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
NOW in every human being there is a built-in human instinct system, without which we should not even come to birth. But each of us has also been educated to a specific local culture system.…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 v
isible. 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.
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Page 9