Joseph Campbell- The Inner Reaches of Outer Space

[haselhurst]

The Inner Reaches of Outer Space (Joseph Campbell)

Hi All,
I was hunting out some work from my computer and was surprised to find that I had actually quoted Campbell's book (it belonged to my father, and I got all his books when he died back in 1993). Sadly I never got to discuss truth and reality with him - in fact back then i never really thought about it.

Karene spent over a year typing out quotes for me - but it was 7 years ago and I had forgotten this one.

So NJ and others - you will hopefully find some of it useful - and you can thank my Dad and Karene.

Cheers,
Geoff
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‘These things are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and all lands, they are not original with me.’ (Walt Whitman)(p.20)

“The best things can’t be told: the second best are misunderstood.” (Zimmer)
The second best are misunderstood because, as metaphors poetically of that which cannot be told, they are misread prosaically as referring to tangible facts. (p.21)

1. Cosmology and the Mythic Imagination

“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?” (Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic)
The little module was out beyond the moon. That was a part of space that no one had ever before visited. Yet it was known to the scientists in Houston exactly how much energy to eject from the jets, when turned in just what direction, to bring the module down from outer space to within a mile of a battleship waiting for it in the Pacific Ocean.
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. During the following flight, when Armstrong’s booted foot came down to leave its imprint on the surface of the moon, no one knew how deeply it might sink into lunar dust. That was to be knowledge a posteriori, knowledge from experience, knowledge after the event. But how to bring the module down, and how to get it up there, had been known from the beginning. Moreover, those later spacecraft that are now cruising far out beyond the moon, in what is known as outer space! It is known exactly how to manoeuvre them, to bring messages back, to turn around, even to correct their faults.
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. (p.27-8)

In 1905 Albert Einstein’s founding statement of the modern theory of relativity: “It is impossible by any experiment whatsoever to determine absolute rest.” (p.29)

Geoff - This is not true - you can measure absolute motion relative to the cosmic background radiation. They just did not have that data then. And it is proof against relativity.

And so now, of all the possible centers, our own earth, of course, is the only one available to us. Revolving on its own axis once every twenty-four hours, this operational still point is annually circling one of the several hundred billion suns that constitute our galaxy, this sun itself meanwhile traveling at the rate of 136 miles per second around the periphery of our native galaxy, circling it once every 230 million years. The diameter of this galaxy, this Milky Way of exploding stars, is now described as 100 000 light years, a light year being the distance light travels in one year. But light travels at the rate of 186 000 miles per second, and the number of seconds a year is
31 5576000. So if we multiply 186 000 miles by 31 557 600 seconds, we arrive at the idea of one light year, which is namely 5 trillion, 869 billion, 713 million, 600 thousand miles. And 100 000 of these will then amount to 586 quadrillion, 971 trillion, 360 billion (586 971 360 000 000 000) miles. And within this galaxy of that diameter, the nearest sun to our sun, nearest star to our star, is Alpha in Centauri, which is about 4 light years, a mere 25 trillion miles away. (p.30)

“The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and inner worlds meet.” (Novalis)
That is the wonder-land of myth. From the outer world the senses carry images to the mind, which do not become myth, however, until there transformed by fusion with accordant insights, awakened as imagination from the inner world of the body. (p.31)

All mythologies, finally, are works of art of this order and effect. Sociologically and psychologically, however, it makes a great difference what images they present; for the degree of their opening of inner space is a function of the reach into outer space that they unclose. (p.32)

“But anywhere is the center of the world.” (Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, 1968)(p.34)

A decisive, enormous leap out of the confines of all local histories and landscapes occurred in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC. That was the period when writing was invented; also, mathematical measurement and the wheel. The priestly watchers of the night skies at that time were the first in the world to recognize that there is mathematical regularity in the celestial passages of the seven visible spheres- the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn- along the heaven-way of the Zodiac. And with that, the idea dawned of a cosmic order, mathematically discoverable, which it should be the function of a governing priesthood to translate from its heavenly revelation into an order of civilized human life. The idea of the hieratic city-state made its appearance at that time, with kings and queens symbolically attired, enacting together with their courts an aristocratic mime in imitation of the celestial display, the king crowned as moon or the sun, his queen and other members of their court as planetary presences. (p.34)

‘And THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH..’ (Prayer p.37)

The mystery of the night sky, those enigmatic passages of slowly but steadily moving lights among the fixed stars, had delivered the revelation, when charted mathematically, of a cosmic order, and in response, from the depths of the human imagination, a reciprocal recognition had been evoked. A vast concept took form of the universe as a living being in the likeness of a great mother, within whose womb all the worlds, both of life and death, had their existence.
And the human body is in miniature a duplicate of that macrocosmic form. So that throughout the whole an occult harmony prevails, which it is the function of a mythology and relevant rites to make known. The Chinese idea of the Tao is a development out of this macro-microcosmic insight. Hinduism in all its aspects carries into every act of life the idea of dharma (“virtue”) as conformity to the caste laws of one’s birth, which are understood to be, not of social intervention, but given of nature, like the laws of action of the various animal species. The noun dharma is from a verbal root dhri (“to hold, to bear, to support”). For by conforming perfectly to one’s dharma (sva-dharma), as do the various animal species to theirs, the plants to theirs, and the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars to theirs, one at once supports the universe and is supported by it. And so, indeed, in our modern Western world, when a doctor takes a patient’s pulse, if the beat is sixty a minute (43 200 in twelve hours), it is the pulse of a conditioned athlete in accord at once with his own nature and with the rhythm of the universe: the function of medicine, like that of mythology and ritual, being to keep mankind in accord with the natural order.
(A startling microcosmic revelation of the mystic force of this number came recently to light when engineers in the Wilson Sporting Goods laboratories testing (for distance) golf balls with anywhere from 30 to 1212 dimples were advised by computer that the optimum number would be 432. For indeed, the Wilson 432 golf ball has been found by professionals to lengthen their drives some ten to thirteen or more yards.) (p.39)

According to Zarathustra, (Zoroaster to the Greeks. Some scholars place him at 1200 BC, others six to seven centuries later), there were two creator-gods, a good god Ahura Mazda, of light, truth and of justice, and an evil god, Angra Mainyu, of darkness, deception and malice. In the beginning, Ahura Mazda created a universe of virtue and light, which Angra Mainyu then maliciously corrupted; so that the world in which we live is mixed of good and evil. Man is therefore not to put himself in accord with nature- as in the ancient and oriental worlds- but to make a decision for the good, put himself in accord with the good, fight for justice and the light, and correct nature. (p41-2)

Black Elk’s word, “The center is everywhere,” is matched by a statement from a hermetic, early medieval text, The Book of the Twenty Four Philosophers: “God is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”
The idea, it seems to me, is in a most appropriate way illustrated in that stunning photograph taken from the moon, and now frequently reproduced, of an earth-rise, the earth rising as a radiant celestial orb, strewing light over a lunar landscape. Is the center the earth? Is the center the moon? The center is anywhere you like. Moreover, in that photograph from its own satellite, the rising earth shows none of those divisible territorial lines that on our maps are so conspicuous and important. The chosen center may be anywhere. The Holy Land is no special place. It is every place that has ever been recognised and mythologised by any people as home.
Moreover, this understanding of the ubiquity of the metaphysical center perfectly matches the lesson of the galaxies and of the Michelson-Morley finding that was epitomised in Einstein’s representation of the utter impossibility of establishing absolute rest. It is the essence of relativity. And, when translated from the heavens to this earth, it implies that moral judgements depend likewise upon the relation of the frame of reference to the person or act being measured. “Judge not that you be not judged” (Matthew 7:1). (p.44)

And so, in mythological terms what is to happen now? All of our old gods are dead, and the new have not yet been born. (p.45)

2. Metaphor as Myth and as Religion

The Problem
From the point of view of any orthodoxy, myth might be defined simply as “other people’s religion,” to which an equivalent definition of religion would be “misunderstood mythology,” the misunderstanding consisting in the interpretation of mythic metaphors as references to hard fact: the Virgin Birth, for example, as a biological anomaly, or the Promised Land as a portion of the Near East to be claimed and settled by a people chosen of God, the term “God” here to be understood as denoting an actual, though invisible, masculine personality, who created the universe and is now resident in an invisible, though actual, heaven to which the “justified” will go when they die, there to be joined at the end of time by their resurrected bodies.
What, in the name of Reason or Truth, is a modern mind to make of such evident nonsense?
Like dreams, myths are productions of the human imagination. Their images, consequently, though derived from the material world and its supposed history, are, like dreams, revelations of the deepest hopes, desires and fears, potentialities and conflicts, of the human will- which in turn is moved by the energies of the organs of the body operating variously against each other and in concert. Every myth, that is to say, whether or not by intention, is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.
Mythologies are addressed, however, as dreams normally are not, to questions of the origins, both of the natural world and of the arts, laws and customs of a local people, physical things being understood in this view as metaphysically grounded in a dreamlike mythological realm beyond space and time, which, since it is physically invisible, can be known only to the mind. And as the insubstantial shapes of dream arise from the formative ground of the individual will, so do all the passing shapes of the physical world arise (according to this way of thought) from a universal, morphogenetic ground that is made known to the mind through the figurations of myth.
These mythic figurations are the “ancestral forms,” the insubstantial archetypes, of all that is beheld by the eye as physically substantial, material things being understood as ephemeral concretions out of the energies of these noumena. (p.55-6)

The distinguishing first function of a properly read mythology is to release the mind from its naïve fixation upon such false ideas, which are of material things as things-in-themselves. Hence, the figurations of myth are metaphorical (as dreams normally are not) in two senses simultaneously, as bearing (1) psychological, but at the same time (2) metaphysical, connotations. By way of this dual focus the psychologically significant features of any local social order, environment or supposed history can become transformed through myth into transparencies revelatory of transcendence. (p.56)

Immanuel Kant has supplied an astonishingly simple formula for the interpretation of such dual statements. It appears in his fundamental Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysic. What there is offered is a four-term analogy (a is to b as c is to x), pointing not to an imperfect resemblance of two things, but to a perfect resemblance of two relationships between quite dissimilar things: not “a somewhat resembles b,” but “the relationship of a to b perfectly resembles that of c to x,” where x represents a quality that is not only unknown but absolutely unknowable- which is to say, is metaphysical.
Kant demonstrates the formula in two examples:
1) As the promotion of the happiness of the children (a) is related to the parents’ love (b), so is the welfare of the human race (c) to that unknown in God (x) which we call God’s love; and
2) The causality of the highest cause (x) is precisely, in respect to the world (c), what human reason (b) is in respect to the work of human art (a).
The first of these propositions is of the mythological order (of the heart); the second, philosophical (of the head). Kant discusses the implication of the second of the two as follows:
“Herewith the nature of the highest cause itself remains unknown to me; I only compare its known effect (namely, the constitution of the universe) and the rationality of this effect with the known effects of human reason, and therefore I call that highest cause a Reason, without thereby attributing to it as its proper quality, either the thing that I understand by this term in the case of man, or any other thing with which I am familiar.” (p. 57)

Eternity being by definition outside or beyond temporality, transcendent of all categories, whether of virtue or of reason (being and nonbeing, unity and multiplicity, love and justice, forgiveness and wrath), the term and concept “God” is itself but a metaphor of the unknowing mind, connotative, not only beyond itself, but beyond thought. So that all that can be said of it, whether as touching time or eternity, has to be in the way of an “as if” (als ob): philosophically and theologically (as Kant has just shown), thorough the analogy of a rationally inferred First Cause, and mythologically (as in his earlier example), in the way of psychologically affective image transparent to transcendence. (p.57)

One cannot but ask: What can such tribal literalism possibly constitute but agony to such a world of intercultural, global prospects as that of our present century? It all comes of misreading metaphors.. (p. 58)

Metaphor as Fact and Fact as Metaphor

“Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift up the stone and you will find me there” (Logion 77:26-27) “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it” (Logion 113:17). (Words of Christ reported in the recently discovered Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas)
The relevant Sanskrit terms are, respectively, maya, the formation of delusion, and bodhi, illumination. (p. 61)

Metaphors of Psychological Transformation

In the normal course of a well-favoured human lifetime the unfolding of the body’s vital energy transpires through marked stages of transformation which in the pictographic lexicon of India’s yogic schools are represented as controlled from separate spinal centers known as cakras.
The first and lowest of the series, described as situated between anus and genitalia, is known as the muladhara (“root base”) and identified as the motivating center of that simple, primal holding to life which is of infancy and early childhood. The body’s urgency at this stage is to feeding and assimilating, which is the precondition of all animal life, which can only exist by consuming lives.
The second bioenergetic station, svadhishthana (energy’s “own, or especial standing place”), is of sexuality, awakened during adolescence. And the third, manipura (“city of the shining jewel”), at the level of the navel, is then of the will to power, mastery and control, which in its healthy, positive aspect is of power achieved, pride in responsibility; but in its morbid, negative form it appears as an insatiable will to conquer, plunder and subjugate, converting everything and everybody within reach into one’s own or one’s like.
These three centers have supplied the motivations of historical man, his effective moral systems and his nightmare of world history.

They are the centers of the basic urges, furthermore, that mankind shares with the beasts- namely,
1) to survive alive by feeding on other lives
2) to generate offspring
3) to conquer and subdue.
Unrestrained by any control system, these become devastating, as the history of the present century surely tells. (p. 63)

The elevation of the human will to aims transcendental of this bestial order of life requires, according to the yogic model, an awakening that will not be of the pelvic region, but of cakra 4, which is of the heart, anahata. (p. 64)

Apparently, the words of Christ, “But I say to you, Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44) (p. 66)

There is a Hindu Tantric saying, nadevo devam arcayet, “by none but a god shall a god be worshipped”. (p. 67)

In the vocabulary of yoga, the two modes of realisation, at Cakra 6 & 7, are termed respectively, of saguna Brahman (the “qualified absolute”) and nirguna Brahman (the “unqualified absolute”), while the two related orders of meditation are, respectively, savikalpa samadhi (“discriminating absorption”) and nirvikalpa samadhi (“undifferentiated absorption”). “But this,” said Ramakrishna in discussion with the latter, “is an extremely difficult path. To one who follows it even the divine play in the world becomes like a dream and appears unreal; his ‘I’ also vanishes. The followers of this path do not accept the Divine Incarnation. It is a very difficult path. The lovers of God should not hear much of such reasoning.” (p. 68)

Threshold Figures

For as threshold figures, these are of the two worlds at once: temporal in the human appeal of their pictured denotations, while by connotation opening to eternity. (p. 69)

“Thus he realised that God has form and, again, is formless.”
“Brahman, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss-Absolute is like a shoreless ocean. In the ocean visible blocks of ice are formed here and there by intense cold. Similarly, under the cooling influence, so to speak, of the devotion [bhakti] of its worshipers, the Infinite transforms itself into the Finite and appears before the worshipper as God with form. That is to say, God reveals Himself to His devotees as an embodied Person. Again, as, on the rising of the sun, the ice in the ocean melts away, so, on the awakening of Knowledge [jnana], the embodied God melts back into the infinite and formless Brahman..” (Ramakrishna) (p. 69)

“which neither is born, nor does it ever die; nor, having once been will it cease to be. Unborn, eternal, perpetual and primeval, it is not slain when the body is slain.” (Bhagavad Gita 2:20). (p. 70)

“..at some point the body and mind together become fundamentally aware and convinced that the energy by which the body is pervaded is the same as that which illuminates the world and maintains alive all beings..” (Avalon, The Serpent Power, 1931) (p.73)

A simple Buddhist interpretation of the two threatening figures at the portal to immortality would be as representing, not the obstructing will of an external god, but the inhibiting attachment of the human will itself to physical mortality, in obsessive fear of physical death. For in this view immortality is already ours. Only the mind’s attachment to mortal aims has deprived us of this knowledge. Physical desire and fear (the two temptations overcome by Prince Gautama Shakyamuni on the night of his attainment of Buddhahood) are all that are debarring us from the Garden in which, ironically, we already dwell; for in this tradition there never was an Exile, only a mistaken focus of mind; as Jesus also is reported to have declared (in the recently discovered and translated Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas): “The Kingdom is within you” (Logion 3) and again, “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it (Logion 113). (p. 80)

The Indian idea of dharma (virtue in the performance of duty) and Chinese of the tao (the unitary first principle from which all order, change, and propriety in action spring) are alike derived from the same prehistoric background as the ancient Egyptian idea of the goddess Maat. And the structuring realisation out of which these equivalent ideas arose was of a society and its members as equally products of nature: to be held in accord with nature by means of metaphorical disciplines, social and psychological, intending harmonisation of the individual will with the general will and thereby with the will of nature. This is the idea already recognised in the Mesopotamian number
43 200 and its transformations, correlating, as of one measure, the cycles of the celestial spheres, periods of historic time, and pulsations of the human heart. Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) adds that in the Indian yogic schools it is held that all living beings exhale and inhale 21 600 times a day. 21 6000 x 2 = 43 2000.
In such a context, since the macrocosm (order of the universe), microcosm (order of the individual) and mesocosm (order of the attuned society) are equivalent, the social ideals and moral principles by which the individual is constrained to his group are conceived to be, finally, of his own nature. (p. 88-9)

“Nature [here] is something hostile to Man and drags him down when he is struggling to reach God. ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ [Matthew 26:41].”
“Man is against God, Nature is against God, and Man and Nature are against each other. God’s own likeness (Man), God’s own creation (Nature) and God himself- all three are at war.” (Suzuki, The Role of Nature in Zen Buddhism, 1954) (p. 89)

In the 1950s R. Gordon Wasson’s investigations of the Mexican pre-Columbian mushroom cult (in collaboration with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist renowned for his discovery of LSD in 1943) established beyond question the prominence of hallucinogens in the religious exercises of the whole Mayan-Aztec culture field. The same investigators in conjunction with the classicist, Carl A.P. Ruck, have lately revealed the likelihood of the influence of a hallucinogen (ergot of barley) in the Greek mysteries of Eleusis. Already in 1968, Wasson published his disclosure of the mysterious Vedic sacramental, Soma, as probably a product of the mushroom Amanita muscaria (fly agaric). Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception (1954), describing his own visionary experiences under the influence of Mescalin, opened the way to a popular appreciation of the ability of hallucinogens to render perceptions of a quasi, or even truly, mystical profundity. There can be no doubt today that through the use of such sacramentals, revelations indistinguishable from some of those reported of yoga have been experienced. Nor can there be any doubt that the source of the revelations is the psyche of the practitioner- the unconscious, that is to say. They are revelations, that is to say further, of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, elementary ideas a priori of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, such as may appear spontaneously no matter where. (p. 90)

The Metaphorical Journey

Adolf Bastian’s theory of a concord throughout the mythologies of the world of certain Elementargedanken, “elementary ideas” (Das Bestandige in den Menschenrassen, Berlin, 1868) was confirmed for me beyond question by these apparently far-flung researchers. The first task of any systematic comparison of the myths and religions of mankind should therefore be (it seemed to me) to identify these universals (or, as C.G. Jung termed them, archetypes of the unconscious) and as far as possible to interpret them; and the second task then should be to recognise and interpret the various locally and historically conditioned transformations of the metaphorical images through which these universals have been rendered. (p99)

Metaphorical Identification

In the Hindu ascent of the sushumna, the chakras of the lower centers are identified, respectively, as of the elements of Earth, Water and Fire, the associated divinities being the Brahma the creator, Vishnu as Preserver and Lover, and Shiva as the Destroyer of Obstructions to Illumination. (p. 102)

Kundalini yoga, not only is extremely difficult, but should also not be practiced by the lovers of God, as Ramakrishna says: “To one who follows it even the divine play in the world becomes like a dream and appears unreal; his ‘I’ also vanishes.” At Chakra 4, anahata, where the sound OM is first heard that is not made by any two things striking together, the element into which the yogi is absorbed is Air (vayu, the life-breath; prana, spiritus, pure spirit); while at Chakra 5 he devolves into akasa, Space. “Boundless am I as Space!” exclaims the ancient sage, Ashtavakra. “The phenomenal world is like an empty jar [enclosing Space, which nevertheless is boundless]. Thus known, phenomenality need be neither renounced, accepted, nor destroyed.” (p. 102-3)

The comparable figure in the Indian system is of the nada, the creative sound OM of the energy of the light, ever resounding in the akasa: beyond which “space,” both in Dante’s concluding cantos (Paradiso XXXI-XXXIII) and in the stations six and seven of the Indian sushumna, the culminating experiences are, first, of the vision of one’s image of God and, then, of a transcendent Light which is the energy of the living world. (p. 103)

The white footprints of the ceremonial path do not identify the initiate with either the rainbow or the lightning, only with the middle way; which is to say, apparently, that there is to be no absorption of the individual in identifications either with the gross matter of the world or with the unembodied light of sheer spirit. Both are recognised, evidently, as attributes of the Pollen Path. (p. 105)

The Net of Gems

The yogi experiencing nondual identification of the Self (atman) with the Being, Consciousness, and Bliss which transcends yet moves the universe and all beings (sac-cid-ananda Brahman), may remain so fixed in this rapture of the Chakras 6 and 7 (“realised disengagement, perfected isolation, absolute unification,” kaivalyam) that his body is abandoned, to continue as a dried leaf blown by a wind until it goes to pieces. Such, they say, is the spiritual state of the wandering mendicant, sannyasin. As described by Shankara: “Though doing, he is inactive, though bearing the fruits of past acts, unaware of them; disembodied though embodied, omnipresent though locally walking about: such a knower of Brahman, everywhere living on as though bodiless, is ever untouched by either pleasure or pain, goodness or evil.”
Or the one thus “released while living” (jivanmukta) may voluntarily return to the state of mind of Chakra 4, either in the way of a Mahayana Bodhisattva whose “being” (sattva) is “illumination” (bodhi), touched by compassion for all suffering beings, who, renouncing for himself release from rebirth, returns to the world as a teaching saviour, or in the way simply of one fulfilled in the knowledge of an eternal mystery at play through himself as through all the productions of time, and who is thus competent to participate with joy and courage, in the sorrows of the world. As interpreted by Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe):
‘If the ultimate Reality is one which exists in two aspects, of quiescent enjoyment of the Self in Liberation from all form and of active enjoyment of objects- that is, as pure “Spirit” and as “Spirit” in matter- then a complete union with Reality demands such unity in both its aspects. It must be known both “here” (Iha) and “there” (Amutra)… It is the one Shiva who is the supreme blissful experience, and who appears in the form of man with a life of mingled pleasure and pain. Both happiness here and the bliss of liberation here and hereafter may be attained if the identity of these Shivas be realised in every human act. This will be achieved by making every human function, without exception, a religious act of sacrifice and worship (Yajna).. And so on Tantric Sadhaka (adept), when eating or drinking, or fulfilling any of the other natural functions of the body, does so, saying and believing, Shivo’ham (“I am Shiva”), Bhairavo’ham (“I am Bhairava”), Sa’ham (“I am She”). It is not merely the separate individual who thus acts and enjoys. It is Shiva who does so in and through him’.
In the words of the legendary Ashtavakra: “Having realised the Self in all and all in the Self, released from egoism and the sense of ‘mine,’ be happy [sukhi bhava, ‘enjoy’]!” (p. 106-7)

‘When these songs are sung over a man, the spirit of the man makes the journey that the song describes. Upon the rainbow he moves from mountain to mountain, for it is thus that the gods travel, standing upon the rainbow. The rainbow is swift as lightning.’ (Curtis, The Indians’ Book, 1907)(p. 109)

Said the Gnostic Jesus: “If those who lead you say to you: ‘See, the Kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of the heaven will precede you. If they say to you: ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. But the Kingdom is within you and it is without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty and you are in poverty” (Logion 3). “I am the Light that is above them all, I am the All, the All came forth from Me and the All attained to Me” (Logion 77). “Whoever drinks from My mouth shall become as I am and I myself will become he, and the hidden things shall be revealed to him” (Logion 108). (The Gospel According to Thomas)
“I am the universal atman, I am the All!” exclaims the illuminated disciple of the great guru of gurus Shankara. “I am transcendent, nondual, unrelated, infinite knowledge. Sheer bliss am I, indivisible.” And the master Ashtavakra: “You pervade the universe and the universe exists in you. You are by nature Pure Consciousness. Do not be small-minded!” (p. 109-10)

Comparably, the dream or nightmare of our lives is a production of our own hidden will. But the dreams and lives of all interlock, as though of a single, superordinated context; “so that,” as the philosopher observes, “in the way of a veritable Harmonia praestabiliter, each dreams only to accord with his own metaphysical associations, yet all the life-dreams are interlocked so artfully that each, though experiencing only what is profitable to himself, is yet fulfilling the requirements of others.. (p. 110)

“Our hesitation before such a colossal thought will perhaps be diminished by the recollection,” Schopenhauer suggests in conclusion, “that the ultimate dreamer of the vast life-dream is finally, in a certain sense, but one, namely the Will to Live, and that the multiplicity of appearances follows from the conditioning effects of time and space [the morphogenetic field whereby the Will to Live assumes forms]. It is the one great dream dreamed by a single Being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Hence, everything links and accords with everything else.”
The Indian image of the “Net of Dreams,” where in every gem of the net all the others are reflected, is a counterpart of this idea. Another likeness may be seen in the Buddhist doctrine of “mutual arising” (pratitya-samutpada), as represented in the Mahayana “Flower Wreath Sutra,” the Avatamsaka (Japanese, Kegon), which has been defined as a theory of the “causation of the universe and its events by the common action-influence of all beings.” Another image is of the Hindu divinity Vishnu couched on the back of the Cosmic Serpent, Ananta (“Unending”), floating on the Cosmic Milky Ocean, dreaming the dream of the Universe. (p. 111)
Schopenhauer was apparently the first philosopher to realise that Immanuel Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), not only had demolished the philosophical mansions both of Cartesian rationalism (the eighteenth-century Enlightenment) and of Baconian empiricism (Anglo-Saxon “common sense”), but also had established the prerequisites for a correlation of oriental and occidental metaphysical terms. For Kant’s a priori forms of sensibility (time and space) and
a priori categories of judgement-(1) of quantity: unity, plurality, universality; (2) of quality: affirmation, negation, limitation; (3) of relation: substantiality, causation, reciprocity; (4) of modality: possibility, actuality, necessity- are exactly India’s maya (from the verbal root ma, “to form, to build”), that deluding faculty of the mind by which Brahman-atman (=Kant’s Thing-in-itself”) is veiled from direct experience and projected transformed as the phenomena of space-time. Schopenhauer’s own crucial contribution, then, was in his realisation that whereas our outer eyes do indeed behold only phenomenal appearances (Vorstellungen) within a three-dimensional field of space-time (Die Welt als Vorstellung), the inward experience of each and every one of those appearances is of him, her, or itself as a willing subject (Die Welt als Wille), this inward experience of the Will to Live then being, in fact, a veiled experience within oneself of the energy of atman-brahman, the universal Self, as linked however to samsara (the temporal, apparitional field) by the apparition’s own fear of death and desire for continued apparitional existence. The impulse of one’s Will to Live, that is to say, the inward experience of the atman as oneself; and the correlative outward experience of the atman as another occurs- as Schopenhauer recognised- only by way of the insight of compassion (karuna), which is the quality of the Bodhisattva:
‘How is it possible,’ he asks in his celebrated essay On The Foundation of Morality, ‘How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action?.. This is something really mysterious, something for which Reason can provide no explanation, and for which no basis can be found in practical experience. It is nevertheless of common occurrence, and everyone has had the experience. It is not unknown even to the most hard-hearted and self-interested. Examples appear every day before our eyes of instant responses of the kind, without reflection, one person helping another, coming to his aid, even setting his own life in clear danger for someone whom he has seen for the first time, having nothing more in mind than that the other is in need and in peril of his life..’
Schopenhauer’s answer to his question if that this immediate reaction and response represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realisation- “tat tvam asi, thou art that.”
“This presupposes that I have to some extent identified myself with the other and therewith removed for the moment the barrier between the ‘I’ and the ‘Not-I’. Only then can the other’s situation, his want, his need, become mine. I then no longer see him in the way of an empirical perception, as one strange to me, indifferent to me, completely other than myself; but in him I suffer, in spite of the fact that his skin does not enfold my nerves.”
“Individuation is but an appearance in a field of space and time, these being the conditioning forms through which my cognitive faculties apprehend their objects. Hence the multiplicity and differences that distinguish individuals are likewise but appearances. They exist only in my mental representation (in meiner Vorstellung). My own true inner being actually exists in every living creature as truly and immediately as known to my consciousness only in myself. This realisation, for which the standard formula in Sanskrit is tat tvam asi, is the ground of that compassion (Mitleid) upon which all true, that is to say unselfish, virtue rests and whose expressions is in every good deed.” (Schopenhauer, 1840)
Everything in such a vision of the world-in-being is held and moves in relationship to every thing else , to accord with an end that is not of the order of time, yet is everywhere fulfilled in time. William Blake’s statement in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time,’ is an adumbration of the paradoxology of the game of hide-and-seek that Non-duality is playing with and in celebration of itself in la divina commedia of this night of its dream. (p. 113)
‘The cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite and holy, whereas now it appears finite and corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ the narrow chinks of his cavern. (Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)(p. 115)
“That [which is beyond every name and form] is comprehended only by the one with no comprehension of it: anyone comprehending, knows it not. Unknown to the knowing, it is to the unknowing known.” (Kena Upanishad) (p. 115)
3. The Way of Art

For the reality to which the artist and the mystic are exposed is, in fact, the same. It is of their own inmost truth brought to consciousness: by the mystic, in direct confrontation, and by the artist, through reflection in the masterworks of his art. The fact that the nature of the artist (as a microcosm) and the nature of the universe (as a macrocosm) are two aspects of the same reality (respectively, as a minute part of the whole, experienced from within, and as a whole, viewed from without- equivalent, respectively, to Schopenhauer’s “world as will” and “world as spectacle or idea”) accounts sufficiently for that creative interplay of discovery and recognition which alerts the artist to the possibility of a revelatory composition in which outer and inner realities are recognised as the same. (p. 121)

“Beautiful things are those that please when seen”. (Thomas Aquinas)
Beauty is thus a value, a good, an end in itself. Ugliness depresses, beauty exhilarates, heightening the sense of life, which again is a good in itself. Normally art aspires to beauty and thus to a sensuous glorification of life: so that Nietzsche could write to the esthetics of art as “nothing but applied physiology.” Whereas l’art pour l’art, in his view, was an aberration of the ‘Decadence’ of his century: “the virtuosic croaking of cold-blooded frogs, despairing in their swamp.”
Beauty we may regard, then, as a normal and proper intention of the Way of Art, affirmative in its sensuous glorification of life, and thus grounded in physiology. To this degree, the Way of Art, coincides with the Way of Beauty. However, there is another and further possible degree or range of the revelation of art that is beyond beauty, namely the sublime, which has been defined as “that which arouses sentiments of awe and reverence and a sense of vastness and power overreaching comprehension.” Cosmic space and great distances may be experienced as sublime; also, detonations of prodigious power. If beauty so heightens our sense of life that esthetics may be termed “applied physiology,” the sublime, transcending physical definitions, suggests magnitudes exceeding life; not refuting, but augmenting life. And from this perspective, viewing art, the same Nietzsche declared: “Art is the proper task of life, art is life’s metaphysical exercise.. Art is more worth than truth.” (p. 122)

“Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.” (Joyce, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man)(p. 122)

The blast will not make a lot of noise, nor will it break upon us all at once. In fact, the conditions for its coming are already here. As viewed by astronauts from the moon, the earth lacks those lines of sociopolitical division that are so prominent on maps. And as recognising here below, the web of interlacing socio-economic interdependencies that now infolds the planet is of one life. All that is required is a general change of vision to accord with these contemporary facts. And this will occur is certain. It is, in fact, already occurring. Moreover, the vision required is nothing new, nor unnatural. What are unnatural, artificial and contrived are the separations. (p. 124)

At the summit of a symbolic pyramid (the World Mountain), of the Great Seal of the United States, we see an eye within a radiant, upward-pointing triangle (the World’s Eye, God’s Eye, Eye of Spirit). It is at that point of rest (stasis) at the summit where the opposed sides come together. Above it is an inscription: Annuit coeptis, “He or It (God, the Eye) has smiled on our undertakings” (which is adapted from Virgil’s Aenid IX.625). Below, displayed on a scroll, is another inscription: Novus ordo seclorum, “A new order of the world.” And along the base of the pyramid is the date, 1776, in Roman numerals. Across the bill is an American bald eagle, bearing in its beak a scroll with the inscription E pluribus unum, “Out of many, one”. (p. 125)

The vision of the Black Elk on the symbolic summit of Harney Peak, “seeing in a sacred manner, the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shapes of all things as they must live together, like one being,” had been achieved in the mystic way by an especially gifted shaman.
In contrast, the elegant eighteenth century engraving still to be seen on the back of our twentieth-century dollar bill represents a realisation of the philosophical way pursued by that extraordinary company of deists to whom we owe the establishment, in reason, of this nation. Composed of elements adapted from a hermetic tradition of great antiquity and universality (undoubtedly assembled from the library and great learning of Thomas Jefferson), its pictorial vocabulary is so little understood today that many suppose the word “God” of its maxim, “In God we trust,” to be a reference to the “God” of the Christian religion, which it is not. For the deists rejected the idea of the “Fall” and, with that, the necessity for “Redemption,” as well as the idea of a special Judeo-Christian revelation. Man’s nature, in their view, is not corrupt. The idea of God is innate in man’s mind from the beginning; so that by reason alone man has arrived, everywhere, at a recognition of God which is sufficient. Religious intolerance is blasphemy, since in their primal ground and ultimate sense, all religions are one, as is mankind. (p. 125-6)

“The Tao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All Things” (Tao The Ching)(p. 128)

It is ironical today that we should be passing around as legal tender these sociological manifestos without being able to read the message of democracy engraved on every one of them, the spiritual inspiration out of which their economic value has been derived. So that, not only the message, but even its whole vocabulary has been lost. (p. 130)

“Aquinas says,” says Stephen Dedalus, “ad pulcritundinem tria requiruntur, integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, radiance.” (Joyce, 1916) (p. 131)

This is the esthetic instrument: rhythm, consonantia. The parts may be objects, colours, words and their sounds, musical intervals, architectural features and proportions. “You pass,” says Stephen, “from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure.” (Joyce)(p.131)

Beauty apprehended should have the power to illuminate the senses, still the mind and enchant the heart. “Art,” Cézanne has said somewhere, “is a harmony parallel to nature.” And I recall having heard the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle declare, as one of his maxims: “L’art fait ressortir les grandes lignes de la nature.” For nature, as we know, is at once without and within us. Art is the mirror at the interface. So too is ritual; so also myth. These, too, “bring out the grand lines of Nature,” and in doing so, re-establish us in our own deep truth, which is at one with that of all being.
So that the artist, functioning in this “proper” way, is the true seer and prophet of his century, the justifier of life and as such, of course, a revolutionary far more fundamental in his penetration of the social mask of his day than any fanatic idealist spilling blood over the pavement in the name of simply another unnatural mask.
Wholeness, harmony and radiance, then, are the prime requirements of any work of what Joyce would term proper art. In its own space, the object or composition is set apart as a thing of beauty in its own nature, which is experienced as akin to that of the witness. There is a telling moment of impact when this recognition strikes, and one is held as by the mystery of one’s own face in the glass. (p. 132)

In Aristotle’s Poetics, tragedy is analysed as a form of dramatic composition in which the leading character is by some passion or limitation brought to a catastrophe.
But every life, either knowingly or unknowingly, is in process towards its limitation in death, which limitation is of the nature of life. Moreover, every significant act sets up a counterfield of resistance, in the way of the Buddhist doctrine of “dependent origination, or mutual arising” (pratitya-samutpada) (p. 133)

Plato writes of katharsis as the “defeat of the sensations of pleasure.” The ultimate effect, that is to say, is not to be of beauty (which “when seen pleases”), but of the sublime (“outreaching human comprehension”). (p. 134)

Thus a breakthrough is accomplished from biography to metaphysics, the backdrop of time dissolves and the prospect opens of an occult power shaping our lives that is at once of the universe and of each of us, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, blazing in the sun, reflected in the moon, and coursing as the ache of desire through the veins. (p. 135)

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where the past and future are gathered. Neither movement
from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving..
(T.S. Elliot “Burnt Norton” 1943) (p. 136)

Assumed from the beginning is the metaphysical principle announce already in the Chhandogya Upanishad (ninth century BC), “Thou art that” (tat tvam asi), which is to say, thou art, in truth, a form of that same transcendent consciousness of which all phenomena, physical as well as psychical, are forms. Consequently, as Heinrich Zimmer observed, “For Indian art, man is god and art is created so that he might experience this truth and need art no longer.. Its raison d^etre lies in the fact that it points beyond itself: it can appear as essence only to someone limited by Ignorance (avidya), Not-yet-enlightened (a-pra-buddha): ‘For the Brahmin versed in sacrifice and the Vedic texts, God is in fire; for the worshipper, in his own heart; for the Not-yet-enlightened, in the sacred image; but for him who is aware of the highest Self, God is in All Things.”
Emphatically, therefore, the accent in Indian art is not upon the welter of images before one’s eyes, but on the background of an unseen power (brahman) or void (sunyam), over which they dance. For they are of the delusive veil of maya, magical apparitions, bursting as foam from the breaking waves of a cosmic sea, which in its depths is still. (p. 138)

As stated in the Bhagavad Gita by the teaching incarnation, Krishna, of Vishnu the Preserver: “The one, yoked in yoga, viewing alike all beings, discerns the Self in all, and all beings in the Self. When he thus perceives me in everything and everything in me, I shall not be lost to him, nor will he be lost to me.” So that finally, all rests well, all struggle and all conflict, in God, the Lord. (p. 142)

Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, had cut himself off completely from the values of his culture. “Non serviam,” he had quoted proudly, using a phase attributed to Lucifer in his defiance of God, his creator. “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church.” (p. 147)

“all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right.” (Heraclitus 540-480BC)(p.147)

The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,
(Winter has given them gold for silver
To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)
From different throats intone one language
So I believe is we were strong enough to listen without
Divisions of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger-smitten cities,
Those voices would be found
Clean as a child’s; or like some girl’s breathing who dances alone
By the ocean shore, dreaming of lovers.
(Robinson Jeffers, Natural Music, 1925)

[northjetty]

The above is great Geoff. I can copy and paste from it. Thanks.

I remember that when I first wrote an e-mail to you originally, which is still in the 'nice letters' section of the site, you had told me that you were familiar with the "The inner reaches of outer space: metaphor as myth and as religion".

That book is one the more complicated to read, as far as the layman is concerned. There's another book that makes the same points which is called "Thou Art That: transforming religious metaphor" which is very good. Seeing the eternal in all of the forms of time is an age old understanding that really gains in validity with the modern physical discovery of matters wave structure - this is very evident.

"The inward wave rotates phase at the center, reverses direction, and becomes the outward wave. The factor 1/r causes the wave amplitude to decrease inversely as the radius increases. At r -> 0, the amplitude of the separate waves is INFINITE. But when the two solutions are COMBINED the opposite signed INFINITIES cancel and a FINITE 'spherical standing wave' results." - Milo Wolff

north jetty/space