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...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. We are its eyes and mind, its seeing and its thinking. And the earth, together with its sun, this light around which it flies like a moth, came forth, we are told, from a nebula; and that nebula, in turn, from space. So that we are the mind, ultimately, of space.

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Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception where he describes the sense that he experienced in his first mescalin adventure of his mind opening to ranges of wonder such as he had never before even imagined. \r\n\r\n\r\n>Reflecting on my experience [Huxley wrote], I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, 'that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.' \r\n\r\n\r\nAccording to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. . . Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate 'spiritual exercises,' or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception 'of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe' (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of

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To quote the monk Thomas Merton again: 'One cannot apprehend a symbol unless one is able to awaken, in one's own being, the spiritual resonances which respond to the symbol not only as sign but as 'sacrament' and 'presence.' The symbol is an object pointing to a subject. We are summoned to a deeper spiritual awareness, far beyond the level of subject and object.

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Father Thomas Merton, in a brief but perspicacious article entitled Symbolism: Communication or Communion?\n \n'But when one comes to a better understanding of those religions, and when one sees that the experiences which are the fulfillment of religious belief and practice are most clearly expressed in symbols, one may come to recognize that often the symbols of different religions may have more in common than have the abstractly formulated official doctrines.' \n \n'The true symbol,' he states again, 'does not merely point to something else. It contains in itself a structure which awakens our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and of reality itself. 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 affectively and consciously into contact with his own deepest self, with other men, and with God.

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There is always in the adventure great danger of what is known to psychology as 'inflation,' which is what overtakes the psychotic. He identifies himself either with the visionary object or with its witness, the visionary subject. The trick must be to become aware of it without becoming lost in it: to understand that we may all be saviors when functioning in relation to our friends or enemies: savior figures, but never The Savior. We may all be mothers and fathers, but are never The Mother, The Father. When a growing girl becomes aware of the pleasing effect that her blossoming womanhood is beginning to have upon others and takes the credit for this to her own ego, she has already gone a little crazy.

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What I learned now was that the LSD retreat and inward plunge can be compared to an essential schizophrenia, and the antinomianism of contemporary youth to a paranoid schizophrenia. The sense of threat from every quarter of what is known as the Establishment -- which is to say, of modern civilization -- is not altogether a put-on or an act for many of these young folk, but an actual condition of soul. The break-off is real, and what is being bombed and blown up outside are actual symbols of interior fears. Moreover, many are unable even to communicate, every thought being so charged for them with feeling that in rational speech there is no name for it. An astonishing number cannot bring forth even a simple declarative sentence, but, interrupting every attempted phrase with the irrelevant syllable 'like,' they are reduced to mute signs and feeling-loaded silences, pleading for appreciation. One feels, sometimes, in dealing with them, that one is indeed in a lunatic asylum without walls. And the indicated cure for the ills that they are shouting about is not sociological at all (as our news media and many of our politicians claim) but psychiatric.

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But when we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament it is to a mythology with a very different upper story and very different power up there: not a polytheistic pantheon favoring both sides simultaneously, but a single-minded single deity, with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled in this literature in a manner in striking contrast to the Greek, pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a 'Thou' (to use Martin Buber's term), but a thing, an 'It.' I have chosen a few characteristic passages that we shall all -- I am sure -- readily recognize, and which, rehearsed in the present context, may help us to realize that we have been bred to one of the most brutal war mythologies of all time. First, then, as follows: \n\n>When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than yourselves, and when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them; then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. You shall not make marriages with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons. For they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods; then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you utterly. But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth [Deuteronomy 7:1-6]. \n\n>When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoils, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here. But in the cities of these people that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded [Deuteronomy 20:10-18]. \n\n> And when the Lord your God brings you into the land which he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you, with great and goodly cities, which you did not build, and houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, and cisterns hewn out, which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive trees, which you did not plant, and when you eat and are full, then take heed lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage [Deuteronomy 6:10-12]. \n\nAnd when, in reading, we move on from Deuteronomy to the greatest war book of all, of Joshua, there is -- most famous of all -- the legend of the fall of Jericho. The trumpets blew, the walls fell down. 'And then,' as we read, 'they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword. . . And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord' (Joshua 6:21, 24). The next city was Ai. 'And Israel smote them, until there was left none that survived or escaped. . . And all who fell that day, both men and women, were twelve thousand, all of the people of Ai' (Joshua 8:22, 25). 'And so Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb, and the lowland and the slopes, and their kings. He left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded' (Joshua 10:40). \n\nAnd that, the very same Lord God so frequently cited by our doves of peace today as having taught, 'Thou shall not kill!

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One of the great problems, I would say, of our own variously troubled society is just this, that youths brought up to function in the protected fields of peacefully domestic life, when suddenly tapped to play the warrior role, are provided with little or no psychological induction.

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By and large, hunting people are warrior people; and not only that, but many are exhilarated by battle and turn warfare into exercises in bravura. The rites and mythologies of such tribesmen are based generally on the idea that there is actually no such thing as death. If the blood of an animal slain is returned to the soil, it will carry the life principle back to Mother Earth for rebirth, and the same beast will return next season to yield its temporal body again. The animals of the hunt are regarded in this way as willing victims who give their bodies to mankind with the understanding that adequate rites are to be performed to return the life principle to its source. Likewise, after episodes of battle special rituals are enacted to assuage and release to the land of spirits the ghosts of those that have been slain.\r\n\r\nSuch ceremonies may also include rites for toning down the war mania and battle heat of those who have done the killing. For this whole business of killing, whether killing beasts or killing men, is supposed to be fraught with danger. On one hand, there is the danger of revenge from the person or animal killed; and on the other hand, there is an equal danger of the killer himself becoming infected by a killing mania and running berserk. Along with the rites to honor and appease ghosts, accordingly, there may be also special rites enacted to reattune returning warriors to the manners of life at home.

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Man,' wrote Oswald Spengler, 'is a beast of prey.' That is simply a fact of nature. And another such fact is this: that throughout the animal kingdom beasts of prey, when compared with their vegetarian victims, are in general not only the more powerful but also the more intelligent. Heraclitus declared war to be the creator of all great things; and in the words again of Spengler, 'The one who lacks courage to be a hammer comes off in the role of the anvil.

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this wonderful Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach simply has to be read.2

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In the various contexts of Oriental erotic mysticism, whether of the Near East or of India, the woman is mystically interpreted as an occasion for the lover to experience depths beyond depths of transcendent illumination -- much in the way of Dante's appreciation of Beatrice. Not so among the troubadours. The beloved to them was a woman, not the manifestation of some divine principle; and specifically, that woman. The love was for her. And the celebrated experience was an agony of earthly love: an effect of the fact that the union of love can never be absolutely realized on this earth. Love's joy is in its savor of eternity; love's pain, the passage of time;

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In the religious lore of India there is a formulation of five degrees of love through which a worshiper is increased in the service and knowledge of his God -- which is to say, in the Indian sense, in the realization of his own identity with that Being of all beings who in the beginning said 'I' and then realized, 'I am all this world!' The first degree of such love is of servant to master: 'O Lord, you are the Master; I am thy servant. Command, and I shall obey!' This, according to the Indian teaching, is the appropriate spiritual attitude for most worshipers of divinities, no matter where in the world. The second order of love, then, is that of friend to friend, which in the Christian tradition is typified in the relationship of Jesus and his apostles. They were friends. They could discuss and even argue questions. But such a love implies a deeper readiness of understanding, a higher spiritual development than the first. In the Hindu scriptures it is represented in the great conversation of the Bhagavad Gita between the Pandava prince Arjuna and his divine charioteer, the Lord Krishna. The next, or third, degree of love is that of parent for child, which in the Christian world is represented in the image of the Christmas Crib. One is here cultivating in one's heart the inward divine child of one's own awakened spiritual life -- in the sense of the mystic Meister Eckhart's words when he said to his congregation: 'It is more worth to God his being brought forth spiritually in the individual virgin or good soul than that he was born of Mary bodily.' And again: 'God's ultimate purpose is birth. He is not content until he brings his Son to birth in us.' In Hinduism, it is in the popular worship of the naughty little 'butter thief,' Krishna the infant among the cowherds by whom he was reared, that this theme is most charmingly illustrated. And in the modern period there is the instance of the troubled woman already mentioned, who came to the Indian saint and sage Ramakrishna, saying, 'O Master, I do not find that I love God.' And he asked, 'Is there nothing, then, that you love?' To which she answered, 'My little nephew.' And he said to her, 'There is your love and service to God, in your love and service to that child.' \r\n \r\nThe fourth degree of love is that of spouses for each other. The Catholic nun wears the wedding ring of her spiritual marriage to Christ. So too is every marriage in love spiritual. In the words attributed to Jesus, 'The two shall be one flesh.' For the 'precious thing' then is no longer oneself, one's individual life, but the duad of each as both and the living of life, self-transcended in that knowledge. In India the wife is to worship her husband as her lord; her service to him is the measure of her religion. (However, we do not hear there anything like as much of the duties of a husband to his wife.) \r\n \r\nAnd so now, finally, what is the fifth, the highest order of love, according to this Indian series? It is passionate, illicit love. In marriage, it is declared, one is still possessed of reason. One still enjoys the goods of this world and one's place in the world, wealth, social position, and the rest. Moreover, marriage in the Orient is a family-made arrangement, having nothing whatsoever to do with what in the West we now think of as love. The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one's dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm. And the aim of such a love can be only that of the moth in the image of Hallaj: to be annihilated in love's fire. In the legend of the Lord Krishna, the model is given of the passionate yearning of the young incarnate god for his mortal married mistress, Radha, and of her reciprocal yearning for him. To quote once again the mystic Ramakrishna, who in his devotion to the goddess Kali was himself, all his life, such a lover: when one has loved God in this way, sacrificing all for the vision of his face, 'O my Lord,' one can say, 'now reveal thyself!' and he will have to respond. \r\n \r\nThere is the figure also, in India, of the Lord Krishna playing his flute at night in the forest of Vrindavan, at the sound of whose irresistible strains young wives would slip from their husbands' beds and, stealing to the moonlit wood, dance the night through with their beautiful young god in transcendent bliss. \r\n \r\nThe underlying thought here is that in the rapture of love one is transported beyond temporal laws and relationships,

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One of the most amazing images of love that I know is Persian -- a mystical Persian representation of Satan as the most loyal lover of God. 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 this 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 from his love. \r\n\r\nNow it has been said that of all the pains of Hell, the worst is neither fire nor stench but the deprivation forever of the beatific sight of God. How infinitely painful, then, must the exile of this great lover be, who could not bring himself, even on God's own word, to bow before any other being! \r\n\r\nThe 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!

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Essentially the same mythological motifs are to be found throughout the world. There are myths and legends of the Virgin Birth, of Incarnations, Deaths and Resurrections; Second Comings, Judgments, and the rest, in all the great traditions. And since such images stem from the psyche, they refer to the psyche. They tell us of its structure, its order and its forces, in symbolic terms.

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Normally we think of causes and effects. I give this book a push and it moves. It moved because I pushed it. The cause preceded the effect. What is the cause, though, of the growth of an acorn? The oak that is to come! What is to happen in the future is then the cause of what is occurring now; and, at the same time, what occurred in the past is also the cause of what is happening now. In addition, a great number of things round about, on every side, are causing what is happening now. Everything, all the time, is causing everything else.

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The leading aim of all Oriental mystic teaching, consequently, might be described as that of enabling us to shift our focus of self-identification from, so to say, this light bulb to its light; from this mortal person to the consciousness of which our bodies are but the vehicles. That, in fact, is the whole sense of the famous saying of the Indian Chhandogya Upanishad, tat tvam asi, 'Thou art That,' 'You yourself are that undifferentiated universal ground of all being, all consciousness, and all bliss.

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The aim of the ascending serpent is to clarify and increase the light of consciousness within, and the first step to the gaining of this boon -- as told in the Bhagavad Gita, as in many another wisdom text -- is to abandon absolutely all concern for the fruits of action, whether in this world or in the next. As the Lord Krishna on the battlefield said to the warrior prince Arjuna, 'To the work alone are you entitled, never to its fruit. . . He who knows that the way of renunciation and the way of action are one, he verily knows.'6

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The ultimate nature of the experience of life is that toil and pleasure, sorrow and joy, are inseparably mixed in it.

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I am told that in the old days a young person desiring to learn swordsmanship in Japan would be left by the master largely unattended for a time, doing chores about the school, washing dishes, and so on; and every now and again the master himself would come popping out from somewhere and give him a smack with a stick. After a season of that sort of thing, the victim will have begun to be prepared. But that will be of no use to him, either; for when ready for the blow to come at him, say, from over there, he will get it from back here; and next, from nowhere at all. At last the baffled youth will arrive at the realization that he will do best not to ready himself in any specific direction, because if one has a notion of where the danger may be lurking, he will be attentive in the wrong direction. The only protection, then, is to be in a perpetual state of centeredness in undirected alertness, every ready for sudden attack and immediate response. \n\nThere is an amusing anecdote of a certain master of this kind who told the young men of his school that he would himself bow before anyone who, in any way whatsoever, could catch him by surprise. Days passed, and the master was never caught. He was never off guard. But then, one day when he had returned from an afternoon in the garden, he asked for some water with which to bathe his feet, and it was brought to him by a ten-year-old. The water was a bit cold. He asked the youngster to warm it. The little fellow returned with it hot, and the master, without thinking, put his feet in, quickly pulled them out, and went down on his knees in a very deep bow before the smallest boy in his school.

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I was in Japan for the Ninth International Congress on the History of Religions. One of our leading New York social philosophers, who was a conspicuous delegate to that extraordinarily colorful assemblage -- a learned, genial, and charming gentleman, who, however, had had little or no previous experience either of the Orient or of religion (in fact I wondered by what miracle he was there) -- having gone along with the rest of us on our visits to a number of noble Shinto shrines and beautiful Buddhist temples, was finally ready to ask a few significant questions. There were many Japanese members of the congress, not a few of them Shinto priests, and on the occasion of a great lawn party in the precincts of a glorious Japanese garden, our friend approached one of these. 'You know,' he said, 'I've been now to a good many ceremonies and have seen quite a number of shrines, but I don't get the ideology; I don't get your theology.'The Japanese (you may know) do not like to disappoint visitors, and this gentleman, polite, apparently respecting the foreign scholar's profound question, paused as though in deep thought, and then, biting his lips, slowly shook his head. 'I think we don't have ideology,' he said. 'We don't have theology. We dance.' That, for me, was the lesson of the congress. What it told was that in Japan, in the native Shinto religion of the land, where the rites are extremely stately, musical, and imposing, no attempt has been made to reduce their 'affect images' to words. They have been left to speak for themselves -- as rites, as works of art -- through the eyes to the listening heart. And that, I would say, is what we, in our own religious rites, had best be doing too. Ask an artist what his picture 'means,' and you will not soon ask such a question again. Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether. You don't ask what a dance means, you enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means, you enjoy it.

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let me recount now a really marvelous Hindu legend to this point, from the infinitely rich mythology of the god Shiva and his glorious world-goddess Parvati. The occasion was of a time when there came before this great divinity an audacious demon who had just overthrown the ruling gods of the world and now came to confront the highest of all with a non-negotiable demand, namely, that the god should hand over his goddess to the demon. Well, what Shiva did in reply was simply to open that mystic third eye in the middle of his forehead, and paff! a lightning bolt hit the earth, and there was suddenly there a second demon, even larger than the first. He was a great lean thing with a lionlike head, hair waving to the quarters of the world, and his nature was sheer hunger. He had been brought into being to eat up the first, and was clearly fit to do so. The first thought: 'So what do I do now?' and with a very fortunate decision threw himself upon Shiva's mercy. Now it is a well-known theological rule that when you throw yourself on a god's mercy the god cannot refuse to protect you; and so Shiva had now to guard and protect the first demon from the second. Which left the second, however, without meat to quell his hunger and in anguish he asked Shiva, 'Whom, then, do I eat?' to which the god replied, 'Well, let's see: why not eat yourself?' And with that, no sooner said than begun. Commencing with his feet, teeth chopping away, that grim phenomenon came right on up the line, through his own belly, on up through his chest and neck, until all that remained was a face. And the god, thereupon, was enchanted. For here at last was a perfect image of the monstrous thing that is life, which lives on itself. And to that sunlike mask, which was now all that was left of that lionlike vision of hunger, Shiva said, exulting, 'I shall call you 'Face of Glory,' Kirttimukha, and you shall shine above the doors to all my temples. No one who refuses to honor and worship you will come ever to knowledge of me.'10 The obvious lesson of all of which is that the first step to the knowledge 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, without 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.

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The word yoga itself, from a Sanskrit verbal root yuj, meaning 'to yoke, to link one thing to another,' refers to the act of linking the mind to the source of mind, consciousness to the source of consciousness; the import of which definition is perhaps best illustrated in the discipline known as knowledge yoga, the yoga, that is to say, of discrimination between the knower and the known, between the subject and the object in every act of knowing, and the identification of oneself, then, with the subject. 'I know my body. My body is the object. I am the witness, the knower of the object. I, therefore, am not my body.' Next: 'I know my thoughts; I am not my thoughts.' And so on: 'I know my feelings; I am not my feelings.' You can back yourself out of the room that way. And the Buddha then comes along and adds: 'You are not the witness either. There is no witness.' So where are you now? Where are you between two thoughts? That is the way known as jnana yoga, the way of sheer knowledge.

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The truth of the matter,' Dr. Watts proposed to his audience, 'is that you didn't come into this world at all. You came out of it, in just the same way that a leaf comes out of a tree or a baby from a womb. . . Just as Jesus said that one doesn't gather figs from thistles or grapes from thorns, so also you don't gather people from a world that isn't peopling. Our world is peopling, just as the apple tree apples, and just as the vine grapes.' We are a natural product of this earth, that is to say; and, as Dr. Watts observed in that same talk, if we are intelligent beings, it must be that we are the fruits of an intelligent earth, symptomatic of an intelligent energy system; for 'one doesn't gather grapes from thorns.

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The word Buddha means simply, 'awakened, an awakened one, or the Awakened One.' It is from the Sanskrit verbal root budh, 'to fathom a depth, to penetrate to the bottom'; also, 'to perceive, to know, to come to one's senses, to wake.' The Buddha is one awakened to identity not with the body but with the knower of the body, nor with thought but with the knower of thoughts, that is to say, with consciousness; knowing, furthermore, that his value derives from his power to radiate consciousness -- as the value of a lightbulb derives from its power to radiate light. What is important about a lightbulb is not the filament or the glass but the light which these bulbs are to render; and what is important about each of us is not the body and its nerves but the consciousness that shines through them. And when one lives for that, instead of for protection of the bulb, one is in Buddha consciousness.

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Next the Levantine, of about the same date, as preserved in the second chapter of Genesis: that melancholy tale, namely, of our simple ancestor, Adam, who had been fashioned of dust by his maker to till and to keep a garden. But the man was lonely, and his maker, hoping to please him, formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. None of them gave delight. 'And so the Lord,' as we read, 'caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs. . .' And the man, when he beheld the woman, said, 'This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.' We all know what next occurred -- and here we all are, in this vale of tears. But now, please notice! In this second version of the shared legend it was not the god who was split in two, but his created servant. The god did not become male and female and then pour himself forth to become all this. He remained apart and of a different substance. We have thus one tale in two totally different versions. And their implications relevant to the ideals and disciplines of the religious life are, accordingly, different too. In the Orient the guiding ideal is that each should realize that he himself and all others are of the one substance of that universal Being of beings which is, in fact, the same Self in all. Hence the typical aim of an Oriental religion is that one should experience and realize in life one's identity with that Being; whereas in the West, following our Bible, the ideal is, rather, to become engaged in a relationship with that absolutely other Person who is one's Maker, apart and 'out there,' in no sense one's innermost Self.

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First the Indian myth, as preserved in a religious work, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, of about the eighth century B.C. This tells of a time before the beginning of time, when this universe was nothing but 'the Self' in the form of a man. And that Self, as we read, 'looked around and saw that there was nothing but itself, whereupon its first shout was, 'It is I!'; whence the concept 'I' arose.' And when that Self had thus become aware of itself as an 'I,' an ego, it was afraid. But it reasoned, thinking, 'Since there is no one here but myself, what is there to fear?' Whereupon the fear departed. However, that Self, as we next are told, 'still lacked delight and wished there were another.' It swelled and, splitting in two, became male and female. The male embraced the female, and from that the human race arose. But she thought, 'How can he unite with me, who am of his own substance? Let me hide!' She became a cow, he a bull and united with her, and from that cattle arose; she a mare, he a stallion . . . and so on, down to the ants. Then he realized, 'I, actually, am Creation; for I have poured forth all this.' Whence arose the concept 'creation' (Sanskrit srishtih, 'what is poured forth'). 'Anyone understanding this becomes, truly, himself a creator in this creation.

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One has to appear in some mask or other if one is to function socially at all; and even those who choose to reject such masks can only put on others, representing rejection, 'Hell no!' or something of the sort. Many of the masks are playful, opportunistic, superficial; others, however, go deep, very deep, much deeper than we know. Just as every body consists of a head, two arms, a trunk, two legs, etc., so does every living person consist, among other features, of a personality, a deeply imprinted persona through which he is made known no less to himself than to others, and without which he would not be. It is silly, therefore, to say, for example, 'Let's take off our masks and be natural!' And yet -- there are masks and masks. There are the masks of youth, the masks of age, the masks of the various social roles, and the masks also that we project upon others spontaneously, which obscure them, and to which we then react.

46

A neurotic might be defined, in this light, as one who has failed to come altogether across the critical threshold of his adult 'second birth.' Stimuli that should evoke in him thoughts and acts of responsibility evoke those, instead, of flight to protection, fear of punishment, need for advice, and so on. He has continually to correct the spontaneity of his response patterns and, like a child, will tend to attribute his failures and troubles either to his parents or to that handy parent substitute, the state and the social order by which he is protected and supported. If the first requirement of an adult is that he should take to himself responsibility for his failures, for his life, and for his doing, within the context of the actual conditions of the world in which he dwells, then it is simply an elementary psychological fact that no one will ever develop to this state who is continually thinking of what a great thing he would have been had only the conditions of his life been different: his parents less indifferent to his needs, society less oppressive, or the universe otherwise arranged. The first requirement of any society is that its adult membership should realize and represent the fact that it is they who constitute its life and being. And the first function of the rites of puberty, accordingly, must be to establish in the individual a system of sentiments that will be appropriate to the society in which he is to live, and on which that society itself must depend for its existence.

24

It is apparent in the light of the findings of archaeology that during the first and primitive stages of the history of our species there was a general centrifugal movement of peoples into distance, to all sides, with the various populations becoming increasingly separated, each developing its own applications and associated interpretations of the shared universal motifs; whereas, since we are all now being brought together again in this mighty present period of world transport and communication, those differences are fading. The old differences separating one system from another now are becoming less and less important, less and less easy to define. And what, on the contrary, is becoming more and more important is that we should learn to see through all the differences to the common themes that have been there all the while, that came into being with the first emergence of ancestral man from the animal levels of existence, and are with us still.

23

In every one of the mythological systems that in the long course of history and prehistory have been propagated in the various zones and quarters of this earth, these two fundamental realizations -- of the inevitability of individual death and the endurance of the social order -- have been combined symbolically and constitute the nuclear structuring force of the rites and, thereby, the society.

22

If a differentiating feature is to be named, separating human from animal psychology, it is surely this of the subordination in the human sphere of even economics to mythology. And if one should ask why or how any such unsubstantial impulsion ever should have become dominant in the ordering of physical life, the answer is that, in this wonderful human brain of ours there has dawned a realization unknown to the other primates. It is that of the individual, conscious of himself as such, and aware that he, and all that he cares for, will one day die. This recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend it is the first great impulse to mythology.

20

...let me conclude with the fragment of a Hindu myth that to me seems to have captured in a particularly apt image the whole sense of such a movement as we today are all facing at this critical juncture of our general human history. It tells of a time at the very start of the history of the universe when the gods and their chief enemies, the anti-gods, were engaged in one of their eternal wars. They decided this time to conclude a truce and in cooperation to churn the Milky Ocean -- the Universal Sea -- for its butter of immortality. They took for their churning-spindle the Cosmic Mountain (the Vedic counterpart of Dante's Mountain of Purgatory), and for a twirling-cord they wrapped the Cosmic Serpent around it. Then, with the gods all pulling at the head end and the anti-gods at the tail, they caused that Cosmic Mountain to whirl. And they had been churning thus for a thousand years when a great black cloud of absolutely poisonous smoke came up out of the waters, and the churning had to stop. They had broken through to an unprecedented source of power, and what they were experiencing first were its negative, lethal effects. If the work were to continue, some one of them was going to have to swallow and absorb that poisonous cloud, and, as all knew, there was but one who would be capable of such an act; namely, the archetypal god of yoga, Shiva, a frightening daemonic figure. He just took that entire poison cloud into his begging bowl and at one gulp drank it down, holding it by yoga at the level of his throat, where it turned the whole throat blue; and he has been known as Blue Throat, Nilakantha, ever since. Then, when that wonderful deed had been accomplished, all the other gods and the anti-gods returned to their common labor. And they churned and they churned and they went right on tirelessly churning, until lo! a number of wonderful benefits began coming up out of the Cosmic Sea: the moon, the sun, an elephant with eight trunks came up, a glorious steed, certain medicines, and yes, at last! a great radiant vessel filled with the ambrosial butter. This old Indian myth I offer as a parable for our world today, as an exhortation to press on with the work, beyond fear.

120

The sin of inadvertence, not being alert, not quite awake, is the sin of missing the moment of life; whereas the whole of the art of the nonaction that is action (wu-wei) is unremitting alertness. One is then fully conscious all the time, and since life is an expression of consciousness, life is then lived, as it were, of itself. There is no need to instruct it or direct it.

19

There is no 'Thou shalt!' any more. There is nothing one has to believe, and there is nothing one has to do. On the other hand, one can of course, if one prefers, still choose to play at the old Middle Ages game, or some Oriental game, or even some sort of primitive game. We are living in a difficult time, and whatever defends us from the madhouse can be applauded as good enough -- for those without nerve.

17

Compare the science of the Bible, for example -- an Oriental scripture, assembled largely following the Maccabean rejection of Greek influence -- with that, say, of Aristotle; not to mention Aristarchus (fl. 275 B.C.), for whom the earth was already a revolving sphere in orbit around the sun. Eratosthenes (fl. 250 B.C.) had already correctly calculated the circumference of the earth as 250,000 stadia (24,662 miles: correct equatorial figure, 24,902). Hipparchus (fl. 240 B.C.) had reckoned within a few miles both the moon's diameter and its mean distance from the earth. And now just try to imagine how much of blood, sweat, and real tears -- people burned at the stake for heresy, and all that -- would have been saved, if, instead of closing all the Greek pagan schools, A.D. 529, Justinian had encouraged them! In their place, we and our civilization have had Genesis 1 and 2 and a delay of well over a thousand years in the maturation not of science only but of our own and the world's civilization.

15

Myths, so to say, are public dreams; dreams are private myths. Both, in his opinion, are symptomatic of repressions of infantile incest wishes, the only essential difference between a religion and neurosis being that the former is the more public.

232

There is a Japanese saying I recall once having heard, of the five stages of 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.

46

The young human being responds to the challenges of its environment by turning to its parents for advice, support, and protection, and before it can be trusted as an adult, this patterning must be altered. Accordingly, one of the first functions of the puberty rites of primitive societies, and indeed of education everywhere, has been always that of switching the response systems of adolescents from dependency to responsibility