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.”
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.
PSYCHOLOGY 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.”
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living Page 10