill animals, this killing of the animals is the
principle sacrifice, and among those people typically we
have no human sacrifices. But in early planting cultures,
there is almost a fury of sacrifice, sacrifices of all kinds, and
it’s in those cultures that we have human sacrifice.

Only the best are sacrificed.

Being sacrificed is a way to go home.
“He who loses his life shall find it.“

Generally, the principle sacrifice is of a major food

animal. For instance, in Southeast Asia, it’s the pig; in
Europe, principally, it’s the bull. Both of these animals are
symbolic of the moon. The tusks of the pig are the crescents
of the moon, with the black face between; the horns of the
bull, the same. The moon is that which dies and is
resurrected, dies and is resurrected. The bull represents, in
a way, the death of the moon out of which a new life can
come.

Snake and moon both die to the old,

shed their shadow to be reborn.
In Rome, suicide was a noble act. When one was about to
be captured, which would mean living a disgraceful life,
there was suicide, a practice that went on among the Celts
too. There is a Hellenistic picture of a Celt killing himself and
his wife as they’re about to be captured.
In Japan, the highest example of ceremonial suicide is
hara-kiri, an interesting and subtle ritual act. A man who has
conspicuously failed in the performance of his duty, which
he places above his personal wish, commits hara-kiri, for it
is the only thing that can redeem him from the disgrace.
The man who is to commit hara-kiri kneels in the center of a
tatami mat, the four corners of which are marked off by
objects—like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John around Christ:
the motif of the center and the four points. He inserts his
sword, the symbol of his nobility and honor, into the right
side of his belly, and carries it across and down. He must fall
face for-ward. It is an extremely painful way to kill yourself.
You can’t just stab and go out. It is a deliberate act, and a
matter of honor that you experience the whole thing. In the
woman’s counter-part of hara-kiri, she cuts her jugular vein
—a different act, but the sense is the same.
An Indian aristocrat, whose sword is his honor, can
behead himself. You can’t practice this one either. The way
it’s done, according to the illustrations, is you bend down a
pliant sapling, attach a rope to it, put the rope around your
head, bend over, take your sword, and cut off your head.
The further the tree pitches your head, the greater the merit
you’ve gained by the act. You are immediately translated to
wherever the merit has brought you, and your friends ‘round
about know what has happened. This type of suicide has
high dignity and belongs to the ritual practice of the
community.
I think the idea of life after death is a bad idea. It distracts
you from appreciating the uniqueness of the here and now,
the moment you are living. For example, if you think that
when you die your parents will be there and you’ll live with
them forever, you may no longer appreciate the significant
moments that you share with them on earth.
Every moment is utterly unique and will not be
continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and
should concentrate your attention on what you are
experiencing now. I think that’s washed out a bit by the
notion that everyone will be happy in heaven. You had
better be happy here, now. You’d better experience the
eternal here and now.. Being “happy with Him forever in
heaven” means that while you are here on earth you should
be happy: that is to say, your life should be identified with
the divine power, the eternal power in all life. If you
concretize the symbol of heaven, the whole situation
disintegrates. You think, for example, that eternity is there,
and your life is here. You believe that God, the source of
energy, is there, and you are here, and He may come into
your life or He may not. No, no—that source of eternal
energy is here, in you, now.
That is the essence of Gnosticism, Buddha
consciousness, and so forth. St. Paul got close to the idea
when he said, “I live now, not I, but Christ in me.” I once
made this observation in a lecture, and a priest in
attendance said, “That’s blasphemy.”—an example of the
church not conceding the very sense of the symbol.
On the other hand, since the function of the heaven
image is to help you to die, to yield to where nature’s taking
you rather than resist, I think you would tell a Christian child
who is going to die that he is going to go to heaven.

The resistance to death

has to do with not knowing
 where you’re going when you die.

In one of the sūtras, the Buddha is asked how one

person helps another face death. He responds: “Suppose a
house caught fire, and in the house was a father with three
little children, and the children were afraid of the flames,
but they wouldn’t go outside. The father says, ‘Now, look,
outside we have a darling little goat cart. The goats are all
waiting for you, so let’s go out and get in the cart.’” That is
to say, you put something out past the flames for the
person who is not able to experience anything else. This
approach is a convenient means of bringing about a
desirable and necessary act that the person would
otherwise be incapable of performing.
When you support someone who is dying, you are
helping that person to identify with the consciousness that
is going to disengage from the body. We disengage from
various things all of our lives. Finally, we identify with
consciousness and disengage from our bodies.

In Buddhism,
the central thought is
compassion without attachment.

And so, the death of one for whom you feel com-passion
shouldn’t be an affliction. Your attachment is the temporal
aspect of the relationship; your compassion is the eternal
aspect. Hence, you can reconcile yourself to feelings of loss
by identifying with that which is not lost when all is lost:
namely, the consciousness that informs the body and all
things. This yielding back into undifferentiated
consciousness is the return, and that is as far as you can
think, as much as you can know. The rest is transcendent of
all conscious knowledge.
[Discuss]
Coming into Awareness
T HE first aphorism of Patanjali’s classic handbook of
yoga supplies the key to the entire work:

“Yoga consists in the intentional stopping

of the spontaneous activity of the mind-

stuff.”56

…Any person unused to meditation, desiring to fix in

his mind a single image or thought, will find within
seconds that he is already entertaining associated
thoughts. The untrained mind will not stand still,
and yoga is the intentional stopping of its
movement.

It may be asked, why should anyone wish to bring

about such a state?

The mind is likened, in reply, to the surface of a

pond rippled by a wind.…The idea of yoga is to
cause that wind to subside and let the waters return
to rest. For when a wind blows and waters stir, the
waves break and distort both the light and its
reflections, so that all that can be seen are colliding
broken forms. Not until the waters will have been
stilled, cleansed of stirred-up sediment and made
mirror-bright, will the one reflected image appear
that on the rippling waves had been broken; that of
the clouds and pure sky above, the trees along the
shore, and down deep in the still, pure water itself,
the sandy bottom and the fish. Then alone will that
single image be known of which the wave-borne
reflections are but fragments and distortions. And
this single image can be likened to that of the Self
realized in yoga. It is the Ultimate—the Form of
forms—of which the phenomena of this world are
 but imperfectly seen, ephemeral distortions: the
God-form, the Buddha-form, which is truly our own
Knowledge-form, and with which it is the goal of
yoga to unite us.57

In kuṇḍalinī yoga, largely through the exercise of

meditation and breath control, called prāṇāyāma—breathing
in through one nostril for a certain number
of counts, holding the breath, filling the body with the
prana, the breath, then breathing out for a number of
counts, holding briefly, breathing in through the other
nostril, and so forth—one gradually stills the whole psyche,
calms the waters, as it were.
There is a notion that breath and emotion are linked.
When you are shocked, your breathing changes. When you
are full of rage or passion of any kind, your breathing
changes. When you are at rest, your breath-ing changes. So
the goal here is to make your breathing regular, to still and
calm the mind. And at the same time there is a meditation
that activates the kuṇḍalinī serpent and starts her up the
spine.

[Kuṇḍalinī]…the figure of a coiled female serpent—a

serpent goddess not of “gross” but of “subtle”
substance—which is to be thought of as residing in a
torpid, slumbering state in a subtle center, the first
of the seven, near the base of the spine: the aim of
the yoga then being to rouse this serpent, lift her
head, and bring her up a subtle nerve or channel of
the spine to the so-called “thousand-petaled lotus”
(sahasrara) at the crown of the head.…She, rising
from the lowest to the highest lotus center, will pass
through and wake the five between, and with each
waking the psychology and personality of the
 practitioner will be altogether and fundamentally
transformed.58

The word cakra means “wheel.” Cakras are also called

padmas, which means “lotuses.” There are seven: three
associated with the pelvic area, three with the head, and
one in between—the heart cakra—in that great cavity of all
the pulses: the pulsation of the heart and the pulsation of
the breath.

Cakra I, Mūlādhāra, the “Root Support,” is located

at the base of the spine. The world view is of
uninspired materialism, governed by ‘hard facts’…
and the psychology, adequately described in
behavioristic terms, is reactive, not active. There is
on this plane no zeal for life, no explicit impulse to
expand. There is simply a lethargic avidity in
hanging on to existence; and it is this grim grip that
must finally be broken so that the spirit may be quit
of its dull zeal simply to be.…

The first task of the yogi, then, must be to break at

this level the cold dragon grip of his own spiritual
lethargy and release the jewel-maid, his own shakti,
for ascent to those higher spheres where she will
become his spiritual teacher and guide to the bliss
of an immortal life beyond sleep.59

Cakra II, Svādhishṭhāna, “Her Special Abode,” is at

the level of the genitals. When the kuṇḍalinī is
active at this level, the whole aim of life is in sex.
Not only is every thought and act sexually
motivated, either as a means toward sexual ends or
as a compensating sublimation of frustrated sexual
zeal, but everything seen and heard is interpreted
compulsively, both consciously and unconsciously,
 as symbolic of sexual themes. Psychic energy, that
is to say, has the character here of the Freudian
libido. Myths, deities, and religious rites are
understood and experienced in sexual terms.60

Cakra III, Maṇipūra, “City of the Shining Jewel,” is

located at the level of the navel. Here the energy
turns to violence and its aim is to consume, to
master, to turn the world into oneself and one’s
own. The appropriate Occidental psychology would
be the Adlerian of the “will to power”: for now even
sex becomes an occasion, not of erotic experience,
but of achievement, conquest, self-reassurance, and
frequently, also, revenge.61

The function of Cakra III is organizing your life,

establishing a family, building a business, learning how to
master the world in terms appropriate to your condition and
place. Self maintenance, family maintenance. society
maintenance, world maintenance—but maintenance in the
sense of transformation: life is maintained, not in a petrified
condition, but in a growth condition, as is a tree by the
gardener that cultivates it.

All three of these lower cakras are of the modes of

man’s living in the world in his naive state, outward
turned: the modes of the lovers, the fighters, the
builders, the accom-plishers. Joys and sorrows on
these levels are functions of achievements in the
world “out there,” what people think of one, what
has been gained, what lost.62

These three cakras are of functions that we share with

the other animals. They are also clinging to life, begetting,
building nests, making their way. Popular religion works on
these levels, and the individual living on these levels is ego-
oriented and his action must be controlled by social law.

…a religion operating only on these levels, having

little or nothing to do with the fostering of inward,
mystical realizations, would hardly merit the name
of religion at all. It would be little more than an
adjunct to police authority, offering in addition to
ethical rules and advice intangible consolations for
life's losses and a promise of future rewards for
social duties fulfilled.63

Cakra IV, Anāhata, meaning “not hit,” is at the level of

the heart. It is the beginning of the religious life, the
awakening where the new life begins, and its name refers to
the sound that is not made by any two things striking
together. All the sounds that we hear are made by two
things striking together. What would the sound be that is not
made by two things striking together? It is the sound of the
energy of which universe is a mani-festation. It is, therefore,
antecedent to things.
The heart cakra, then, is the opening of the spirit-ual
dimension: all is metaphoric of the mystery. Once you have
got that point of all being metaphoric of the mystery, then
these lower powers become spiritualized. The very doing of
the things of the first three cakras become the realizations
of Cakras V, VI, and VII.

When you reach the upper cakras,

you don’t do without the first three:
survival, sex, power.

You don’t destroy

the first three floors of a building
when you get to the fourth.
 Cakra V, called Viśuddha, “Purified,” is at the level of
the larynx. This is the cakra of spiritual effort to hold back
the animal system from which the energies come. One has
gone through the lower cakras to get to here, but the pelvic
cakras have not been rejected. They now have to be turned
to a spiritual, rather than a merely physical, aim. Cakra V is
commonly referred to by Tibetan images of deities standing
on prostrate forms, putting down the merely physical with
weapons and ferocity: the ferocity with which you have to
handle yourself.

Cakra VI, Ājñā, the lotus of “Command,” located

between the eyebrows, is what we would call the cakra of
heaven, the highest cakra in the world of incarnate forms.
The forms of the pharaohs from Egypt show the Uraeus
Serpent coming out of this point between the brows. When
the kuṇḍalinī has reached this point, one beholds God. Any
god you have been meditating on or have been taught to
revere is the god that will be seen here. This is the highest
obstacle for the complete yogi. As Ramakrishna says, “One
is tempted to stay there tasting the juice.” It is so sweet, so
blissful.

On the brink of illumination,

the old ways are very seductive
and liable to pull you back.

The Sufis have a wonderful image connected with Cakra

VI. This is the story told by Hallaj: One night a moth sees a
lamp, a burning flame enclosed in glass. It spends the whole
night bumping against the glass, trying to become one with
the flame. In the morning it returns to its friends in the
morning and tells them of the beautiful thing it has seen.
They say, “You don't look the better for it.” This is the
condition of the yogi trying to break through. So it goes
back the next night and, somehow or other, gets through.
For an eternal instant it achieves its goal: it becomes the
flame—tat tvam asi—”thou art that.” And so, here is the
subject and here is the object—the Soul and God—between
is a pane of glass. Remove the pane and there is neither
subject nor object, because to have an object you have to
have a subject.
The final barrier to enlightenment is the barrier that
prevents you from becoming God. The pane of glass is a
way of speaking about the dividing factor. Removing the
glass suggests the annihilation of the veil of ignorance that
keeps you from knowing God. Beholding God—God with
characteristics—is the final whisp of ignorance. At this level
you have to have a symbol, an experience because you are
still holding the last whisp of you. I am beholding God.
That’s the final barrier.
It is so sweet that one is reluctant to yield, but the
ultimate yielding is the yielding of your own being. If you’re
going to hang onto your soul, you can’t become one with
God. You can’t even become one with your spouse. This is
what has to be given up. I hear OM. I know God is
ubiquitous. Divine energy is all around me. It is here. It is
here. It is here.
When you come to fulfillment, you have come to that
high point. The god’s name doesn’t matter, they are all
included. The different gods are personifications of aspects
of the total functioning. The ultimate thing is going past
gods. Meister Eckhart said, “The ultimate leave-taking is the
leaving of God for God.”64 That means leaving the folk idea
of God—the ecclesiastical idea of God, what you’ve been
taught of God—for that transcendent reference of which
God is the metaphor. Where are you between two thoughts?
Where is God between two Gods?
It’s a simple idea,yet we are so used to being taught
something else that the words tend to block us instead of
letting us through. Leaving God for God is, for me, a very
vivid statement. Indian philosophy has no problem with this
concept. When the kuṇḍalinī reaches Cakra VI, you see God:
“brahman with characteristics.” At Cakra VII, you go past
God and are in the transcendent: “brahman without
characteristics.”

Cakra VII, Sahasrāra, “Thousand Petalled,” is the lotus

at the crown of the head. At this cakra there is no person to
be conscious of God. There is only undifferentiated
consciousness: the silence. When you hit Cakra VII, you are
inert. It is a catatonic knockout, you might say, and you are
reduced simply to a thing.
Now as I see it, if you come back down to the heart, to
Cakra IV, where spiritual life begins, subject and object are
together. Cakra I corresponds to VII. The inertia from Cakra I
sets in when you have hit Cakra VII. Cakra II corresponds to
VI. Cakra III corresponds to V. You are then able to take the
war energy from Cakra III and practice self control in Cakra
V. So you can bend things at Cakra IV.
For example, through the experiences of Cakra II, if they
are of love, you are really experiencing the grace of God in
Cakra VI. You transmute the lust energy of Cakra II into love.
If there has been no experience of the discipline of Cakra V,
you’ll never get an inkling of what it is you are to be
experiencing through the physical. If in your physical love,
you can realize that what you are touching is the grace of
the divine in its proper form for you, this is a translation of
the carnal adventure into the spiritual, without the loss of
the carnal. The two are together. You are then beholding the
god as in Cakra VI and experiencing the beloved as a
manifestation of that divine power, that love which informs
the world.
In the courtly love tradition, the woman had to test the
man by holding him off until she was sure that it was not
lust that was approaching her, but love, the gentle heart.
That is the whole sense of courtly love. The same theme is
later represented in Dante’s Divine Comedy, where his love
for Beatrice brings him to the throne of God. In his
wonderful book of poems called La Vita Nuova, “The New
Life,” Dante describes how he looks at her, not with the eye
of Cakra II, but with that of Cakra VI, as a manifestation of
God’s love, and that carries him through the whole thing.
My wonderful friend, Heinrich Zimmer, my final guru, often
said, “The best things cannot be told.” That is to say, you
can’t talk about that which lies beyond the reach of words.
The second best are misunderstood, because they are
your statements about that which cannot be told. They are
misunderstood because the vocabulary of symbols that you
have to use are thought to be references to historical
events.
The third best is conversation, political life, economics,
and all that. And that’s what we are usually dealing with:
the first three cakras.
Zimmer loved to recount an amusing animal-fable from
India. It tells of a tigress, pregnant and starving, who comes
upon a little flock of goats and pounces on them with such
energy that she brings about the birth of her little one and
her own death.
The goats scatter, and when they come back to their
grazing place, they find this just-born tiger and its dead
mother. Having strong parental instincts, they adopt the
tiger, and it grows up thinking it’s a goat. It learns to bleat.
It learns to eat grass. And since grass doesn’t nourish it very
well, it grows up to become a pretty miserable specimen of
its species.
When the young tiger reaches adolescence, a large
male tiger pounces on the flock, and the goats scatter. But
this little fellow is a tiger, so he stands there. The big one
looks at him in amazement and says, “Are you living here
with these goats?” “Maaaaaa,” says the little tiger. Well, the
old tiger is mortified, something like a father who comes
home and finds his son with long hair. He swats him back
and forth a couple of times, and the little thing just responds
with these silly bleats and begins nibbling grass in
embarrassment. So the big tiger brings him to a still pond.
Now, still water is a favorite Indian image to symbolize
the idea of yoga. The first aphorism of yoga is: “Yoga is the
intentional stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind-
stuff.” Our minds, which are in continual flux, are likened to
the surface of a pond that’s blown by a wind. So the forms
that we see, those of our own lives and the world around us,
are simply flashing images that come and go in the field of
time, but beneath all of them is the substantial form of
forms. Bring the pond to a standstill, have the wind
withdraw and the waters clear, and you’ll see, in stasis, the
perfect image beneath all of these changing forms.
So this little fellow looks into the pond and sees his own
face for the first time. The big tiger puts his face over and
says, “You see, you’ve got a face like mine. You’re not a
goat. You’re a tiger like me. Be like me.”
Now that’s guru stuff: I’ll give you my picture to wear,
be like me. It’s the opposite to the individual way.
So the little one is getting that message; he’s picked up
and taken to the tiger’s den, where there are the remains of
a recently slaughtered gazelle. Taking a chunk of this bloody
stuff, the big tiger says, “Open your face.” The little one
backs away, “I’m a vegetarian.” “None of that nonsense,”
says the big fellow, and he shoves a piece of meat down the
little one’s throat. He gags on it. The text says, “As all do on
true doctrine.”
But gagging on the true doctrine, he’s nevertheless
getting it into his blood, into his nerves; it’s his proper food.
It touches his proper nature. Spontaneously, he gives a tiger
stretch, the first one. A little tiger roar comes out—Tiger
Roar 101. The big one says, “There. Now you’ve got it. Now
we go into the forest and eat tiger food.”

Vegetarianism
is the first turning away from life,
because life lives on lives.
Vegetarians are just eating
something that can’t run away.
 Now, of course, the moral is that we are all tigers living
here as goats. The right hand path, the sociological
department, is interested in cultivating our goat-nature.
Mythology, properly understood as metaphor, will guide you
to the recognition of your tiger face. But then how are you
going to live with these goats?
Well, Jesus had something to say about this problem. In
Matthew 7 he said, “Do not cast your pearls before swine, or
they will trample them under their feet and turn and tear
you.”

The function
of the orthodox community
is to torture the mystic to death:
his goal.

You wear the outer garment of the law, behave as

everyone else and wear the inner garment of the mystic
way. Jesus also said that when you pray, you should go into
your own room and close the door. When you go out, brush
your hair. Don’t let them know. Otherwise, you’ll be a kook,
something phony.
So that has to do with not letting people know where
you are. But then comes the second problem: how do you
live with these people? Do you know the answer? You know
that they are all tigers. And you live with that aspect of their
nature, and perhaps in your art you can let them know that
they are tigers.
And that’s the revelation then. And so this brings us to
the final formula of the Bodhisattava way, the way of the
one who is grounded in eternity and moving in the field of
time. The field of time is the field of sorrow. “All life is
sorrowful.” And it is. If you try to correct the sorrows, all you
do is shift them somewhere else. Life is sorrowful. How do
you live with that? You realize the eternal within yourself.
You disengage, and yet, reengage. You—and here’s the
beautiful formula—“participate with joy in the sorrows of the
world.” You play the game. It hurts, but you know that you
have found the place that is transcendent of injury and
fulfillments. You are there, and that’s it.
I haven’t kept up with psychology since the death of Jung,
but I’d say that Jung was such a person: one grounded in
eternity and moving in the field of time. Jean and I had tea
for an hour-and-a-half with Dr. and Mrs. Jung at Bollingen,
his place at Lake Zurich. It was a lovely occasion. Since he
was editing some of the German posthuma of Zimmer and I
had done my work on the English, we had no trouble saying
hello and enjoying things together without any anxiety of
understanding. When we were about to leave Jung said, “So,
you’re going to India. Well, let me tell you the meaning of
OM.
“When I was in Africa a group of us went for a little hike.
Presently, we knew we were lost. Then we looked around
and saw all these boys with things in their noses, standing
on one leg, supporting themselves with spears. Nobody
knew how to talk to anybody else. We had no knowledge of
their language. It was a tense moment. We all just sat down
and kept looking at each other. When everybody felt that
everything was okay—”it’s okay, these are good people,
they’re perfectly okay”—what do I hear? ‘OM…OM…OM…’
“Then, the next year I was in India with a group of
scientists, and if there’s one variety of the human species
that is not susceptible to awe, this is it. We went up to
Darjeeling, to Tiger Hill, which is a wonderful experience.
You are awakened early in the morning about a half hour
before sunrise and driven in the chilly morning air to a lofty
ridge. And it’s dark. When the sun rises, you see before you
millions of square miles of Himalayan peaks breaking into
rainbow colors. What did I hear from the scientists? ’OM…
OM…OM…’ OM is the sound nature makes when it’s pleased
with itself.”
That’s an example of the kind of playful conversa-tion
that we had. He was a beautiful man, and Jean said that he
had beautiful eyes.
 Jung found out in 1909 that myth and dream were
linked, but it has been well known in India forever. It is
implicit in the syllable OM, or A-U-M.

According to the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, the world of

the state of waking consciousness is to be identified
with the letter A of the syllable AUM; that of dream
consciousness (heaven and hell, that is to say) with
the letter U; and deep sleep (the state of the
mystical union of the knower and the known, God
and his world, brooding the seeds and energies of
creation: which is the state symbolized in the center
of the mandala) with M.65 The soul is to be propelled
both by and from this syllable AUM into the silence
beyond and all around it: the silence out of which it
rises and back into which it goes when pronounced
—slowly and rhythmically …as AUM—AUM—AUM.66

If you want to hear AUM, just cover your ears and you’ll
hear it. Of course, what you are hearing is the blood in the
capillaries, but it’s AUM: Ah—waking consciousness; ou—
dream consciousness; and then, mmm—the realm of deep,
dreamless sleep. AUM is the sound of the radiance of God.
This is the most mysterious and important thing to
understand, but once you get the idea, it’s very simple.

“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost

secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic
night which was psyche long before there was any
ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no
matter how far our ego-consciousness may extend.
For all ego-consciousness is isolated: because it
separates and discriminates, it knows only
 particulars, and it sees only what can be related to
the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it
reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All
consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on
the likeness of that more universal, truer, more
eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial
night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in
him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all
egohood.

“It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream

arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, or
immoral. So flowerlike is it in its candor and veracity
that it makes us blush for the deceitfulness of our
lives.”—Jung67

The secret of dreams is that subject and object are the

same. The object is self-luminous, fluent in form, multivalent
in its meanings. It’s your dream, the manifestation of your
will, and yet you are surprised by it. This is the relationship
of ego-consciousness to the unconscious. Ego-
consciousness has to learn about the unconscious, and
dreams are the vocabulary of the unconscious speaking to
the conscious mind. Yet, in dreams and in visions, subject
and object are the same.
Dream, vision, God—God is a luminous vision. The
image of God is equivalent to the dream vision.
So your God is an aspect of yourself, just as your dream
image is. That’s what is meant by the Hindu saying, nādevo
devam arcayet, “by none but a god shall a god be
worshiped.” Your god is a manifestation of your own level of
consciousness. All of the heavens and all of the hells are
within you. This understanding is just taken for granted in
India, so we are in the realm of myth.
 Write down your dreams.
They are your myths.

Now, this consciousness is unconscious, but the body is

conscious; there is consciousness still there. The heart is
beating, the blood is running through the body. If you are
cold you will pull the blanket up over you; if you are hot you
will push the blanket down. I recall a cartoon in a magazine
of a husband and wife in bed. He has all the covers over
him, and he’s dreaming about watching a hula dancer on a
South Sea isle. She’s freezing and thinks of herself in an
Eskimo igloo. The body is conscious.
The point is that consciousness itself is below this level
of darkness, beyond dream consciousness. In one of the
Upaniṣads there is a saying: “We go into that brahman
world every night, but, alas, we are asleep.” The goal of
yoga is to go into that realm awake. If you do, you will have
arrived at pure, unmitigated, undifferentiated
consciousness. Not consciousness of any thing, because you
are not on levels A or U, but consciousness per se. Since all
of our words relate either to things or to a relationship of
things—whether things of waking or visions of dream—there
are no words for this experience. All that can be said about
it is silence.
Silence is the proper vocabulary of this realization. The
Buddha is called Shakyamuni. The word muni means “the
silent one,” and Shakya is his family name, so he is the
silent one of the Shakya clan. This is why Zimmer said that
the best things can’t be told—there are no words for this
realization. And when you utter words in order to refer the
mind to it, the danger is that the words will trap you and
you won’t go through. So, for anyone lecturing, there’s a not
very comfortable saying: “He who speaks, does not know.
He who knows, does not speak.” That’s the final word.
The point is that this AUM heard in silence informs all
things. All things are manifestations of it. Now you are
inward turned. The secret to having a spiritual life as you
move in the world is to hear the AUM in all things all the
time. If you do, everything is transformed. You no longer
have to go anywhere to find your fulfillment and
achievement and the treasure that you seek. It is here. It is
everywhere.

Clearly the occurrence of such visions over the

whole in-habited earth requires no explanation in
terms either of racial or of cultural diffusion. The
problem is, rather, psychological: of that depth of
the unconscious where, to quote the words of C. G.
Jung, “man is no longer a distinct indivi-dual, but his
mind widens out and merges into the mind of
mankind—not the conscious mind, but the
unconscious mind of mankind, where we are all the
same.”68
 N OW 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.…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.69

In a mature life you’re hanging onto life, your erotic

relationships are in play and established, and you have
found a way to maintain yourself. I will give you an example
of how these various energies work against each other.
There’s one male fish that is normally colored in such a way
that the upper part of its body is dark and the lower part is
light. That’s the usual coloring of fish, because when you are
below looking up into the light, the fish is relatively invisible,
and when you are above looking down into the dark, it’s
also camouflaged. But when this particular fish is in love, his
color shifts so that he’ll be visible. This puts him in danger,
you see, and it seems to me symbolic of this love thing. You
give up self-protection when this other comes along and you
are seized with erotic compulsion.
It’s a very amusing exchange. When the female fish
goes by, a dance takes place. There is something about his
coloration that makes her give a little move, and then that
move triggers his response. If any one of the little moves is
missed, the dance ends and that choreography is finished.
But if they can go through the whole choreography, then
something happens.
There was a beautiful movie of three whales: two bulls
and a cow. A little job of nature was going to be done for the
cow. She was ready. It was one of the most impressive and
moving things to see the cooperation of these three
animals. They were swimming, the three of them plowing
along, and when she was ready to receive one of them, she
slowed down. The one on the right was supporting her and,
my god, like a rainbow this penis comes curving over the
body of this enormous animals. It was very moving and
awesome.
When animals get involved with something that comes
pushing from inside like that, there are elaborate ritual
relationships. One can say that ritual gets going when the
species principle begins operating in individuals. It is a
commitment of the individual to whatever might be the
intention of nature or the society given the circumstances.
But how is it that the second bull, who is not involved in the
act itself, can participate in this? This to me is something
way out. There was absolutely no sense of competition. This
was cooperation. I’ve heard that now that boats are taking
out tourists to look at the whales, the whales are moving out
beyond Catalina Island. The crowds can ruin anything.
I was watching a flock of birds the other day. The rhythm
of their flight is something to see. They all seem to know
just when they are going to turn, where they are going, and
what’s up now. How does this happen? That’s participating
in a transpersonal rhythm of some kind.

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, having 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 has 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!70
The Bushmen in South Africa have very pitiful little bows
that don’t have a shooting distance beyond twenty yards or
so, but they also have a deadly poison that they put on the
points of these little arrows. The Bushmen’s counterpart to
the American Indian’s buffalo would be the eland: a big,
beautiful type of gazelle. A Bushman has to hypnotize an
eland to get close enough to send his arrow. The eland will
live for another day in great pain while the poison kills it,
and the hunter has to identify himself with the animal and
observe certain taboos, and the way he behaves actually
influences the death of the animal.
The Hopi Snake Dance relates to this. It’s a strange and
wonderful ritual, where the dancers hold snakes in their
mouths and stroke them with feathers as they dance. I saw
a film about the snake worshipping, or snake using, people
in the mountains of, I think it was, Georgia or Tennessee.
These people have ceremonies in which they toss a tangle
of rattlesnakes back and forth. The participants believe that
if they are “in the Christ” they won’t be bitten. They get
themselves into a psychological state that the animals
somehow recognize. But in the film, the leader of this
particular ceremony is bitten. He says he had a feeling that
his consciousness “slipped,” as it were, so he won’t allow
anybody to cure him, and he dies.
Living as I have in New York City, with no real
relationship to animals—except when I was a kid out in the
country—I never could understand such things. So it’s
amazing to me to hear stories of what can take place
between a human being and a wild animal, when these
symbolic ideas of sacrifice and compassion are actually
worked out in action.

How can city people

call upon animal powers
if they know nothing about animals?
 In Hawaii, I love to watch birds in palm trees. They don’t
consciously know that palm leaves will go down when they
light on them. But when some little bird lands on a leaf that
goes down, the bird knows immediately how to catch itself.
It’s fantastic. What kind of consciousness is that?
I remember when I was a kid walking through the woods
and came upon a barbed wire fence with a tree leaning up
against it. The tree had incorporated the barbed wire, had
very neatly taken it into itself. You cannot tell me there isn’t
consciousness there. How far down the line does that go?
In the nineteenth century, when systematic vivisection
was beginning to be practiced, the animals being used
didn’t matter. Animals did not have consciousness. Their
reactions were thought to be just stimulus responses of a
mechanistic organism. How far can you push that way of
reading life? Can you bring it right up into human beings?
Are we also just mechanistic organisms? That’s behavioristic
psychology.
The other extreme is what you get with the Hindu
perspective of the ubiquity of ātman and brahman: all
things are living things.

Hindu meditations are intended

to put you in accord with Nature.

When you are in accord,

all the boons come.

The ego that relates to the other as to a “Thou” is

different from the ego that’s relating to an “It.” You can turn
anything into a Thou, so the whole world is a Thou. That’s
what the mystical experience is supposed to be. As soon as
anything is an It, you have duality. I-Thou is not a duality. It
is the nondual realization.
 Working with that realization, the whole world is then
radiant of life and joy. Finding everything a Thou and
realizing it’s life is the extreme statement of the implication
of all of these religious meditations. That’s the perspective
that the mechanistic scientists resist.
When I lecture around, it’s funny the negative reaction I
get from some scientists and Anglo-Saxon philosophers who
object to my use of the word “consciousness” for what they
would term “energy.” I have come more and more to think
that these two words are two ways of saying the same
thing, two aspects of a single thrust. There’s an implicit
tendency in conscious-ness to differentiation and
movement, and it strikes me that perhaps the energy we
see is consciousness. In the biological sphere at least,
energy seems to be associated with consciousness, almost
to the point of identity.
I think there are three states of being. One is the
innocent expression of Nature. Another is when you pause,
analyze, think about it. When you do, Nature is not just
living; and while you are analyzing, your nature isn’t
pushing you. Then, having analyzed, there comes a state in
which you’re able to live as Nature again, but with more
competence, more control, more flexibility.
I am more and more convinced that there is a plane of
consciousness that we are all sharing, and that the brain is a
limiting machine that pulls it in. It is possible to sink back,
lose this definition, and participate in that plane of
consciousness. How else do you explain extrasensory
perception? And since time is a form of sensibility—
meaning, that which is going to happen has already
happened in a certain sense—you cannot say that
premonitions are coincidences. They are not. They happen
too often to be attributed to chance.
I’ve had such experiences on enough occasions to attest
to that: meeting somebody, having a kind of “click,” and
knowing that you are going to do some-thing important
together that will be a major feature in your lives. I mean,
when you meet people who are going to be of deep
significance in your life, knowing that it’s going to happen is
somehow right there in the first meeting. It’s a very
mysterious business.
Sometimes you can feel you’ve missed the message
and gotten off the wave. I have had the feeling that I’ve
missed it, that I should have talked to that person next to
me because that’s why they were sitting there. But then
there are other times when you wonder how the hell a
particular person ever got in on your program.
You can get distracted by the desire for psychic powers.
Whether you have psychic powers or not, you still face the
problem of a life destiny and a life tragedy. I feel that, with
the academic life, I have gone on my life journey in a
shallow shell. My confession would be that I’m a thinking-
intuition type, short in both the feeling side and the
sensation side. Okay, that’s the boat I have, and that’s the
one I’m using. My sensations and feelings are there, but I
couldn’t guide myself by them. I’m certain of this from
knowing and living with people who do live in their feelings.
I see the richness and nuances of their experiences. Mine
are very crude, but I’ll match any of them for thinking.

Carl Jung, in his analysis of the structure of the

psyche, has distinguished four psychological
functions that link us to the outer world. These are
sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. Sensation,
he states, is the function that tells us that
something exists; thinking, the function that tells us
what it is; feeling, the function that evaluates its
worth to us; and intuition, the function that enables
us to estimate the possibilities inherent in the object
or its situation.71 Feeling, thus, is the inward guide to
value; but its judgments are related normally to
outward, empirical circumstance.72

The wonderful thing about symbology is that it includes

all four functions. Jung speaks of a fifth, in the center, that
he calls “the transcendent function.” That’s the one that
symbols help you to attack. The symbol carries the thought
to domains not of the head, but the head can lead it. I’ve
been afraid that the other functions would interrupt the flow
of this shell. It’s a damn good craft I’ve got, but it can’t do
those other things.
I haven’t meditated, and I know I have been afraid that
meditation might open up lots of things that could delay the
passage of this craft I’m rowing. It is an intentional limitation
in order to go in a direction and get there. And I have gotten
there, and I know it. Psychic experiences don’t necessarily
yield this kind of dimension. Each of us has individual
capacities. The real trick is knowing the machinery of the
boat in which you are crossing the channel.
The only way you can talk about this great tide in which
you’re a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is
a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream
characters dream too.
 W HEN we talk about scientific truth—just as when
we talk about God—we are in trouble, because
truth has different meanings. William James said,
and it’s valid , “Truth is what works.”
The idea of Truth with a capital “T”—that there is
something called Truth that’s beyond the range of the
relativity of the human mind trying to think—is what I call
“the error of the found truth.” The trouble with all of these
damned preachers is the error of the found truth. When they
get that tremolo in the voice and tell you what God has said,
you know you’ve got a faker. When people think that they,
or their guru, have The Truth—“This is It!”—they are what
Nietzsche calls “epileptics of the concept”: people who have
gotten an idea that’s driven them crazy.
Thinking you’ve got The Truth is a form of madness, as
are pronouncements about absolute beauty, because one
can easily see that there is no such thing. Beauty is always
relevant to something. That quote from Keats’s Ode on a
Grecian Urn—“‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’—that is all ye
know on earth, and all ye need to know.”—it is a nice poetic
thought, but what does it mean? Speaking of platitudes, I
like Robert Bly’s extrapolation of Descartes: “I think,
therefore I am. The stone doesn’t think, therefore it isn’t.”

Ideals are dangerous.

Don’t take them seriously.
You can get by on a few.

A human being in action cannot represent perfection.

You always represent one side of a duality that is itself
perfection. The moment you take action, you are imperfect:
you have decided to act that way instead of that other way.
That’s why people who think they are perfect are so
ridiculous. They’re in a bad position with respect to
themselves.
 It is a basic thought in India—it also turns up in China—
that life itself is a sin, in this sense of its being imperfect. To
live, you’re killing and eating something, aren’t you? You
can reduce what you eat to fallen leaves if you want, but
you’re still eating life. You are taking the common good, you
might say, and focusing it in your direction. And that is a
decision on one side rather than on the other. So, decide to
be imperfect, reconcile yourself to that, and go ahead.
That’s “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.”
The idea in India is that after many incarnations you
achieve perfection and don’t get reincarnated. You quit.
You’re out. Hence, all Buddhas are depicted more or less
alike, because they all are perfect and don’t reincarnate. As
long as you’re reincarnating, you are imperfect. So, you
have to be loyal to your imperfection: find out what it is,
then continue on your track. By being loyal to your part of
the duality, you are keeping the mystery of history
informed.

Do not give up your vices.

Make your vices work for you.

If you are a proud person,

don’t get rid of your pride.
Apply it to your spiritual quest.
The sublime in contrast to beauty? That which is beautiful
does not threaten you. Even the terror of tragedy is not as
threatening as something that blows you to pieces. The
sublime is rendered by prodigious power or by enormous
space: when you reach a mountaintop, for instance, and the
world breaks open:
a motif that is used in Buddhist art a great deal., and
the reason temples are put on the top of hills. In Kyōto,
there are gardens where you are screened from the
expanding view while climbing, and suddenly—bing!—the
whole vista opens before you. That’s sublimity. So, power
and space are two renditions of sublimity, and in both cases,
the ego is diminished. It’s strange: the less there is of you,
the more you experience the sublime.
Coomaraswamy has a definition of art—“art is the
making of things well”—that underlies art no matter what its
function or category. If you’re not interested in making
things well, then you’re not, even in the most elementary
sense, an artist. I think Japanese machinery sells so well
because the Japanese have that artistic idea. They strive for
perfection and precision in everything.
The aim of art is perfection in the object. The Taj Mahal,
for instance, is a grand artistic achievement. It’s perfect.
That’s all there is to say about it. I had the advantage of
seeing it first on a full-moon night, and I can’t forget that
moment. The damned thing is, I stood there and thought,
“This is what Robinson Jeffers calls ‘divinely superfluous
beauty.’ It’s of no practical value in my life, but this moment
is something in itself.”

…the act of drinking tea is a normal, secular,

common day affair; so also is sitting in a room with
friends. And yet, consider what happens when you
resolve to pay full attention to every single aspect of
the act of drinking tea while sitting in a room with
friends, selecting first your best, most appropriate
bowls, setting these down in the prettiest way, using
an interesting pot, sharing with a few friends who go
well together, and providing things for them to look
at: a few flowers perfectly composed, so that each
will shine with its own beauty and the organization
of the group also will be radiant: a picture in accord,
selected for the occasion: and perhaps an amusing
little box, to open, shut, and examine from all sides.
Then, in preparing, serving, and drinking, every
phase of the action is rendered in such a gracefully
functional manner that all present may take joy in it,
the common affair might well be said to have been
elevated to the status of a poem. And, in fact, in the
writing of a sonnet, words are used that are quite
normal, secular, common day tools. Just as in
poetry, so in tea: certain rules and manners have
been developed as a consequence of ages of
experience; and through a mastery of these,
immensely heightened powers of expression are
achieved. For as art imitates nature in its manner of
operation, so does tea.73

The guest approaches by the garden path, and must

stoop through the low entrance. He makes
obeisance to the picture or flower-arrangement, to
the singing kettle, and takes his place on the floor.
The simplest object, framed by the controlled
simplicity of the teahouse, stands out in mysterious
beauty, its silence holding the secret of temporal
existence. Each guest is permitted to complete the
experience in relation to himself. The members of
the company thus contemplate the universe in
miniature, and become aware of their hidden
fellowship with immortals.
The great tea masters were concerned to make of
the divine wonder an experienced moment; then out
of the teahouse the influence was carried into the
home; and out of the home instilled into the
nation.74
In the fourth and fifth centuries B.C., “excellence in
everything” was the Greek ideal. The gods represented
excellencies in various categories. The golden mean was the
middle way, “nothing in excess.” I think excellence in living
is a fine purpose. The Greeks were humanists. The Platonic
mandate was “Know Thyself.” The philosophical papers of
that period have to do with conduct and virtue: virtue in the
sense of excellence, not in the sense of good-versus-evil.
This is a point that Nietzsche brings out in Beyond Good
and Evil. He distinguishes between what he calls “slave
morality”—obeying a rule, doing what you’re told, being
good and not bad—and “master morality,” which is
equivalent to the Greek idea of virtue, and the Renaissance
idea of virtu, and has to do with the kind of excellence
achieved by one who is competent in some-thing. I can
remember somebody saying, “He’s a good man.” And
somebody else asking, “Good for what?” That’s a very
important shift in accent. There is something exhilarating
about the idea of sheer excellence and aggressive
performance: “I get in there and do it!” in contrast to
“Everything’s okay, and I submit.”
So, following Nietzsche, the lion of virtue is the one that
tears a lamb to pieces, and the bad lion is the one that
won’t. But from the lamb’s point of view, the bad lion is the
one that eats him. And so, what you find in slave morality is
that the people of excellence—the masterly ones—are
regarded as bad. It really is so.
With the idea of the masterly ones, we get the idea of
elitism. “Elitism? Elitism is bad.” Have you ever heard that
said? It’s slave morality speaking. I recall lecturing at the
University of Oklahoma to a select group of outstanding
students from colleges all over the country. I’d never before
had such an assemblage of excellent students. One of the
professors later told me that one student came to him and
said, “Having only excellent students in this group is
elitism.” The professor replied, “This program is for people
who are up to the scholarship.” “No,” the student argued,
“it’s elitism and shouldn’t be on this campus.” So the
professor said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Bill. I’m going to
recommend to the football coach that you play defensive
halfback. What do you think?” He got the idea. The only
place where excellence is appreciated is on the athletic
field.
Around the eighteenth century, linguists discovered that
almost all of the languages from India to Ireland, across that
whole range, were of the Indo-European language family. At
the time, they did not know how ancient civilization is—the
Mesopotamian region and Egyptian civilization had not yet
been explored—but it was evident that the Greek, Roman,
and European civilizations were all out of the impulse of the
Indo-European peoples. And so, a Frenchman came up with
the idea of a master race. The idea of Aryan supremacy that
Hitler later picked up had to do with this idea of a master
race. It had nothing to do with master morality or slave
morality. But Hitler used Nietszche’s words, which is very
unfortunate, because Nietzsche absolutely despised anti-
Semitism and the idea of the state. In fact, he said, “The
new idol is the state.” And that’s what Hitler represented. A
horrible little man. His ideas were not Nietzsche’s.
 P SYCHOLOGY is a means of interpretation, a way of
interpreting what’s going on. Are you going to
interpret it as the work of a concrete deity up there
who has brought it about? Is that concrete deity a fact? How
did it get there? That diety has to be interpreted
psychologically, so that you know that what we’re talking
about is not “out there,” but “in here.”

It was for me a startling experience, as it must have

been for many others watching at that time the
television broadcast of the Apollo space-flight
immediately before that of Armstrong’s landing on
the moon, when Ground Control in Houston asked,
“Who’s navigating now?” and the answer that came
back was, “Newton!”

I was reminded of Immanuel Kant’s discussion of

space in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic,
where he asks: “How is it that in this space, here,
we can make judgments that we know with
apodictic certainty will be valid in that space,
there?”75

Kant’s reply to the question was that the laws of

space are known to the mind because they are of
the mind. They are of a knowledge that is within us
from birth, a knowledge a priori, which is only
brought to recollection by apparently external
circumstance.…

In other words, it then occurred to me that outer

space is within us inasmuch as the laws of space are
within us; outer and inner space are the same. We
know, furthermore, that we have actually been born
from space, since it was out of primordial space that
the galaxy took form, of which our life-giving sun is
a member. And this earth, of whose material we are
made, is a flying satellite of that sun. We are, in fact,
productions of this earth. We are, as it were, its
organs. Our eyes are the eyes of this earth; our
knowledge is the earth’s knowledge. And the earth,
as we now know, is a production of space.…

And so now we must ask: What does all this do to

mythology? Obviously, some corrections have to be
made.

For example: It is believed that Jesus, having risen

from the dead, ascended physically to heaven (Luke
24:51), to be followed shortly by his mother in her
sleep (Early Christian belief, confirmed as Roman
Catholic dogma on November 1, 1950). It is also
written that some nine centuries earlier, Elijah,
riding a chariot of fire, had been carried to heaven
in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:11).

Now, even ascending at the speed of light, which for

a physical body is impossible, those three celestial
voyagers would not yet be out of the galaxy. Dante
in the year A.D. 1300 spent the Easter weekend in a
visit to hell, purgatory, and heaven; but that voyage
was in spirit alone, his body remaining on earth.
Whereas Jesus, Mary, and Elijah are declared to
have ascended physically. What is to be made today
of such mythological (hence, metaphorical) folk
ideas?

Obviously, if anything of value is to be made of

them at all (and I submit that the elementary
original idea must have been something of this
 kind), where those bodies went was not into outer
space, but into inner space. That is to say, what is
connoted by such metaphorical voyages is the
possibil-ity of a return of the mind in spirit, while still
incarnate, to full knowledge of that transcendent
source out of which the mystery of a given life
arises into this field of time and back into which it in
time dissolves. It is an old, old story in mythology: of
the Alpha and Omega that is the ground of all being,
to be realized as the beginning and end of this life.76

The limits of psychology are the same as the limits of

theology. They have to do with the problem of
symbolization, not with the transcendence, and they go the
same distance. When you simply translate God into a
psychological function or factor, you have gone as far as
God and no further. As long as you have a God, you’re stuck.
Recall Meister Eckhart: “The ultimate leave-taking is the
leaving of God for God.”
It’s a shame we have only one word for the two
concepts. In India, there are several—jīva, ātman, brahman
—and they are all different. “God,” our one word, is a really
inadequate word. It always implies a personification, and
unless one says “Goddess,” it implies a male
personification. Our limited vocabulary is what binds us,
what ties us up.
 In relation to the first books and chapters of the
Bible, it used to be the custom of both Jews and
Christians to take the narratives literally, as though
they were dependable accounts of the origin of the
universe and of actual prehistoric events. It was
supposed and taught that there had been, quite
concretely, a creation of the world in seven days by
a god known only to the Jews; that somewhere on
this broad new earth there had been a Garden of
Eden containing a serpent that could talk; that the
first woman, Eve, was formed from the first man’s
rib, and that the wicked serpent told her of the
marvelous properties of the fruits of a certain tree of
which God had forbidden the couple to eat; and
that, as a consequence of their having eaten of that
fruit, there followed a “Fall” of all mankind, death
came into the world, and the couple was driven
forth from the garden. For there was in the center of
that garden a second tree, the fruit of which would
have given them eternal life; and their creator,
fearing lest they should now take and eat of that
too, and so become as knowing and immortal as
himself, cursed them, and having driven them out,
placed at his garden gate “cherubim and a flaming
sword which turned every way to guard the way to
the tree of life.”77

Those cherubim are an important symbol. The Garden of

innocence and spontaneous life, of unity before the
knowledge of pairs of opposites, exits into the world of time
and historical duality, symbolized by the cherubim at the
gate with the flaming sword between: you can’t go through.
How are we to interpret those cherubim and the Garden?
 Well, you go to Japan to see the Great Buddha at Nara.
He is seated in the garden at the foot of the Tree of
Immortal Life. As you approach the temple, you come to a
preliminary building where two terrific figures stand as door
guardians. They are the cherubim. One of them has his
mouth open, the other’s mouth is closed: a pair of
opposites. One represents the fear of death, and the other
the desire for life—the temptations that didn’t touch the
Buddha.

No earthly paradise has been found.…for it is the

garden of man’s soul. As pictured in the Bible tale
with its four mysterious rivers flowing in the four
directions from a common source at the center, it is
exactly what C. G. Jung has called an “archetypal
image”: a psychological symbol, spontaneously
produced, which appears universally, both in
dreams and in myths and rites.…Like the image of a
deity, the quadrated garden with the life source at
its center is a figment of the psyche, not a product
of gross elements, and the one who seeks without
for it, gets lost.78

So what is keeping you out of the Garden? Your fear

and desire: that which the Buddha transcended. And when
the Buddha did not respond to temptations of fear and
desire, he passed through the gate to the tree, where he
now sits with his hand pointing to the earth. That’s
redemption. The Buddha and the Christ are equivalent.
Jesus has gone through and become, himself, the fruit of the
tree.

When threatened
by fear and desire,
let ego go.
 So the idea of redemption in both Christianity and
Buddhism has to do with one’s having come through.
Whether one does or not, in either tradition, is some-thing
else. You can walk between those figures at Nara and enter
the temple, bringing fear and desire with you, and you’ve
not really gone through. You may think you’ve achieved
illumination, but you’re still in exile.
The Buddhist interpretation of this whole thing is one of
psychological transformation. The Christian interpretation is
one of debt and payment. Paul was preaching to a group of
merchants, who understood
the whole mystery in terms of economics: there is a
debt, and you get an equivalent payment. The debt is
enormous, so the payment has to be enormous This is all
bankers’ thinking. Christianity is caught up in that.
I see Buddhism and Christianity as two vocabularies for
speaking about the same thing. In Buddhism we are lost in
the world of fear and desire, the field of māyā, illusion. This
is, in Christian iconography, the Fall. Redemption is losing
those fears and having the experience of eternal life. You
experience that through the act of Jesus in affirming the
world, in participating in the world with joy.
The Buddha is saying, “Don’t be afraid of those gate
guardians. Come in and eat the fruit of the tree.” The act of
communion is eating the fruit of the second tree in the
Garden. The fruit is symbolic of the spiritual nourishment
that comes when you have reached the knowledge of your
eternal life. There are various ways of interpreting these
mysteries. I am not telling you something I invented.

“Since in the world of time every man lives but

one life, it is in himself that he must search for the
secret of the Garden.”—Loren Eisely79

…in the Levant, the accent is on obedience, the

obedience of man to the will of God, whimsical
though it might be; the leading idea being that the
god has rendered a revelation, which is registered in
a book that men are to read and to revere, never to
presume to criticize, but to accept and to obey.
Those who do not know, or who would reject, this
holy book are in exile from their maker. 80

So, then, what is it that our religions actually teach?

Not the way to an experience of identity with the
Godhead, since that, as we have said, is the prime
heresy; but the way and the means to establish and
maintain a relationship to a named God. And how is
such a relationship to be achieved? Only through
membership in a certain supernaturally endowed,
uniquely favored social group.81

A religion of relationships
is a religion of exile.

The Old Testament God has a covenant with a

certain historic people, the only holy race—the only
holy thing, in fact—on earth. And how does one gain
membership? The traditional answer was most
recently (March 10, 1970) reaffirmed in Israel as
defining the first prerequisite to full citizenship in
that mythologically inspired nation: by being born of
a Jewish mother.82

Our actual ultimate root

is in our humanity,
not in our personal genealogy.83

And in the Christian view, by what means? By virtue

of the incarnation of Christ Jesus, who is to be
known as true God and true man (which, in the
Christian view, is a miracle, whereas in the Orient,
 on the other hand, everyone is to be known as true
God and true man, though few may have yet
awakened to the force of that wonder in
themselves).84

We are all Christs

and don’t realize it.

Among tribesmen depending on the hunting skills of

individuals for their existence, the individual is
fostered: even the concept of immortality is
individual, not collective. Spiritual leadership is
exercised primarily by shamans, who are individuals
endowed with spiritual power through personal
experience, not socially installed priests, made
members of an organization through appointment
and anointment.85

The central demand is to surrender our exclusivity:

everything that defines us as against each other. For years
people have used religious affiliations to do this. Martin
Buber speaks of “I-Thou” and “I-It” relationships. An ego
talking to a Thou is different from an ego talking to an It.
Wherever we emphasize otherness or outgroups, we are
making persons into Its: the gentile, the Jew, the enemy—
they all become the same.

Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing

cults represent only partial solutions of the
psychological problem of subduing hate by love:
they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in
them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only
of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the
whole of his society. The rest of the world
meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion
of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his
sympathy and protection because outside the
sphere of the protection of his god. And there takes
place, then, that dramatic divorce of the two
principles of love and hate which the pages of
history so bountifully illustrate. Instead of clearing
his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.86

If you fix
on yourself and your tradition,
believing you alone have got “It,”
you’ve removed yourself
from the rest of mankind.
Some say Communism is a social system without a religion;
but you can’t say that Communism is not religious, for the
laws of a Communist society have all the qualities of a
religion because Communism has become the religion.
In terms of the ritual side of it, Communism has all the
character of a religion, and it has the characteristics of one
that is a biblical descendent. There is a good and there is a
bad, and we’re fighting for the good, and there will be a day,
come the Revolution, when all will be Communist and right.
Part of the argument between Russia and China is about
who is interpreting Marx properly, which is sheer
scholasticism.
So, actually, most of the world’s societies are being
ruled by post-biblical traditions, in which anybody who is
anything else is out. Besides the Communist brother-hood,
there is the Jewish community, the Christian community,
and the Islamic, the Muslim community. Judaism doesn’t
have a missionizing impulse, but the other three—Islam,
Christianity, and Communism—are murderous traditions.
The aim of each is total world conquest. That’s a beautiful
show. Makes a mess of the world though.

The goal of life

is to make your heartbeat
match the beat of the universe,
to match your nature with Nature.

In Buddhism the goal of life is the repose of the nirvāṇic

experience of life: “joyful participation in the sorrows of the
world,” and soon. In a credo religion, the goal of life tends to
get formulated. In Islam, it’s in the very name of the
religion: islām means “submission,” to bow in acquiescence
and reverence to the will of God. This credo gives warriors
enormous courage and power: whether they’re going to get
killed or not get killed, they move in with submission to the
fate. In fact, that’s what a warrior has to do anyhow.

The warrior’s approach

is to say “yes” to life:
“yea” to it all.

In terms of historical action, Christianity and Islam have

the same character. They’re going to remake the world for
their God. I find this repulsive, but it’s what makes history,
so you have to say “yes” to it. If you say “no” to one little
detail of your life, you’ve unraveled the whole thing. You
have to say “yes” to the whole thing, including its
extinction. That’s what’s known as “joyful participation in
the sorrows of the world.” It’s my little theme song.

Love informs the whole universe

right down into the abyss of hell.
Dante in his Divine Comedy unfolded a vision of the
universe that perfectly satisfied both the approved
religious and the accepted scientific notions of his
time. When Satan had been flung out of heaven for
his pride and disobedience, he was supposed to
have fallen like a flaming comet and, when he
struck the earth, to have plowed right through to its
center. The prodigious crater that he opened
thereupon became the fiery pit of Hell; and the
great mass of displaced earth pushed forth at the
opposite pole became the Mountain of Purgatory,
which is represented by Dante as lifting heavenward
exactly at the South Pole.87

Dante saw even the fires of hell

as a manifestation of God’s love.

You will have heard the old legend of how, when

God created the angels, he commanded them to
pay worship to no one but himself; but then,
creating man, he commanded them to bow in
reverence to this most noble of his works, and
Lucifer refused—because, we are told, of his pride.
However, according to the Moslem reading of his
case, it was rather because he loved and adored
god so deeply and intensely that he could not bring
himself to bow before anything else. And it was for
that that he was flung into Hell, condemned to exist
there forever, apart form his love.88

Satan is the epitome of infractible ego.

The Persian poets have asked, “By what power is

Satan sustained?” And the answer that they have
found is this: “By his memory of the sound of God’s
voice when he said, ‘Be gone!’” What an image of
that exquisite spiritual agony which is at once the
rapture and the anguish of love!89

“The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much
as one holds a spider or some lothsome Insect over
the Fire, ab-hors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his
Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you
as Worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the
Fire; he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in
his Sight; you are Ten Thousand Times so
abominable in his Eyes as the most hateful
venomous Serpent is in ours.…you are thus in the
Hands of an angry god; ‘tis nothing but his mere
Pleasure that keeps you from being at this Moment
swallowed up in everlasting Destruction.” —Pastor
Jonathan Edwards90

”God’s mere pleasure,” which defends the sinner

from the arrow, the flood, and the flames, is termed
in the traditional vocabulary of Christianity God’s
”mercy”; and ”the mighty power of the spirit of
God,” by which the heart is changed, that is God’s
“grace.” In most mythologies, the images of mercy
and grace are rendered as vividly as those of justice
and wrath, so that a balance is maintained, and the
heart is buoyed rather than scourged along its way.
“Fear not!” says the hand gesture of the god Śiva,
as he dances before his devotee the dance of the
universal destruction.

“Fear not, for all rests well in God. The forms that
come

and go—and of which your body is but one—are the

flashes of my dancing limbs. Know Me in all, and of
 what shall you be afraid?”91

Hell is the concretization of your life experiences, a

place where you’re stuck, the wasteland. In hell, you are so
bound to yourself that grace cannot enter.

The problem with hell

is that the fire doesn’t consume you.
The fires of transformation do.

Fire is symbolic of the night sea journey, the upcoming

of shadow—repressed biography, history, and traumas—and
the burning out of the imps of malice. Purgatory is a place
where that fire is turned into a purging fire that burns out
the fear system, burns out the blockage so that it will open.
If hell is the wasteland, then purgatory would be the
journey where you leave the place of pain. You are still in
pain, but you’re in quest with a sense of possible realization.
There is no longer despair. You really do not have a sacred
place, a rescue land, until you can find some little field of
action, or place to be, where it’s not a wasteland, where
there is a little spring of ambrosia. It’s a joy that comes from
inside. It is not something that puts the joy in you, but a
place that lets you so experience your own will, your own
intention, and your own wish that, in small, the joy is there.
The sin against the Holy Ghost, I think, is despair. The Holy
Ghost is that which inspires you to realization., and despair
is the feeling that nothing can come. That is absolute hell.

Find a place where there’s joy,

and the joy will burn out the pain.
I had an interesting experience when I was lecturing at the
Foreign Service Institute in Washington D.C. to groups of
officers about to go on assignment to the Orient or
Southeast Asia. In one group there was this very smart black
man, who’d just come from three years in Vienna and was
going to India. The gentlemen in these groups would always
invite me to have lunch at a very nice restaurant at the
Watergate Hotel, and this time they asked this chap to drive
me over there.
He had a zoom-zoom sports car, and he was quite the
guy. When he and I were at the table, the first thing he
started talking to me about was being black and the things
that were against him. I thought, “Well, I’m going to let him
have it. I’m sick of this kind of stuff.” I said, “In terms of the
people I know, you are way up there. You’ve got a good life.
Everybody has something against him. Some people are
unattractive, and that’s against them. Some people are
Protestants in a Catholic country; some are Catholic in a
Protestant environment. If you go on blaming everything
that is negative in your life on the fact that you’re black, you
deny yourself the privilege of becoming human. You’re just a
black man. You are not a man yet.” Then the crowd came in,
and he sat quietly the rest of the time.
When I arrived the next month for my session, I went up
to report in, and the officer on duty said, “Say, Joe, what did
you tell that guy last time?” I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Why?”
He said, “Well, he’s bought all your books, and he’s
downstairs and wants you to sign them. When I asked him
why he was doing that, he said, ‘Professor Campbell has
made a man out of me.’”
Now that was a big lesson to me, and it runs against all
this bleeding-heart stuff. I was proud of that. So, he’d been
stuck in his hell: he hadn’t been able to see past his own
notion of what his limitation was. Anyway, I went
downstairs, and he had all the books, and as I was signing
them, I said, “Well, this’ll help you remember me.” He said,
“Oh, I’ll never forget you.”
Everytime you do something like that you find it was the
right thing to do, provided that you furnish the person with
something to jump to. If you’re really not interested in the
person, you can just agree with them, “Ah, you poor chap, I
understand. It’s real tough.”

Don’t think of what’s being said,

but of what’s talking.
Malice? Ignorance? Pride? Love?

The goal of the hero’s journey

is yourself, finding yourself.
When we are one place in our lives and want to be in
another place, there’s an obstacle to be overcome, a
threshold to be passed. The six-pointed star, which in
Judaism is the Star of David, is a symbol that appears in
India as the sign of Cakra IV.
In the double triangle, the upward-pointed triangle—you
might use the word “aspiration” for that—is symbolic of the
movement principle. The downward-pointed triangle is
inertia, and it represents what the obstacle would be. The
downward-pointing triangle can be experienced either as an
impediment or as the door that is opened. When you
recognize its psychological significance and effect a mental
transformation, then you see the obstacle as an opening.
So you can experience the downward-pointed triangle
two ways: one, as an obstacle; and the other, as the means
by which you are going to make the ascent. So, everything
in your life that seems to be obstructive can be transformed
by your recognizing that it is the means for your transition.
That’s the whole sense of the Tantra philosophy in India.
Tantric exercises, which are occult and hidden, go so far as
to propose precisely the most destructive, or seductive
practices, as the rung of a ladder of ascent. So, for example,
sexual union, which is usually one of the chief distractions
from the way, is taken to be the way. Also you have—and
this is extreme—necrophagia, the eating of dead bodies.
In certain American Indian cultures of the Southwest,
one of the initiations to the clown category—and their black
and white costume motif is a good symbol of the clown—
involves actually eating dog shit. The most repulsive has to
be accepted as also brahman. People like that are beyond
all pairs of opposites. You can go to quite an extreme in
eliminating your resistance to some of the things that life
proposes. But you don’t have to go that far.
In the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas, Jesus says,
“Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift up the stone and
you will find me there.”92 The historical Jesus has identified
himself with the Christ. That is Buddha consciousness. He is
living in terms, not of his ego, but of the Christ: the ubiquity
in everything of the radiance of that which is the deepest
center within you.
So, when this downward-pointed triangle becomes the
means, instead of the obstruction, to your break-through,
you’ve achieved the passage of the threshold.

There is always danger

at the threshold.
Leave the temporal body,
and let the spirit enter.

What is the obstruction in your life, and how do you

transform it into the radiance? Ask yourself, “What is the
main obstruction to my path?” In India, demons are really
obstructions to the expansion of conscious-ness. A demon or
devil is a power in you to which you have not given
expression, an unrecognized or suppressed god. Anyone
who is unable to understand a god sees it as a devil.

“Devil” is a word we use

for another peoples’ god.

All anyone is really trying to do is have an expansion of

consciousness, so that the knowing and loving are on
greater and greater horizons. That’s what happens when the
kuṇḍalinī comes up: more and more of the body is informed
with radiance and consciousness.

The goal of the journey

is to discover yourself
as consciousness.
 Joyce says in Ulysses, “If you can put your five fingers
through it, it is a gate, if not a door.”93 The difficulties one
encounters may be looked at as having the possibility of
transformation into opening gates rather than closed doors.
When you find yourself blocked by a concretized symbol
from your childhood, meditation is a systematic discipline
that will solve your problem. The function of meditation,
ideally, would be to transcend the concretized response and
deliver the message.
The first thing I’d do would be to think, “What are,
specifically, the symbols that are still active, still touching
me this way?” What are the symbols? There’s a great
context of symbols in the world. Not all of them are the ones
that afflict you. When you do find the symbol that is
blocking you, find some mode of thinking and experience
that matches in its importance for you what the symbol
meant. You cannot get rid of a sym-bol if you haven’t found
that to which it refers.
If you find in your own heart a center of experience for
which the symbol has been substituted, the symbol will
dissolve. Think, “Of what is it the metaphor?” When you find
that, the symbol will lose its blocking force, or it will become
a guide.
This is the “knowing” part of “to know, to love, to
serve.” If you’re in trouble with this part because you do not
really know what this thing refers to, then it will push you
around. I’m very, very sure of that.
To dissolve such a concretization as an adult, you need
to find what the reference of the symbol is. When that is
found, you will have the elucidation. The symbol will move
into place, and you can regard it with pleasure: as
something that guides you to the realization of what its
message is, instead of as a roadblock. This is an important
point.
That is the downward-pointed triangle. It is either an
obstruction or the field through which the realization is to
come.
Heaven and hell are psychological definitions. The Catholic
definition of mortal sin should relieve you of the thought
that you have committed one. As a Catholic, you learn that
for a sin to be mortal, the kind that condemns you to hell, it
has to be a grievous matter, over which there has been
sufficient reflection, done with full consent of the will. So, a
mortal sin is a deliberate exclusion of the gift of grace, and
that is what the devil symbolizes. You cannot open to
supernatural grace, to the voice of God.
Deliberately breaking the ritual law can be a mortal sin.
But here’s the bizarre thing about such a religion of ritual
laws: kill your mother in a passion, and that is not a mortal
sin. That’s a venial sin, and you will have your two-thousand
years in purgatory on that one. But one little mortal sin, and
you’re bound for hell. Let’s all go in a big chariot. When the
Church said that eating meat on Friday was no longer a
mortal sin, there was a crisis in the entire Catholic
community. In New York City, where there are a lot of
Catholics, there was a great crisis, part of which had to do
with the fish merchants.

When the symbols are interpreted

spiritually rather than concretely,
then they yield the revelation.

I want to tell about my relationship to confession. As a

kid, you go to confession, and you say, “Bless me, Father,
for I have sinned. I disobeyed Mother three times, didn’t say
morning prayers two mornings, and told a lie.” He says,
“You mustn’t do these things. Say five Our Fathers and five
Hail Marys, and you’re clear.”
I never got old enough to confess any significant sin. I
don’t know what the hell would have happened. I did
commit one little sin one summer, at Shelter Island out on
Long Island. I was about nine years old. There was a
wonderful hardware store named Ferguson’s. I remember it
well. I’d go there with my mother and see her buy things.
She’d say, “Charge it,” and then go out with them. One such
trip, I saw a wonderful penknife with all these things on it.
So a few days later I went in alone and said, “I want that
knife.” the owner said, “Here, Joe.” I said, “Charge it.” He
said, “Okay.”
I went home and said to Mother, “Look at the wonderful
penknife I found.” She said, “Are you sure you found that?” I
said, “Yes, yes, I found it.” Well, at the end of the month a
bill came for the penknife, and Mother said, “Joe, come here.
When you go to confession on Saturday, take that penknife
to Father Isadore. Confess the sin, and then take the knife
around to the sacristy and give it to him.
This was not easy. It was the most severe indication of
what I’d done. Five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys were
nothing like giving up that knife. So, I went to confession
and tried to tell the priest what I had done. I was an altar
boy at the time: you know, “mea culpa, mea culpa” stuff.
Afterward, I went around to the sacristy and gave him the
penknife. And he said, “Oh, Joe, I didn’t know it was that
serious.”
I knew something then that I didn’t know before I stole
that penknife: charging it without any idea of what the hell
was going to happen was wonderful.
The forgiveness in Roman Catholic confession is
conditional. The absolution the priest gives is conditional on
a resolution on your part.
First, you need contrition, meaning you are really, really
sorry for having committed that sin. Second, you make a
resolution never to commit it again. That does not mean
that you are not going to commit it again. It means that you
sincerely resolve not to.
In that wonderful Arthurian Romance of La Questa del
St. Graal, where all the knights go out to discover the Grail,
Lancelot could not behold the Grail. Why? Because of his
adulterous affair with Guinevere. But the real reason was
that he could not honestly feel contrition for that love. How
could Lancelot possibly have contrition for having
experienced through Guinevere an illumination beyond what
even the church had given him? And it is represented as
such. He could not feel sorry, and he could not resolve to
cancel it, so he was unworthy to behold the Grail.

The Grail is being in perfect accord

with the abundance of nature,
the highest spiritual realization,
the inexhaustible vessel from which
you get everything you want.

In a religion of duality,
the sin and eternal punishment
comes from the outside,
from the ruling concrete god.

There’s a knight in mortal sin. And yet, the monk who

wrote that Romance had a sense of the charm of Lancelot’s
life: he’s the most human, the most touching character in
the whole context. These are ironical things, which is why,
finally, the priest says, “God’s will? We don’t know God’s
will. There may be forgiveness that we don’t know anything
about.”

I will hold this love against God,

eternal damnation, anything.
That is true love.

When I was about sixteen years old, in prep school, and

knew I was losing my childhood faith, I resolved that I would
not quit the Catholic church until I knew why I was quitting,
that is to say, until I had dissolved the symbols and knew
what they referred to and meant. The whole thing wasn’t
over until I was twenty-five years old and in Germany. I
spent nine years working everything out, and then it just
dropped off like a worn-out shirt. That’s the knowing thing. If
you don’t know what the hell that symbol is saying to you,
then it’s just there as a command, and there is going to be
more and more of this hanging on. If you can’t use your
mind in this rather complex field, I don’t know how you are
going to work it out.

You become mature

when you become
the authority for your own life.
 C OULD God exist if nobody else did? No. That’s why
gods are very avid for worshipers. If there is nobody
to worship them, there are no gods. There are as
many gods as there are people thinking about God. When
Mrs. Mulligan and the Pope are thinking about God, it is not
the same God.

In choosing your god, you choose

your way of looking at the universe.
There are plenty of Gods.
Choose yours.

The god you worship

is the god you deserve.

When you say that God needs man and man needs God,
that “God” that’s being talked about is the image of God,
the concept of God, the name of God, the ethnic God. You
bet he needs man. He wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for
man.

In the tribe, deities were personifications of power.

In later years,
they became the source of power.

All the gods of the world are metaphors, not powers.

All imaging of God, if the word is going to mean

anything besides “this is what Mother taught me,” is
supposed to refer to that which transcends all knowledge,
all naming, all forming; and, consequently, the word has to
point past itself. In our tradition, the idea of God is so
strongly personified as a person that you get stuck with that
problem whenever you think of God.
 God is not an illusion,
but a symbol pointing beyond itself
to the realization of the mystery
of at-one-ment.

Jung, in his book Answer to Job, deals with the image of

God that has come down through the centuries. How can we
relate to it? Well, the Old Testament image, Yahweh, is of a
lawgiver, a very strong dictator, an angry father. And in the
Book of Job, you have the epitomization of that image.
Here is this Job, who has been a good man, and Yahweh,
the God, boasting to the devil, Satan, says: “Have you
considered Job? How loyal he is to me? How he loves me?”
And Satan says, “Well, you’ve been pretty good to him.
Make it tough and see how long this is going to last.”
Yawheh says, “I bet ya.” And Satan says, “I bet ya.”
Gilbert Murray has commented: “It’s as though someone
says, ‘My dog won’t bite me no matter what I do.’ And
someone else says, ‘I bet he will.’ The dog’s master says, ‘I
bet he won’t.’ And the other person says, ‘Get going now,
see how badly you can abuse him, and then see if he won’t
bite you.’”
So that’s the situation, and after the wager, things get
rough. What a time Job has! His family is killed, his wealth is
taken from him, and he ends up on a heap of ashes with a
case of boils. His friends, his so-called “comforters,” annoy
him further by saying, “You must have been a pretty bad
chap to deserve all this.” He says, “No, I’m good.” And he’s
right: he is good.
Well, with this challenge to God, he finally has to come
through and show himself. I mean, it’s a big deal. So, God
shows himself, and what does he say? He says, “Who are
you, you little worm, to question me? How dare you even
consider that you could understand what is happening to
you? Could you fill Leviathan’s nose with harpoons? I did it.
Try it.”
 Job is completely cowed. He suspends human judgment.
He says, “I have heard of you with the hearing of my ears.
Now I behold you with my eyes, and I am ashamed. I cover
my head with ashes.”
Now, reading that in terms of its real spiritual message,
what it means is that you cannot judge your destiny in
terms of something that was done to you by somebody. I
mean, what is actually happening there—although it is not
admitted—is that the image of God as a person is exploded.
When you get to the trans-personal, you can’t speak of
“justice” and “injustice.”
What about all the landslides along the Big Sur coastline
and the millions of dollars of damage they’ve caused? If you
take these acts of nature as something that somebody has
done to the people living there, you have the whole thing
messed up. But that’s not the way the Book of Job has been
understood. It has been under-stood in the way of
submission to a person. And a person who would pull a deal
like that on somebody is a pretty unappetizing type.
Actually, the Book of Job, which dates from around the
fifth century B.C., is anticipated by a Babylonian text from
about 1500 B.C. called the “Babylonian Job,” in which a king,
who has been sacrificing to the deities and building them
temples, has been overcome by, I think it was, leprosy. He
tries to interpret his affliction in terms of what he has done
in worship as a payment. Now, if you think of worship as a
form of payment for something, you’re on the wrong track
altogether. The Book of Job really breaks down that idea. But
if you are going to hold to the image of God that is
presented in the Book of Job, you have something that
needs a little bit of refinement.
So then the Christians, as a next step, take the idea of
the Incarnation of the second person of the Blessed Trinity
offering himself in love to the world to be a higher, more
illuminated, form. In other words, God has been tempered
by taking the form of man and experiencing the world of
man.
But, says our friend Jung, this is not the answer either,
because Christ was a divine incarnation born of a virgin, so
he really wasn’t man, he was God. Yet, Jung argues, “God
wanted to become man and still wants to.” So he provided
for his continuing incarnation, as it were, within man as the
Holy Ghost, the third person of the Blessed Trinity. So, if you
want to see God in the world, recognize it in mankind.
That’s the essence of Jung’s answer to Job: Don’t throw this
blame back on God, on the universe, or on anything of the
kind. Realize that all notions of God are historically
conditioned images for qualities that are to be recognized as
actually being in man.

“The incarnation in Christ is the prototype which is

continually being transferred to the creature by the
Holy Ghost.”—Jung94

There is a darling little woman who comes to my

lectures in New York, who was a nun. She left the con-vent
after hearing a couple of my talks. She did. That’s one of my
great credits, you old bastard up there. The last time I was
lecturing and she was in the group, she came up to me
afterward and asked, “Mr. Campbell, do you think that Jesus
was God, was God’s son?” I said, “Not unless we all are.”
“Ahh!” she said, and off she went.
And that’s what Jung is saying in his Answer to Job : it is
actually the work of man that is projected in the image of an
imagined being called God. And so, historically, the God
image is really a mirror image of the condition of man at a
given time.
Yet, I think most people take their image of God very
concretely. Except for the French. A survey was taken in
which people were asked, “Do you believe in God? Do you
believe in hell?” The French—I think, seventy-five percent of
them—did not believe in God, but did believe in hell! I like
Alan Watts’ reply: “If you believe in God, I don’t. If you don’t,
I do.”
My belief is that nobody experiences the ultimate
rapture, because it’s beyond pairs of opposites, so if anyone
did, there’d be nobody there anyhow. Jung is amusing on
that point. “If you go beyond subject and object,” he
wonders, “who is there to have the experience?” I think to
give oneself a ground for anything other than monastic
living, all one has to do is realize that such a thing is
implied; that is to say, a mystery that is beyond subject,
object, and all pairs of opposites is the mystery on the
ground of which we ride.
When the physicist explores the depths of the atom or
the outer reaches of space, he discovers pairs of opposites
and mysteries that science hasn’t been able to penetrate.
When it does penetrate to the next level, it’s still
mysterious. They’ve got so many sub-atomic particles. One
is named after Joyce’s “quark.” It seems to me that’s about
as mysterious as you can get. There is the transcendent.
Know it’s there, and then don’t worry about it. Simply
behold the radiance everywhere.
People know there is a way to have this spiritual
development take place, but the Church is not helping us do
it, because it’s talking about metaphorical events as if they
were historical facts. The Pope is having a hard time now
because nobody believes any of it. Who believes in the
Virgin Birth? The Virgin Birth is metaphorical, and so is the
Ascension. Sure, I can believe in the Ascension of Jesus, but
I’ve turned the outer space into the inner space: he went
into the place where heaven is: right inside. His Ascension
represents the inward, mythological journey. And the Virgin
Birth refers to the birth of the spiritual life in the human.

“…this birth befalls in the soul exactly as it does in

eternity, neither more nor less, for it is the same
birth: this birth befalls in the ground and essence of
the soul.95

“God is in all things as being, as activity, as power.

but he is procreative in the soul alone; for though
every creature is a vestige of God, the soul is the
natural image of God.… Such perfection as enters
the soul, whether it be divine light, grace, or bliss,
must needs enter the soul in this birth and no other
wise. Do but foster this birth in thee and thou wilt
experience all good and all comfort, all happiness,
all being, and all truth. What comes to thee therein
brings the true being and stability; and whatsoever
thou mayest seek or grasp without it perishes, take
it how thou wilt.”—M. Eckhart96

That font of life is the core of the individual, and

within himself he will find it—if he can tear the
coverings away.97

The idea that we will have a divine visitation by some

friendly forms, benign forces from other planets who will
come to our aid and save us, is a clear reflection of an
outmoded understanding of the universe. Jung wrote that
the modern myth of unidentified flying objects tells us
something of humankind's visionary expectations. People
are looking for visits from the outside world because they
think our deliverance will come from there. But the space
age reminds us that voyages into outer space turn us back
to inner space. The Kingdom of God is within us, but we
have this idea that the gods act from “out there.”

The Kingdom of the Father is not

going to come through expectation.

We bring it about in our own hearts.

The Kingdom is here.

One looks at the world

and sees the radiance.

The Easter revelation is right there.

We don’t have to wait
for something to happen.98

What has always been basic to Easter, or resurrection, is

crucifixion. If you want resurrection, you must have
crucifixion. Too many interpretations of the Crucifixion have
failed to emphasize that relationship and emphasize instead
the calamity of the event. If you emphasize the calamity,
you look for someone to blame, which is why people have
blamed the Jews. But crucifixion is not a calamity if it leads
to new life. Through Christ’s crucifixion we were unshelled,
which enabled us to be born to resurrection. That is not a
calamity. So, we must take a fresh look at this event if its
symbolism is to be sensed.
 If we think of the Crucifixion only in historical terms, we
lose the symbol’s immediate reference to ourselves. Jesus
left his mortal body on the cross, the sign of earth, to go to
the Father, with whom he was one. We, similarly, are to
identify with the eternal life within us. The symbol also tells
us of God’s willing acceptance of the cross, that is to say, of
his participation in the trials and sorrows of human life in
the world, so that he is here within us, not by way of a fall or
mistake, but with rapture and joy. Thus the cross has dual
sense: one, of our going to the divine; the other, of the
coming of the divine to us. It is a true crossing.
In the Christian tradition, Christ’s crucifixion is a major
problem: Why could the savior not have just come? Why did
he have to be crucified?
Well, various theological explanations have come down
to us, but I think an adequate and proper one can be found
in Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, where he writes in
chapter 2 that Christ did not think that God-hood was
something to be held to—which is to say, neither should you
—but rather, yielding, he took the form of a servant even to
death on the cross. This is joyful affirmation of the sufferings
of the world. The imitation of Christ, then, is participating in
the suffering and joys of the world, all the while seeing
through them the radiance of the divine presence. That’s
operating from the heart cakra, where the two triangles are
joined together.
That’s what I see in the Crucifixion. Of all the
explanations I’ve read, it is the only one that makes, what I
would call, respectable sense. The others are all concerned
with a wrathful god who has to be appeased by the sacrifice
of his son. What do you do with a thing like that? It is a
translation of the sacrifice into a very crude image. The idea
of God being entity that has to be appeased is just too nasty
a concretion.

Christ’s crucifixion,
 his going to the Father, the spirit,
is not something
that should not have happened.

It must happen.

The hero’s death and resurrection

is a model for
the casting off of the old life
and moving into the new.

Not the animal world, not the plant world, not the
miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the
crucial mystery. Man is that alien presence with
whom the forces of egoism must come to terms,
through whom the ego is to be crucified and
resurrected, and in whose image society is to be
reformed. Man, understood however not as “I” but
as “Thou”: for the ideals and temporal institutions of
no tribe, race, continent, social class, or century,
can be the measure of the inexhaustible and
multifariously wonderful divine existence that is the
life in all of us.99
The central truth about Easter and Passover, which have
the same roots, is that we’re all called out of the house of
bondage, even as the Jews were called out of their bondage
in Egypt. We are called out of bondage to our old traditions
in the way in which the moon throws off its shadow to
emerge anew, in the way life throws off the shadow of
death. Easter is not Easter and Passover is not Passover,
unless they release us even from the tradition that gives us
these feasts.

Easter and Passover

make us experience in ourselves
a call out of bondage.

So experiencing them
doesn’t destroy
our religious traditions.

Understanding these symbols

in their transcendent spiritual sense
enables us to see our traditions freshly
and to possess them anew.

Easter and Passover are prime symbols of what we are

faced with in the space age. We’re challenged both
mystically and socially, because our ideas of the universe
have been reordered by our experience in space. The
consequence is that we can no longer hold onto the
religious symbols that we formulated when we thought that
the earth was the center of the universe.

The misunderstanding is reading

spiritual mythological symbols
as though they were references
to historical events.
The Kingdom of God is within us. Easter and Passover
remind us that we have to let go in order to enter it. The
space age demands that we change our ideas about
ourselves, but we want to hold onto them. That’s why there
is a resurgence of old-fashioned orthodoxy in so many areas
at the present time. There are no horizons in space, and
there can be no horizons in our own experience. We cannot
hold onto ourselves and our in-groups as we once did. The
space age makes that possible, but people reject this
demand or don’t want to think about it. So they pull back
into one true church or black power or the unions or the
capitalist class.
Easter and Passover offer the perfect symbols, for they
mean that we are called to new life. This new life is not very
well defined, which is why we want to hold onto the past.
The journey to this new life, a journey we all must make,
cannot be made unless we let go of the past. The reality of
living in space means that we are born anew; not born again
to an old-time religion, but born to a new order of things:
there are no horizons. That is the meaning of the space age.
We are in a free fall into a future that is mysterious. It is
very fluid, and this is disconcerting to many people. All you
have to do is know how to use a parachute.
St. Augustine speaks of Christ’s going to the cross as a
bridegroom to his bride. There is an affirmation here. In the
Prado, there is a great painting by Titian of Simon of Cyrene
as he willingly helps Jesus with the cross. The painting
captures the free, human, voluntary participation we all
must have in the Easter-Passover mystery. That is what we
are all challenged to do. Self-preservation is only the second
law of life. The first law is that you and the other are one.
 I N Mark 13, Jesus says that the end of the world is
going to come, and he describes it as a terrible crisis of
fire and all kinds of other horrors. So, according to the
teachings of the Catholic church, it’s going to be a concrete
historical event. And in Mark 13:30, Jesus says, “Amen I say
to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things
have been accomplished.” But that generation did pass
away, and the end of the world didn’t come, so it’s often
called “the great nonevent.” It didn’t happen. So then the
Catholic church said that when Jesus used the words “this
generation,” what he meant was the generation of mankind,
and so this event is yet going to happen.
In the Thomas Gospel, on the other hand, when the
apostles ask, “When will the Kingdom come?” Jesus says,
“The Kingdom will not come by expectation. They will not
say ‘see here, see there.’ The Kingdom of the Father is
spread upon the earth, and men do not see it.”100 That’s
Gnosticism.

Gnosticism is the Western

counterpart of Buddhism.

Thomas says, in other words, that there is a revelation

possible to you right now. It is here. So, “to be happy with
Him forever in heaven” means to reach that depth now. It’s
a totally different slant.

If you read Christian mythology

in the Gnostic way,
it makes universal sense.

Yet because the Catholic church insists that the coming

of the Kingdom of the Father is going to be a historical
event, every now and then, especially every thousand
years, people think the end of the world is coming. In the
year 1000, for instance, it was thought the end of the world
was going to come, so people with a lot of property gave
their property to the church to gain merit. There are still
cases in the French courts to get that property back. Now
it’s time for the second millennium, so everyone is
expecting annihilation. These expectations come
automatically. There’s always a way to envision that the end
is going to happen. I do not know what the situation will be
in the year 3000, but if any of you happen to be around in a
later incarnation, you can expect that there will be some
kind of panic.
You see, Christianity was born in a panic time. In the
centuries just before the Christian era, the Levant was in
turmoil. The Hellenistic empire was breaking up, Rome was
in its ascendancy, and the Jewish community was in a hell of
a condition.
In 167 B.C., Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid
emperor of Syria, installed a Greek altar on the Jewish altar
in the temple court of Jerusalem. By establishing a Greek
shrine in the Jewish temple compound, he hoped he would
show that this religion was a variant of what all religions are
about. No siree! Instead, Judas Maccabeus and his brothers
killed the commissioner who was to establish the shrine.
There was an uproar, the Maccabean revolt, which led to
independent governance of the Jewish state for nearly a
hundred years by a succession of Maccabean priest-kings.

In the age of the Maccabees the leaders in

Jerusalem of the Hellenizing party were the
Sadducees, among whom were priestly families
claiming descent from the priestly patriarch Zadoc
(Zadoc>Sadducee), and these were opposed chiefly
by the Pharisees, or “Separatists,” who believed
themselves to be of a stricter orthodoxy—though, in
fact, they had combined the old Hebrew heritage of
 a Day of Yahweh to come with the idea of the world
end of Zoroastrian eschatology.101

During that period there was continual internecine

conflict, which intensified in 104 B.C., when the Jewish king
Aristobulus claimed that he was, essentially, also the
Messiah. This was heresy! Though he reigned only a year,
his son, Alexander Jannaeus, spent the next thirty fighting a
series of wars and suppressing all Jewish insurrections with
his foreign troops.

And with [his] death, 76 B.C., the Pharisees came to

power, and the internecine tide only ran the other
way. New purges, fratricides, betrayals, liquidations,
and miracles kept the kingdom in uproar until, after
a decade of such madness, the Roman legion of
Pompey was invited by one of two brothers who
were then contending for the crown to assist him in
his holy cause; and it was in this way that the city of
God, Jerusalem, passed in the year 63 B.C. into the
sphere of Rome.102

It was a fantastic period in Jewish history. With all this

going on, at least one sect, the Essenes, thought that the
end of the world was coming. So, they went out near Wady
Qumrân, at the northwest corner of the Dead Sea, and built
a monastery, where they rigorously trained to survive that
ultimate moment when the Messiah would appear. We’ve
learned about this Essene community from the Dead Sea
Scrolls, which were discovered hidden in desert caves and
rock crannies. These fantastic documents exhibit a very
strong Zoroastrian influence. Even some of the vocabulary is
Zoroastrian. One of the scrolls, for example, projects
detailed plans for a forty-year apocalyptic war between “the
Sons of Light” and “the Sons of Darkness.”
 It is in this context, then, at precisely that time, the first
century B.C., that St. John the Baptist was baptizing people
only a few miles north of the Qumrân community. Now ritual
bathing was a Qumrân rite, but John was not one of the
Essenes, who wore white garments, for he wore the skins of
animals and ate locusts and wild honey. The gospels recount
that Jesus went out there, was baptized by John, and then
went into the desert to have his own experience, known as
“the Temptation in the Desert.” After forty days in the desert
—imitating, in small, the Hebrew’s forty years—he returned
and began to teach. And that’s where his story really
begins.
It is not dissimilar from the story of the Buddha, who
also goes out, studies with the principle teachers of the
time, goes beyond them in his austerities, comes to
illumination, and returns. Whether or not it happened to
either of them is a question. The myth of a teacher who
goes past all teachers is a standard motif.
What Jesus thought he was, we just don’t know. He
didn’t write anything. He talked sometimes as though he
thought he was the god of the Greek mys-teries who dies
and is resurrected—dies to today and is resurrected to
tomorrow—but he wrote, as it were, in sand. What little we
do know about him, we’ve learned from the four gospels,
and they are of different dates and actually differ
considerably. For instance, if you look in your Bible, you will
see that the Virgin Birth motif is found only in the gospel of
Luke, a Greek. In Matthew and Mark, where the genealogy
of Jesus is related in detail from David on down the royal
line, it ends up, not with Mary, but with Joseph. Though we
do not know the date of Jesus’ birth—we know nothing
about it, in fact, except what we read in Luke—if he died, he
probably died around 30 A.D. The gospels are funny things.
They don’t agree. Unfortunately, four people wrote them,
and they wrote differing accounts.
 Luke seems to have traveled with Paul, and the earliest
writings about Jesus are those of Paul, who never saw him.
Paul, in fact, was in the crowd of Jewish zealots who killed
the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen—which, by the way, is
why Joyce calls his hero Stephen Dedalus. It was shortly
after that event, on the road to Damascus, that Paul’s
conversion took place: he had a vision, fell off his horse,
and, so to speak, “founded Christianity.” It seems that Paul,
a Jew who wrote elegant Greek, was torn between the
monotheistic culture of Judaism and the non-dualistic Greek
tradition. So, my notion of what happened to Paul is that he
realized that the catastrophic killing of this young, inspired
Jewish rabbi could be read as an enactment of the death
and resurrection of the Greek mystery hero.
Now, monotheism is a concretization of God, a mystery
that actually transcends concretization, and the
concretization of the mystery savior in Jesus is equivalent.
So, God is concretized, the savior is concretized, the end of
the world is concretized, and Christianity loses its
metaphoric perspective. If you read the historical “facts” as
metaphors, however, then you will discover in Christianity a
marvelous array of psychologically valid symbols that are
fundamentally okay until they’re concretized.
Concretization is alright for teaching little children, who
don’t understand metaphor. Matters such as these, they
tend to take concretely. What has to happen at a certain
point in one’s development is that these child-hood
concretizations have to be opened up. You can’t get rid of
them, because symbols that are taken concretely are put
right into you. They are internalized and can’t just be
dismissed. They have to be reread. I know. Until I was
twenty-five-years old I took Christianity concretely. And I
must say I’m grateful for having been exposed to such rich
symbolism.
Yet there’s also some great strength to be gained by
giving up that religion, by going beyond it. I mean, if you
really do. If you just “drop out,” that’s something else. But if
you think it through—if you learn to read the symbols as
metaphors instead of accepting them as the facts they’re
purported to be—if you know, in other words, why you are
out, then it can be a source of great strength. But when you
do break out, you then have to set up your own sacred field.
When I was student, still in the Catholic church, there
was one week each year when we gave up all our studies
and spent our time listening to sermons: some were like the
hell sermon Joyce recounts in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man; others were on such themes as the meaning of
the sacraments. The purpose of these “retreats,” as they
were called, was to remove us from the secular world and
put us in a sacred space.
Such events are examples of the church creating a
sacred space, but it’s the church’s sacred space, set up
according to its program. Now, if the church is the rope
you’re hanging onto, if that is what’s bringing you to your
bliss place, then this approach avoids the problem of
working this stuff out for yourself. But another way is to
have your own little tabernacle, your own sacred space,
from which you exclude everything else.
A sacred space is any space that is set apart from the
usual context of life. In the secular context, one is
concerned with pairs of opposites: cause and effect, gain
and loss, and so on. Sacred space has no function in the
way of earning a living or a reputation. Practical use is not
the dominant feature of anything in the space. You do not
have anything in your sacred space that’s not of
significance to you for the harmonization of your own life. In
your sacred space, things are working in terms of your
dynamic—and not anybody else’s.

Your sacred space is

where you can find yourself
again and again.

You really don’t have a sacred space, a rescue land, until

you find somewhere to be that’s not a wasteland, some field
of action where there is a spring of ambrosia—a joy that
comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into
you—a place that lets you experience your own will and
your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the
Kingdom is there. I think everybody, whether they know it or
not, is in need of such a place.
Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do
is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous
and increasing joy.

What you have to do,

you do with play.

I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a

playground. If what you’re doing seems like play, you are in
it. But you can’t play with my toys, you have to have your
own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play
with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they
like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that
don’t lead anywhere.

One great thing about growing old

is that nothing
is going to lead to anything.
Everything is of the moment.

When Jung decided to try to discover the myth by which

he was living, he asked himself, “What was the game I
enjoyed when I was a child?” His answer was making little
towns and streets out of stones. So, he bought some
property and, as a way of playing, began to build a house. It
was a lot of work, utterly unneces-sary for he already had a
house, but an appropriate way to create sacred space. It
was sheer play.

What did you do as a child

that created timelessness,
that made you forget time?

There lies the myth to live by.

 What do you like to do? What have you learned to do?
Jung was a big, strong man, and he liked to push rocks
around, so that’s what he did. I’ll bet that if you search
back, you’ll find connections between the sacred space that
you have now and a really special space that you had as a
child.

As an adult,
you must rediscover
the moving power of your life.

Tension, a lack of honesty,

and a sense of unreality
come from following
the wrong force in your life.

In my own situation, when I was between the ages of

about eleven and fifteen, I was crazy about American
Indians. My family bought me The Complete Works of
Parkman, reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, and all sorts of
other books on the subject. I had a very nice little library,
with beautiful, bronze, Indian heads that were bookends,
and Navajo rugs, and so on. Then the house burned down. It
was a terrible crisis in our family. My grandmother was
killed. All of my things were gone.
I now realize that the sacred space I created for myself,
the room in which I do my writing, is really a reconstruction
—a reactivation, if you will—of my boy-hood space. When I
go in there to write, I’m surround-ed by books that have
helped me to find my way, and I recall moments of reading
certain works that were particularly insightful. When I sit
down to do the writing, I pay close attention to little ritual
details—where the notepads and pencils are placed, that
sort of thing—so that everything is exactly as I remember it
having been before. It’s all a sort of “set-up” that releases
me. And since that space is associated with a certain kind of
performance, it evokes that performance again. But the
performance is play.

Work begins
when you don’t like
what you’re doing.

And if your life isn’t play, or if you are engaged in play and
having no fun, well, quit! The spirit of the sacred space is
Śiva dancing. All responsibilities are cast off. There are
various ways of doing this casting off. and it doesn’t matter
how it happens. The rest is play.

“Any man who is attached to the senses and things

of this world…is one who lives in ignorance and is
being consumed by the snakes that represent his
own passions.” —Black Elk103

A sacred space is hermetically sealed off from the

temporal world. When you’re in such a space, there is no
penetration through the enclosure. You are in an eternal
zone that is protected from the impact of the stimuli of the
day and the hour. That’s what you do in meditation: seal
yourself off. The meditation posture is a sealing-off posture,
and the regularized breathing furthers your inward-turned
explorations. The world is sealed off, and you become a self-
contained entity.
You must have such a sealing-off program for yourself
whenever you require it: once a week, once a day, or once
an hour. Of what value is that? It is an absolute necessity if
you are going to have an inner life. What it provides is an
interval in which the eternal within you is disengaged from
the field of time. We spoke earlier of God’s making us “to
know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world,” out
there, “and to be happy with him forever in heaven,” in the
hermetically sealed sacred space within yourself. The
further you can get into that, the more at peace you will be
with whatever happens.
I was thinking of the sorts of conditions you set up for
yourself to achieve the visit to the Grail Castle—for that’s
what this sacred space is: the place where your associations
are not with the field of phenomenal experience, but with
the field of your own inward life. You do not get there in the
normal run of life. To visit the Grail Castle, you have to have
a sacred space. Then, once you have found the connection
in your sacred space, you can perhaps translate it into other
parts of your life. But first you have to have a little oil well,
as it were, that goes down deep.

To live in sacred space

is to live in a symbolic environment
where spiritual life is possible,
where everything around you
speaks of exaltation of the spirit.
I’ve been traveling a lot the last ten years, and when I’m
not somewhere I’ve been before, the kind of hotel room I
prefer is a completely noncommittal room, an efficient
room, the kind you find in a Holiday Inn. I open my bag, put
my books on the table, hang my clothes on the open rack,
and that’s it: here is Joe Campbell and here are his books—
so what more do we have in the world? You can turn any
place into a sacred space once you have your own sacred
space. However, you can say that sacred space is
everywhere only after you have learned, through a
meditation discipline or the experience of sacred places,
what the sanctity is. It is the metaphoric relevance of the
object.

In sacred space,
everything is done
so that the environment
becomes a metaphor.

In India, I’ve seen sacred places that are just a red circle
put around a stick or a stone in such a way that the
environment becomes metaphoric: when you look at that
stick or stone, you see it as a manifestation of brahman, a
manifestation of the mystery.
Sacred space is a space that is transparent to
transcendence, and everything within such a space
furnishes a base for meditation. I’m thinking specifically of
those Indian temples with a great wall around them: when
you enter through the door, everything within that space is
symbolic, the whole world is mythologized.
The earliest sacred spaces of which we have any
evidence might well have been the little shrines of
Neanderthal man, where there was a cave-bear skull and a
lighted fire to build up a little atmosphere. The first, real
sacred spaces were probably caves in southern France and
northern Spain, dating from 30,000 B.C. When you go into
those caves, you are in a magical sacred space, and your
consciousness is transformed. I remember going into the big
cave in Lascaux. It was fantastic. That universe down there
seemed to be the primary world. The animals above ground
were simply reflections of those on the walls of the caves.
You don’t want to leave a place like that. The majesty and
magic of it all somehow brings you into your own center.
And once you are there, then sacred space is everywhere.
I’ve been a few places like that where I’ve thought, “A
breakthrough is possible here. This is a place for the
exercises that will bring me to where I want to be.” That’s
the whole meaning of a cult. A cult is a sacred place. But if
you get stuck in a cult—if you think, “I just can’t be
anywhere if I’m not here”—well, that’s too bad. You’re still in
training.
 W HEN I was in India, I wanted to meet a real, first-
class master, and I didn’t want to hear any more
slop about māyā and how you’ve got to give up
the world and all that kind of thing. I’d had enough of that
for about fifteen or twenty years. I was nosing around,
listening, and I heard of one master in Trivandrum, in
southwest India, and I decided to go see him. His mystic
name was “Sri Atmananda.” I’ll call him that. Now when you
get close to a master of that kind, you’re bound to meet a
lot of nuts. You just are, there’s no doubt about it. But I knew
that if I went, and if I was on the beam, I would get to see
him.
I went to this funny little hotel called the Mascot Hotel,
where all the rooms opened out onto a veranda. It was
fiercely hot, and I was seated on the veranda, when this
chap comes up to me without any introduction, shows me
this great big watch, and says, “See that? I have an hour
hand, and I have a minute hand, and I have a second hand.
” Before I can respond, he says, “Men have periods, just as
women do, only they don’t know it. But I’ve worked mine
out. It’s represented on this watch.” I looked at the watch.
On it were two little scales, a red and white one on one side
and a black and white one on the other, with little indicators
that could go this way or that. He points to the red and
white scale and says, “When this hand is over on the red
side, I’m in my period. When it is in the white, I’m out.”
Then pointing to the other scale, he says, “We have mental
periods also, and I have those worked out too. When this
hand is on the black and the other is on the red, I stay
home.” Imagine what it cost him to have that thing made.
That evening, down in the dining room, I saw a man and
woman, who looked like translucent praying mantises. They
were seated just across the room, and between them, on
the table, was a tall vase, and it was filled with food that
they took out and ate with their fingers. Later I met the man
and learned that he was president of the International
Vegetarian Society. He said he had come to India to reform
vegetarianism, that the Indian people didn’t know anything
about it! At the next table, two gentlemen were talking, and
I heard one of them mention the name “Arthur Gregor.”
Now, I knew a young American poet with that name, and I
knew that he was in India, so I said, “Pardon me, did I hear
you mention Arthur Gregor?” They said, “Yes, he is with Sri
Atmananda.” I said, “Would you give him my regards? My
name is Joseph Campbell.”
Two days later, I was invited to meet the guru. If you’re
on your right track, that’s the way it goes: doors open
miraculously. So, I went to a lovely cottage, and at the door
was an Indian with a long, white beard. He said, “The
master is upstairs.” I went up to an attic that was perfectly
naked except for two chairs. Atmananda was seated in one,
and I was to sit in the other, facing him. I mean, it was a real
confrontation.
He said, “Do you have a question?” I had the good
fortune, I later learned, to ask exactly the question that had
been his first question to his guru, so we had a very good
conversation. When we’d concluded, he said he had now to
go down to his class. He dismissed me, and I thanked him.
Now, I had made arrangements to meet some members of
that class in a coffee shop after the class was finished.
When I came in, one of them said, “The master said you are
on the brink of illumination.” Why? Because of the question I
had asked.
My question was this: “Since all is brahman, all is the
divine radiance, how can we say ‘no’ to ignorance or
brutality or anything? His answer was: “For you and me, we
say ‘yes.’”

Breaking the ideals of society

is the path of the mystic.
 Then he gave me a little meditation: “Where are you
between two thoughts?” That is to say, you are thinking all
the time, and you have an image of your-self. Well, where
are you between two thoughts? Do you ever have a glimpse
beyond your thinking of that which transcends anything you
can think about your-self? That’s the source field out of
which all of your energies are coming.

In meditating,
meditate on your own divinity.

The goal of life is to be a vehicle

for something higher.

Keep your eye up there

between the pairs of opposites
watching your play in the world.

Let the world be as it is

and learn to rock with the waves.

Remain “radiant,”
as Joyce put it,
in the filth of the world.
A Buddha image is not a picture of the historical Buddha.
We are all Buddha beings, all things are Buddha beings. So,
an image of the Buddha is not a graven image to be
understood concretely. It is a meditation tool, something to
be seen through. It is a support for meditation on the
Buddhahood within you, not a depiction of any actual
Buddha “out there.”

God and Buddhas in the Orient are not final terms

like Yahweh, the Trinity, or Allah, in the West—but
point beyond themselves to that ineffable being,
consciousness, and rapture that is the All in all of us.
And in their worship, the ultimate aim is to effect in
the devotee a psychological transfiguration through
a shift of his plane of vision from the passing to the
enduring, through which he may come finally to
realize in experience (not simply as an act of faith)
that he is identical with that before which he
bows.104

The entire heavenly realm

is within us, but to find it
we have to relate to what’s outside.

It is in this context that one says, “If you see the Buddha
coming down the road, kill him.” That is to say, if your
notion of Buddhahood is concretized to that extent, then
cancel the concretization. You cannot say that about Jesus,
at least not in the orthodoxy.

You must kill your god.

If you are to advance,

all fixed ideas must go.
 Most Buddhas that one sees depicted are what are
known as “meditation Buddhas,” and they never lived. They
represent Buddha powers within all of us, and in
contemplating them, you will choose and be guided by your
own Buddha—as, in the Catholic tradition, your principle
guide is a particular saint, who represents virtues and
qualities that are somehow accessible to you. The Buddha
image, then, isn’t a picture of the Buddha. It is a tool to help
you meditate on the Buddhahood within yourself.
This whole drift of Buddhism comes to a very clean
expression in Zen, where there are no images. The only
picture in a Zen monastery would be of Bodhidharma, the
wall-gazing teacher who came to China from India, and that
image would simply be a reminder of how to meditate.
Finding the Buddha within yourself is a difficult exercise, and
sometimes images help. You have to realize that Buddhism
is not only an elite religion, but also a popular religion. A
popular religion must provide bases for meditation. As a
result, there is a long history in Buddhism of relic worship.
All of those great stūpas, those monuments of the early
Buddhist world, are reliquary mounds. Each one contains a
relic, just as every Catholic church is supposed to be built on
a relic. It is all a base for meditation.
 Two great divisions of Buddhist thinking are
distinguished. The first was dedicated to the ideal of
individ-ual salvation and represented the way to this
end as monastic self-discipline. The second, which
seems to have matured in northern India during and
following the first and second centuries A.D. (long
after the other had been disseminated as far
southward as the island of Ceylon), proposed the
ideal of salvation for all and developed disciplines of
popular devotion and universal secular service. The
earlier is known as the Hīnayāna, “the lesser or
little (hīna) boat or vehicle (yāna),” while the second
is Mahāyāna, “the great (mahat) boat or vehicle,”
the boat in which all can ride.105

Before the period of Mahāyāna Buddhism, the Buddha

was never depicted. Hence, in the illustration of the
Buddha’s life on the early stūpas, there are only symbols of
the Buddha—his footprints, an umbrella, a sun disk—
because the Buddha is one who is identified no longer with
his ego but with total consciousness, and consequently,
cannot be depicted. He’s like the sun that has set, and you
don’t depict what is not. As a result, in early depictions of
the Temptation of the Buddha, the temptation is rendered—
on one side of the throne are the posturing daughters of
Kāma, Lord Desire, and on the other, the ogres of Māra, King
Death—but nobody is in the throne. Well, there was nobody
there. He was not identified with this personality.
With the arrival of Mahāyāna, however, comes the idea
that the distinction between nirvāṇa and saṁsāra —“the
round of being,” the round of rebirth—is a dualism, and the
two are, in fact, one: nirvāṇa is here, this is it. There is a
total transformation of consciousness, and images of the
Buddha appear. Images of everything appear, because they
are all Buddha things.
The word saṁsāra refers to the torrent of time, to our
participation in the Dionysian passage of time with all things
coming and going. Time explodes forms and brings out new
ones, and you are one of those forms. In so far as you
identify with your body, you think, “Oh, my God, here I go!”
You live in life; you die; and, depending on your life, you go
either to a hell or a heaven, and from there you come back
to the next life. In the Oriental system, this is all saṁsāra,
the round of being. nirvāṇa goes past that. We are but
reflections on the wall of the cave. From where do they
come?
The word nirvāṇa means “blown out,” the breath that
enlivens the world has been blown out of you. In Jainism,
another Indian philosophy, nirvāṇa is thought of as death.
But in Indian there is reincarnation, so you cannot truly die
until you’ve achieved release from life.
The Buddha is the one who stresses the psycholog-ical
aspect of this “dying.” You can stay alive, in action, but be
disengaged from desire for, and fear of, the fruits of your
actions. This psychological disengagement of your passions
from the events of your life is nirvāṇa.
With the Mahāyāna, then, comes the simultaneous
experience of these two attitudes toward the one thing
which is life. So, you can be alive, in samsara, but acting
without passion—that’s nirvāṇa. That’s also the idea in the
post-Buddhistic Bhagavad Gītā, 563–483 B.C.

The Bhagavad Gītā says:

“Get in there and do your thing.
Don’t worry about the outcome.”

Recognize sorrow as of the essence.

When there is time, there is sorrow.
We can’t rid the world of sorrow,
but we can choose to live in joy.
The term bodhisattva, “one whose being (sattva) is
enlightenment (bodhi),” had been employed in the
earlier vocabulary…to designate one on the way to
realization but not yet arrived: a Buddha in his
earlier lives, a Future Buddha. In the new
vocabulary…the term was used to represent the
sage who, while living in the world, has refused the
boon of cessation yet achieved realization, and so
remains a perfect knower in the world as a beacon,
guide, and compassionate savior of all beings.106

The Bodhisattva voluntarily

comes back into the world
knowing that it’s a mess.

He doesn’t come back

“only if it’s sweet for me.”

The Bodhisattva
participates joyfully
in the sorrows of the world.

”The great Mahāyāna Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara is

a personification of the highest ideal of the
Mahāyāna Buddhist career. His legend recounts that
when, following a series of eminently virtuous
incarnations, he was about to enter into the
surcease of nirvāṇa, an uproar, like the sound of a
general thunder, rose in all the worlds. The great
being knew that this was a wail of lament uttered by
all created things—the rocks and stones as well as
the trees, insects, gods, animals, demons, and
human beings of all the spheres of the universe—at
 the prospect of his imminent departure from the
realms of birth. And so, in his compassion, he
renounced for himself the boon of nirvāṇa until all
beings without exception should be prepared to
enter in before him—like the good shepherd who
permits his flock to pass first through the gate and
then goes through himself, closing it behind him.”—
Zimmer107

The Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, with a woman’s earring

in one ear and a man’s in the other, represents mercy, or
compassion. The name Avalokiteśvara is a difficult word to
translate, but the sense of it is “he who looks down on the
world with mercy.” Avalokiteśvara is frequently pictured as a
male flanked by two female figures called “Tārās,”
personifications of the tears of mercy that flow from the
Bodhisattva’s eyes: one from the right eye, the other from
the left. The word tārā is related to our word “star” and to
the verb “to strew.” The Tārās strew out mercy to the world,
which is, to me, one of the most darling notions.
When this tradition went to the Far East, to China and
Japan, Avalokiteśvara’s feminine aspects were accented and
this Bodhisattva became female, represented in the
character of Kuan-yin, Kannon in Japanese, for the female
form was thought to be a more appropriate manifestation of
the fostering of self-giving compassion than the male, which
usually represents discipline.

Peace is at the heart of all because Avalokiteśvara-

Kannon, the mighty Bodhisattva, Boundless Love,
includes, regards, and dwells within (without
exception) every sentient being. The perfection of
the delicate wings of an insect, broken in the
passage of time, he regards—and he himself is both
their perfection and their disintegration.108
 In another manifestation, Avalokiteśvara has a
thousand hands surrounding him like a halo, and in the palm
of each is an eye that is pierced by the sorrows of the world,
as Christ’s hands were pierced by nails. They are equivalent
symbols. Christ is a Bodhisattva. Buddhists have no problem
accepting Christ, but they don’t accept him as a unique
manifestation and the only way.
Mahāyāna Buddhism and Christianity grew up
simultaneously. The two systems are of the same dates and
developed fifteen-hundred miles apart on a military road
that was built by the Persians.

When the Bodhisattva teaches, we have been told,

he assumes the outward forms of his auditors; but
his message is addressed to the Wisdom-Self within
each, to wake and call it to life.109
When the Dalai Lama, the incarnation of Avalokiteśvara,
first came to New York, there was an interesting event. At
his first reception, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral—where there
were Roman Catholic clergy, Eastern patriarchs, Jewish
rabbis, and, I suppose, even psychiatrists—what he said
was, “All of your ways are valid ways to expansion of
consciousness and illumination.” Of course, Cardinal Cook
had to get up and say, “No, we’re different. Our religion is
not to be confused with these other ways.”
I was also at the next event, a Buddhist event at the
Cathedral of St. John the Divine. About fifteen-hundred
people from various Buddhist communities or societies in
New York gathered in the big nave of that cathedral and had
a real Tibetan ceremony, with monks chanting and all. The
Dahli Lama gave a brief talk in Tibetan and a young man
instantly translated his intricate theological Tibetan into
English. What a fantastic performance!
What the Dalai Lama said was, “Now you are on the
Buddhist way. Keep up your meditation, as there is no
instant illumination. The mind moves slowly into this. Do not
become attached to your method. When, in the course of
your meditation, your consciousness will have expanded
and been transformed, you will then recognize that all the
ways are valid ways.”

The rational mind

stresses opposites.

Compassion and love

go beyond pairs of opposites.
The Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī is shown with a sword known as
“the sword of discrimination.” Discrimination has to do with
discriminating between the mortal and the eternal. The
mortal is that which you see. When you see yourself in the
mirror, that is the mortal. The eternal is that which you are.
So, discriminating in your life between the eternal and the
mortal is the essence of this figure.

The sword is usually

a benevolent instrument
which clears the way.

When you are desiring things and fearing things, that’s

mortality. The three temptations of the Buddha—desire,
fear, and duty—are what hold you in the field of time. When
you put the hermetic seal around your-self and, by
discriminating between the mortal and the enduring, you
find that still place within yourself that does not change,
that’s when you’ve achieved nirvāṇa. That still point is the
firmly burning flame that is not rippled by any wind.
When you find that burning flame within yourself, action
becomes facilitated in athletics, in playing a musical piece
on the piano, or in performance of any kind.. If you can hold
to that still place within yourself while engaged in the field,
your performance will be masterly. That’s what the Samurai
does. And the real athlete.
Watch a professional marathon runner: he is not
concerned with his showing the way somebody who is
running his first race is. You win, you lose, you run the race.
The race is what counts, not the winning or the losing.
Running the marathon is itself the event. Everybody wins.
Whether you win or place is a secondary matter. This is
participation without engagement.
But if you lose that still point, you are all in the world. If,
for example, you go into the race as a front runner, thinking
you are going to have to win, and you are concerned that
you don’t quite have the capacity to do so, then you won’t
be participating in the marathon. Nietzsche says one must
act with only three-quarters of one’s power. That’s the
discrimination.

Anything you do has a still point.

When you are in that still point,
you can perform maximally.

Where are you between two thoughts? If you identify

yourself with certain actions, certain achievements and
failures, those are thoughts. That’s you in the field of time
and experience. Where are you otherwise?
If it weren’t difficult to get to that still point, there
wouldn’t have to be so much talk about it and all this sitting
in postures trying to get there. And then, when you get up
from the posture, you are right back where you were. So,
you go back to the posture to see if you can get there again.
It’s not easy; yet, it’s very easy. It’s like riding a bicycle: you
keep falling off until you know how to ride, and then you
can’t fall off.
It’s a perspective problem. Running through the field of
time is this energy which is the one energy that is putting
itself into all these forms. By identifying with that one
energy, you are at the same time indentified with the forms
coming and going. If you see the two modes—involvement
and the still point within you, samsara and nirvāṇa—as
separate from each other, you are in a dualistic position. But
when you realize that the two are one, you can hold to your
still point while engaging. It’s the same world experienced in
two different ways. You can experience both ways at once.
Sri Ramkrishna was devoted to the Goddess Kālī. Kālī,
the word means “black” and also “time,” is that black abyss
of mystery out of which all things come and back into which
they go. That’s Kālī. Her principle image is that of dancing in
the burning ground,the place where corpses are burned.
This is dissolution. She is dancing on the body of her god,
Śiva, her husband. Your god is the final obstacle to get past.
Any idea, any concept, any name, is a final obstacle.
The one preached in the church in any religion is the final
obstacle. The only Western teacher I have found who gets it
is Meister Eckhart, who says, “The ultimate leave-taking is
the leaving of God for God.” All of our religions hang onto
the image. None has gone past its god. The still point is
going past the god. Goethe says, “Everything temporal is
but a symbol.”110 Nietzsche says, “Everything eternal is but
a metaphor.” They are saying the same thing. “Everything”
includes God, heaven, hell, the whole works. So as long as
you are living to get to heaven, you won’t find that still
place.

One has to go beyond

the pairs of opposites
to find the real source.
In Buddhism, those who attain nirvāṇa are said to have
“achieved the yonder shore”; that is to say, they have
crossed the river from the normal experience of life to the
yonder shore of nirvāṇa, beyond all pairs of opposites,
beyond twoness. Heinrich Zimmer gave this amusing
anecdote to help us understand Buddhism:
Let’s say you’re living in San Francisco, and you are
simply fed up with San Francisco. You have heard of
Berkeley: the wonderful people there and these councils of
sages. There are domes that suggest temples. You’ve never
been to such a place, but you have heard of it. It seems that
this Berkeley would be a great escape from San Francisco,
and so—in the old days before the bridge—you go to the
shore, you look across, and you think, “If I could only get
away from this place—saṁsāra, the world of pain and effort
—and go to Berkeley, I would be saved.”
Well, one fine day, you see a ferryboat set off from the
yonder shore, and it comes right to where you are standing.
There’s a man in the boat who says, “Anyone for Berkeley?”
This is the Buddha in the Buddha boat. And you say, “I.” And
he says, “Well, get aboard, but remember: this is a one-way
trip. It takes great effort. There’s no coming back to San
Francisco. You will give up everything: your career, your
family, your ambitions. Everything.” You say, “I’m fed up
with every-thing.” “Okay,” he says, “you are eligible.”
This ferryboat is known as the “lesser vehicle.” It’s for
“Little Ferryboat” Buddhism, Monk Buddhism. To board it,
you have to be ready to become a monk or a nun and give
up the whole thing. In India, the saffron robes the monks
wear are the color of the garment put on a corpse. These
men are dead. Are you ready to put on the garment of a
corpse? You are? Get on the boat.

Sri Ramakrishna says,

“Do not seek illumination
 unless you seek it
as a man whose hair is on fire
seeks a pond.”

The ferryboat starts out, and it suddenly comes over

you what you’re leaving, but you are already on the boat.
You’re a monk or a nun. You’re a sailor. You love the sound of
the waves slapping on the side of the boat, you learn how to
lift sails and bring them down, and you use a different
vocabulary: you call the right side, the “starboard” side, and
the left side, the “port”; the front is “fore,” the back, “aft.”
You don’t know any more about Berkeley than you did
before you got on the boat, but people in San Francisco
you’re now calling “fools.” You thought it would be a short
trip, but
it may continue for three or four incarnations.
This is the monk’s life. This is the student’s life. This is
obeying orders. Life is reduced to pushing beads here and
there and chanting OM. You have reduced life to something
that is a pretty simple affair. You would not want that to end.
It’s like a situation I’ve seen in art studios: the student is
working on a piece of sculpture, and the master looks at it
and says, “Continue.” Of course, the disaster would be if he
said, “You’ve got it, you’re finished.” “Oh no, I don’t want to
leave school.” The last thing you want is not to be a monk
or a nun.
Finally, after several incarnations, the boat scrapes
ashore, and you think, “This is it: rapture, nirvāṇa!” You go
ashore. There are explosions: LSD and the whole goddamn
thing—but it’s not the goal at all.
The Buddha, in the conversations known as the
“Medium-length Dialogues,” says, “Oh, Monks, supposing a
man, wishing to get to the yonder shore, should build
himself a raft, and by virtue of that raft, achieve the yonder
shore; then, out of gratitude for the raft, he picks it up and
carries it about on his shoulder. Would that be an intelligent
man?” The monks reply, “No, Master, that would not be an
intelligent man.” “So,” says the Buddha, “the laws and
experiences of the order of yoga have nothing to do with
nirvāṇa. The vehicle of the doctrine is the way that you get
to the yonder shore, and having attained it, you cast away
the raft and forsake it.”
So, you are on the yonder shore, and you think, “I
wonder how San Francisco looks from Berkeley?” You turn
around and…there is no San Francisco, there is no bay,
there is no boat, there is no Buddha.
You thought there was an opposition. You were still
thinking in terms of pairs of opposites. The place you have
left is exactly where you are. It’s simply your perspective
that has been changed. This is the point of view of the so-
called “Great Ferryboat,” or Mahāyāna tradition, where we
realize that all things are Buddha things, we are on the
Great Ferryboat, and the ferry-boat is already there.
Furthermore, since the first doctrine of Buddhism is “no
self,” there is nobody on the boat! The real self is that
transcendent life and Buddha consciousness of which we
are all just visionary moments. This is the Mahāyāna.
So we hear next, “Delight is yoga.” The life you are living is
your yoga. As Ramakrishna put it, “The little nephew that
you love is your God.” The irony of this wonderful discipline
is that it teaches that you, who were bored, are in exactly
the same place, but in rapture, simply because you’ve
shifted your level of consciousness. You’ve given up thinking
things should be the way they are not, and you realize, “This
is it. This is it. This is it.” And you get to saying “This is it” by
first saying, “This is not it.” That discrimination forces you
into a different level of consciousness. What “isn’t it” is the
way you’re looking at it.

The Buddha is the one whose eye

of full consciousness has opened.

This is the journey that comes through worship, because

a deity represents a degree of power,a degree of
consciousness of knowledge and love that is on a level not
immediately apparent to the eyes. The Tantric saying “to
worship a god, you must become a god” means you must
find in yourself the level of conscious-ness and love that the
deity epitomizes and symbolizes. When you do, you are
worshiping that deity.
It doesn’t matter what name you give the deity. People
say, “Oh, we are Christians: Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and the
Virgin Mary.” But if you can’t get into yourself on the level of
the Christ within you, you are not a Christian. And
depending on the level of awareness you have reached,
your worship will be different from that of people in the
same church who aren’t at the same level. Saying you are a
member of this church, that church, or the other is a social
notion, a sociological phenomenon that has nothing to do
with religion.

What is your religion telling you?

 How to be a Jew? A Catholic?
Or how to be a human being?

I had a friend, a marvelous young man named John, who

became an editor of the Jesuit periodical America about the
time that the Catholic church got interested in the
ecumenical movement. Everybody was trying to correlate
Catholicism with the other religions, but at the same time,
they were denigrating them. So, John would always be
telling them, for example, “No, you can’t do that with
Hinduism. You can’t put it down by misrepresenting it.
You’ve got to face up to it.”
Well, there was a big Roman Catholic conference of the
meditation orders—Cistercians, Trappists, and so forth—in
Bangkok, and John was there as an observer. By the way, it
was while attending this conference that Thomas Merton
died. He was electrocuted by a bad fixture in some absurd
Thai hotel. John later said that the talk that Merton had
given just before his death was one of the most magnificent
he’d ever heard.
When John came back, he said the Christian monks and
Buddhist monks had no problem communicating. As anyone
who’s tried to be a poet knows, when you’ve had a spiritual
experience, the words don’t render it. All they can do is give
a clue. The experience goes beyond anything that can be
said. The religious sense is implied in the metaphoric
language of religion. “But,” he said, “the lay clergy who
have never had the experience, but have only read the
books, are in collision all the time.”

What is the Kingdom?

It lies in our realization of the ubiquity

of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our
enemies, in all of us.111
The big lesson in Buddhism, then, the sense of what we
have been saying is, “Get away from your rational system
and get into the wonderful experience that is moving
through all things all the time.”

It is through living
that we experience and communicate
the spirit.

It is through life
that we learn to live in the spirit.

One in full quest of the spirit

knows that the goal of life is death.

I recall a wonderful talk I had with Alan Watts, who was

a marvelous man. One of my problems was that Jean was
always late. I’d make an appointment to meet her
somewhere or other, and there I’d sit waiting for half an
hour. I found it’s a normal thing for men to wait for women.
They have so many things they have to do before they can
walk out of the house that half an hour or more goes by
quickly.
Now, it’s a basic rule in New York that it takes a half-
hour to get anywhere, but Jean always thought that the time
when she was supposed to be somewhere was the time to
leave. So, I had this long wait problem, and I said to Alan,
“What can I do about this? I get aggravated, and when she
arrives, I’m a little bit nasty.”
Alan said, “Well, your problem is that you want her to be
there, and you’re wishing for a situation that is not the one
you are in. Just realize that you are ruining the experience
that you could be having there while waiting by thinking it
should be otherwise.”
 So then, waiting for Jean became a spiritual exercise. I
said to myself, “You should not be thinking that Jean should
be here. Look around you and see what is going on.” And,
you know, the place where I was be-came so goddamn
interesting that I wasn't bored at all. Oftentimes, I hoped
that Jean would make me wait a little longer. That would
have seemed impossible to me, until Alan suggested
shutting out any thought that my situation should have
been otherwise.
That’s an example of what fear and desire do. I de-sired
the situation to be the one we planned, and that desire
forbade me my immediate experience: “This is it! This is
life! Look at it! Isn’t it bubbling?” But now that I could love
the situation I was in, the waiting was no longer a bore. The
psychological transformation would be that whatever was
formerly endured is now known, loved, and served.

As long as you move

from a place of fear and desire,
you are self-excluded
from immortality.
The aim of all religious exercises is a psy-chological
transformation. You can make up your own meditations and
rites based on knowing, loving, and serving the deity in
caring for your children, doctoring drunks, or writing books.
Any work whatsoever can be a meditation if you have the
sense that everything is brahman: the process, the doing,
the thing that is being looked at, the one that is looking—
everything.

The return
is seeing the radiance
everywhere.

The main problem is changing the location of your mind.

The town you come back to is the one you left, otherwise
the journey is not complete. You come back to whatever you
regard as the place that is your life, to the same career, not
necessarily to the same locale. The yoga disciplines are
disciplines. They are not the place.

You give yourself to life

by leaving temporality behind.

Desire for mortal gains

and fear of loss
hold you back from giving
yourself to life.

Fear and desire do not give rise to social duty, society

does. Do-gooders come and say, for example, “We have this
picket line against nuclear armament. Please get on the line,
give up your thinking, and do what we ask you to do.”

If you’re performing your social duty,

it is not your act at all.
 Society has put it upon you
and it will keep you from life.

Dealing with such demands as compulsory social

obligations means you are linked and locked to a given
order of life in the phenomenal world. You can involve
yourself voluntarily, but there is no compulsion upon you to
participate in these actions. Nor are they necessarily the
final good of mankind. That’s the whole didactic sphere.
People put social duty on you. Your neighbors say, “Why
this apathetic sitting in meditation? Get up and do
something for the world. You owe it to the world.” All that
kind of thing. Duty doesn’t rise out of your fear. People put it
on you. Duty is dharma; that is to say, dharma understood
as social dharma.
Notice that little icon on the dollar bill, the static eye at
the point where the pair of opposites come together. If
you’re going to be in the world in action, you have to be
down the pyramid on one side or the other. It doesn’t matter
whether you are for Democracy or Communism or Fascism,
you are still in the field of time, and the radiance shines
through no matter which one you’re in. You can also get
locked into compulsive participation in any position. It is a
matter of relativity. All judgments are transformed as you
move from one position to another. Good and evil are not
absolute. They are relative to which side you are on.

The limitation comes

where your judgment comes.

A wonderful example is a story I was told about a

Buddhist monk whom a friend was following. Now in Tibet,
people go to a slaughter-house, buy a lamb that is about to
be killed, then give the lamb its freedom, and that is a pious
act. Accordingly, this monk, who had a cluster of beautiful
girls around him, was going to perform a pious act by
freeing five hundred fish.
And so, with his constellation of beauties, he went from
one bait shop to another in Monterey trying to buy five
hundred minnows. But bait was in short supply, and the
shopkeepers said they were not going to sell him minnows
for liberation. Finally, however, he found a shop that would,
and he and his entourage, carrying buckets filled with fish,
went down to the shore, where they had a ceremony of
blessing the fish that were about to be given their freedom.
Then they dumped one bucket after another into the ocean.
Well, pelicans flocked from every point of the compass, and
the little monk ran back and forth, waving his robe, trying to
keep the pelicans away.
Now, what is good for pelicans is bad for fish, and this
monk had taken sides. He was not in the middle place. This
is to me a very important story. Every now and then, I wake
up laughing at that monk and his banquet for the pelicans.
That is why the story of the lion lying down with the
lamb is so silly. Read concretely, you realize that when the
lion is eating the lamb, he is lying down with it. That’s how it
was meant to be, and “shanti, shanti, shanti”: nothing is
happening. That is the perspective of the sublime, which
annihilates ego consciousness and its relationship. Without
changing the world, there is escape from sorrow just by
shifting the perspective.

Life will always be sorrowful.

We can’t change it, but we can

change our attitude toward it.
There is a story of the Buddha, in a little company of yogis,
and he says, “At one time I starved my body to such a
degree that, when I touched my stomach, I could grab my
backbone. The thought occurred to me that this is not the
way to achieve enlightenment. There is not enough strength
in the body to absorb the experience or even to achieve it.
So it was then that I ate my first meal.”
There was a lovely little girl around who was the
daughter of a cattleherder, and she took the milk of a
thousand cows and fed it to a hundred, that of a hundred
she fed to ten, and the milk of those ten cows she fed to
one. There was such power in that concentrated milk that,
when she gave the bowl to the Buddha and he drank of it,
his whole body was refreshed. When he was finished, he
threw the bowl into the river and said, “If this bowl goes
upstream, I shall become a Buddha.” It went upstream. That
night the illumination came.

Fear of your power

is what commits you
to the lower system.

If in me there is the kind of power that can stand against

the tide of history, then I can become disengaged from it.
Nietzsche says, “Beware of spitting against the wind.” You
know what will happen. But if you can spit against the wind
and it hits somebody else in the eye, then you’re going to
be a Buddha.
I’ve always looked for signs like that. When I had to
register for the drafts, behind the desks there were three
men and one woman. I said if the woman calls me, I won’t
be drafted. The woman called me, and just when it was time
for me to be taken in, they learned that I was thirty-eight,
and they could not use people of that antiquity. I think, as
do the Buddhists, that what is to be is somehow implicit in
what is, and that to look for such signs is a natural and
amusing thing to do.
In our tradition, we do not operate in accordance with
those fixed patterns. We believe that the ego, which makes
value judgments and decisions for action, brings about
change. Freud speaks of the ego as “the reality principle,”
that which puts you in touch with “reality,” reality with a
small “r”: meaning, the individual circumstances of your life
and your relationship to those circumstances. And in our
culture, the ego, the evaluating principle, is developed. The
mother asks, “What kind of ice cream do you want, Johnny,
strawberry or vanilla?” “I want vanilla.” And he gets vanilla.
In the East, by contrast, where everything you do is
what you are told to do, they put something in front of you
and you get what you are given. And if everything you do is
what you are told to do, your ego is not being developed.
Consequently, in the East, people have no concept of the
ego. They don’t know what the ego is. It doesn’t play any
role. There is no individual evaluation.
In Freudian psychology, the pleasure principle, the id,
the zeal of life for holding on to food, comfort, sex, and life
itself—the context I call “health, wealth, and progeny”—is
what most people live for. Against the id, Freud posits the
superego, the social laws that discipline the individual, so
that one does, not what one wants, but what society says
one should do. In the East, in psychological terms, the whole
conflict is between superego and id. No ego principle is even
considered.
So, without anything that we would call an ego, the
Easterner seeking illumination leaves his family, goes to a
guru, and brings a little ball or shell, his ego, and he asks
the guru to break it. And the guru takes a little mallet, the
yoga discipline, and—“bing!”—his ego is gone. But the
Westerner going to a guru brings with him a rock-solid ego
that’s been the guiding force of his whole life. And when he
asks the guru to break his ego, the guru takes the same
little mallet and goes “bing! bing! bing!” for forty years and
nothing happens. The person just feels increasingly
unhappy.
I submit that if you are a person with an evaluating
psyche. who is having thoughts no guru ever had, there
must be another way to have illumination. I think what
Ramakrishna calls “the monkey way” can, in our culture,
turn into the equivalent of the Buddhist “middle way.” That
is to say, when you have found the center within yourself
that is the counterpart of the sacred space, you do not have
to go into the forest. You can have a technique for
extracting your own repose from that center. You can live
from that center, even while you remain in relation to the
world.
There is a popular Indian fable that Ramakrishna
used to like to tell, to illustrate the difficulty of
holding in mind the two conscious planes
simultaneously, of the multiple and transcendent. It
is of a young aspirant whose guru had just brought
home to him the realization of himself as identical in
essence with the power that supports the universe
and which in theological thinking we personify as
“God.” The youth, profoundly moved, exalted in the
notion of himself as at one with the Lord and Being
of the Universe, walked away in a state of profound
absorption; and when he had passed in that state
through the village and out onto the road beyond it,
he beheld, coming in his direction, a great elephant
bearing a howdah on its back and with the mahout,
the driver, riding—as they do—high on its neck,
above its head. And the young candidate for
sainthood, meditating on the proposition “I am God;
all things are God,” on perceiving that mighty
elephant coming toward him, added the obvious
corollary, “The elephant also is God.” The animal,
with its bells jingling to the majestic rhythm of its
stately approach, was steadily coming on, and the
mahout above its head began shouting, “Clear the
way! Clear the way, you idiot! The youth, in his
rapture, was thinking still, “I am God; that elephant
is God.” And, hearing the shouts of the mahout, he
added, “Should God be afraid of God? Should God
get out of the way of God?” The phenomenon came
steadily on with driver at its head still shouting at
him, and the youth, in undistracted meditation, held
both to his place on the road and to his
transcendental insight, until the moment of truth
arrived and the elephant, simply wrapping its great
trunk around the lunatic, tossed him aside, off the
road.

Physically shocked, spiritually stunned, the youth

landed all in a heap, not greatly bruised but
altogether undone; and rising, not even adjusting
his clothes, he returned, disordered, to his guru, to
require an explanation. “You told me,” he said, when
he had explained himself, “you told me that I was
God.” “Yes,” said the guru, “you are God.” “You told
me that all things are God.” “Yes,” said the guru
again, “all things are God.” “That elephant, then,
was God?” “So it was. That elephant was God. But
why didn’t you listen to the voice of God, shouting
from the elephant’s head, to get out of the way?”112

Wisdom and foolishness

are practically the same.
Both are indifferent
to the opinions of the world.

According to legend, when Avalokiteśvara looked

down upon this suffering world he was filled with
such compassion that his head burst into
innumerable heads…while from his body sprang a
thousand helping arms and hands, like an aura of
dazzling rays, and in the palm of each hand there
appeared an eye of unimpeded vision.…

Every pore of the body of Avalokiteśvara contains

and pours forth thousands of Buddhas, saints of all
kinds, entire worlds. From his fingers flow rivers of
ambrosia that cool the hells and feed the hungry
ghosts.…He appears to brahmans as a brahman, to
merchants as a merchant, to insects as an insect, to
each in the aspect of its kind.…113
 "T HE goddess alone knew of the all-moving,
secret world energy which had helped the
gods to victory; it was the power within them, of
which they were unaware. They believed that they
were strong in themselves, but without this force, or
against it, they could not so much as harm a blade
of grass. The goddess knew of the universal force,
which the Vedic priests called brahman and which
Hindus call śakti, for śakti, i.e. energy, is the
essence and name of the Great Goddess herself,
hence she could explain the mysterious being to the
gods, she could teach them its secret—for it was her
own secret.”—Zimmer114

In Hinduism, all power, śakti, is female. So, the female

represents the totality of the power, and the male is imaged
as the agent of the female. In that sense, the power that a
female feels from the male—the animus, in Jungian terms—
is a specification of the female power, a mode of application
of that power.

Every being has a twofold aspect, reveals a friendly

and a menacing face. All gods have a charming and
a hideous form, according to how one approaches
them; but the Great Goddess is the energy of the
world, taking form in all things. All friendly and
menacing faces are facets of her essence. What
seems a duality in the individual god, is an infinite
multiplicity in her total being.…

She is the mute security of life in itself; from the

ashes of burned forests she raises eager fresh
flowers whose decay is pregnant with new life, a
 new life which all around it sees only life in its
transitions and transformations with no shadow of
death, just as we ourselves, when we sink our teeth
into a ripe fruit, or draw a living plant from the
garden, are without awareness of death.

Whatever you do, in waking or sleeping, consciously

or involuntarily in the cycle of your flesh to the
accompanying music of your soul; whatever you do
as your body builds and destroys, absorbs and
excretes, breathes and procreates, or bestows joy
infringing on the limits of rage and pain—all this is a
mere gesture of the Great Mother, jaganmayi
(consisting of all worlds and beings), who
unremittingly does likewise with her world body in
endless thousands of forms.…To see the twofold,
embracing and devouring, nature of the goddess, to
see repose in catastrophe, security in decay, is to
know her and to be saved.…She is the perfect
figuration of life’s joyous lures and pitiless
destruction: the two poles charged with the
extremest tension, yet forever merging.—Zimmer115

Also, in Hinduism, the sun is female and the moon is

male: he is born of her, dies into her, and is born of her
again every month. Śiva, this great power, is the moon god.
Pārvatī, his consort, is the sun power. And although the
worship in the masculine-oriented action systems in India is
directly to Śiva, it’s to the goddess Kālī, that the worship
finally goes. So that, actually, in India, Kālī is the great
divinity.

…the Hindu goddess Kālī…is shown standing on the

prostrate form of the god Śiva, her spouse. She
brandishes the sword of death, i.e., spiritual
discipline. The blood-dripping human head tells the
devotee that ”he that loseth his life for her sake
shall find it.” The gestures of “fear not” and
“bestowing boons” teach that she protects her
children, that the pairs of opposites of the universal
agony are not what they seem, and that for one
centered in eternity the phantasmagoria of temporal
“goods” and “evils” is but a reflex of the mind—as
the goddess herself, though apparently trampling
down the god, is actually his blissful dream.116

The Goddess
gives birth to forms
and kills forms.
It’s interesting that in the North, in the European systems—
and in the Chinese system, where one hears of yang and yin
—the man is the aggressor, the active principle, and the
woman is the receptive and passive aspect. It’s just the
opposite in India. The Hindu position is that woman is the
śakti, the serpent power that comes up the spine, the life-
energy principle. She’s the activator, and the man just
wants to be left alone. The man, psychologically, is
interested in other things, but when this power field goes
by, he’s activated. As Joyce writes in Finnegans Wake, “With
lipth she lith-peth to him all to time of thuch on thuch and
thow and thow. She he she ho she ha to la.”117 And wouldn’t
it be nice to sthart the world again? And he thinks, “My god,
yeah, it would.” And that’s it, he’s gone. He gets involved
that way because she’s the whole damned energy in any of
it’s aspects.
Similarly, in the mythological systems of what we call,
basically, the Bronze Age, the female was the great divinity
and the source of all power. For instance, in the Egyptian
image of the Pharaoh on the throne, the throne being what
gives him his authority, the throne is the goddess Isis. The
same mythic image comes up in Byzantine iconography of
the Virgin and the Christ: the Christ Child sits on the Virgin’s
knee just the way the Pharaoh sits on the throne: she is his
power. He is called the world ruler, but she’s behind him all
the way. Likewise, in old pictures of Presidents of the United
States, one usually sees the President’s wife standing
behind him. She’s Isis, and he’s the child on the throne.
There is a Pygmy dance where the woman ties the
whole male community up with a rope. They stand there
completely immobilized and one of them says, “She has
made us all silent.” Then she loosens them, and as each one
is loose, he sings. They know this basic, basic mythological
stuff that we’ve lost.
 Her womb is the field of space, her heart the pulse
of time, her life the cosmic dream of which each of
our own lives is a reflex; and her charm is the
attractive power, not of a yonder shore, but of this.
In short: in Biblical terms, she is Eve; or rather, Eve
extended to be the mother, not only of mankind but
of all things, the rocks and trees, beasts, birds and
fish, the sun and moon and stars.118

The male power comes in with the Semites and Indo-

European Aryans, masculine-oriented societies of herding
peoples for whom the specific function of the energy was to
control the animals on the plains. Then you have the
problem of the relationship between male and female
mythologies.

Where agriculture
is a main means of support,
there are earth and goddess powers.

Where hunting predominates,

it’s male initiative
that empowers the killing of animals.

In the Semitic tradition, the goddess is wiped out, and a

prominent feature of that orthodoxy is a masculine fear of
the female body, the prime anthropomorphic symbol of
Nature’s allure and power. This went to such extremes in
Christianity that nuns were not even allowed to look at their
bodies. In Islam, the most male-oriented of the modern
religions, a woman is nothing but a vehicle for producing
sons, and the male function is, in large part, the protection
of the women. I was in PakistanI for only a few hours, but
what I saw! Those women were going around in tents! Even
their eyes were covered with cheesecloth, so you did not
know if it was an old hag or a glorious goddess walking
around. And you can’t respond to a tent.

Male = social order.

Female = nature order.

The male’s job is to relate to life.

The female’s job is to become it.

The prime function of the male is to set up an eco-

logical situation in which the woman can give birth, to
prepare the field so that the female may bring forth the
future, because she is the life. She is the totality. He is a
protecting factor, the agent of her power. If a woman loses
her husband, she has to take over a male role, but it is a
mistake to regard that as something foreign to her own
energy. The animus function is in every woman, but it is
usually delegated to somebody.
What I think has happened now—with so many women,
left without husbands, being thrown into the field of male
achievement—is that women have been sold a bill of goods
—perhaps not intentionally, but actually. With our strong
emphasis on such dramatic and conspicuous male activities
as building cities filled with skyscrapers and sending jet-
propelled rockets to the moon, women have come to believe
that only the aims and virtues of the male are to be
considered, and that male achievement is the proper aim
for everyone, as though that is what counts. No indeed.
Women used to know how to run the world, but when
they move into the secondary energy position of doing the
job of the man—who is, in fact, just the agent of the female
power—women lose their real power and become resentful.
Spengler said, in a telling sentence that got into me when I
read it: “Man makes history. Woman is history.” She’s what it
is about, and the man fashions the field within which she
can produce history and be history.
 The man’s function is to act.
The woman’s function is to be.
She’s “It.” She is Mother Earth.

So, the female is “It.” When you say the woman brings
forth children, that’s part of just being, fulfilling a role that is
already there in the very body itself. And the production
need not be children. It can be in represent-ing that power,
that quality, that being in life which the woman represents.
This is why the woman’s beauty or quality of character is so
important in mythological tales, which does not mean that a
woman who’s not physically beautiful does not have this
power. It’s right there in the female presence.

The mythological figure of the Universal Mother

imputes to the cosmos the feminine attributes of the
first, nourishing and protecting presence. The
fantasy is primarily spontaneous; for there exists a
close and obvious correspondence between the
attitude of the young child toward its mother and
that of the adult toward the surrounding material
world. 119

When Heinrich Zimmer, a great devotee of the Goddess,

was trying to find his place in America, he was helped by
the old ladies of the Jung Foundation. They were getting him
jobs, helping his wife to find a place and so forth. He said,
“When I look into those eyes, I say, ‘I see you there.’” So,
she’s operative in every woman in a way that the god is not
operative in a man. I’ll never forget that wonderful twinkle
in his eye when he said, “I see you there.”
 Woman, in the picture language of mythology,
represents the totality of what can be known. The
hero is the one who comes to know. As he
progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the
form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of
transfigurations: she can never be greater than
himself, though she can always promise more than
he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she
guides, she bids him burst his fetters. And if he can
match her import, the two, the knower and the
known, will be released from every limitation.
Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of
sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is
reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of
ignorance she is spellbound to banality and
ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of
understanding. The hero who can take her as she is,
without undue commotion but with the kindness and
assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the
incarnate god, of her created world. 120

A little girl has a golden ball. Now gold is the in-

corruptible metal, the sphere is the perfect sphere, and the
circle is her soul. She likes to go out to the edge of the
forest, the abyss, and sit beside a little pool, a little spring,
the entrance to the underworld, and there she likes to toss
her soul around: toss the little ball and catch it, toss the ball
and catch it, toss the ball and—bing!—she misses it, and it
goes down into the pond.
She starts to weep. She has lost her soul. This is
depression. This is loss of energy and joy in life. Some-thing
has slipped out. It is the counterpart of Helen of Troy being
stolen in the classic story of the Iliad: Helen of Troy was
stolen, so they want to get her back.
 So, the little golden ball has dropped, her soul has been
swallowed by the wolf of the underworld. Now, when the
energy goes down like that, the power that’s at the bottom
of the pool, the inhabitant of the under-world, comes up—a
dragon, or in this case, a little frog. He says “What’s the
matter, Little Girl?” And she tells him, “I’ve lost my golden
ball.” And he says, “I’ll get it for you.” And she says, “That
would be very nice.” And he says, “What will you give me?”
Now, she has to give up something, there has to be
some kind of exchange, so she says, “I will give you my
golden crown.” He says, “I do not want your golden crown.”
“I’ll give you my pretty silk dress.” “I don’t want your pretty
silk dress.” “Well,” she demands, “what do you want?” “I
want to eat with you at the table, be with you as your
playmate, sleep with you in your bed.” So, underestimating
the frog, she says, “Okay, I’ll do that.”
The frog dives down and brings up the ball. Now he is
the hero who is on the adventure. She, without so much as a
thank you, takes the ball and goes trotting home, and he
comes flopping after her, saying, “Wait for me.” He’s very
slow.
She gets home, and that evening, when the little
princess and King Daddy and Queen Mother are having
dinner, doing very nicely with their meal, this green creature
comes flopping up the front steps: plomp, plomp, plomp.
The girl goes a bit pale, and her father asks, “So, what’s the
matter? What’s that?” And she says, “Oh, just a little frog I
met.” And he says, “Did you make any promises?”
Now there’s the moral principle coming in; you have to
correlate all these things. So, when she answers, “Yes,” the
king says, “Well, then, open the door and let him in.” So, in
comes the frog, and he’s down on the floor, and then he
says, “I want to be on the table. I want to eat off of your
golden plate.” Well, that spoils dinner. The dinner is finished,
and she goes up to bed. He comes flopping up the stairs
after her and bangs against the door, saying, “I want to
come in.” So she opens the door and lets him in. “I want to
sleep in your bed with you.” Well, that is more than she can
take.
There are several ways of ending this part of the story,
but the one I like best is where she just picks up the frog
and throws him against the wall. The frog cracks open, and
out steps this beautiful prince, with eyelashes like a camel.
It seems he had also been in trouble: he had been cursed by
a hag into the condition of a frog. Now that’s the little boy
who hasn’t dared to move on into adulthood. She is the little
girl who is at the brink of adulthood. Both of them are
refusing it, but each now helps the other out of this
dilemma, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful experience.
Then, the story says, the next morning, after they had
been married, a coach comes to the front door. It was his
coach. He was a prince, after all, whose kingdom had been
in desolation since his transformation into a frog. So he and
his bride get into the coach, and as they are driving away,
they hear a loud sound: Bang! He says to the coachman,
“What’s the matter, Henry? What’s happened?” And Henry
says, “Well, ever since you have been gone, my Prince,
there have been four bands of iron around my heart. One of
them has now broken.” As they ride further, there are three
more “Bangs,” and then the heart of the coachman beats
properly once again.
The coachman is symbolic of the land that requires the
prince as its generating and governing power. He’d failed in
his duty and gone down into the underworld, but down in
the underworld, he found his little bride.
I like that story particularly, because both of them are in
trouble, both are at the bottom of the pond, and each
rescues the other in this funny way. Meanwhile, the world up
there has been waiting for its prince to return. So that is one
example of the hero journey.
 T HE question that comes—always, always, always—
is: “What about the woman’s journey?” The woman’s
life, if she is following the biologically grounded
norm, is that of life in the world, in one relationship or
another to a family. Then when the retirement time comes,
the normal passage is into the stage which can be pictured
as the Grandmother, of giving advice to the new life coming
along. One can be in a position of being a grandmother to
the grandchildren of the world. One is in a role, then, of
mature, life-fostering advice. The woman brings forth life in
one way or another, either biologically or socially, and then,
in the latter stage, is life-fostering and life-guiding. The man
is more inward than the woman in that last stage.
The relationship of age to childhood, it seems to me, is a
very sweet thing. There is a sweet, amusing picture of Ida
Rolf and a little child looking at each other, west to east,
across the distance of life: the whole, historically
conditioned stage between is missing, and there’s just one
eternity looking at the other. If you can be in some kind of
social relationship that enables that principle of the eternal
experience to look at the eternal innocence and foster it,
that is really archetypal.
In cases throughout history, however, where there have
been inadequate responses to what the woman is doing—
that is to say, she is doing what nature and society expect,
but it’s an arid and bad situation—this is what I would term
a “call to adventure.” And if a woman engages in the man’s
task of entering the field of achievement, then her
mythology will be essentially the same as that of the male
hero.
The heroine will, of course, encounter difficulties and
advantages which are not those that the male meets, but
whether one is male or female, the stages of the inner
journey, the visionary quest, are the same, even though the
imagery is going to be a little different. For instance, the
central image in a man’s mandala is often some radiant
jewel, or gem, or something like that, but the central image
for a woman might be of her holding a child in her arms, the
child of her spiritual birth, since the imagery of biological
commitment is translated even to the spiritual forms.
My wife, who is anything but the housewife, has no
trouble in seeing the male hero as the counterpart of the
female hero, if the woman is engaged in the kind of task
that has traditionally been seen as a male task; that is to
say, if she is engaged in achieving something, rather than
waiting in solitude to be achieved, which is the woman’s
normal role. Jean is an artist, richly fulfilled in an active role,
and her crises are essentially the same as a male’s crises.
The women we know with whom she has worked are also
not typical housewives. They have achieved fulfillment in
the realm of the arts, which is the only place I know of—
except, perhaps, for academe—where women can have this
unconventional way of life. In my own work, I have known a
lot of women in the world of “the head trip,” but they never
seemed to me to be as richly fulfilled as the ones that went
into the arts. Their fulfillment was more in the way of
achievement, whereas the artists’ fulfillment was in doing
what the artist does, and that is a different thing.
In all of literature there is very little of the woman’s
adventure because she is already “It,” and her problem is
the realization of that. There are quite a few adventures of
little girls in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and most of them have to
do with the hesitation before moving into the threshold of
accepting womanhood—the sleeping princess, and all that
sort of thing, and then the waking. When women dream,
often their active aspect appears in male form.
What the male represents is the agent of the femi-nine
power directed to a specific kind of functioning. In the male
body, however, there’s not the recall to female nature that
there is automatically in the female body. Consequently, a
male going forth and finding the place of, the instrument of,
his full power would not have the problem of discovering the
feminine factor in himself, for it is quite slight compared
with the feminine factor in the female body. It is a greater
distance from what the body has given you. It’s a matter of
proportion.

A man must do.

He must disengage from the mother
and find his way of “doing,”
which is a way of pain.
A woman has only to be.

In my twenties, I lived with artists, many of them

women. I noticed that when they approached the age of
thirty, the marriage problem came up with each one. “I have
to get married now and have a child.” When the female
within calls the sculptress who has found her instruments of
power, the mallet and chisel, her art falls apart, because she
can’t carry a serious art career unless she is at it, and
nothing else, all day long.
This wreckage doesn’t happen with men. When the
female calls the male, all he does is go and get married,
because the female is out there, where she naturally is. I
would say that this is one of the points in the female
journey: there is a heavier load of given nature to deal with.
It starts with the girl being overtaken by the menstrual
moment, and then she’s a woman.
That much of a summons to life is the problem that you
ladies have that we men don’t. Your whole body tells you
that you have disowned it. A man does not have that
problem. A woman can follow the hero’s journey, but there
will be other calls and another relationship that’s asked of
her, namely, to the nature field of which she is the
manifestation.
It took me a long time to get around to marriage,
principally because I felt that women always wanted to have
fun, and that was not my interest at all. It would interfere
with my reading. That’s really the truth. But another reason
was that every time I would get really involved with a
woman, I’d have the feeling of weight: life was heavy. And
pretty soon I’d just get fed up with that heaviness, with that
feeling of everything being so goddamn important and all
these little bits of things becoming mountainous problems,
and—Jesus!: “I’m out.” And then, a little while later, here it
is again.
I have taught hundreds of young women, many of whom
have gone into the arts, as did Jean, who went into classic
dance. But many of the others had husbands who would not
stand for that. Each of these women had to make a choice,
and if she chose to knuckle down to what her husband
wanted, that ended her adventure. It really did. Everything
else then became a substitute. But the objective is to have
your own adventure, not a substitute, and it is not by any
means an easy thing to do.
When I was teaching these young women, I wasn’t
thinking of turning them into philologists or historians. So
what was I giving them this stuff for? Most were going to get
married, have children, and give them-selves to daily chores
—comparable to my daily chore of teaching them, which,
after the first excitement, was no fun either. But there are
many ways of using the material, and my thought was this:
they will have their families, and then, when they are fifty
and their families have been launched, there they’ll be. And
it was my intention to give them this spiritual message of
how to read the world in the second half of life’s journey.
That was a long time ago. I still know many of these women
—twenty, thirty, or forty years later—and I hear
unanimously, that my approach worked, that I gave them
something that is now feeding this aspect of their lives.
It’s interesting that in traditions like the Japanese or the
old Oriental, and this goes all the way back to Greece in
Plato’s time, the housewife was one kind of woman, and the
courtesan was another. The courtesan was the woman
proficient in the arts, in literature, and in talk. It was a
different type of human life from that of the housewife, and
in those traditions, the woman was fulfilled in that role.
Then there’s another woman’s role in literature, but one
I have never seen, that of the woman who appears as an
Amazon. There is one such story about the daughter of the
King of France, who’s been kidnapped by the Muslims. After
she and a Muslim fall infinitely in love, she is rescued by her
family and brought back from Islam. Her Muslim lover
follows, recaptures her, and now, as they are running to
escape from this military group of brothers who are trying to
take her back, she says to him, “How good are you with
your sword?” He says, “No good. I’m just good in bed.”
“Well,” she replies, “you go on then, and I will take care of
this bunch.” It is a wonderful story, one of the best in the
world, and it’s worth looking for in the Arabian Nights.
Joyce speaks of the woman as the one who is the link
between: between nations, between people. The ability
women have to marry men of totally alien cultures and find
themselves at home with them is more than what happens
when men marry women of alien cultures. Woman is the link
between. Another thing that Joyce brings out in Finnegans
Wake: a woman has three or four sons: one is a great son,
another is a poor son. She loves them all. She is not
evaluating in terms of achievements or anything of the kind.
She represents a human-to-human relationship.

Where male power dominates,

you have separation.
Where female power dominates,
there’s a non-dual, embracing quality.

Having taught young women, I’ve been amazed to see

how competent they are in understanding their hus-band’s
job, if they are in a marriage that’s really going. She never
studied that stuff, but she’s right in there with him, because
any failure on the part of either member ruins the duad. In
my own case, everything that I write I read to Jean, who
gives me the criticism and support that my work requires.
The man might feel sometimes as though he does not need
cooperation, but he does. There is a big difference between
a man operating with a woman behind him and one out
there alone.
 When we were first married, and I was driving the car, it
didn’t matter what the hell I did, Jean went along with it.
Then there came a time when I realized there would been a
psychological transformation, that some-times she was
critical of the way my driving was done. There then came a
stage where she was directing, And all of that was
acceptable: it had to do with changes in her thinking. First,
she thought, “Anything he does is great.” Then, when she
had learned a little more about me, her uncritical
acceptance went away. Finally, after she had learned still
more about me—and it always goes like this—now, she is
the boss. I know the feeling of turning a car over to
someone and just having to say, “If we run into something,
that’s okay. Here we go, Dear.” And you find that she
manages very well. It’s different, that’s all. It is the Perilous
Bed.

A knight, in full armor,

approaches the Perilous Bed.
Whenever he tries to settle into it,
the bed jumps and bucks and moves.

The Perilous Bed represents

the female temperament.

If the male can just hold on,

if he can endure,
the bed will settle down,
and he’ll get the reward.

Some time ago, I had a sabbatical and spent the whole

year traveling, mostly in India and Japan, but I was also in
Thailand, Ceylon, Burma, and Taiwan. My impression was
that, in anything, the women in these cultures were more
competent than the men. Perhaps I had to go abroad to see
something that is also a fact back here, but I was
tremendously impressed by the vigor and authority of
Oriental women.
I was a long time in India, and since I had already
published the Zimmer books, I saw every department of
India that one could ask to see, including the house of
Nehru. His younger sister took me as her person-to-go-to-
parties-with, so I met the whole bunch. Indian women look
so darned humble with their saris and all, but they are
nothing of the kind. They are potent. In Japan, however, it is
a different situation, because those men are really strong
men. But when you see a Japanese couple in a restaurant,
who pays the check? The woman. She has the money.
The principle characterization of Athene is as the guardian
of heroes, as a patroness, like Lakṣmī, the Indian goddess
who isthe supporter of the king or of anybody who then
becomes her hero. We find Athene depicted in art as the
protector of heroes: she is there when Perseus takes the
head of Medusa, and she is the one who initiates the young
man into his heroic career. In the Odyssey, she tells
Telemachus to go find his father. She is present when
Odysseus lands on the island of Scherie and meets the
Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, and she is again present at
the meeting of father and son. So, we can think of her as
the guardian of heroes.
Athene is also the protectress of the Acropolis, the
fortress of the city. Athene relates to the father, not to the
mother. Her mother was Metis, but when Metis was
pregnant, Zeus swallowed her, so she gave birth to her child
in Zeus’ belly, and Athene emerged from his head. That’s
what Freud calls a transfer to above—the birthplace of the
male creation—and she comes forth from there. In societies
with such traditions, as I see it, the mother is the mother of
our nature. The child is born of the mother and is the little
nature object. The father is the parent of one’s social
maturity. Hence, in the boy’s initiation, he goes from the
mother to the men’s camp, and they initiate him.

Father is the separator.

Mother brings together.

Hera is the consort of Zeus, who represents royal rule,

the justice that governs the world, so she is matron of the
household. This role is different from that of Athene, patron
of the heroic adventure. In the contrast between seductress
and wife, Hera is the wife, and the seductress role goes to
Aphrodite. Aphrodite, however, is more than just the
seductress. She is the goddess of all love, a tremendously
powerful figure, for love can overtake a person as
seductress, but it is also the supporting love of life.
The Ouranian Venus is the one who gives the inspiration
of the muses that is the inspiration of the spirit. She feeds
not only the body but the spirit as well. The way she pours
life into the world shows that this one life is the one truth of
all things. That’s why I think that the woman as artist is in a
field which furnishes not only physical life but spiritual life
as well—the spiritual life at once the revealing power.
I have noticed that the way women look at children is
different from the way men do. There are two ways of
looking at a little kid in an airplane toddling up and down
the aisle: one is the way the woman looks at the child; the
other is the way the man does. That’s why I say that the
prime female power and virtue is compassion: the lack of
egoistic isolation , the opening to participation. Even in sex,
the man is aggressive, but the woman opens. The opening
to that ubiquitous presence which is the ground of us all is
compassion. Recognizing that spontaneous feeling,
embracing it, and manifesting it in action is the female
power.
In my book The Mythic Image, I have a wonderful story
about Kuan-yin, one of the personifications of the great
Mahāyāna Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, the embodiment of
compassion.121
It seems that Kuan-yin realized that in a certain part of
China, out in the rural areas, nobody had ever heard of
enlightenment. They were all interested in horse racing and
all this macho stuff. So she turns herself into a gloriously
beautiful girl, comes into town with fresh fish from the river
to sell, and when her basket is empty, she disappears. Early
the next day, this beautiful fish-selling girl is there again,
and then once again she disappears. This daily pattern
continues, and soon all of the men have become enchanted
by her.
One morning, when she appears, about ten or twenty of
them surround her and say, “You have to marry one of us.”
“Well,” she says, “I cannot marry twenty men, but tomorrow
morning, if one of you can recite by heart the Sūtra of the
Compassionate Kuan-yin, I will marry that man.” The next
morning, a dozen men know the entire sūtra by heart, so
she says, “Well, I cannot marry all of you, but I will marry
the one who can interpret this sūtra to me tomorrow.”
The next day, there are four men who can interpret the
sūtra, so now she says, “I am only one woman, and I can’t
marry four men, but if one of you has experienced the
meaning of this sūtra three days from now, then I will marry
that man.”
Three days later, there is but one man waiting for her.
Now she says, “My little house is down by the bend in the
river. Come there this evening, and you will be my
husband.”
So that evening, he goes to where the shore bends and
comes to a little house. An old couple is standing outside,
and the old man says, “Oh, we’ve been waiting a long, long
time for you. Our daughter is inside.” But when he goes into
the room, it’s empty. She isn’t there. So he looks out the
window and sees footprints, which he follows down to the
river, where he finds a little pair shoes at the water’s edge,
but no girl.
Then, as he’s standing there, with the reeds blowing and
so forth, he realizes that all the reeds and everything else is
she. Through her allure and charm, which is what the female
figures represent in these Mahāyāna images, he realizes the
nirvāṇic grace of beauty in the universe. Having understood
the sūtra, he knew what he was experiencing, and he
received illumination.
Dante realized something of this kind at the end of The
Divine Comedy. He had followed the allure of Beatrice, who
had guided him through the heavens to the very throne of
God, and when he got there, she was there, together with
the Trinity and the angelic forms. Behind the three persons
of the Trinity, he saw three circles of flame and light, which
represented the non-personal aspect of the god. He said
that he was wondering how the personified forms and non-
personified illumination could be the same, when suddenly
he under-stood that the whole world was of the love and
grace of God: the love he’d first experienced in Beatrice.

When it’s all love,

all must be love.
Nothing must interfere:
love conquers all.

[Discuss]
Living in the Sacred
 N OW the Indian term for “illusion,” māyā—from the
verbal root mā, “to measure, to measure out, to
form, to create, construct, exhibit or display”—
refers to both the power that creates an illusion and the
false display itself. The art of a magician, for example, is
māyā; so too the illusion he creates. The arts of the military
strategist, the me-chant, actor, and thief: these also are
māyā. Māyā is experienced as fascination, charm;
specifically, feminine charm. And to this point there is a
Buddhist saying: “Of all the forms of māyā that of woman is
supreme.” 122

Let’s say we have the world of that which is no world:

the Garden of Eden before the world of duality, the
transcendent mystery. Then we have the world of things:
the world of duality and multiplicity, of māyā, where we’ve
lost connection with the transcendence.

Māyā is that power

which converts transcendence
into the world.

As a cosmogenic principle—and as a feminine, personal

principle, also—māyā is said to possess three powers:

1. A Veiling Power that hides or conceals the “real,” the

inward essential character of things; so that, as we read
in a sacred Sanskrit text: “Though it is hidden in all
things, the Self shines not forth.”123

The first stage, the veil, manifests from the fact that you
don’t see the white light. This is what is called the māyā
veil. The image that’s given is of white light broken into
the colors of the rainbow by a prism. This prism is the
Goddess. With the veiling power, the obscuring power,
 the white light can’t get through.

2. A Projecting Power, which then sends forth illusionary

impressions and ideas, together with associated desires
and aversions—as might happen, for example if at night
one should mistake a rope for a snake and experience
fright. Ignorance (the Veiling Power), having concealed
the real, imagination (the Projecting Power) evolves
phenomena. And so we read: “This power of projection
creates all appearances, whether of gods or of the
cosmos.”124

With the projecting power, the forms of the world come

through. The prism is the veil, but it is also the
projector: what stops the white light and what projects
the colors of the rainbow. In this second stage, the white
light shows through the forms of the world. If you put a
number of colors on a disk and spin it, you’ll get a white
spinning disk—that’s the revealing power.

These first two powers, concealing and projecting, can

be compared to those properties of a prism by which
sunlight is transformed into the colors of the rainbow.
Arrange these seven colors on a disk, spin it, and they
will be seen as white. So too, when viewed a certain
way, the phenomena themselves may reveal what
normally they veil; which demonstrates:

3. The Revealing Power of māyā, which it is the function of

art and scripture, ritual and meditation: to make
known.125

It is the function of art to serve

the revealing power of māyā.
 The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of
little rivers,
(Winter has given them gold for silver
To stain their water and bladed green for
brown to line their banks)
From different throats intone one language.
So I believe if we were strong enough to
listen without
Divisions of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of
the hunger- smitten cities,
Those voices also would be found
Clean as a child’s; or like some girl’s
breathing who dances alone
By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.
—Robinson Jeffers126

Fear and desire

are the problem of the artist also.

We need more poetry that reveals

what the heart is ready to recognize.

…the first function of art is exactly that which I have

already named as the first function of mythology; to
transport the mind in experience past the guardians
—desire and fear—of the paradisal gate to the tree
within of illuminated life. In the words of the poet
Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “If the
doors of perception were cleansed, everything
would appear to man as it is, infinite.”127 But the
cleansing of the doors, the wiping away of the
guardians, those cherubim with their flaming sword,
is the first effect of art, where the second,
 simultaneously, is the rapture of recognizing in a
single hair “a thousand golden lions.”128

“Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of

access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.”129 That is James
Joyce. The statement is quoted in Ulysses by Buck Mulligan.
The situation is that Leopold Bloom, thinking of his home
problem, is looking intently at a red triangle on the label of a
bottle of Bass ale. When someone starts to disturb Bloom,
Mulligan stops him, saying, “…preserve a druid silence. His
soul is far away. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened
from a vision as to be born. Any object, intensely regarded,
may be a gate of access…,” and so on.

Take, for example, a pencil, ashtray, anything, and

holding it before you in both hands, regard it for a
while. Forgetting its use and name, yet continuing to
regard it, ask yourself seriously, “What is it?”…Cut
off from use, relieved of nomenclature, its
dimension of wonder opens; for the mystery of the
being of that thing is identical with the mystery of
the being of the universe—and of yourself. 130

Art is the transforming experience.

The revelation of art is not ethics, nor a judgment, nor

even of humanity as one generally thinks of it. Rather, the
revelation is a marveling recognition of the radiant Form of
forms that shines through all things.

In the simplest terms, I think we might say that

when a situation or phenomenon evokes in us a
sense of existence (instead of some reference to the
possibility of an assurance of meaning) we have had
an experience of this kind. The sense of existence
evoked may be shallow or profound, more or less
intense, according to our capacity or readiness; but
even a brief shock (say, for example, when
discovering the moon over city roofs or hearing a
sharp bird cry at night) can yield an experience of
the order of no-mind: that is to say, the poetical
order, the order of art. When this occurs, our own
reality-beyond-meaning is awakened (or perhaps
better: we are awakened to our own reality-beyond-
meaning), and we experience an affect that is
neither thought nor feeling but an interior impact.
The phenomenon, disengaged from cosmic
references, has disengaged ourselves, by that
principle, well known to magic, by which like
conjures like. In fact, both the magic of art and the
art of magic derive from and are addressed to
experiences of this order. Hence the power of the
meaningless syllables, the mumbo jumbo of magic,
and the meaningless verbalizations of metaphysics,
lyric poetry, and art interpretation. They function
evocatively, not referentially; like the beat of a
shaman’s drum, not like a formula of Einstein. One
moment later, and we have classified the
experience and may be having utterable thoughts
and describable feelings about it—thoughts and
feelings that are in the public domain, and they will
be either sentimental or profound, according to our
educa-tion. But according to our life, we have had,
for an instant, a sense of existence: a moment of
unevaluated, unimpeded, lyric life—antecedent to
both thought and feeling; such as can never be
communicated by means of empirically verifiable
propositions, but only suggested by art.131

The goal of life is rapture.

Art is the way we experience it.
I will give you what seems to me to be the most clear and
certain exposition of basic esthetic theory I know, namely,
that of James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
.
Joyce makes a distinction between what he calls “proper
art” and “improper art.” By “proper art” he means that
which really belongs to art. “Improper art,” by contrast, is
art that’s in the service of something that is not art: for
instance, art in the service of advertising. Further, referring
to the attitude of the observer, Joyce says that proper art is
static, and thereby induces esthetic arrest, whereas
improper art is kinetic, filled with movement: meaning, it
moves you to desire or to fear and loathing.
Art that excites desire for the object as a tangible object
he calls pornographic. Art that excites loathing or fear for
the object he terms didactic. All sociological art is didactic.
Most novels since Zola’s time have been the work of
didactic pornographers, who are preaching a social doctrine
of some kind and fancying it up with pornographic icing.
Say you are leafing through a magazine and see an
advertisement for a beautiful refrigerator. There’s a girl with
lovely refrigerating teeth smiling beside it, and you say, “I’d
love to have a refrigerator like that.” That ad is
pornography. By definition, all advertising art is
pornographic art. Or suppose you see a photograph of a
dear old lady, and you think, “I’d love to have tea with that
dear old soul.” That photograph is pornography. Or you go
into a ski buff’s house, where there’s a paint-ing of a
mountain slope, and you think, “Oh, to go down that
mountain slope…” That painting is pornography: your
relationship to it is not purely esthetic: just perceiving the
thing. Most of the art that one sees is either didactic or
pornographic.
For help with proper art, Joyce goes to Aquinas.
 He says, and he uses the Latin words, that the esthetic
object renders three moments: integritas, “wholeness”;
consonantia, “harmony”; and claritas, “radiance.”
Say that you have several objects on a table. Put a
frame around any portion of this situation, and what is
within that frame is now to be regarded not as an as-
sortment of separate objects but as something else: a single
entity, a wholeness: integritas.

The late Buckminster Fuller has left with us a

definition of this way of seeing and appreciating…:

“In order to be able to understand the great

complexity of life and to understand what the
universe is doing, the first word to learn is synergy.
Synergy is the behavior of whole systems,
unpredicted by the behavior of their parts. The most
extraordinary example of it is what we call mass
attraction. One great massive sphere and another
massive sphere hung by tension members are
attracted to one another. We find there is nothing in
one sphere in its own right, that predicts that it’s
going to be attracted to another. You have to have
the two. It is, then, synergy which holds our earth
together with the moon; and it is synergy which
holds our whole universe together.…Synergy is to
energy as integration is to differentiation.”132

The Buddhist doctrine of “dependent origination, or

mutual arising” (pratitya samutpada) corresponds
to this of Fuller’s “synergy.” When, on the occasion
of the Buddha’s silent flower sermon (which is
regarded traditionally as the founding sermon of
Zen), he simply held out to his congregation a single
flower, the only one who understood was his
foremost disciple, Mahakashyapa, who quietly
 smiled at him in recognition.133 In the symbol, which
is almost universal in the Orient, of the universe as
a lotus and the lotus as manifest sign on the surface
of the waters of an invisible life below waves, the
Buddhist doctrine is already implicit of pratītya-
samutpāda, “dependent origination, or mutual
arising”; for the petals are not to be interpreted as
in any way independent of each other, casual or
consequential of each other. The whole system has
simply arisen, “thus come” (tathāgata), like the
Buddha himself.134

Now, when you have integritas, wholeness inside such a

frame, the only thing that counts is the harmonious
placement of everything, the consonantia , what Joyce calls
the “rhythm of beauty,”135 which includes the relationship of
colors to each other, of masses to each other, and of the
spaces in between. All elements are part of this harmonious
rhythm. When the rhythm is fortunately achieved, one
experiences the claritas, or radiance: one sees that the
aesthetic object is itself and no other thing, and one is held
in esthetic arrest.

”The mind,” [Joyce] writes, “is arrested and raised

above desire and loathing.”136 The original,
biological function of the eye, to seek out and
identify things to eat and to alert the mind to
danger, is for a moment, or (in the case of a true
artist) for a lifetime suspended, and the world
(beheld without judgment of its relevance to the
well-being of the observer) is recognized as a
revelation sufficient in itself.137
 In other words, the frame is a border hermetically
sealing-off the object, so that all you are experiencing, all
that matters, is within that border. It’s a sacred field, and
you become pure subject for a pure object. You no longer
have to know what these things are named or what can be
done with them. This is the a-b-c of esthetics. Next comes
the d-e-f.
The mystery of art is why one rhythm fixes you in esthetic
arrest and another doesn’t. Music is nothing if not rhythm.
Rhythm is the instrument of art. Music is the organization,
not only of rhythm, but of scale and of the notes played
against each other: quarter notes, half notes, and so forth. If
you are playing a C-Major chord and move to a dominant
Seventh, that’s an organization of the relationship of one
note to another. It is really space.
It’s wonderful to see a jazz group improvise: when five
or six musicians are really tuned in to each other, it’s all the
same rhythm, and they can’t go wrong, even though they
never did it that way before.
The Pygmy people have little pipes that each sound one
note, and a bunch of them sit around, each piping one note,
and when they get going, something darling comes out: like
birds, like forest noises.
Indian music never has a beginning and never has an
end. The music represents a plane of consciousness and is
going on all the time. When you go to a concert, it’s the
strangest event. They’re fooling around with the
instruments, tuning and zinging them, and this may go on
for a half hour. Then presently they’re playing. It is as
though the music were going on continuously, and the
musicians simply dip down, pick it up, play with it for a
while, and then leave it. It is altogether different from
western music: there is not only no tension or release, but
no beginning and no end. It’s always there.
There’s a relationship between musical organization and
architectural organization. All architecture is an organization
in space. It happens to have a function that is also related to
space. The Century Club in New York was built by Sanford
White, an important architect, around the end of the
nineteenth century. The building is an historical monument.
The lounge floor is very harmonizing: a room so
proportioned that it puts you at peace. But why this
happens is mysterious.
The only answer I can think of is Cezanne’s: “Art is a
harmony parallel to nature.” There are, of course, two
natures involved: Nature, the world out there, and the world
of nature within. That is to say, when it is the artist’s
intention is to arrange “a harmony parallel to nature”—and
any other intention probably involves didactics or
pornography—then that harmony resonates with something
inside you, fixes you in esthetic arrest, and you have that
big “a-ha!” experience. So it is the function of art to open
the consumable things of the tangible, visible world, so that
the radiance—the same radiance that’s within you—shines
through them.
I think one feels this harmony most powerfully in Japan,
where your own nature is constantly invoked, and you don’t
know where Nature ends and art begins. When a garden is
constructed, the man who composes it tells his son when to
bend each branch: “When it grows out to here, bend it”—so
that it looks like Nature. It is art: Nature that has been
harmonized with the nature within. That harmony is the first
stage of this rhythm. This is basic. Abstract art, any kind of
art, has to be thought of in terms of this rhythm. Choosing
what verse form you are going to use in poetry in relation to
what it is you are going to say, the echoing of one
consonant against another: it is all rhythm, to be conceived
of in terms of sensuous rhythmic effects that touch you.
Certain rhythms render certain responses.
And the two kinetic movements that block this
harmonious rhythm are exactly the two temptations of the
Buddha: desire, which draws you to possess the object, and
loathing or fear, which turns you away from it. When you
move to possess or to turn away from an object, you are
reacting to the world of delusory appeals and terrors that
māyā has projected. And esthetic arrest, the condition of the
heart or spirit or whatever not being moved by desire or
fear, is precisely the counter-part of the experience of the
Buddha under the tree of the immovable spot. It is the
immovable spot. It is a psychological stasis with respect to
your relationships to the forms of the world around you.

The biological urges to enjoy and to master (with

their opposites, to loathe and to fear), as well as the
social urge to evaluate (as good or evil, true or
false), simply drop away, and a rapture in sheer
experience supervenes, in which self-loss and
elevation are the same. Such an impact is “beyond
words;” for it is not such as can be explained by a
reference to anything else. The mind is released—
for a moment, for a day, or per-haps forever—from
those anxieties to enjoy, to win, or to be correct
which spring from the net of nerves in which men
are entangled. Ego dissolved, there is nothing in the
net but life—which is everywhere and forever. The
Zen masters of China and Japan have called this
state the state of “no-mind.” The classical Indian
terms are mokṣa, “release,” bodhi,
“enlightenment,” and nirvāṇa, “transcendence of
the winds of passion.” Joyce speaks of “the luminous
silent stasis of esthetic pleasure,”138 when the clear
radiance of the esthetic image is apprehended by
the mind, which has been arrested by its wholeness
and fascinated by its harmony. “The mind,” he says,
“in that mysterious instant Shelley likened
beautifully to a fading coal.”139

So the esthetic vehicle, the instrument of the rhythm of

beauty that induces esthetic arrest, is the revealing power
of māyā.
One application of the artist’s craft is in doing something
like making a turkey dinner, another is in creating art that is
of no use whatsoever except esthetically. When I use the
word “art,” it has to do with “divinely superfluous beauty”
and esthetic arrest. There’s no esthetic arrest in eating a
turkey. That’s life in action, doing what it has to do, namely
eating some-thing that’s been killed, putting it into your
system. It’s totally different from esthetic arrest and
recognizing the radiance. Are you going to look at the object
or eat it? Eating the object is related to desire and loathing.
The distinction between the two has to do with whether
it is the projecting power of māyā or the revealing power
that is present when you look at the object. It’s very
important to make a clear distinction between the two. If
you’re concerned with prospering or failing with the object,
eating or not eating it, your perspective involves desire and
loathing, the temptations of the Buddha, the projecting
power of māyā.
This bringing together of Joyce’s esthetic theory with the
māyā idea was a wonderful illumination for me. I just woke
up this morning and said, ”My god, I have finally got it after
eighty years.” I have known the implications of esthetic
arrest, but I’d never linked it up to the māyā idea. It is your
mental attitude that determines whether you experience the
projecting or the revealing power. The world is there in both
modes. It is not that the world changes, it’s your
consciousness.
Esthetic arrest is the result of this change of focus. “The
Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do
not see it.” You see it in esthetic arrest. But to develop the
inward depth experienced through this change of focus,
those who seek to achieve fully the goal of life should set
aside a sacred space. The sacred space, when you think of
where it appears in traditional cultures, is for initiations and
meditations. If you are so fulfilled already that no further
initiations are necessary, then you can do without such a
space. But, insofar as you’ve not struck the ultimate depth
and are interested in enriching and building the interior, in
addition to the external aspects of your life, then you have
to have some place, some way, to practice this.
All the world will open up when you’ve achieved this
inner depth, and your play in life will be informed by this
radiance. The Grail Castle is in the field that is adventured in
the way of experiencing esthetic arrest. The Grail is the
sense of total rapture and spiritual fulfillment that comes
from your experience of this hermetically sealed field. It is
like probing for oil: you put a pipe down, strike oil, and then
realize the oil is under everything. But you first have to go
down somewhere to find it, and this is the field of this
plunge.
I think if you imagine yourself taking the position of
esthetic stasis, you’ll understand about withdrawing fear
and desire for what happens, and about samsara being
nirvāṇa, the still point in the midst of the turning world.
That’s all there is to it. Then the world becomes a display of
things from which you are disengaged, and yet, voluntarily,
you can become engaged: “joyous participation in the
sorrows of the world.” It is very different from being
compulsively linked.
The change of consciousness from stasis to kinesis is
the Fall in the Garden. The bondages from which the Buddha
disengaged—desire, fear, and social duty—are temporal
matters. You can engage in them voluntarily, but
compulsive engagement is linked to māyā. If you have
gotten that, you have gotten all I can give you.
Now Ramakrishna, speaking of brahman and Sakti—or
Devi, the Goddess—says that brahman is the still point, the
milky ocean experienced as stillness; Sakti is the
movement, the joy and the pain; and the two together are
one. That’s the idea of the Yab-Yum. One thing after another
was coming together last night in terms of this simple
analysis that Joyce has given us.
Then, in Joyce’s analysis, we have the emotions of pity
and terror. Now, terror is not the same as fear and loathing.
It is the realization of both the transcendent operating
principle and the effect of the passage of time: the sorrows
of the world. It’s static, a still terror, not the terror of flight. It
is the realization of compassion: identification with the
human sufferer: not the poor sufferer, the black sufferer, the
Communist or Fascist sufferer, but the human sufferer—
which eliminates the sociological didactic. You identify with
”the suffering servant,” you might say, and the terror goes
past all movement to the still point of Goethe’s “schaudern”:
the shudder of realization of the mere phenomenality
of the world. That’s the whole story.
One might add that, in the way of either lust or love, the
female enables the male to make the transit: the seductress
lures him to the world, and the virgin—the Virgin Birth
mother, Mary—introduces him to the transcendent, the
Christ principle that transcends individualism. It seems to
me that everything falls right in-to place with this very
simple realization.
My life has been one job, one wife, one image: the Grail.
This is known as conservatism. There is a won-derful line in
the Portrait, where Stephen’s friend, who’s been hearing all
this heretical stuff, asks if he intends to become a
Protestant. “I said that I had lost the faith,” Stephen replies,
“but not that I had lost my self-respect. What kind of
liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is
logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical
and incoherent?”140

Buddhist art before the first century was mostly narrative:

the life of the Buddha and similar discursive art, although
the Buddha himself was never depicted. However, with the
Mahayana realization that samsara is nirvāṇa and all things
are Buddha things, the earliest Buddha images, and other
images, began to appear—all presented as revelatory of
that realization—and the art object itself became a
revelation of Buddha consciousness. It became transparent
to the radiance, claritas,. which is what we have been
talking about.
In Christian art, by contrast, I don’t think you have that
concept, because in the orthodoxy tangible things are not
regarded as being informed by the Christ. It is only in the
Thomas Gospel that we read, “Split the stick, there am I. Lift
the stone. I am there.” And so, in the Christian tradition, one
finds only anecdotal. art. The Crucifixion is an anecdote of
Jesus’s suffering on the cross. It’s not a revelation. It doesn’t
induce esthetic arrest. It’s didactic. Early Christian art was
meant to be didactic, because nobody could read. In the
Gothic period, the story of Christ and his apostles and
disciples was rendered as when you go to Chartres
Cathedral.
I’ve been there five times. Once I used a guidebook to
identify every figure in every window. They are all
references to anecdotes of the Christiian tradition, and I
could get the whole of the Christian doctrine there. The
Rose Window, however, does reveal the radiance. It is
magnificent art. Looking at it, one experiences esthetic
arest. And the cathedral itself is an art object.

…within the field of a mythology, the symbolic

details reflect, indeed, a local material history and
environment, yet they are of an order of the mind,
and to be interpreted by the faculty of reason as
expressions of a spiritual insight.…The idea of a
temple (or European cathedral) is what is here
announced, an enclosure wherein every feature is
 meta-phorical of a connoted metaphysical intuition,
set apart for ritual enactments.

The heart in such an environment is at home, as it

were, in its own place: removed from the chaotic
spectacle of the world of waking consciousness, at
rest and at peace in the recognition of a harmony
(which is of one’s own nature) informing the whole
terrible scene of lives forever consuming lives. And
the function, then, of the ritual is to bring one’s
manner of life into accord with this non-judgmental
perspective in the way, not of crude ego-
maintenance in a world one never made, but of
synergetic participation in a phantasmagoric
rapture.141

The town of Chartres lives around that cathedral, just as

ancient temple cities used to be centered around the
temple, which represented the spiritual information the
entire city lived by. We have nothing comparable.
I had the most marvelous experience at Chartres. I had
been there for several days going through all of this, and
the concierge came to me and asked if I’d like to help him
ring the noontime bell. Well, you bet. So we went up the
north fleche to where there is a great big bell. The bell is
down below you, and there is a seesaw-like thing above it
with a little railing across. He stood on one side, I stood on
the other, and we hung onto the bar between us. He gave a
push, this thing started to move, and our hair was blowing,
and then, underneath us: “Bong! Bong!” We were on that
damned thing four or five minutes. It was tremendous. Then
he brought me down and showed me where he lived.
Now, in a cathedral of that kind there is a nave and a
crossing. Then there is an apse and a choir screen that runs
around it. That choir screen was wide enough for a little
room to be in there. He had his bed in that little room in the
choir screen and lived there. You could see out between the
figures, and right there was the Black Virgin. Oh, I tell you,
he had a privileged life in that place. Everything went
together: the imagery, the architecture, the rhythm of the
day, going up to ring the bells. It was a beautifully
coordinated existence.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there was a body
of stories known as the Miracles of the Virgin that included
some wonderful little Romances. One of the cutest—years
ago it was turned into a miraculous play in New York—was of
a nun who was assigned to scrub the chapel floor just when
she had a date with her lover. The imaged Virgin comes
down, takes the scrub-brush and pail, and says, “Go on out
and have your day.” She did not play by the rules of the
Cardinals.
Art, then, is the Virgin’s medium. Art is the vehicle of
the revealing power of māyā, the vehicle by which we go
from the earth to the transcendent. One can always see the
Goddess in the world of art.
In the Protestant community, where Mariolatry is
abominated, there is no art. Go into any New England
chapel and you’ll see that it is very pretty, but hymns are
the closest things to art that you’ll find. I was raised a
Catholic and married Jean, daughter of a Protestant
minister, so the first Protestant service I went to was with
her. We were standing there singing hymns, and I said to
her, “You Protestants do not have images, but just look at
the images in this hymn: God coming to my little room and
all that kind of thing.”
One of the most interesting and amusing services I have
experienced was in a beautiful church with marvelous
stained-glass windows in Grand Rapids, where I gave a
sermon entitled “Trick or Treat,” for Halloween, the Celtic
festival of All Souls. In the middle of the service, the doors
opened, and in came all the children of the congregation
wearing masks. The big ones led the way, followed by
smaller and smaller kids, until, finally, in came these tiny
little tots with these absurd masks. The masked children
represented the spirits about to be born. Then they all lined
up near one of the upright pianos and sang, “I’ve been
working on my costume, all the live long day.” It was really a
spiritual experience: the children, the choir—just members
of the congregation—it was simply sublime.
Then I got up in this pulpit and, my god, I tell you, the
pulpit is a weapon. Now there’s art for power: just the
placement of that thing—where it is in relation to everybody
else. Unless you’ve stood in a pulpit, you don’t realize what
you have on your side. When you stand there, nobody can
hurt you. You are at the prow of a ship, poised to plow right
through that sea of faces down below. I did it twice in two
years. The first time, I was a little in awe of the pulpit, but
the second time, I really knew how to use it.

An artist, to me, is a person who is a competent

practitioner of an art. Somebody who just gets up to splash
around is not necessarily an artist. One definition of an artist
that I heard someone seriously give is: “anybody who, in the
telephone book, calls him or herself an artist.” I do not go
along with that. Even in the practical arts, the principle of
perfection in work is a basic expectation.
An artist is someone who is completed an art work, not
a person who merely intended to. Whether or not it is
saleable either this year or next affects neither its intrinsic
value nor its intrinsic definition as an art work. Van Gogh
never sold a thing, but a couple of his works can make a
museum. He was in great psychological trouble, but that
man was an artist.
The word artist is used in a number of ways, the two
principle ones, the two extremes, being: (a) one competent
in performance and (b) an artist in the fine arts. You cannot
be an artist in the fine arts unless you are competent in
performance, but you can be competent in cooking or
acrobatics or whatnot. But the experience of esthetic arrest
has to do with the fine arts. One doesn’t seek esthetic arrest
in looking at a good plumbing job. Its real function would be
missed.
I heard of an amusing experiment when LSD was first
around. Four bridge players were given light doses of LSD,
with the understanding that they would then play bridge.
When the cards had been dealt and picked up, all they did
was look at them. There was no playing of the game. It was
esthetic arrest, an example of sacred space. The cards were
of no use except for esthetic rapture. The object, formerly in
certain relevant situations in the life of secular enjoyment,
suddenly becomes a thing-in-itself, a final thing.
In action, it makes a difference whether all you are
trying to do is to act or whether you are trying to act
competently. It helps a great deal to know what the hell
you’re doing. What are you going to do well? Are you going
to be a painter, a Picasso? Is this where your life
achievement is? That is a real sacrifice of life.
Whatever choice you make, there is a period of learning
and analyzing, when you are not in action, the body is not in
performance. Anyone who has taught somebody a skill has
seen this stage, where the student is analyzing and trying to
do it, but really not in it. Then, finally, the person is able to
give expression to what he or she is intending to express.
My first and strongest experience of this was once when
Jean came to Esalen with me and was going to give classes
in dance. She got this bunch of people who were not
interested in technique, but wanted to dance. What they
called creative work was going out, opening their arms, and
breathing at the ocean. It was not worth being with them
even to see what was going on.
There is nothing esthetic about a bunch of ballet people
doing their bar exercises. Then they move into dance and
are still thinking about the rules, and their work is contrived.
But then, finally, the rules melt and natural spontaneity
takes over again. There is an old standard saying about the
arts: “You need to learn all the rules, and then forget them.”
That is to say, let them melt back into pure action.
When young people who’ve not had the schooling I’ve
had decide they’re going in for writing, editing, or
something like that, I’ve noticed they don’t really have the
full equipment. Working on my books, I’ve hired intelligent
young people to help me with the editorial aspects, only to
discover they can’t read German, they can’t read French.,
they don’t know this, they don’t know that. It makes me
realize what all those years of schooling gave me. The
fantastic amount of work that’s all under the water. One
sees only the tip of the iceberg.
In writing a book, you are moving along on the wave of
your inspiration and intuition, and then you come to a
difficult passage, an area you have to cover in order to get
from here to there, and your momentum stops. That’s when
you have to bring in the rules.
Also, in athletics, after you practice and practice, there
is a lot you can then do spontaneously. But at certain points,
you have to act according to rules for moving the body that
are not yet spontaneous to you. I think of pole vaulting or
the high hurdles: the time that has to be spent just on the
technical posture. Or playing golf: how are you going to hold
that club? There is no spontaneity when you are thinking all
these things. When that is all absorbed, then you have a
stronger propulsion than you had before you were forced to
break it all up.
I don’t think it is proper at all to take the position that C.
P. Snow has: namely, that the science—the knowledge, the
mathematical side of life—runs in an opposite direction to
the life of spontaneous humanistic action. They supplement
each other. In literature, for instance, writing sonnets: it
takes a lot of practice to make that kind of structure become
something that just pours out, but when it does pour out, it
is possible to say things that cannot be said without the
sonnet form. Form and expression are very close together.
If you are going to act on the basis of what you know,
you cannot just hold onto your knowledge. You have to
translate it into a movement. This is the whole thing in the
arts. The student studies, studies, studies—learning the
techniques, the rules, what it is he must strive for—and
when he gets used to doing all of that, then he can move.

The creative act is

not hanging on, but yielding
to new creative movement.

Think, for instance, of someone studying the piano.

There is nothing worse than having somebody in the
neighborhood studying the piano, practicing their exercises.
There’s nothing at all beautiful about them. Their function is
to give you facility. Then presently there comes a point
when you have the facility, it happens automatically, and
you do not have to think, “do… re…me…fa….” Although
analysis facilitates competent action, your spontaneity of
action is inhibited when you are constantly thinking of the
rules. This is true for everything. The one who attempts to
be an artist and has not learned the craft is never going to
be an artist.

If you find you are trying,

go back to school.
You’re not ready yet.

There is a big difference between art as therapy, where

the person is trying to become human, and art as art, where
the art carries the person past humanity into new spheres.
The difference is that, in therapy, the technique and the art
object are of no importance, since all you are trying to do is
turn a person who’s off the track into someone who is on
the track. The therapeutic operation in the art is to bring the
person back to his own self, to turn him into a harmonized
human being again. But art comes from harmonized human
beings—“Art is a harmony parallel to nature.” And if the
person is not parallel to nature yet, then art is just a therapy
to bring him or her to that point. Therapeutic art is trying to
“catch up,” you might say. It is no art for anybody but the
person who’s doing it.

Highly stylized dance, like ballet and Indian dance, is a

wonderful example of this thing we are talking about: what
has to be learned to manipulate the body, all those
exercises, eliminates dance fora while. In Hindu dance, the
whole body is taken apart: there are certain things the eyes
do, certain things the hands do, and so on. Then it is put
back together again, and what you get is a transformation
of nature in art. It is nothing to look at until you see a
dancer who really can do it, and then, my god, another
nature comes in on another plane.

The dance
is the highest symbol
of life itself.

In song and dance man expresses himself as a

member of a higher community; he has forgotten
how to walk and speak and is on the way toward
flying, dancing into the air. His very gestures are of
enchantment.… He feels himself to be a god, going
about in ecstasy, exalted, like the gods beheld in his
dreams.…He is no longer an artist, he has become a
work of art. In a paroxysm of intoxication the
creative power of all nature has come to light in him
 as the highest rapture of the one that is All. Nature,
with its true voice undissembled cries out to us: “Be
as I am! I, the primordial ever-creating mother
amidst the ceaseless flux of appearances, ever
impelling into existence, eternally finding in these
transformations satisfaction.”—Nietzsche142

Art is the set of wings

to carry you out of
your own entanglement.

Spengler makes an interesting distinction between what

he calls “art as ornament” and “art as imitation.” The prime
example of art as ornament is architecture, where a
structure is timeless once it is achieved: there it sits. The
opposite, art as imitation, would be the dance: if you do not
see a particular performance, you’ll never see that dance
again. It is something of a life moment. It’s an idea that has
meant a lot to me in realizing the different problems of
various artists. One of the sad things about a dancer’s
career is that such great moments are of an essence, and
anybody who was not there missed it. For instance, what
about Pavlova? If you didn’t see that particular performance,
it’s gone.
I have lived close to the dance world ever since my
marriage to Jean. She had the idea of dance being a part of
her life, so that when dance in the high style was no longer
possible, she was able to handle it: always her life, not her
art, was the number one thing. Jean has had an elegant
career, and she has had a husband who was willing to see it
happen. She was taken into Martha Graham’s group just
when we were married, and that was a marvelous group of
wonderful dancers: Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, Jane
Dudley, Jean. Believe me, they were all first-rate dancers.
 The big shift that the dancer has to make in later years
is that the dance is no longer to be thought of as something
in the way of a performance or an exhibition, but rather, like
a bird singing, just for itself, and only to the distance the
body feels it would be lovely to go. Out of that will come a
life, because you are in the center of action of your psyche’s
need and joy, and that will radiate into the rest of what you
are doing. The whole world will join the dance.

All we really want to do is dance.

Sacred Dance is for the gods, not for an audience. This

is one of the things that comes up when you try to put folk
dance on the stage. It’s for the joy of the people doing the
dance, and it just does not work any other way. The fact that
dance was cut out of our religions way back in the late
Middle Ages has turned dance into a purely secular thing.
I’m working on the posthumous papers of a young man
who went to India to study dance. He was one of Jean’s
students at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts,
and he became so fascinated with Indian dance that he
went to India. He was a young Jew, who had been studying
to be a rabbi, and his family was in great distress when he
went over there, not only to dance, but to study the dance
of Śiva, an alien god. Being a religiously oriented person, he
was fascinated by the religious implications of the dance:
the god is the dancer, and you have to become the god to
worship the god, to find that god in yourself. What he
recognized was the total difference in implication between
dancing for an audience and dancing for the god. When you
are alone and in your own place, you are dancing for the
god and identifying with it. This whole idea is basic to
Tantra: to worship a god, you must become that god. No
matter what you call the god or think it is, the god you
worship is the one you are capable of becoming.
 The power of a deity is that it personifies a power that is
in Nature and in your nature. When you find that level, then
you are in play. That is the work of art in general, because
art really is a worship.

There are two approaches to choosing a profession. One is

to study the statistics on the number of jobs that are going
to be available in this or that cate-gory in the next ten years
and base your life on that. That’s following the rim of the
wheel. The other, is to ask yourself, “What do I want to do?”
If you do that, then you are up against your decision. But if
you say, “I am going to do what I want to do,” and if you
stay with it, then something will happen. You may not have
a job, but you will have a life, and it will be interesting.

In the wheel of fortune,

wisdom points to the center.
Youth points to the rim.

I have known dozens of artists, and most of them,

unless they become commercial artists, live without
knowing where their life is going or how it is going to be. You
should see what kids in dance go through, and there are no
jobs. If you really want to know what it is like in a profession
where there are no jobs, go to an actors’ school. It is
disheartening to see those young people come in full-of-
beans and, boy, do they get it.
The normal situation is that, perhaps for years, you work
away at your art, your life vocation, your life-fulfilling field of
action, and there’s no money in it. You have to live though,
so you get a job, which may be a low-degree activity
relative to what you are interested in. You could, for
instance, teach people the art you are operating in yourself.
So, let’s say you have a teaching job, and you also have
sacred space and time to perform your own work. Your art is
what I would call your work. Your employment is your job.
Then, you are doing so well in your job that your
employer wants to move you into a higher position. You’ll
have to give more to the job than before, and you will
receive a higher salary, but your new commit-ments will cut
down on your free time. My advice is: don’t accept the
promotion. Don’t accept anything that piles more on you
than what you must do to earn your base income, because
you are developing, not in your job, but in your artistic work.
You can see on campuses all the time what happens with
promotions: you move up, up, up, until you are in
administration, and it uses up everything you’ve got. The
artist must build a structure, not in the way of being of
service to society, but in the way of discovering the
dynamism of the interior.
To do that, to keep up with your responsibilities and your
fitness and still nurture your creative aspect, you must put a
hermetically sealed retort, so that there is no intrusion,
around a certain number of hours each day—however many
you can honestly afford—and that time must be inviolate.
You can allow yourself a few more hours than you think you
deserve, but you must make certain you have enough
energy and time left over to attend to whatever you have to
take care of.
It’s like doing your exercises: you set aside a time when
you’re going to exercise, and that is a holy time. With your
art, you should do the same: give a certain number of hours
a day to your art, and make it consis-tent. Then, whether
you’re writing or not, sit there for those hours: it’s a
meditation on communication and expression, the two
factors in the art work. What will happen, ideally, is that
gradually—and it might not be this week or next or even this
year—as your given responsibilities drop off, there will be an
expansion of the time available to you for the practice of
your art. The point I’m making is that your work—that is,
your art—and your job must not contaminate each other.

The creative adventure is always reckless. That goes even

for the simple thing I do in writing a book. Friedrich Schiller,
a German poet in Goethe’s time, wrote an interesting letter
to a young writer who had writer’s block—that’s refusal of
the call in a writer. Schiller said in the letter, “Your problem
is that you bring in the critical factor before the lyric factor
has had a chance to express itself.” In poetry, for example,
we spend our youth studying Shakespeare and Milton, and
then, when we start to write our own pitiful little poem, we
think, “Oh, my god.”

When writing,
don’t criticize the words coming out.
Just let them come.
Let go of the critical factor:
Will I make money? Am I wasting time?

My writing is of a very different kind from anything I

have heard about. All this mythological material is out there,
a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some
forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling
that. The most common is to put the material together and
publish a scholarly book about it. But when I’m writing, I try
to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material.
In fact, I can’t write unless that happens. It is like putting it
into some kind of meat grinder that grinds it into a new
thing and yet does not do violence to the material. It’s very
exciting when it comes together that way.
I don’t write unless the stuff is really working on me,
and my selection of material depends on what works.
Usually, with mythology, you are almost cheating, because
it is all in shape anyhow. All the elementary ideas are there.
You only have to recognize them, and the work cooks. It’s
the damnedest thing: you are going along, and suddenly
you find you have said things you did not know you were
saying, because it is all right there.
When I’m writing, I think of the whole academic world: I
know how they think about this material, and it is not the
same way that I think about it. I just have to say, “Let the
guillotine come down. You are still going to have this
message.” I always feel as if I am going through the
Clashing Rocks, and they are just about to close, but I
manage to get through before I let that thought overcome
me. It’s a very strange process: actually holding that door
open and getting the sentences out. Do not think about the
negative side. There will be negatives that are going to
come down, but you have to hold the door open if you are
going to do any-thing that has not been done before. You
have to suspend all criticism to do your work. In writing, you
have to do this all the time in order to get the sentence out.
Suspending criticism is killing the dragon Thou Shalt. Kill
him.

Get the writing out first.

Forget the critic and just write.
Afterward, you can bring in
the critical factor and prune.

If you have trouble because you are thinking, “Who is

ever going to see this?”—then think of someone you know
who would resonate to your statement and write for that
person. It is a great facilitator to have a specific person in
mind, until you no longer need an audience. Think of little
children, for example, with their tiny eyes looking up at you.
Talk to them. Write to them. In a book, you will often see a
sincere dedication to the person for whom the book was
written. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for instance, was
written for one specific little girl. When I started writing, I
thought of my students at Sarah Lawrence, the actual
people with whom I was dealing. I knew their thinking and
the kinds of words that spoke to them.
The two things, then, that I’d say are necessary for
breaking through what’s called writer’s block are, first, to
have a person to whom you are addressing yourself and,
second, to set aside a couple of hours a day when, as it
were, you’re writing letters of love to that person.

Writer’s block results from

too much head. Cut off your head.
Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa
when her head was cut off.
You have to be reckless when writing.
Be as crazy as your conscience allows.

When you begin to get a sense of the material dictating

the form, you will be writing. It may happen fast, or it may
take you a little while to find the flow. When I started The
Masks of God, I dashed off the first book, Primitive
Mythology I was in a great hurry to get finished, because I
had been given some money to go to Japan for a big session
of the International Congress for the History of Religions, so
I just churned it out. And then, the reaction to it was so
impressive to me—it was a much better book than I thought
I had written—that when I started to write Volume II, I was
blocked for awhile, until I said, “Hey, listen, come off it. Stick
your neck out and just write the book.” I thank God that I
had read that letter of Schiller’s to the young poet.
In religion, one speaks of the fear of God and the love of
God. Fear of God will block you. Love of God will carry you
on. If you can do something that you love to do without fear
of criticism, you will move. You will find joy in it. You do not
have to move more than an inch to feel the joy. Remember,
the Buddha’s third temptation was dharma, duty, doing
what people expect you to do. That’s the censorship fear.
 After you have written something, when you see it in
typescript, you will want to fool around with it, because it
will be different from the way it was in script. Then, when
you are satisfied with the typescript, you send it to the
publisher. He accepts it, and when he sends you the galleys,
you will want to fool with it again. Every time it appears in a
form that is not the one directly out of your hand, you get
an objective attitude toward it. In a way, you become the
reader instead of the writer, and you see it in a new light.
This crafting is part of the process of turning something into
a work of art. I think that many people today do not realize
what it means to be an artist, instead of simply a person
who is writing. I mean, there is a craft and an attitude and a
willingness to recognize that, unless it is in form, it is not
art.

Let your darlings out,

but murder them,
or two years later,
you’ll wish you had.

If you are going to stay in the village compound, the town

will take care of you. But if you go on the adventure, it is
prudent to go at the right time. This is a real problem if you
are overcome late in life, if you have already taken on
responsibilities when the light goes on: like Gauguin ,who
made a total mess, not only of his life, but of his family’s
life. But as he went to pieces, his art became greater and
greater. He did not go into painting seriously until he was
around forty-five-years–old, and then his life was in his
paintings. His was a hero’s journey, but at a very high price.
It is an ironic situation: you’d say he made a mess of it as a
man, but as an artist, he was a triumph.
Then there is the experience of coming back with your
jewel and nobody wants it: the “don’t-throw-your-pearls-
before-swine” sort of thing, lest people turn against you.
Often there is not a waiting public. You know the story of the
artist who is “ahead of his time,” the one who is only
appreciated a generation-and-a-half later.
During the 40s and 50s, Jean was working with some
artists who were way out, and twenty years later they are
top people. John Cage, for example, did music for four of her
dances and nobody knew Cage. He was doing the most
bizarre things, but he just hung on and knew and knew.
Now, he is a major figure in the field.
He also said, “Fame is of no importance.” The light of
fame comes past, and one may be in it for three minutes,
for thirty minutes, or never at all. But fame is not what the
artist is working for. It’s the commercial artist who says,
“Whatever they want, I am going to give it to them.” The
real artist gives expression to a gift that has come to him,
and the susception of the gift implies, “I have to put it out.”
Sometimes, however, an artist becomes so enraptured
by the creative plunge, that you might say “life drops off.”
This is one of the problems in yoga also. When illumination
hits, life drops off, and you can’t get back. That’s the effect
that follows one who is an artist but has not gotten the
realization into his or her life.

In loving the spiritual,

you cannot despise the earthly.

Joyce was such a person: my god, what a life! When you

read Richard Ellman’s James Joyce, his biography, you
wonder how anyone could have lived such a life. You don’t
know how that man stood it, how his family stood it, how
any of his friends stood it. But look what he accomplished. I
mean, if you have the eyes to see it.
It took him twelve years to finish A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man. He began the project as an essay in 1904,
but the novel wasn’t published until 1916. And if Yeats had
not recommended him to Ezra Pound, who got him
published, we would never have heard of Joyce. Meanwhile,
he had written Dubliners and was at work on Ulysses, which
he spent seven years writing. It’s as though he said, “There
it is. I have to formulate this thing for my own realization of
what it is.”
The first editions of Ulysses were burned by New York
and English customs authorities I think only one or two
copies remain. Finally, he had to have it printed in France,
and when I was a student, that was the only place you could
buy Ulysses. People here in the United States did not even
know it existed.
He spent sixteen years writing Finnegans Wake, and you
should have read the reviews when that came out: “What is
this guy doing? Has he gone nuts? Is he just pulling a crazy
job on us?” The first edition of Finnegans Wake was
remaindered within two months. I bought four hardcover
copies for fifty-six cents each. When a book is remaindered,
the publisher is trying to get back the money for printing it.
The author gets nothing.
Joyce died three weeks short of his fifty-ninth birthday,
with the final book he was planning left undone. He would
not be my model for a life, but he is a model for my
relationship to art. Thomas Mann said Joyce was probably
the greatest novelist of the twentieth century. But, look
what it cost him to do that.
Joyce endured all these travails because his intention
was perfection. Perfection is the fulfillment implicit in art,
and he achieved it. Imperfection is life. All forms in life are
imperfect, but the function of art is to see the radiance
through the imperfection.

The artist opens

the forms of the work
to transcendence.
 What I understand art to be, then, is the revealing
power of māyā: the production in music, in dance, in the
visual arts, and in literature of such “divinely superfluous
beauty,” of objects for esthetic arrest which are of no
practical use, but which open up dimensions within. And the
projecting power of māyā, on the other hand, I take to be
desire and loathing, which link you in phenomenal discourse
to the object as object. It is as clear and clean as that.

In India, there are two orders of art: one is esthetic art; the
other, temple art, is not esthetic in its aim. Temple art is
concerned not with arresting the eye but with affecting a
psychic transformation in the artist and the beholder. We’re
into another kind of art here. The source of the image is a
vision. Europeans for quite a while had a hard time
appreciating Indian art. Indian poetry and philosophy were
appreciated, but not the art, until they realized the images
weren’t representations of things, but tools for psychic
transformation.
Now, with Joyce, I would say Finnegans Wake is a book
that affects a psychic transformation in the reader. If the
reader really works on it and finds out what Joyce is saying,
there is a vision there that can transform one’s relationship
to the world.
Coomaraswamy has given considerable attention to the
conception of an Indian religious work of art. Let us say an
artist is going to do something on Śiva in the dance. First he
studies the textbooks on Śiva: what the organization of the
image should be, what should be in the god’s hands, and all
that. Then he pronounces the god’s name, meditates, and
brings forth in his own consciousness an image of the god
dancing, so that what is presented has been derived from
inner, rather than from outer, vision.
Normally we look at the Nataraja Śiva with an esthetic
intent: we see it simply as an art object. But the one who is
devoted to Śiva lets that object become an opening of those
centers in his own consciousness that correspond to the
Śiva in himself: “I am Śiva.” That is very different from just
looking at a Śiva image.
One is often unable to experience Indian temple art in
an esthetic way at all, because it has intended another kind
of effect. You have to move into the god position to grasp
what the image has given you. Indian temple art is not
pornographic, because you are not excited to desire the
object depicted. Say you go to an art gallery desiring to
have an esthetic experience. It is static, and insofar as it
affects a transformation of consciousness, it brings about a
new stasis within you. There is a trans-formation just as
there is a transformation with esthetic arrest. You are no
longer the lecherous human being. You are stabilized in
esthetic arrest. Temple art pushes that one dimension
further, so that your consciousness with respect to all things
in the world is changed. It’s a permanent change that takes
place in you. Perhaps one could say that all true art is
temple art, but there is a difference between art that
intends esthetic arrest and art that intends psychic
transformation. You could say the latter is not properly art. It
is a religious device.

Some artists are in pain, others are not. Picasso had a run
of wives and women that was just fantastic. What one wife
did would not have mattered a bit. I do not think it possible
to interpret Picasso’s life as one of pain. In the Picasso
Retrospective, which I saw twice at the Museum of Modern
Art, there was one room filled with about twenty-five
paintings that he had done in one day. What was it that
impelled him to this fury of action? He was certainly the
type of artist in whom life is so abundant that the art is
easily handled, which shows the great skill of his nature.
 I read Wagner’s autobiography—fantastic! That guy was
writing three operas, carrying on three love affairs, and
actually being resentful that the women’s husbands would
not give money to help produce his operas! He was outta
sight! His knowledge of mythology was way ahead of what
any of the scholars in his time knew. In the Ring Cycle, he
combined into one unit two aspects of Germanic mythology:
the hero journey and the cosmic order—coming into the
world and going out of the world. On top of that, at the
same time he was writing the librettos, he amplified the
orchestra to such an extent—using reeds and French horns
and so on—that he effectively invented a whole new
orchestra! And he designed what is probably the best
theatre that Europe has had. I can’t understand how he did
it all. I think some people justhave so much spunk that they
cannot be judged in ordinary terms.
I never knew an artist who didn’t want money, but they
don’t pursue it. Their minds are elsewhere. Joyce begged
everyone he knew for money. But he couldn’t make money
and do what he did: sixteen years writing Finnegans Wake.
Bringing that prodigious load into the “room of his life” was
all that Joyce could manage.
Schiller, a sensitive and intelligent student of psy-
chology in relation to art, distinguished two types of artists:
one, he called the “sentimental” artist; the other, the
“naive” artist. He used as his models Goethe and himself.
He was the sentimental artist: the one without great means,
who did not pay proper attention to his health, for whom art
was his life, not the other way around. Everything went into
his art. Goethe, on the other hand, was the naive artist: a
man of ample life, an important person in local politics, a
person for whom art was but one aspect of his life. Some
such people require a bit more instruction than others, but
Goethe had fantastic intuition, great energy, and vitality. He
was a masterly artist.
 Thomas Mann wrote an interesting paper called “Goethe
and Tolstoy,” based on this idea of Schiller’s. He compared
Dostoevsky to the sentimental artist, as Schiller had
described himself, and Tolstoy to the naive artist. Tolstoy
was a property owner, who used to put on a nice silk shirt,
go out, and harvest the grain with his peasants. He would
make believe he was a peasant, but that was all part of the
game too.
It’s interesting to compare the works of these two types
of writers. The Schiller-Dostoevsky types tend to be highly
hopped up. There’s a strong, dramatic conflict in their
writing. Both Tolstoy and Goethe, on the other hand, are
genial authors, and their works have powerful passages of
epic proportions and a wonderful majesty. Conversely, in
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment it is pain, pain—a life of
inward, spiritual agony. These are two different ways, two
different temperaments. The pain is not something
sentimental artists strive for, it results from their giving all
of their energy to divinely superfluous activity and not
paying attention to the living of life.

We are to fill the sacred space, then, with art. And when I
say “art,” I mean “divinely superfluous beauty,” not
doodling and having pretty decorations in your house. The
sacred space is where things are experienced as not being
of any practical use. It is through the contemplation of
something “thus come”—“divinely superfluous”—that the
aspects of oneself that are not of immediate practical use
can come forth. I think organic growth comes in that way,
not in the way of going into a practical activity.
The practical activity comes after the organism has
stated itself in its maturity, or else it comes forth in a
distorted way: the person thinks of himself as nothing but a
plumber or something like that. That’s the problem in a
traditional culture like India, where people from birth are
cookie-molded into the dharma of their caste. And they are
nothing but that. They never become human beings,
individuals, but remain individuals: people that are elements
in a larger structure.
I think that is the big difference between the Oriental
and the Occidental ideal for a human being. The person in
the Orient is either a warrior, or a merchant, or whatever,
and nothing else. In the West, however, the person is an
individual. The Greeks had the idea of the total individual
and held it up as being completely different from the
Oriental idea of people being trained into a pattern of life in
accordance with the necessities of society. I experienced
this idea of the total individual at Delphi, where you see
everything related: the oracle, the art, the theatre, and the
stadium up on top.
For most people, the life of art is an all-absorbing
matter, and it requires a hell of a lot of work. What
Ramakrishna said about illumination is also true about art:
“Unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a
pond, don’t pursue it.” It is too difficult.
For women who marry, it requires a hell of an ac-
quiescence on the part of the husband, too—I can tell you
about that. I know so many young women who were in
dance, then married, and the husband could not stand it.
And, of course, it is difficult to have a family with an art that
requires the kind of discipline dance demands. The thing
about dance is that if you are not disciplined, it is damned
evident the next time you get on stage.
Jean once said, “The way of the artist and the way of the
mystic are similar, but the mystic lacks a craft.” The craft
keeps the artist in touch with the phenomenality of the
world and in a relationship to it: a constant evaluation of the
uniqueness of each event in the world. The mystic, by
contrast, can be so darned abstract that there is no link to
life except the begging bowl. Yet, sometimes those begging
bowls can be very productive. Some of our gurus are pulling
in millions of dollars. But that does not mean they are
related to life.
I have seen the training of artists in this country and in
Europe. They are trained only in the craft. They are given
techniques for rendering something, but they do not know
what to do with the techniques. I’ve know many of them
who just cracked up. Their art technique becomes a wall
they cannot penetrate, so they try to think of anecdotes and
narratives to render that show off their technique. They are
so loaded with sociology, that they think they do not have
an art object if there is not some kind of lesson in there for
fixing the world or themselves. But, in fact, an art object by
definition is “divinely superfluous beauty.”
Do you see in this the projecting power of māyā and the
revealing power? As long as the motifs of desire and
loathing are moving you, it is the projecting aspect. You are
yourself the māyā-maker, and you are the one who opens
the revealing power when your attitude is that of the
Buddha. When I realized this, it was thrilling to me. I think
that art and this knowledge of what art is can be the
modern Western way to illumination. It will release you from
all kinds of linkages. It will not keep you from practicing all
those things you hardly believe in, but it will help you in
achieving the esthetic before you become linked to the
objects of your life.

When you distinguish

between good and evil,
you’ve lost the art.

Art goes beyond morality.

The reach of your compassion

is the reach of your art.
 J OYCE’S trick was
seeing symbols everywhere.

…Dr. John W. Perry has characterized the living

mythological symbol as an “affect image.” It is an
image that hits one where it counts. It is not
addressed first to the brain, to be there interpreted
and appreciated. On the contrary, if that is where it
has to be read, the symbol is already dead. An
“affect image” talks directly to the feeling system
and immediately elicits a response, after which the
brain may come along with its interesting
comments. There is some kind of throb of resonance
within, responding to the image shown without, like
the answer of a musical string to another equally
tuned. And so it is that when the vital symbols of
any given social group evoke in all its members
responses of this kind, a sort of magical accord
unites them as one spiritual organism, functioning
through members who, though separate in space,
are yet one in being and belief.143

Once you understand symbolic things,

you, too, will see symbols everywhere.

The wonder is that the characteristic efficacy to touch

and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest
nursery fairy tale—as the flavor of the ocean is contained in
a droplet or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a
flea. For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured;
they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently
suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the
psyche, and each bears within it, undam-aged, the germ
power of its source.144
 The divine manifestation is ubiquitous,
only our eyes are not open to it.

The symbol opens our eyes.

“A true symbol takes us to the center of the circle,

not to another point on the circumference. It is by
symbolism that man enters effectively and
consciously into contact with his own deepest self,
with other men, and with God.…”—Thomas
Merton145

Frequently a symbol doesn’t open

our eyes, but closes them instead.

If we concretize the symbol,

we get stuck with it.

In short, then: just as the buffalo suddenly

disappeared from the North American plains, leaving
the Indians deprived not only of a central mythic
symbol but also of the very manner of life that the
symbol once had served, so likewise in our own
beautiful world, not only have our public religious
symbols lost their claim to authority and passed
away, but the ways of life they once supported have
also disappeared; and as the Indians then turned
inward, so do many in our own baffled world—and
frequently with Oriental, not Occidental, guidance in
this potentially very dangerous, often ill-advised
interior adventure, questing within for the affect
images that our secularized social order with its
incongruously archaic religious institutions can no
longer render.146

The world has been desanctified.

 The chick from the egg
is a symbol of the spirit of Easter.

The image of the cosmic egg is known to many

mythologies; it appears in the Greek Orphic,
Egyptian, Finnish, Buddhistic, and Japanese. “In the
beginning this world was merely nonbeing,” we read
in a sacred work of the Hindus; “It was existent. It
developed. It turned into an egg. It lay for the period
of a year. It was split asunder. One of the two parts
became silver, one gold. That which was of silver is
the earth. That which is of gold is the sky. What was
the outer membrane is the mountains. What was
the inner me-brane is cloud and mist. What were the
veins are the rivers. What was the fluid within is the
ocean. Now, what was born there from is yonder
sun.”147 The shell of the cosmic egg is the world
frame of space, while the fertile seed-power within
typifies the inexhaustible life dynamism of nature.148

The eggshell is cast off by the chick as the skin is

sloughed off by the serpent, or the shadow of the moon is
shed by the moon reborn.

Snake and moon both die to the old,

shedding their shadows to be reborn.

Birds in flight and Christ on the cross: both symbolize

the spirit released from the bondage of earth. The moon,
like Christ, dies and is resurrected. The moon is three nights
darkk: Jesus was three nights in the grave with a stone
covering the cave entrance—the dark disk over the moon.
The dating of Easter according to both lunar and solar
calendars suggests that life, like the light reborn in the
moon and eternal in the sun, finally is one. The whole
mystery is right there in Christian symbology.

The moon, furthermore, and the spectacle of the

night sky, the stars and the Milky Way, have
constituted, certainly from the beginning, a source
of wonder and profound impression. But there is
actually a physical influence of the moon upon the
earth and its creatures, its tides and our own interior
tides, which has long been consciously recognized
as well as subliminally experienced. The coincidence
of the menstrual cycle with that of the moon is a
physical actuality structuring human life and a
curiosity that has been observed with wonder. It is in
fact likely that the fundamental notion of a life-
structuring relationship between the heavenly world
and that of man was derived from the realization,
both in experience and in thought, of the force of
the lunar cycle. The mystery, also, of the death and
resurrection of the moon, as well as of its influence
on dogs, wolves and foxes, jackals and coyotes,
which try to sing to it: this immortal silver dish of
wonder, cruising among the beautiful stars and
racing through the clouds, turning waking life itself
into a sort of dream, has been a force and presence
even more powerful in the shaping of mythology
than the sun, by which its light and its world of
stars, night sounds, erotic modes, and the magic of
dream, are daily quenched.149

Dew is an ambrosia
fallen from the moon.

This lunar symbology is ancient: the moon god in

Mesopotamia was named Sin; the mountain that Moses
ascended was Mount Sinai. It may have been the moon
goddess mountain. When Moses came down from that
mountain, he was so luminous from his reception of God’s
energy that he wore a veil in front of his face, and
emanating from his forehead were horns of light: the horns
of the lunar mystery.

”The moon lives twenty-eight days and this is our

month. Each of these days represents something
sacred to us: two of the days represent the Great
Spirit; two are for Mother Earth; four are for the four
winds; one is for the Spotted Eagle; one for the sun;
and one for the moon; one is for the Morning Star;
and four are for the four ages; seven for our seven
great rites; one is for the buffalo; one for the fire;
one for the water; one for the rock; and finally, one
is for the two-legged people. If you add all these
days up you will see that they come to twenty-eight.
You should know also that the buffalo has twenty-
eight ribs, and that in our war bonnets we usually
wear twenty-eight feathers. You see, there is a
significance for everything, and these are things
that are good for men to know and to remember.”—
Black Elk150

Awe is what moves us forward.

…in the contemporary world of cross-cultural

communication, where the minds of men, leaping
the local fences, can recognize common fields of
experience and realization under alien forms, what
many priests and sociologists regard as eight
distinct deities, the comparative mythologist and
psychologist can take to be aspects of one and the
same.…151
 Myth deities personify energies
that are around us in nature.

The gods and goddesses then are to be understood

as e-bodiments and custodians of the elixir of
Imperishable Being but not themselves the Ultimate
in its primary state. What the hero seeks through his
intercourse with them is therefore not finally
themselves, but their grace, i.e., the power of their
sustaining substance. This miraculous energy-
substance and this alone is the Imperishable.…152

Live from your own center.

The key to understanding the problem that’s solved with

the symbolic idea of the Trinity is the Tantric saying, “To
worship a god, one must become a god.” That is to say, you
must hit that level of consciousness within yourself that is
equivalent to the deity to whom you are addressing your
attention.
In the Trinity, the Father is the deity your attention is
addressed to; you are the Son, knower of the Father; and
the Holy Spirit represents the relationship between the two.
It seems to me you cannot have the notion of a god
without having implicit the notion of a Trinity: a god, the
knower of the god, and the relationship between the two, a
progressive knowing that brings you closer and closer to the
divine.

The divine lives within you.

…there is still one more degree of realization…

namely that termed in Japanese “ji ji mu ge”—”thing
and thing, no division”: no separation between
things: the analogy suggested is of a net of gems:
the universe as a great spread-out net with at every
joint a gem, and each gem not only reflecting all the
others but itself reflected in all. An alternate image
is of a wreath of flowers. In a wreath, no flower is
the “cause” of any other, yet together, all are the
wreath.153

The separateness
apparent in the world
is secondary.

The very great physicist Erwin Schrödinger has

made

the same metaphysical point in his startling and

sublime little book, My View of the World. “All of us
living beings belong together,” he there declares,
“in as much as we are all in reality sides or aspects
of one single being, which may perhaps in western
terminology be called God while in the Upaniṣads its
name is brahman.”154

Beyond the world of opposites

is an unseen (but experienced)
unity and identity in us all.

For we are all, in every particle of our being,

precipitations of consciousness; as are, likewise, the
animals and plants, metals cleaving to a magnet
and waters tiding to the moon.155

Today the planet is

the only proper “in group.”

…we are to recognize in this whole universe a

reflection magnified of our own most inward nature;
so that we are indeed its ears, its eyes, its thinking,
and its speech—or, in theological terms, God’s ears,
God’s eyes, God’s thinking, and God’s Word; and, by
the same token, participants here and now in an act
of creation that is continuous in the whole infinitude
of that space of our mind through which the planets
fly, and our fellows of earth now among them.156
 Participate joyfully
in the sorrows of the world.

The obvious lesson…is that the first step to the

knowl-edge of the highest divine symbol of the
wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of
the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that
character: the realization that this is just how it is
and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those
who think—and their name is legion—that they
know how the universe could have been better than
it is, how it would have been had they created it,
without pain, without sorrow, with-out time, without
life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think—
as do many—“Let me first correct society, then get
around to myself” are barred from even the outer
gate of the mansion of God’s peace. All societies are
evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always
be. So if you really want to help this world, what you
will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no
one can do who has not himself learned how to live
in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the
knowledge of life as it is.157

We cannot cure the world of sorrows,

but we can choose to live in joy.

Flying down from Boston to New York at night, the plane

goes over highly populated areas and you can see rivers of
automobile lights, like blood molecules going through the
veins. You really get a sense of this whole thing as a strange
organism. The life of the planet depends on certain areas in
the swamplands and so forth that are being violated now.
People who don’t have a concept of the whole can do very
unfortunate things in neighborhood development.
 “If those who lead you say to you: ‘See, the
Kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of the heaven
will precede you. If they say to you: ‘It is in the sea,’
then the fish will precede you. But the Kingdom is
within you and it is without you. If you will know
yourselves, then you will be known and you will
know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But
if you do not know yourselves, then you are in
poverty and you are poverty.”—Jesus Christ158

You must return

with the bliss
and integrate it.

Every now and then, while I’m walking along Fifth

Avenue, everything just breaks up into subatomic particles
and I think, “Well, Jesus Christ, that is what it is. This is the
experience of māyā, an illusion of the senses if there ever
was one.” It’s a fantastic thought.

His disciples said to Him: “When will the Kingdom

come?” Jesus said: “It will not come by expectation;
they will not say: ‘See, here’ or: ‘See there.’ But the
Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and
men do not see it.”159

The return is seeing

the radiance everywhere.

“The president in Washington sends word that he

wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell
the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we
do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle
of the water, how can you buy them?
“Every part of this earth is sacred to my people.
Every single pine needle, every sandy shore, every
mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every
humming insect. All are holy in the memory and
experience of my people.

“We know the sap which courses through the trees

as we know the blood that courses through our
veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us.
The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the
deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The
rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body
heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same
family.

“The shining water that moves in the streams and

rivers is not just water, but the blood of our
ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must
remember that it is sacred. Each ghostly reflection
in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and
memories in the life of my people. The water’s
murmur is the voice of my father’s father.

“The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst.

They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you
must give to the rivers the kindness you would give
any brother.

“If we sell you our land, remember that the air is

precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all
the life it supports. The wind that gave our
grandfather his first breath also receives his last
sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of
life. So if we sell you our land, you must keep it
apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to
taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow
flowers.

“Will you teach your children what we have taught

our children? That the earth is our mother? What
befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

“This we know: The earth does not belong to man,

man belongs to the earth. All things are connected
like the blood which unites us all. Man did not weave
the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever
he does to the web, he does to himself.

“One thing we know: our god is also your god. The

earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to
heap contempt on its creator.

“Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen

when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild
horses tamed? What will happen when the secret
corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of
many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by
talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone!
Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is it to say
goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt? The end of
living and the beginning of survival.

“When the last Red Man has vanished with his

wilderness and his memory is only the shadow of a
cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores
and forests still be here? Will there be any of the
spirit of my people left?

“We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother’s

heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we
have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it.
Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is
when you receive it. Pre-serve the land for all
children and love it, as God loves us all.

“As we are part of the land, you too are part of the
land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious
to you. One thing we know: There is only one God.
No man, be he Red Man or White Man can be apart.
We are brothers after all.”—Chief Seattle160
 The world is a match for us.
We are a match for the world.

Having soared beyond thought into boundless

space, circled many times the arid moon, and begun
their long return: how welcome a sight, [the
astronauts] said, was the beauty of their goal, this
planet Earth, “like an oasis in the desert of infinite
space!” Now there is a telling image: this earth—the
one oasis in all space, an extraordinary kind of
sacred grove, as it were, set apart for the rituals of
life; and not simply one part or section of this earth,
but the entire globe now a sanctuary, a set-apart
Blessed Place. Moreover, we have all now seen for
ourselves how very small is our heaven-born earth,
and how perilous our position on the surface of its
whirling, luminously beautiful orb.161

…we are the children of this beautiful planet that we

have lately seen photographed from the moon. We
were not delivered into it by some god, but have
come forth from it.162

The spirit is the bouquet of nature.

We may think of ourselves, then, as the functioning

ears and eyes and minds of this earth, exactly as
our own ears and eyes and minds are of our bodies.
Our bodies are one with this earth, this wonderful
“oasis in the desert of infinite space”; and the
mathematics of that infinite space, which are the
same as of Newton’s mind—our mind, the earth’s
mind, the mind of the universe—come to flower and
fruit in this beautiful oasis through ourselves.163

The first function of mythology

 is to sanctify the place you are in.

“The world,” wrote the poet Rilke, “is large, but in us

it is deep as the sea.” We carry the laws within us by
which it is held in order. And we ourselves are no
less mysterious. In searching out its wonders, we
are learning simultaneously the wonder of
ourselves. That moon flight as an outward journey
was outward into ourselves. And I do not mean this
poetically, but factually, historically. I mean that the
actual fact of the making and the visual
broadcasting of that trip has transformed,
deepened, and extended human consciousness to a
degree and in a manner that amounts to the
opening of a new spiritual era.

…that lovely satellite has been out there circling our

earth for some four billion years like a beautiful but
lone-some woman trying to catch earth’s eye. She
has now at last caught it, and has caught thereby
ourselves. And as always happens when a
temptation of that kind has been responded to, a
new life has opened, richer, more exciting and
fulfilling, for both of us than was known, or even
thought of or imagined, before. There are
youngsters among us, even now, who will be living
on that moon; others who will visit Mars. And their
sons? What voyages are to be theirs?164

Follow your bliss.

What is, or what is to be, the new mythology? Since

myth is of the order of poetry, let us ask first a poet:
Walt Whitman, for example, in his Leaves of Grass
(1855):
I have said that the soul is not more than the
body,
And I have said that the body is not more
than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than
one’s-self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without
sympathy walks to his own funeral,
dressed in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may
purchase the pick of the earth,

And to glance with an eye or show a bean in

its pod confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the
young man following it may become a
hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a
hub for the wheeled universe,
And any man or woman shall stand cool and
supercilious before a million universes.

And I call to mankind, Be not curious about

God,
For I who am curious about each am not
curious
about God,
No array of terms can say how much I am at
peace about God and about death.

I hear and behold God in every object, yet I

understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more
wonderful than myself.
 Why should I wish to see God better than this
day?
I see something of God each hour of the
twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God,
and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street,
and every one is signed by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know
that others will punctually come forever
and ever.165

These lines of Whitman echo marvelously the

sentiments of the earliest of the Upaniṣads, the
“Great Forest Book” (Bṛhadāranyaka) of about the
eighth century B.C.

“This that people say, ‘Worship this god! Worship

that god!’—one god after another! All this is his
creation indeed! And he himself is all the gods.…He
is entered in the universe even to our fingernail-tips,
like a razor in a razor case, or fire in firewood. Him
those people see not, for as seen he is incomplete.
When breathing, he becomes ‘breath’ by name;
when speaking, ‘voice’; when seeing, ‘the eye’;
when hearing, ‘the ear’; when thinking, ‘mind’:
these are but the names of his acts.…

“One should worship with the thought that he is

one’s self, for therein all these become one. This self
is the footprint of that All, for by it one knows the All
—just as, verily, by following a footprint one finds
cattle that have been lost.… One should reverence
the Self alone as dear. And he who reverences the
Self alone as dear—what he holds dear, verily, will
not perish.…
So whosoever worships another divinity than his
self, thinking, ‘He is one, I am another,’ knows not.
He is like a sacrificial animal for the gods.…”166

Indeed, do we not hear the same from Christ

himself, as reported in the early Gnostic Gospel
According to Thomas?

“Whoever drinks from my mouth shall become as I

am and I myself will become he, and the hidden
things shall be revealed to him.…I am the All, the All
came forth from me and the All attained to me.
Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift up the stone
and you will find me there.”167
 If you want the whole thing,
the gods will give it to you.
But you must be ready for it.

There are now no more horizons. And with the

dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are
experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of
peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when
dividing panels are withdrawn from between
chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a
rush of these forces together.…That is just what we
are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a
new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of
mankind—to which no one anywhere alive today can
say that he has the key, the answer, the prophecy,
to its dawn. Nor is there anyone to condemn here…
What is occurring is completely natural, as are its
pains, confusions, and mistakes.168

The goal is to live

with godlike composure
on the full rush of energy,
like Dionysus riding the leopard,
without being torn to pieces.

Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and

religions are great poems and, when recognized as
such, point infallibly through things and events to
the ubiquity of a “presence” or “eternity” that is
whole and entire in each. In this function all
mythologies, all great poetries, and all mystic
traditions are in accord; and where any such
inspiriting vision remains effective in a civilization,
everything and every creature within its range is
alive. The first condition, therefore, that any
mythology must fulfill if it is to render life to modern
lives is that of cleansing the doors of perception to
the wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of
ourselves and of the universe of which we are the
ears and eyes and the mind.169

A bit of advice
given to a young Native American
at the time of his initiation:

“As you go the way of life,

you will see a great chasm.

Jump.

It is not as wide as you think.”

And so, to return to our opening question: What is—

or what is to be—the new mythology?

It is—and will forever be, as long as our human race

exists—the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in
its “subjective sense,” poetically renewed in terms
neither of a remembered past nor of a projected
future, but of now: addressed, that is to say, not to
the flattery of “peoples,” but to the waking of
individuals in the knowledge of themselves, not
simply as egos fighting for place on the surface of
this beautiful planet, but equally as centers of Mind
at Large—each in his own way at one with all…170

[Discuss]
 About the Collected Works of Joseph
Campbell

At his death in 1987, Joseph Campbell left a significant body

of published work that explored his lifelong passion, the
complex of universal myths and symbols that he called
“Mankind’s one great story.” He also left, however, a large
volume of unreleased work: uncollected articles, notes,
letters, and diaries, as well as audio- and videotape-
recorded lectures.
The Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF)—founded in 1990 to
preserve, protect, and perpetuate Campbell's work—has
undertaken to create a digital archive of his papers and
recordings and to publish The Collected Works of Joseph
Campbell.

Robert Walter, Executive Editor

David Kudler, Managing Editor

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF JOSEPH CAMPBELL

The JCF has undertaken to make Mr. Campbell's unreleased
and no-longer-available work—uncollected essays, journals,
interviews, lectures, article fragments, etc—available
through this thought-provoking series. The works in the on-
going series are:

Print:

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor—An

exploration of the myths and symbols of the Judeo-
Christian tradition
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Myth As
Metaphor and As Religion—The last book that
Campbell completed in his lifetime explores the
nascent mythology of the modern age.
The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the
Mythological Dimension—A collection of some of
Campbell's most far-reaching essays
Baksheesh and Brahman: Asian Journals—India—The
thoughtful diary of Campbell's life-changing trip to
India
Sake and Satori: Asian Journals—Japan—The
continuation of Campbell's 1955 trip, including his
eye-opening experiences in Japan
Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal—
An exploration of the central myths and symbols of
the great Asian religions
The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and
Work—A wonderful series of conversations between
Campbell and many of his associates and friends
Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on
the Art of James Joyce—An exploration of the mythic
impact of the twentieth century's greatest novelist
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake—co-written with
Henry Morton Robinson and newly edited by Joyce
scholar Edmond Epstein, this remains the seminal
analysis of Joyce's masterpiece
Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal
Transformation—In this work, Campbell explores
myth as it pertains to the individual
The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987
—A new volume of Campbell's far-ranging, thought-
provoking essays
The Hero with a Thousand Faces—A new edition of
Campbell's classic exploration of the universal
monomyth of the Hero Journey, and of its cosmic
mirror, the Cosmogonic Cycle
Myths to Live By (ebook)—A newly illustrated and
annotated electronic edition of this classic
 exploration of the philosophical, social and
psychological affects of living myth
A Joseph Campbell Companion (ebook)—A new
digital edition of one of Joseph Campbell's most
popular and most quotable works

Video:

The Hero's Journey: A Biographical Portrait—This

film, made shortly before his death in 1987, follows
Campbell's personal quest—a pathless journey of
questioning, discovery, and ultimately of delight and
joy in a life to which he said, "Yes"
Sukhavati: A Mythic Journey—This hypnotic and
mesmerizing film is a deeply personal, almost
spiritual, portrait of Campbell
Mythos—This series is made up of talks that
Campbell himself believed summed up his views on
"the one great story of mankind"

Audio:

The Joseph Campbell Audio Collection, Series I—A

newly digitized and remastered release of these
classic recordings, covering Campbell's early years
as a public speaker and including some of his most
inspiring and beloved talks.
The Joseph Campbell Audio Collection, Series II
The Joseph Campbell Audio Collection, Series III—
The JCF is preparing for the orderly release of sixty
previously unavailable recordings of Campbell at his
finest, exploring myth, religion, history, literature
and personal growth as only he could.
 About Joseph Campbell

OVER ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, on March 26th in 1904, Joseph

John Campbell was born in White Plains, NY. Joe, as he came
to be known, was the first child of a middle-class, Roman
Catholic couple, Charles and Josephine Campbell.
Joe's earliest years were largely unremarkable; but then,
when he was seven years old, his father took him and his
younger brother, Charlie, to see Buffalo Bill's Wild West
show. The evening was a high-point in Joe's life; for,
although the cowboys were clearly the show's stars, as Joe
would later write, he "became fascinated, seized, obsessed,
by the figure of a naked American Indian with his ear to the
ground, a bow and arrow in his hand, and a look of special
knowledge in his eyes.”
It was Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher whose
writings would later greatly influence Campbell, who
observed that
…the experiences and illuminations of childhood and
early youth become in later life the types, standards and
patterns of all subsequent knowledge and experience,
or as it were, the categories according to which all later
things are classified—not always consciously, however.
And so it is that in our childhood years the foundation is
laid of our later view of the world, and there with as well
of its superficiality or depth: it will be in later years
unfolded and fulfilled, not essentially changed.
And so it was with young Joseph Campbell. Even as he
actively practiced (until well into his twenties) the faith of
his forbears, he became consumed with Native American
culture; and his worldview was arguably shaped by the
dynamic tension between these two mythological
perspectives. On the one hand, he was immersed in the
rituals, symbols, and rich traditions of his Irish Catholic
heritage; on the other, he was obsessed with primitive (or,
as he later preferred, "primal") people's direct experience of
what he came to describe as "the continuously created
dynamic display of an absolutely transcendent, yet
universally immanent, mysterium tremendum et fascinans,
which is the ground at once of the whole spectacle and of
oneself." (Historical Atlas of World Mythology, I.1, p. 8)
By the age of ten, Joe had read every book on American
Indians in the children's section of his local library and was
admitted to the adult stacks, where he eventually read the
entire multi-volume Reports of the Bureau of American
Ethnology. He worked on wampum belts, started his own
"tribe" (named the "Lenni-Lenape" after the Delaware tribe
who had originally inhabited the New York metropolitan
area), and frequented the American Museum of Natural
History, where he became fascinated with totem poles and
masks, thus beginning a lifelong exploration of that
museum's vast collection.
After spending much of his thirteenth year recuperating
from a respiratory illness, Joe briefly attended Iona, a
private school in Westchester NY, before his mother enrolled
him at Canterbury, a Catholic residential school in New
Milford CT. His high school years were rich and rewarding,
though marked by a major tragedy: in 1919, the Campbell
home was consumed by a fire that killed his grandmother
and destroyed all of the family's possessions.
Joe graduated from Canterbury in 1921, and the following
September, entered Dartmouth College; but he was soon
disillusioned with the social scene and disappointed by a
lack of academic rigor, so he transferred to Columbia
University, where he excelled: while specializing in medieval
literature, he played in a jazz band, and became a star
runner. In 1924, while on a steamship journey to Europe
with his family, Joe met and befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti,
the young messiah-elect of the Theosophical Society, thus
beginning a friendship that would be renewed intermittently
over the next five years.
After earning a B.A. from Columbia (1925), and
receiving an M.A. (1927) for his work in Arthurian
Studies, Joe was awarded a Proudfit Traveling
Fellowship to continue his studies at the University
of Paris (1927-28). Then, after he had received and
rejected an offer to teach at his high school alma
mater, his Fellowship was renewed, and he traveled to
Germany to resume his studies at the University of Munich
(1928-29).
It was during this period in Europe that Joe was first
exposed to those modernist masters—notably, the sculptor
Antoine Bourdelle, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee, James Joyce
and Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung—whose art
and insights would greatly influence his own work. These
encounters would eventually lead him to theorize that all
myths are the creative products of the human psyche, that
artists are a culture's mythmakers, and that mythologies are
creative manifestations of humankind's universal need to
explain psychological, social, cosmological, and spiritual
realities.
When Joe returned from Europe late in August of 1929,
he was at a crossroad, unable to decide what to do with his
life. With the onset of the Great Depression, he found
himself with no hope of obtaining a teaching job; and so he
spent most of the next two years reconnecting with his
family, reading, renewing old acquaintances, and writing
copious entries in his journal. Then, late in 1931, after
exploring and rejecting the possibility of a doctoral program
or teaching job at Columbia, he decided, like countless
young men before and since, to "hit the road," to undertake
a cross-country journey in which he hoped to experience
"the soul of America" and, in the process, perhaps discover
the purpose of his life. In January of 1932, when he was
leaving Los Angeles, where he had been studying Russian in
order to read War and Peace in the vernacular, he pondered
his future in this journal entry:

I begin to think that I have a genius for working like

an ox over totally irrelevant subjects. … I am filled
with an excruciating sense of never having gotten
anywhere—but when I sit down and try to discover
where it is I want to get, I'm at a loss. … The
thought of growing into a professor gives me the
creeps. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself
and my pupils into believing that the thing that we
are looking for is in books! I don't know where it is—
but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn't in books.
— It isn't in travel. — It isn't in California. — It isn't in
New York. … Where is it? And what is it, after all?

Thus one real result of my Los Angeles stay was the

elimination of Anthropology from the running. I
suddenly realized that all of my primitive and
American Indian excitement might easily be
incorporated in a literary career. — I am convinced
now that no field but that of English literature would
have permitted me the almost unlimited roaming
about from this to that which I have been enjoying.
A science would buckle me down—and would
probably yield no more important fruit than
literature may yield me! — If I want to justify my
existence, and continue to be obsessed with the
notion that I've got to do something for humanity —
well, teaching ought to quell that obsession — and if
I can ever get around to an intelligent view of
matters, intelligent criticism of contemporary values
 ought to be useful to the world. This gets back again
to Krishna's dictum: “ The best way to help mankind
is through the perfection of yourself.”

His travels next carried him north to San Francisco, then

back south to Pacific Grove, where he spent the better part
of a year in the company of Carol and John Steinbeck and
marine biologist Ed Ricketts. During this time, he wrestled
with his writing, discovered the poems of Robinson Jeffers,
first read Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, and wrote
to some seventy colleges and universities in an
unsuccessful attempt to secure employment. Finally, he was
offered a teaching position at the Canterbury School. He
returned to the East Coast, where he endured an unhappy
year as a Canterbury housemaster, the one bright moment
being when he sold his first short story ("Strictly Platonic")
to Liberty magazine. Then, in 1933, he moved to a cottage
without running water on Maverick Road in Woodstock NY,
where he spent a year reading and writing. In 1934, he was
offered and accepted a position in the literature department
at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he would retain for thirty-
eight years.
In 1938 he married one of his students, Jean
Erdman, who would become a major presence in
the emerging field of modern dance, first, as a star
dancer in Martha Graham's fledgling troupe, and
later, as dancer/choreographer of her own
company.
Even as he continued his teaching career, Joe's life
continued to unfold serendipitously. In 1940, he was
introduced to Swami Nikhilananda, who enlisted his help in
producing a new translation of The Gospel of Sri
Ramakrishna (published, 1942). Subsequently, Nikhilananda
introduced Joe to the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, who
introduced him to a member of the editorial board at the
Bollingen Foundation. Bollingen, which had been founded by
Paul and Mary Mellon to "develop scholarship and research
in the liberal arts and sciences and other fields of cultural
endeavor generally," was embarking upon an ambitious
publishing project, the Bollingen Series. Joe was invited to
contribute an "Introduction and Commentary" to the first
Bollingen publication, Where the Two Came to their Father: A
Navaho War Ceremonial, text and paintings recorded by
Maud Oakes, given by Jeff King (Bollingen Series, I: 1943).
When Zimmer died unexpectedly in 1943 at the age of
fifty-two, his widow, Christiana, and Mary Mellon asked Joe
to oversee the publication of his unfinished works. Joe would
eventually edit and complete four volumes from Zimmer's
posthumous papers: Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and
Civilization (Bollingen Series VI: 1946), The King and the
Corpse (Bollingen Series XI: 1948), Philosophies of India
(Bollingen Series XXVI: 1951), and a two-volume opus, The
Art of Indian Asia (Bollingen Series XXXIX: 1955).
Joe, meanwhile, followed his initial Bollingen
contribution with a "Folkloristic Commentary" to
Grimm's Fairy Tales (1944); he also co-authored
(with Henry Morton Robinson) A Skeleton Key to
Finnegans Wake (1944), the first major study of
James Joyce's notoriously complex novel.
His first, full-length, solo authorial endeavor, The
Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series XVII:
1949), was published to acclaim and brought him
the first of numerous awards and honors—the
National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for
Contributions to Creative Literature. In this study of
the myth of the hero, Campbell posits the existence of a
Monomyth (a word he borrowed from James Joyce), a
universal pattern that is the essence of, and common to,
heroic tales in every culture. While outlining the basic
stages of this mythic cycle, he also explores common
variations in the hero's journey, which, he argues, is an
operative metaphor, not only for an individual, but for a
culture as well. The Hero would prove to have a major
influence on generations of creative artists—from the
Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s to contemporary film-
makers today—and would, in time, come to be acclaimed as
a classic.
Joe would eventually author dozens of articles and
numerous other books, including The Masks of God:
Primitive Mythology (Vol. 1: 1959), Oriental Mythology (Vol.
2: 1962), Occidental Mythology (Vol. 3: 1964), and Creative
Mythology (Vol. 4: 1968); The Flight of the Wild Gander:
Explorations in the Mythological Dimension (1969); Myths to
Live By (1972); The Mythic Image (1974); The Inner Reaches
of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (1986);
and five books in his four-volume, multi-part, unfinished
Historical Atlas of World Mythology (1983-87).
He was also a prolific editor. Over the years, he edited
The Portable Arabian Nights (1952) and was general editor
of the series Man and Myth (1953-1954), which included
major works by Maya Deren ( Divine Horsemen: the Living
Gods of Haiti, 1953), Carl Kerenyi ( The Gods of the Greeks,
1954), and Alan Watts ( Myth and Ritual in Christianity,
1954). He also edited The Portable Jung (1972), as well as
six volumes of Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (Bollingen
Series XXX): Spirit and Nature (1954), The Mysteries (1955),
Man and Time (1957), Spiritual Disciplines (1960), Man and
Transformation (1964), and The Mystic Vision (1969).
But his many publications notwithstanding, it was
arguably as a public speaker that Joe had his greatest
popular impact. From the time of his first public lecture in
1940—a talk at the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center
entitled "Sri Ramakrishna's Message to the West"—it was
apparent that he was an erudite but accessible lecturer, a
gifted storyteller, and a witty raconteur. In the ensuing
years, he was asked more and more often to speak at
different venues on various topics. In 1956, he was invited
to speak at the State Department's Foreign Service
Institute; working without notes, he delivered two straight
days of lectures. His talks were so well-received, he was
invited back annually for the next seventeen years. In the
mid-1950s, he also undertook a series of public lectures at
the Cooper Union in New York City; these talks drew an ever-
larger, increasingly diverse audience, and soon became a
regular event.
Joe first lectured at Esalen Institute in 1965. Each year
thereafter, he returned to Big Sur to share his latest
thoughts, insights, and stories. And as the years passed, he
came to look forward more and more to his annual sojourns
to the place he called "paradise on the Pacific Coast."
Although he retired from teaching at Sarah Lawrence in
1972 to devote himself to his writing, he continued to
undertake two month-long lecture tours each year.
In 1985, Joe was awarded the National Arts Club
Gold Medal of Honor in Literature. At the award
ceremony, James Hillman remarked, "No one in our
century—not Freud, not Thomas Mann, not Levi-
Strauss—has so brought the mythical sense of the
world and its eternal figures back into our everyday
consciousness."
Joseph Campbell died unexpectedly in 1987 after a brief
struggle with cancer. In 1988, millions were introduced to
his ideas by the broadcast on PBS of Joseph Campbell and
The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, six hours of an
electrifying conversation that the two men had videotaped
over the course of several years. When he died, Newsweek
magazine noted that "Campbell has become one of the
rarest of intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who
has been embraced by the popular culture."
In his later years, Joe was fond of recalling on how
Schopenhauer, in his essay On the Apparent Intention in the
Fate of the Individual, wrote of the curious feeling one can
have, of there being an author somewhere writing the novel
of our lives, in such a way that through events that seem to
us to be chance happenings there is actually a plot
unfolding of which we have no knowledge.
Looking back over Joe's life, one cannot help but feel that
it proves the truth Schopenhauer's observation.
For more information on the works of Joseph Campbell,
click here.
 About Joseph Campbell Foundation
Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF) is a not-for-profit
corporation that continues the work of Joseph Campbell,
exploring the fields of mythology and comparative religion.
The Foundation is guided by three principal goals:

First, the Foundation preserves, protects, and

perpetuates Campbell’s pioneering work. This
includes cataloging and archiving his works,
developing new publications based on his works,
directing the sale and distribution of his published
works, protecting copyrights to his works, and
increasing awareness of his works by making them
available in digital formats on JCF’s Web site
(www.jcf.org).

Second, the Foundation promotes the study of

mythology and comparative religion. This involves
implementing and/or supporting diverse
mythological education programs, supporting and/or
sponsoring events designed to increase public
awareness, donating Campbell’s archived works
(principally to Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas
Archive and Library), and utilizing JCF’s Web site as a
forum for relevant cross-cultural dialogue.

Third, the Foundation helps individuals enrich their

lives by participating in a series of programs,
including our global, Internet-based Associates
program, our local international network of
Mythological Roundtables, and our periodic Joseph
Campbell–related events and activities.
For more information on Joseph Campbell
and Joseph Campbell Foundation, contact:
Joseph Campbell Foundation
www.jcf.org
Post Office Box 36
San Anselmo, CA 94979-0036
United States of America
[Back to Nt. 1]
M. Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Centemporary Physics
(Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1961), p. 319; as cited in Fritjof Capra, The
Tao of Physics (Boulder, CO: 1975), p. 211.
[Back to Nt. 2]
Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology, Vol. 4 of The Masks of God
(New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1968), p. 508.
[Back to Nt. 3]
This paragraph is paraphrased and quoted from C. G. Jung, The
Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung,
Bollingen Series XX, Vol. 8, pars. 789–792; originally published as “Die
seelischen Probleme der menschlichen Altersufen,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung,
March 14 and 16, 1930; Revised, largely rewritten, and republished as “Die
Lebenswende,” Seelenprobleme der Gegenwart (Psychologische
Abhandlunger, III; Zurich, 1931), which version was translated by W. S. Dell
and Cary F. Baynes as “The Stages of Life,” Modern Man in Search of a Soul
(London and New York, 1933); the present translation by R. F. C. Hull is
based on this; cited in The Portable Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell (New
York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1970), pp. 19–20.
[Back to Nt. 4] Matthew 18:3.
[Back to Nt. 5]
“Myths and Tales of the Jicarilla Apache Indians,” in Memoirs of the
American Folklore Society, Vol. XXXI (1938,) p. 110.
[Back to Nt. 6] Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” in Leaves of Grass.
[Back to Nt. 7]
Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By (New York: Bantam Books, 1974;
ebook edition, Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2011), "II - The Emergence of
Mankind," pp. 23–24.
[Back to Nt. 8]
Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.1–5.; quoted in Joseph Campbell,
Primitive Mythology, Vol. 1 of The Masks of God (New York: Viking Penguin
Inc., 1959), p. 105.
[Back to Nt. 9]
Primitive Mythology, p. 104; abridging Symposium 189D ff, from The
Dialogues of Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett (New York: Random House,
1937).
[Back to Nt. 10]
C. G. Jung,Axion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self,
The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part II, par. 26; translated by R. F.
C. Hull from the first part of Axion: Untersuchungen zur Symbolgeschichte,
Psychologische Abhandlungen, VIII (Zurich: Rascher Verlag, 1951); cited in
The Portable Jung, p. 151.
[Back to Nt. 11] Ibid., pars. 28–30, abr.; cited in The Portable Jung, pp. 152–153, abr.
[Back to Nt. 12]
Erik Routley, The Man for Others (New York: Oxford University Press,
1964), p. 99; cited in Creative Mythology, p. 177.
[Back to Nt. 13]
Gurraut de Borneilh, Tam cum los oills el cor.…, in John Rutherford,
The Troubadors (London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1861), pp. 34–35; cited
in Creative Mythology, pp. 177–178.
[Back to Nt. 14]
Creative Mythology, p. 567; Campbell here paraphrases James
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Jonathen Cape, Ltd.,
1916), p. 196.
[Back to Nt. 15]
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen XVII,
3rd edition, revised (Novato, California: New World Library, 2008), p. 196.
[Back to Nt. 16]
Arthur Schopenhauer, “Die beiden Grundproblemen der Ethik,” II.
“Über das Fundament der Moral” (1840), Sämtliche Werke, 12 Vols.
(Stuttgart: Verlag der Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1895–1898) Vol. 7, p. 253;
cited in Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, 2nd edition,
revised (Novato, California: New World Library 2002), p. 93.
[Back to Nt. 17] Ibid.
[Back to Nt. 18] Myths to Live By, p. 155.
[Back to Nt. 19]
Campbell comments: “See Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of
Children, The International Psycho-Analytical Library, No. 27 (1937).”
[Back to Nt. 20]
Géza Róheim, War, Crime, and the Covenant (Journal of Clinical
Psychopathology, Monograph Series, No. 1, Monticello, N.Y., 1945), pp. 137–
138.
[Back to Nt. 21] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 173–174.
[Back to Nt. 22] Myths to Live By, pp. 220–221.
[Back to Nt. 23] Ibid., p. 47.
[Back to Nt. 24]
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 3.118.14–17 and 28; translated
(in part) from Helen M. Mustard and Charles E. Passage (New York: Vintage
Books, 1961), p. 127.
[Back to Nt. 25] Ibid., 3.119.29–30.
[Back to Nt. 26]
Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology, Vol. 3 of The Masks of God
(New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1964), pp. 508–509.
[Back to Nt. 27] Creative Mythology, pp. 677–678.
[Back to Nt. 28]
James Joyce, p. 247; cited in Joseph Campbell, The Flight of the Wild
Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimensions of Fairy Tales, Legends,
and Symbols (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1969), p. 209.
[Back to Nt. 29] Myths to Live By, p. 68.
[Back to Nt. 30]
Albert Pauphilet, editor, La Queste del Saint Graal (Paris: Champion,
1949), p.26; as cited in Creative Mythology, op. cit.
[Back to Nt. 31]
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, translated by R. F. C. Hull, in
The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol.. 12, p. 222; cited in Myths to Live By,
p. 68.
[Back to Nt. 32]
Joseph Campbell, “Mythological Themes in Creative Literature and
Art,” in The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959–1987, edited by
 Antony Van Couvering (Novato, California: New World Library, 2008), p. 148.
[Back to Nt. 33]
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Penguin ed., p.
203; cited in The Mythic Dimension, p. 168.
[Back to Nt. 34] Ibid., p. 174.
[Back to Nt. 35] The Flight of the Wild Gander, p. 226.
[Back to Nt. 36] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 53.
[Back to Nt. 37] Ibid., p. 17.
[Back to Nt. 38] Ibid., p. 217.
[Back to Nt. 39] Ibid., p. 229.
[Back to Nt. 40] Myths to Live By, p. 238.
[Back to Nt. 41]
C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Company, 1936), p. 129; cited in Primitive Mythology, p. 124.
[Back to Nt. 42] Ibid., p. 126; cited in Primitive Mythology, p. 124.
[Back to Nt. 43] Primitive Mythology, p123.
[Back to Nt. 44] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 365–366.
[Back to Nt. 45] The Flight of the Wild Gander, p. 110.
[Back to Nt. 46] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 121.
[Back to Nt. 47] Ibid., p. 356.
[Back to Nt. 48] Ibid., p. 308.
[Back to Nt. 49] Myths to Live By, p. 131, abridged.
[Back to Nt. 50]
Bhagavad Gītā, 2.27, 30, 23; abridged, reordered, and cited in
Myths to Live By, p.202.
[Back to Nt. 51]
Lao-tse, Tao-te Ching, 16 (translation by Dwight Goddard, Laotzu’s
Tao and Wu Wei; New York, 1919, p. 18; as cited in The Hero with a
Thousand Faces, p. 189.
[Back to Nt. 52]
Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV, 252–255; as cited in The Hero with a
Thousand Faces, p. 243.
[Back to Nt. 53] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 367.
[Back to Nt. 54]
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford University Press,
1934), Vol. VI, pp. 169–175, summarized.
[Back to Nt. 55] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 16.
[Back to Nt. 56]
Patanjali, Yoga Sūtras 1.1–2, from Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of
India, edited by Joseph Campbell, Bollingen Series XXVI (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1951), p. 284.
[Back to Nt. 57]
Joseph Cambell, The Mythic Image, Bollingen Series C (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 313.
[Back to Nt. 58] Ibid., p. 331.
[Back to Nt. 59] Ibid., p. 341.
[Back to Nt. 60] Ibid., p. 345.
[Back to Nt. 61] Ibid., p. 350.
[Back to Nt. 62] Ibid., p. 356.
[Back to Nt. 63] Ibid.
[Back to Nt. 64]
Meister Eckhart, edited by Franz Pfeiffer, translated by C. de B.
Evans (London: John M. Watkins, 1924–1931), No. XCVI (“Riddance”), I, 239.
[Back to Nt. 65] Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad 9–11.
[Back to Nt. 66] The Flight of the Wild Gander, p. 177.
[Back to Nt. 67]
C. G. Jung, “The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man,”
Civilization in Transition, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 10, pp..
144–145, ar. 304–305; cited in The Mythic Image, p. 7, abr.
[Back to Nt. 68]
C. G. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1968), p. 46; cited in The Mythic Image, p. 186.
[Back to Nt. 69] Myths to Live By, p. 219.
[Back to Nt. 70] Ibid., pp. 217–218.
[Back to Nt. 71] C. G. Jung, Analytical Psychology, pp. 11–14.
[Back to Nt. 72] Myths, Dreams, and Religion, p. 169.
[Back to Nt. 73]
Joseph Campbell, Oriental Mythology, Vol. 2 of The Masks of God
(New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1962), pp. 503–504.
[Back to Nt. 74]
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 168; Campbell notes: “See
Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea (New York: 1906). See also Daisetz Teitaro
Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (London: 1927), and Lafcadio Hearn, Japan
(New York: 1904).”
[Back to Nt. 75]
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik,
die als Wissenschaft wird aufreten können, par. 36–38.
[Back to Nt. 76] The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, pp. 27–31, abr.
[Back to Nt. 77] Myths to Live By, p. 23.
[Back to Nt. 78] The Mythic Dimension, p. 157.
[Back to Nt. 79]
Loren Eisely, The Firmament of Time (New York: Atheneum
Publishers, 1962), p. 140; cited in Creative Mythology, p. 624.
[Back to Nt. 80] Myths to Live By, p. 77.
[Back to Nt. 81] Ibid., p. 97.
[Back to Nt. 82] Ibid.
[Back to Nt. 83]
Joseph Campbell, "Earthrise," Thou Art That, edited by Eugene
Kennedy. (Novato, California: New World Library, 2011) p. 108.
[Back to Nt. 84] Ibid.
[Back to Nt. 85]
Occidental Mythology, pp. 506–507; Campbell comments: “See
Primitive Mythology (op. cit.), p. 231.”
[Back to Nt. 86] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 156.
[Back to Nt. 87] Myths to Live By, pp. 3–4.
[Back to Nt. 88] Ibid., pp. 152–153.
[Back to Nt. 89] Ibid., p. 153.
[Back to Nt. 90]
Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (Boston,
1742); cited in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 127–128, abr.
[Back to Nt. 91] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 128.
[Back to Nt. 92]
The Gospel According to Thomas, Coptic text, established and
translated by A. Guillaumont, H.-Ch. Puech, G. Quispel, W. Till, and
Yassah’abd al Masih (Leiden: E. J. Brill; New York: Harper, 1959), p. 43,
Logion 77:26–27; cited in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, p. 61.
[Back to Nt. 93]
James Joyce, Ulysses (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 9th
printing, 1927; New York: Random House, 1934), p. 38.
[Back to Nt. 94] Cited in The Portable Jung, p. 634.
[Back to Nt. 95]
Meister Eckhart, Vol. I, Sermons and Collations, No. II, p. 10; cited in
Occidental Mythology, p. 510.
[Back to Nt. 96] Ibid.
[Back to Nt. 97] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 191.
[Back to Nt. 98] Thou Art That, loc. cit.
[Back to Nt. 99] Ibid., p. 391.
[Back to Nt. 100] The Gospel According to Thomas, Logion 113:16–17, p. 57.
[Back to Nt. 101] Occidental Mythology, p. 276.
[Back to Nt. 102] Ibid., p. 281.
[Back to Nt. 103]
Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the
Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press),
p. 4, note 2; as cited in The Flight of the Wild Gander, p. 79.
[Back to Nt. 104] The Flight of the Wild Gander, pp. 197–198.
[Back to Nt. 105]
Editor’s note in Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India, edited by
Joseph Campbell, Bollingen Series XXVI (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1951), p. 18.
[Back to Nt. 106] Oriental Mythology, p. 280.
[Back to Nt. 107] Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India, p. 534.
[Back to Nt. 108] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 160.
[Back to Nt. 109] The Mythic Image, p. 419.
[Back to Nt. 110] Goethe, Faust, Act II, scene 5, concluding Chorus Mysticus.
[Back to Nt. 111] Thou Art That, loc. cit.
[Back to Nt. 112] Myths to Live By, pp. 149–151.
[Back to Nt. 113] The Mythic Image, pp. 321–322, abr.
[Back to Nt. 114]
Heinrich Zimmer, “The Indian World Mother,” translated by Ralph
Manheim, in The Mystic Vision, Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, Vol. 6,
edited by Joseph Campbell, Bollingen XXX– 6 (New York: Bollingen
Foundation, 1968; paperback reprint: Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1982), p. 77; originally published in Eranos-Jahrbücher VI (1938) by
Rhein-Verlag, Zurich, Switzerland.
[Back to Nt. 115] Ibid., pp. 95–96, abr.
[Back to Nt. 116] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 170, note 132.
[Back to Nt. 117] James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1939), pp.
23–24.
[Back to Nt. 118] The Mythic Image, p. 238.
[Back to Nt. 119] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 113.
[Back to Nt. 120] Ibid. p. 116.
[Back to Nt. 121] See The Mythic Image, pp. 327–328.
[Back to Nt. 122]
Louis de la Vallée-Poussin, Le Bouddhisme (Paris: G. Beauchesne
and Cie, 1909), p. 140; cited in The Mythic Image, p. 52.
[Back to Nt. 123] Kaṭha Upaniṣad 3.12; cited in The Mythic Image, p. 52.
[Back to Nt. 124] Vākya Sūdha 13; cited in The Mythic Image, p. 52.
[Back to Nt. 125] The Mythic Image, p. 52.
[Back to Nt. 126]
Robinson Jeffers, from “Natural Music,” in Roan Stallion, Tamar, and
Other Poems (New York: Horace Liveright, 1925), p. 232; cited in The Mythic
Dimension, p. 175.
[Back to Nt. 127]
William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in The Viking
Portable Blake (New York: 1976), p. 258.
[Back to Nt. 128] The Mythic Dimension, pp. 164–165.
[Back to Nt. 129] James Joyce, Ulysses, p. 409.
[Back to Nt. 130] The Flight of the Wild Gander, p. 196.
[Back to Nt. 131] Ibid., pp. 186–187.
[Back to Nt. 132]
Robert Snyder, Buckminster Fuller (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1980), p. 100.
[Back to Nt. 133]
Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series),
Published for the Buddhist Society, London (London, New York, Melbourne,
Sydney, Cape Town: Rider and Company, n.d.), p. 58.
[Back to Nt. 134]
Joseph Campbell, The Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Volume
I: The Way of the Animal Powers, Part 2: Mythologies of the Great Hunt (New
York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. xv.
[Back to Nt. 135]
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Jonathen Cape
ed., p. 233; Penguin edition, p. 205.
[Back to Nt. 136] Ibid.
[Back to Nt. 137] Mythologies of the Great Hunt, p. xiii.
[Back to Nt. 138]
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Penguin
edition., p.214.
[Back to Nt. 139] Ibid.; as cited in Primitive Mythology, pp. 469–470.
[Back to Nt. 140] Ibid., p. 245.
[Back to Nt. 141] Mythologies of the Great Hunt, p. xvii.
[Back to Nt. 142]
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie; oder Griechenthum
und Pessimusmus (leipzig: E. W. Fritzch, 1886), passages from the ends of
Sections 1 and 16, abr. and translated by Joseph Campbell; cited in Historical
Atlas of World Mythology, Volume II: The Way of the Seeded Earth, Part 1:
The Sacrifice (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 46.
[Back to Nt. 143] Myths to Live By, pp. 89–90.
[Back to Nt. 144] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 4.
[Back to Nt. 145]
Thomas Merton, “Symbolism: Communication or Communion?” in
New Directions 20 (New York: New Directions, 1968), pp. 1–2, abr.; as cited
in Myths to Live By, p. 265.
[Back to Nt. 146] Myths to Live By, p. 91.
[Back to Nt. 147] Chāndogya Upaniṣad, 3.19.1–3.
[Back to Nt. 148] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 276–277.
[Back to Nt. 149] Primitive Mythology, p. 58.
[Back to Nt. 150]
Joseph Epes Brown, pp. 3–4 and 80; cited in The Flight of the Wild
Gander, p. 78.
[Back to Nt. 151] Primitive Mythology, p. 463.
[Back to Nt. 152] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 181.
[Back to Nt. 153] Myths to Live By, p. 148.
[Back to Nt. 154]
Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World, translated by Cecily
Hastings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 95; cited in
Myths to Live By, p. 257.
[Back to Nt. 155] The Flight of the Wild Gander, p. 197.
[Back to Nt. 156] Myths to Live By, p. 257.
[Back to Nt. 157] Ibid., p. 106.
[Back to Nt. 158]
The Gospel According to Thomas, Logion 3, p. 3; cited in
Mythologies of the Great Hunt, p. xvii.
[Back to Nt. 159]
Ibid., Logion 113, pp. 55–57; as cited in Mythologies of the Great
Hunt, p. xviii
[Back to Nt. 160]
From an anonymously edited and popularly circulated speech
delivered by Chief Seattle (Seathl) in 1855; other versions have been
published by Virginia Armstrong, I Have Spoken: American History Through
the Voices of the Indians (Chicago: Sage Books, 1971); by Thomas Sanders
and Walter Peck, Literature of the American Indian (New York: Macmillan,
1973); and in German, as Chief Seattle, Wir sind ein Teil der Erde (Olten und
Freiburg i Brsg.: Walter-Verlag A. G. Olten, 1982); as cited in Mythologies of
the Great Hunt, p. 251.
[Back to Nt. 161] Myths to Live By, pp. 244–245.
[Back to Nt. 162] Ibid., p. 274.
[Back to Nt. 163] Ibid., pp. 253–254.
[Back to Nt. 164] Ibid., pp. 246–247.
[Back to Nt. 165] Leaves of Grass, ll. 1262-1280.
[Back to Nt. 166] Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.6–10, abr.
[Back to Nt. 167]
The Gospel According to Thomas, 99:28-30 and 95:24–28; cited in
Myths to Live By, pp. 258–260, abr.
[Back to Nt. 168] Myths to Live By, p. 263.
[Back to Nt. 169] Ibid., p. 266.
[Back to Nt. 170] Ibid., p. 275.