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.
WHEN 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.”
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Page 10