Still Still

     Dōgen Zenji says, “To read words, unaware of the way of practice, is just like reading a medical prescription and overlooking to mix the compounds for it; it will be altogether worthless.” We just look at the prescription and forget to drink the medicine. We enjoy reading the prescription, saying, “Oh, this is wonderful medicine!” It is ridiculous, but we do this always. We think zazen is wonderful because Buddha says if we do zazen we become strong. From where does the strength come? Does it come from outside of you? We look at the scriptures and depend on them, and then we are really happy. But who must be strong, the scriptures? No, you must be strong.
— Dainin Katagiri, Return to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life, p. 107.

The six pāramitās or perfections that the bodhisattva practices are:
Generosity,
Moral conduct,
Patience,
Courage,
Meditation,
Wisdom.

The Eightfold Path consists of:
Right views,
Right intention,
Right speech,
Right action,
Right livelihood,
Right effort,
Right mindfulness,
Right concentration.

Buddha’s teaching of the four holy truths, or the Four Noble Truths, is as follows:
Life is suffering;
Suffering is caused by craving;
Suffering can cease;
The cessation of suffering comes about by following the Eightfold Path.

The Triple Treasure is:
I take refuge in the Buddha.
I take refuge in the Dharma [Truth].
I take refuge in the Sangha [Community].

The Three Collective Pure Percepts are:
Refrain from evil.
Practice all that is good.
Purify the mind.

The Ten Prohibitory Percepts are:
Refrain from taking life.
Refrain from stealing.
Refrain from committing adultery.
Refrain from telling lies.
Refrain from intoxicants.
Refrain from misguided speech.
Refrain from extolling oneself while slandering others.
Refrain from being avaricious in the bestowal of the Dharma.
Refrain from being angry.
Refrain from abusing the Triple Treasure.

The six senses are — (a), six sense organs (b), six sense objects (c), and the five skandhas (d); as below:
(a) color, sound, smell, taste, touch, thoughts;
(b) eyes, ears, nose, mouth, body, mind;
(c) visual object, auditory object, taste object, object of smell, tactile object, object of thought;
(d) form, feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness.

— Dainin Katagiri, Return to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life, “Notes,” pp. 175-176 passim.

INTERVIEWER

Still, some artists put such an emphasis on their work, on creating something that will last, that they put it before everything else. That line by Faulkner — “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”

ALLEN

I hate when art becomes religion. I feel the opposite. When you start putting a higher value on works of art than people, you’re forfeiting your humanity. There’s a tendency to feel the artist has special privileges, and that anything’s okay if it’s in the service of art. I tried to get into that in Interiors. I always feel the artist is much too revered: it’s not fair and it’s cruel. It’s a nice but fortuitous gift — like a nice voice or being left-handed. That you can create is a kind of nice accident. It happens to have high value in society, but it’s not as noble an attribution as courage. I find funny and silly the pompous kind of self-important talk about the artist who takes risks. Artistic risks are like show-business risks — laughable. Like casting against type, wow, what danger! Risks are where your life is on the line. The people who took risks against the Nazis or some of the Russian poets who stood up against the state — those people are courageous and brave, and that’s really an achievement. To be an artist is also an achievement, but you have to keep it in perspective. I’m not trying to undersell art. I think it’s valuable, but I think it’s overly revered. It is a valuable thing, but no more valuable than being a good schoolteacher, or being a good doctor. The problem is that being creative has glamour. People in the business end of film always say, “I want to be a producer, but a creative producer.” Or a woman I went to school with, who said, “Oh, yes, I married this guy. He’s a plumber but he’s very creative.” It’s very important for people to have that credential. Like if he wasn’t creative, he was less.
— Woody Allen, in The Paris Review, #136: “Whither Mirth?,” pp. 216-217.

Symbolic Action

     The third condition is ritual. Ritual in Buddhism is attaining kannō dōkō, which means “the interacting communion of appeals and response.” Ritual is constantly painting a portrait of our life, setting in motion the interactive communion between us and the universe, not between us and something small, between us and the universe. Without ritual we cannot do anything. The poem “To Paint the Portrait of the Bird,”1 by Jacques Prévert [1. Jacques Prévert, To Paint the Portrait of the Bird, trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971). Copyright 1949 Editions Gallimard.], is a good example of the interacting communion of appeal and response that is ritual or the essential nature of repentance:

First paint a cage
with an open door.
Then paint
something pretty
something simple
something beautiful
something useful
for the bird.
Then place the canvas against a tree
in a garden
in a wood
or in a forest.
Hide behind the tree
without speaking
without moving . . .
Sometimes the bird comes quickly
but he may take long years
before deciding.
Don’t get discouraged.
Wait.
Wait years if necessary.
How fast or how slowly the bird comes
has nothing to do with the success
of the picture.
When the bird comes
if he comes
observe the most profound silence
till the bird enters the cage
and when he has entered
gently close the door with a brush.
Then
erase all the bars one by one
taking care not to touch any of the bird’s feathers.
Then paint the portrait of the tree
choosing the most beautiful of the branches
for the bird.
Paint also the green foliage and the wind’s freshness
the dust of the sun
and the noise of the creatures in the grass in the summer heat.
And then wait for the bird to decide to sing.
If the bird doesn’t sing
it’s a bad sign,
a sign that the painting is bad.
But if he sings it’s a good sign,
a sign that you can sign.
So, then, so very gently, you pull out
one of the bird’s feathers
and you write your name in a corner of the picture.

     The cage, in the first line, means our whole body — the six senses, six sense organs, six sense objects and the five skandhas. This is what the whole world consists of; this is our cage. Everyone has an individual cage. We are nothing but the cage. The poet says, “First paint a cage with an open door.” “Open door” means we should accept the vastness of existence. Usually we don’t open the door. We make the cage and then shut ourselves off. But, if we do this, how can we attract the bird? “Bird” means the Truth, the same and one ground. How can we attract the truth if we close the door? So the poet tells us to paint a cage with the door open.
     Next he says, “Then paint/something pretty/something simple/something beautiful/something useful/for the bird.” We have to paint something pretty, simple and beautiful, not for ourselves, not for the cage, but for the bird. “Something beautiful, something simple” means something beyond our intellectual sense. It means we have to see ourselves and also the vastness of space in which all sentient beings exist. This is our practice, constantly. Even if we don’t understand it, paint it, paint something pretty. Even if we don’t believe it is something beautiful, that’s all right, we are following the Buddha’s teaching and we should see the total picture. We should put ourselves in this position. This is to paint something beautiful.
     “Then place the canvas against a tree/in a garden/in a wood/or in a forest./Hide behind the tree/without speaking/without moving . . ./Sometimes the bird comes quickly.” When we paint something beautiful, we shouldn’t attach to it. Leave the painting in the wood, in the forest and then hide ourselves. This is to practice the truth. When we do gassho, we have to practice samādhi. Samādhi is really silence. We must be behind the gassho, but we cannot move. If we move, even a little, immediately our intellect comes up and argues. That’s why the poet says. “Hide behind the tree/without speaking/without moving . . .”
     Then the poet says, “Sometimes the bird comes quickly,” but strictly speaking, the bird is always there. The bird is there, but because we don’t always experience enlightenment through zazen we say “sometimes” it comes. However, Buddha’s compassion is open to everyone; there is always a bird whether we realize it or not. We don’t know when it will come. But according to this poet it doesn’t matter when it comes or how long it takes. How fast or how slowly the bird comes doesn’t matter, because that has nothing to do with the success of our life. Real success is just to put ourselves in zazen when we do zazen, to put ourselves in gassho when we do gassho, because compassion is open to everyone. “When the bird comes . . ./observe the most profound silence/till the bird enters the cage/and when he has entered/gently close the door with a brush.” Not with our hand, please, close the door with a brush. “Then”—and this practice is very important—“erase all the bars one by one/taking care not to touch any of the bird’s feathers.” This is egolessness, the practice of egolessness. How beautiful it is. If we want to paint the portrait of a bird we have to practice egolessness.
     “Then paint the portrait of the tree/choosing the most beautiful of its branches/for the bird./Paint also the green foliage and the wind’s freshness/the dust of the sun.” When we do this, all things become alive. We can make our lives come alive. But without this practice, we cannot paint the autumn, the air, “the dust of the sun” or “the noise of the creatures in the grass in the summer heat.” We cannot.
     “And then wait for the bird to decide to sing./If the bird doesn’t sing/it’s a bad sign,/a sign that the painting is bad.” This means that perhaps enlightenment is attained, or a Ph.D. degree or the degree of medical doctor, but our life doesn’t work. When it doesn’t work, we need to pay more attention to what that degree means or we have to pay attention to our own experience, until the bird starts to sing. When the bird starts to sing that is our experience, our life, so we can sign the painting. But don’t sign with arrogance. The poet says to sign your name in the corner of the picture. We shouldn’t show off, because the whole of life, the whole world is alive. We are just a corner, that’s enough. We are the whole world; the whole world is working. “One of the bird’s feathers” means take Buddha. Take one of the ideas of the universe that we believe, for instance, “the universe is the same and one ground,” and use that feather. With that feather we can write our name, not in the middle of the canvas, but in the corner of the picture. This is the poem, a very beautiful one. Throughout this poem we can see ritual in action.
— Dainin Katagiri, Return to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life, pp. 75-78.

Those Real Myths

     Apparently human beings whose souls have answered to God’s call cannot just be “on earth”; they must have a “heavenly” counterpart. Hence certain lightnings and stars represent their celestial “dimension,” as it were. The author reads the lightnings and stars as cosmically projected symbols of the spiritual aspect of saints on earth. The imagery of spatial transcendence is transparently symbolic of inner spirituality as the presence of “heaven” within human personality.
     Our second witness is Jewish merkabah (“throne-chariot”) mysticism, which flourished within Judaism as a significant but underground movement from some time after Ezekiel right down through medieval cabalism to modern Hasidism. The great historian of this phenomenon in Judaism G. G. Scholem comments almost offhandedly on a shift in the mystics’ perception of the nature of the spiritual quest, a shift that took place so inconspicuously that it can only be dated as happening somewhere around 500 c.e. It was the moment when the Jewish mystics no longer spoke of the mystical ascent through the seven heavens, and described it rather as a descent.41 This revolution in imagery (and nothing is more revolutionary than the transformation of the fundamental metaphors by which we apprehend the world) marked the perception that the mystic did not in fact journey into heaven but penetrated the soul’s own depth. This shift was the seed that would, after many centuries of drifting, darkness, nurture, and growth, come to full flower in an inheritor of that mystical tradition—Sigmund Freud. It is this shift that led finally to the psychological mind-set of modern times, stripped, however, of a sense of the divine reality within. It was that shift which enabled Jung, standing on Freud’s shoulders (or toes), to recover a sense of the numinous reality behind the myth and symbol and to redirect us back to these ancient treasuries of truth, with this difference: we can now withdraw the unconscious projections which “change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face,” and locate the cosmic aspect of myth within ourselves—and, I would wish to add, in the inwardness of the events of our time and the forces of nature and history and institutional structures that impinge on us. We are, in short, capable of a “second reading” of the ancient texts, a reading in which the myth is understood to speak symbolically of the real but invisible spiritual dimension of personal and corporate earthly existence.
     Why not, then, simply discard the myth in favor of our demythologized interpretation? The more obvious and general answer is that we cannot dispense with the myth because it says more than we can tell. It is not only lucid but opaque. It participates not only in the light of consciousness and reason but also in the darkness of mystery. It treasures things that we have not yet learned to comprehend and preserves them for a generation that might. Through a set of powerfully evocative symbols acknowledged as meaningful by a people, it presents an incredibly condensed story that depicts, through the indirect language of narrative, the nature of ultimate reality, the way things got how they are, the path to salvation, and the final meanings of life. All our “explanations” of myths are dispensable and time-bound and will soon be forgotten, but the myth lives on, fed by its continual interplay with the very reality it “presents.”

41. G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1941, 1965), 46-47. Perhaps a similar phenomenon happened independently in gnosticism as well. Speaking of the same kind of mystical journey to heaven, the NHL Steles Seth says, “The way of ascent is the way of descent” (127: 21-22). This echoes an ancient saying of Heraclitus: “The way up and the way down are one and the same” (H. Diels, Die Fragments der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1912), 1:89, frag. 60). Perhaps that ancient insight was only now being vindicated. See also NHL Zost. 82:23-24 and the Teach. Silv. 116:27-117.:5; and 117:6-9—“Open the door for yourself that you may know what is. Knock on yourself that the Word may open for you.” The Greater Hekhalot repeatedly refers to the “descent” into the Merkabah, as do the “Hekhalot Fragments” (cited by Ithamar Greunwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980], p. 188). Another way of symbolizing the “descent” to God appears in Re’uyot Yehezkel, where Ezekiel is depicted as “standing on the River Chebar looking down at the water and the seven heavens were opened to him and he saw the Glory of the Holy One” (cited by Gruenwald, p. 135). The water serves as a mirror of the things in heaven. But that is tantamount to saying that the heavenly is revealed through the depths of the unconscious (“water”). See also T.B. Sanh. 91b—“So will the Holy One, blessed be He, bring the soul, [re]place it in the body, and judge them together, as it is written. He shall call to the heavens from above, and to the earth, that he may judge his people: He shall call to the heavens from above—this refers to the soul; and to the earth, that he may judge his people—to the body.” One could scarcely hope to find a more explicit equation of heaven with the “within” of a person.

— Walter Wink, Naming the Powers, pp. 141-143.

Delightfully Defined

Patience, n.
A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Patriot, n.
One to whom interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Patriotism, n.
Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Peace, n.
In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Plagiarism, n.
A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Plan, v.t.
To bother about the best method od accomplishing an accidental result.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Platitude, n.
The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demitasse of milk-and-morality. The Pope’s-nose of a featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Definite Apposites

Faith, n.
Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Language, n.
The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another’s treasure.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Learning, n.
The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Lecturer, n.
One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Lexicographer, n.
A pestilent fellow, who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to consider “as one having authority,” whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statute. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as “obsolete” or “obsolescent” and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor — whereby the process of impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, the bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that “it isn’t in the dictionary” — although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation — sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion — the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which the Creator had not created him to create.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Past, n.
That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one — the knowledge and the dream.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.

Making of Minds

     Long before we understand the function of each hemisphere, it was recognized that people have at least two modes of understanding. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes called one mode “directed” and the other “free.” Indian spiritual teacher Rhadhakrishnan called one “rational” and the other “integral.” French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss referred to one as “positive” and the other as “mythic.” A graphic and poetic description of the “two minds” appears in the second-century Indian Buddhist text, the Lankavatara Sutra:
     The discriminating mind is a dancer and a magician
     with the objective world as his stage. Intuitive
     mind is the wise jester who travels with the magi-
     cian and reflects upon his emptiness and transiency.
— Wes “Scoop” Nisker, Crazy Wisdom, pp. 107-108.

RATE THE INTENSIVE above the extensive. The perfect does not lie in quantity, but in quality. All that is best is always scant, and rare, for mass in anything cheapens it. Even among men the giants have often been true pygmies. Some judge books by their thickness, as though they had been written to exercise the arms, instead of the mind. Bigness, alone, never gets beyond the mediocre, and it is the curse of the universal man, that in trying to be everything, he is nothing. It is quality that bestows distinction, and in heroic proportions if the substance is sublime.
— Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Wordly Wisdom, #27, Martin Fischer (tr.), p. 15.

DILIGENT, AND INTELLIGENT. Diligence quickly accomplishes what the intelligence has well thought out. Haste is the passion of fools, and as they know not the difficulties, they work without heed: wiser men, on the other hand, are likely to fail from overcaution; for of reflection is bred delay: and so their hesitation in acting loses them the fruits of their good judgment. Promptitude is the mother of fortune. He does much who leaves nothing for tomorrow. A magnificent motto: to make haste slowly.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #53, p. 30.

THE SENSE TO let things settle. Especially when the public, or the private, sea is most turbulent. There come whirlwinds into human traffic, storms of passion, when it is wise to seek a safe harbor with smoother waters: many times is an evil made worse by the remedies used; here leave things to nature, or there to God: the learned physician needs just as much wisdom in order not to prescribe, as to prescribe, and often the greater art lies in doing nothing; the way to quiet the turbulence of a mob is to withdraw your hand, and let it quiet itself, to concede today, may be the best way to succeed tomorrow; it takes little to muddy a spring, nor does it clear by being stirred, but by being left alone: there is no better remedy for turmoil, than to let it take its course, for so it comes to rest of itself.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #138, pp. 79-80.

A PROPER CONCEIT of yourself, and of your aims, especially at the start of life. All have a high opinion of themselves, particularly those with least reason; each dreams himself a fortune, and imagines himself a prodigy: hope wildly promises everything, and time then fulfills nothing: these things torment the spirit, as the imagined gives way before the truth, wherefore let the man of judgment correct his blunders, and even though hoping for the best, always expect the worst, in order to be able to accept with equanimity whatever comes. It is well, of course, to aim somewhat high, in order to near the mark; but not so high that you miss altogether a starting upon your life’s job; to make this proper estimate of yourself is absolutely necessary, for without experience it is very easy to confuse the conjectured with the fact; there is no greater panacea against all that is foolish, than understanding; wherefore let every man know what is the sphere of his abilities, and his place, and thus be able to make the picture of himself coincide with the actual.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #194, p. 114.

IN HEAVEN ALL is gladness. In hell all is sorrow. Upon this earth, since it lies between, sometimes the one, and sometimes the other. We have our being between two extremes, and so it partakes of both. Fortune should vary, not all being felicity, nor all adversity. This world is a zero, and by itself worth nothing, but joined to heaven worth everything: indifference to your lot is common sense, and not to be surprised by it, wisdom. Our life becomes more complicated as we go along, like a comedy, but toward its end it becomes simpler; keep in mind, therefore, the happy ending.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #211, p. 124.

ENJOY A LITTLE more, and strive a little less: others argue to the contrary; but happy leisure is worth more than drive, for nothing belongs to us, except time, wherein even he dwells who has no habitation: equally infelicitous to squander precious existence in stupid drudgery, as in an excess of noble business. Be not crushed under success, in order not to be crushed under envy: it is to trample upon life, and to suffocate the spirit; some would include hereunder knowledge, but he who is without knowledge, is without life.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #247, p. 145.

Seeing HOW

     One of the finest parallels to what has been said here is the description of his central experience given by Edward Maitland, the collaborator of Anna Kingsford. He has discovered that during reflection on an idea, related ideas become visible, so to speak, in a long series apparently reaching back to their source, which to him was the divine spirit. By means of concentration on this series, he tried to penetrate to their origin. He says: ‘I was absolutely without knowledge or expectation when I yielded to the impulse to make the attempt. I simply experimented on a faculty . . . being seated at my writing-table the while in order to record the results as they came, and resolved to retain my hold on my outer and circumferential consciousness, no matter how far towards my inner and central consciousness I might go. For I know not whether I should be able to regain the former if I once quited my hold of it, or to recollect the facts of the experience. At length I achieved my object, though only by a strong effort, the tension occasioned by the endeavor to keep both extremes of the consciousness in view at once being very great.
     ‘Once well started on my quest, I found myself traversing a succession of spheres or belts . . . the impression produced being that of mounting a vast ladder stretching from the circumference towards the centre of a system, which was at once my own system, the solar system, and the universal system, the three systems being at once diverse and identical…. Presently, by a supreme, and what I felt must be a final effort . . . I succeeded in polarizing the whole of the convergent rays of my consciousness into the desired focus. And at the same instant, as if through the sudden ignition of the rays thus fused into a unity, I found myself confronted with a glory of unspeakable whiteness and brightness, and of a luster so intense as well-nigh to beat me back…. But though feeling that I had to explore further, I resolved to make assurance doubly sure by piercing if I could the almost blinding luster, and seeing what it enshrined. With great effort I succeeded, and the glance revealed to me that which I had felt must be there…. It was the dual form of the Son . . . the unmanifest made manifest, the unformulated formulate, the unindividuate individuate, God as the Lord, proving through His duality that God is Substance as well as Force, Love as well as Will, Feminine as well as Masculine, Mother as well as Father.’ He found that God is two in one like man. Besides this he noticed something that our text also emphasizes, namely, ‘suspension of breathing’. He says ordinary breathing stopped and was replaced by an internal respiration, ‘as if by breathing of a distinct personality within and other than the physical organism’. He took this being to be the entelechy of Aristotle, and the inner Christ of the Apostle Paul, the ‘spiritual and substantial individuality engendered within the physical and phenomenal personality, and representing, therefore, the rebirth of man on a plane transcending the material’. This genuine experience contains all the essential symbols of our text. The phenomenon itself, that is, the vision of light, is an experience common to many mystics, and one that is undoubtedly of the greatest significance, because in all times and places it appears as the unconditional thing, which unites in itself the greatest energy and the profoundest meaning. Hildegarde of Bingen, an outstanding personality quite apart from her mysticism, expresses herself about her central vision in a similar way. ‘Since my childhood,’ she says, ‘I have always seen a light in my soul, but not with the outer eyes, nor through the thoughts of my heart; neither do the five outer senses take part in this vision…. The light I perceive is not of a local kind, but is much brighter than the cloud which bears the sun. I cannot distinguish height, breadth, or length of it…. What I see or learn in such a vision stays long in my memory. I see, hear, and know in the same moment…. I cannot recognize any sort of form in this light, although I sometimes see in it another light that is known to me as the living light…. While I am enjoying the spectacle of this light, all sadness and sorrow vanish from my memory….’
— C. G. Jung, Golden Flower, “Commentary by C. G. Jung,” R. Wilhelm & C. G. Jung, pp. 104-107.

     At our point of time the I Ching responds to the need of further development in us. Occultism has enjoyed a renaissance in our times which is virtually without a parallel. The light of the western mind is nearly darkened by it. I am thinking now of our seats of learning and their representatives. I am a physician and deal with ordinary people, and therefore I know that the universities have ceased to act as disseminators of light. People have become weary of scientific specialization and rationalistic intellectualism. They want to hear truths which broaden rather than restrict them, which do not obscure but enlighten, which do not run off them like water, but penetrate them to the marrow. This search threatens to lead a large, if anonymous, public into wrong paths.
— C. G. Jung, “Appendix,” “In Memory of Richard Wilhelm,” in Ibid., p. 143.

Be Now Here

     In the Thomas Gospel, on the other hand, when the apostles ask, “When will the Kingdom come?” — Jesus says, “The Kingdom will not come by expectation. They will say ‘see here, see there.’ The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it.” That’s Gnosticism.

     Gnosticism is the Western
     Counterpart of Buddhism.

     Thomas says, in other words, that there is a revelation possible to you right now. It is here. So, “to be happy with Him forever in heaven” means to reach that depth now. It’s a totally different slant.

     If you read Christian mythology
     in the Gnostic way,
     it makes universal sense.

— Joseph Campbell, Joseph Campbell Companion, Diane K. Osbon (sel. & ed.), pp. 174-175.

     This bringing together of Joyce’ esthetic theory with the maya idea was a wonderful illumination for me. I just woke up one morning and said, “My god, I have finally got it after eighty years.” I have known the implications of esthetic arrest, but I’d never linked it up to the maya idea. It is your mental attitude that determines whether you experience the projecting or the revealing power. The world is there in both modes. It is not that the world changes, it’s your consciousness.
     Esthetic arrest is the result of this change of focus. “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.” You see it in esthetic arrest. But to develop the inward depth experienced through this change of focus, those who seek to achieve fully the goal of life should set aside a sacred space. The sacred space, when you think of where it appears in traditional cultures, is for initiations and meditations. If you are so fulfilled already that no further initiations are necessary, then you can do without such a space. But, insofar as you’ve not struck the ultimate depth and are interested in enriching and building the interior, in addition to the external aspects of your life, then you have to have some place, some way, to practice this.
     All the world will open up when you’ve achieved this inner depth, and your play in life will be informed by this radiance….
— Joseph Campbell, Ibid., pp. 252-253.

     Participate joyfully
     In the sorrows of the world.

     The obvious lesson . . . is that the first step to the knowledge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think — and their name is legion — that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think — as do many — “Let me first correct society, then get around to myself” are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.

     We cannot cure the world of sorrows,
     but we can choose to live in joy.

— Joseph Campbell, Ibid., p. 289.

Willful Randomness?

[Terrence McKenna]     I think of the Divine Imagination as the class of all things both possible and beautiful in a kind of reverse Platonism. The attractor is at the bottom of a very deep well into which all phenomena are cascading and being brought into a kind of compressed state. This is happening in the biological realm through the career of the evolution of life. It’s simultaneously happening in the world as we experience it within our culture, in what we call history. History is the track in the snow left by creativity wandering in the Divine Imagination. In the history departments of modern universities, it is taught that this track in the snow is going nowhere. The technical term is trendlessly fluctuating. We’re told that history is a trendlessly fluctuating process: it goes here, it goes there. We just wander around. It’s called a random walk in information theory.
    This is all very interesting, for we’ve begun to see, through the marvel of the new mathematics, that random walks are not random at all — that a sufficiently long random walk becomes a fractal structure of extraordinary depth and beauty. Chaos is not something that degrades information and is somehow the enemy of order, but rather it is something that is the birthplace of order.
— Ralph Abraham, Terrence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, Trialogues at the Edge of the West, “Creativity and Imagination,” p. 9.

     The psyche knows how to heal, but it hurts. Sometimes the healing hurts more than the initial injury, but if you survive it, you’ll be stronger, because you’ve found a larger base. Every commitment is a narrowing, and when your commitment fails, you have to get back to a larger base and have the strength to hold it.
      Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called “the love of your fate.” Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment — not discouragement — you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.
     Then, when looking back at your life, you will see the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.

     The dark night of the soul
     Comes just before revelation.

     When everything is lost,
    And all seems darkness,
    then comes the new life
    and all that is needed.
— Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion, Diane K. Osbon (sel. & ed.), pp. 38-39.

     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 Keat’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.”
— Joseph Campbell, Ibid., pp. 134-135.

Do You Think You Think? Do You Do What You Do?

     “Find out who it is who has free will or predestination and abide in that state. Then both are transcended. That is the only purpose in discussing these questions. To whom do such questions present themselves? Discover that and be at peace.

     “The only path of karma (action), bhakti (devotion), yoga and jnana (knowledge) is to enquire who it is who has the karma, vibhakti (lack of devotion), viyoga (separation) and ajnana (ignorance). Through this investigation, the ego disappears and the state of abidance in the Self in which none of these negative qualities ever existed, remains as the Truth.
     “As long as a man is the doer he also reaps the fruits of his deeds, but as soon as he realizes the Self through enquiry as to who is the doer, his sense of being the doer falls away and the triple karma (destiny) is ended. This is the state of eternal liberation.”

     Bhagavan said: “We are really Sat-chit-ananda (Being-Knowledge-Bliss) but we imagine that we are bound (by destiny) and have all this suffering.”
     I asked him why we imagine this, why this state of ignorance (ajnana) comes over us.
     Bhagavan said: “Ask yourself to whom this ignorance has come and you will discover that it never came to you and that you always have been Sat-chit-ananda. One goes through all sorts of austerities to become what one already is. All effort is simply to get rid of the mistaken impression that one is limited and bound by the woes of samsara (this life).”


D.: Is there predestination? And if what is destined to happen will happen, is there any use in prayer or effort or should we just remain idle?

This is a concise form of the question which Bhagavan was so often asked, and the reply is typical in that it does not expound theory but prescribes what to do.

B.: There are only two ways in which to conquer destiny or be independent of it. One is to enquire who undergoes this destiny and discover that only the ego is bound by it and not the Self, and that the ego is non-existent. The other way is to kill the ego by completely surrendering to the Lord, by realizing one’s helplessness and saying all the time: “Not I, but Thou, O my Lord,” and giving up all sense of “I” and “mine” and leaving it to the Lord to do what he likes with you. Surrender can never be regarded as complete so long as the devotee wants this or that from the Lord. True surrender is love of God for the sake of love and for nothing else, not even for the sake of salvation. In other words, complete effacement of the ego is necessary to conquer destiny, whether you achieve this effacement through Self-enquiry or through bhakti-marga.
— Ramana Maharshi, The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi, Arthur Osborne (ed.), pp. 68-69.

B.: Now, I will ask you a question. When a man gets into a train, where does he put his luggage?
D.: Either in the compartment or in the luggage van.
B.: He doesn’t carry it on his head or in his lap while on the train?
D.: Only a fool would do so.
B.: It is a thousand times more foolish to bear your own burden once you have undertaken the spiritual quest, whether by the path of knowledge or devotion.
D.: But can I relinquish all my responsibilities, all my commitments?
B.: You remember the temple tower? There are many statues on it, aren’t there? Well, there are four big ones at the base, one at each corner. Have you seen them?
D.: Yes.
B.: Well, I tell you that the huge tower is supported by these four statues.
D.: How is that possible? What does Bhagavan mean?
B.: I mean that to say that is no more foolish than saying that you bear all the cares, burdens and responsibilities of life. The Lord of the universe bears the whole burden. You only imagine that you do. You can hand over all your burdens to Him. Whatever you have to do, you will be made an instrument for doing it at the right time. Do not imagine that you cannot do it unless you have the desire to. It is not desire that gives you the necessary strength. The strength is the Lord’s.
— Ramana Maharshi, Ibid., pp. 85-86.