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All of
life is a meditation, most of it unintentional. Many
people spend most of life in
meditating on where their
money is coming from and where it's
going to go. If you have a family to bring
up, you're concerned for the family.
These are all very important concerns, but they have to do with
physical conditions, mostly.
But
how are you going to communicate
spiritual consciousness to the
children if you don't have it yourself?
Myths are designed
to bring us to a level of
consciousness that is
spiritual in essence.
Myths
offer life models, models to
imitate, models to
live by.
The models have to be
appropriate to the time in which you are
living, and our time has
changed so fast that what worked fifty years
ago may not work today.
The
moral order has to catch up with the
moral necessities of actual
life in time, here and
now. The old time
religion belongs to
another age, another people, another set of
human values, another universe - basically
another different
reality.
By going back to
dogmatic literialist intrepretations you throw yourself
out of sync with present social and
cultural conditions.
Adults, as well
as children growing up, lose
faith in the dogmatic literialist
religion that has been taught to
them.
Religion is really a
category of second womb.
Religion is
designed to bring this extremely complicated
thing, a
human being, to maturity by learning to be
compassionate and understanding of the human condition and of human
nature.
The
idea of being
born into sin, of inherent
spiritual corruption
placed upon your soul at birth as ordained by
God, puts you in a servile condition -
guilty - to those who claim to be
interpreters of the will and/or word of
God and those who claim to be
intercessors to God.
The
biblical
traditions all
speak with derogation of the so called
nature religions, you identify with the
good and fight against the evil. The shift from a
nature religion to a sociological religion makes it difficult for
us to link back to
nature. Actually all of those
cultural symbols are perfectly susceptible to
interpretation in terms of the
psychological and
cosmological
systems, if you choose to look at
them that way.
Every
religion is true when understood metaphorically.
When a
religion gets stuck to its own
metaphors, interpreting metaphors as literal
facts, then you are in trouble.
Then a
religion does not
speak about the connotations of the
metaphors. It does not
speak about the connotations of the
archetypical conceptual symbolic imagery but becomes stuck with the
ethics of what is good and what is evil - and then everything must be catagorized as
good or evil.
And these
ethics of good or evil are
defined by their adherents who very well may have demons of their own that they
are attempting to exorcise. Think
James C. Dobson,
Jim Bakker,
Jim Jones,
David Koresh,
Marshall Herff Applewhite,
Ken Ham, Jimmy Swaggard,
Pat Robertson,
Ted Haggard,
William Eugene Scott.
Today the
organized traditionally practiced
religions of
Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam are addressing
social problems and ethics instead of the mystical experience.
The
difference between a priest and a
shaman is that the priest is a
functionary and the shaman is someone who has had a mystical experience. In
our tradition it is the monk who seeks the
mystical experience, while the
priest is the one who has
studied to serve the
community.
I had a friend who attended an international
meeting of the Roman Catholic
meditative orders, which was held in
Bangkok. He told me that the Catholic
monks had no problems
understanding the
Buddhist monks, but that it was the
clergy of the two religions who were unable
to understand each
other.
One of the
wonderful things is the
Catholic ritual of going to
communion. There you are taught that
this is the body and
blood of the Savior. And you take it to you, and you turn
inward, and there
Jesus is
working
within you. This is a
way of inspiring a
meditation on
experiencing the
spirit in you. You see people coming back from
communion and their attention is turned
inward.
In India,
I have seen a red ring put around a stone, and
then the stone is regarded as an incarnation of the mystery of life. Typically
people think of
things in practical material
terms, but you can
think of any
thing in terms of its
mystery.
Take any object. Draw a ring around
the object and regard the object in terms of it's mystery, of it's essence, of it's every facet, it's every
perspective and it's every
dimension.
Doing this
essentially consecrates the
object in your
mind.
Do you really
know what the
object truly is?
It is an
object
existent in time and space.
Think how mysterious it is that any
object should
exist.
The object
becomes the center of
meditation,
the
center of the
intelligible mystery of
existence,
which fully
immerses and surrounds us.
This object is now the
center of the universe.
The
axis mundi is the still point in
the chaotic and frantic motion of reality.
I had a
revelation when using
my computer about mythology. You buy a certain software, and there is a
whole set of
signals that lead to the achievement of your
aim. If you begin experimenting with
signals that belong to
another
system of software, they just
won't work.
Similarly, in
mythology - if you have a mythology in which the metaphor of the mystery of
reality is the
Father, you are going to have a
different set of signals from those that you
would have if the metaphor for the
wisdom and mystery
of reality is the
Mother.
These are two
good metaphors.
Neither one is, in reality, an
actual fact.
These are
metaphors.
It is as though the
universe were my
Father.
It is as though the
universe were my
Mother.
Jesus says, "No one gets to the
Father but by me."
The
Father that he was talking about was
God.
It might be that you can get to
God, the Father, only by
way of Jesus. On the
other
hand, suppose you are going by
way of the Mother.
There you might prefer Kali, and the hymns to the goddess. That is simply
another
way to get to the mystery of your life.
You must understand that
each religion is a
category of software that has
its own set of signals that works well only within the bounded
conceptual symbolic imagery of the religious culture.
If an
individual is deeply involved in
a religion and basing the
reality of his life on it, he better stay with the software that
he has got. Unless his life is not
working, then it is
time to install new software and
re-boot.
The three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam have three different names for the
same biblical
God.
Why is it they can
not get along? They believe they are
dissimilar because they are stuck with their metaphor, their consecrated
object, and do not
realize the metaphors and consecrated
objects are
conceptual symbolic references. None of them have allowed
the circle that surrounds them to open. Each
exists in a closed
circle. Each group says, 'We are
the chosen group, we are special
and our god and only our
god is the supreme being.'
How
can any cultural group claim ownership of
God?
This is a
problem you get in the
book of Kings and in
Samuel. The various Hebrew kings were sacrificing on the
mountain tops. And they did
wrong in the sight of
Yahweh. The
Yahweh cult
was a specific movement in the Hebrew
community, which finally won.
The
Yahweh cult
pushed through a temple bound patriarchal warrior god,
normally worshiped by nomads, against the nature cult of the
Mother which was celebrated in all farming
cultures by settled peoples.
This imperialistic thrust of an 'in group'
culture continues in the West.
"We
are by nature sorters. We
evolved in small bands of hunter-gathers
when there was a selection for within-group amity and between-group enmity.
With our fellow in-group members, we are
cooperative and altruistic.
Unfortunately, the downside to this social
bonding is that we are also quite tribal and xeno-phobic to out-group
members. Only when all people are considered to be members of one global
in-group can we begin to attenuate these out-group associations. But it won't
be easy. Vigilance is the watchword of both freedom and dignity." - Michael Shermer
Old testament
biblical
views of reality are based on an
understanding of the
universe that belongs to the
first millennium B.C..
Old testament
biblical
views of reality do not accord with
our current conceptual
understanding of either
the universe or the dignity of
man.
Old testament
biblical
views of reality belong entirely in the past.
The
fact is literalists can not reconcile their
religious ideas with the
scientific
knowledge available in contemporary
life.
The fact is
literalists can not reconcile their
religious ideas to existent human
beings rather than just to the idealized human
beings of their own fantasized
community.
Today the organized
traditionally practiced
religions of
Judaism, Christianity, and
Islamas well as their
literalists brethern are good examples of the
failure of religion to function as
orginally designed. That is because these three
religions were designed for entirely different
social and cultural conditions than those on
Earth today.
It's right there in
book of Genesis:
we are to be the masters of the
Earth.
The truth is this way
of living, as masters of the
Earth, actually worked just fine and would
work just fine on an
Earth in which
industry was based on sustainable
agriculture. Unfortunately this is no longer true.
These three
traditional mythologies are fighting
a war that is already lost.
By doing
so they have disqualified themselves for the future.
They have
disqualified themselves not because they refuse to adapt in
social and cultural ways to
popular cultural but because their whole
understanding of
reality is based on the
biblical
condemnation of nature.
To them a
supernatural warrior god,
separate from nature,
created the
Universe and
condemns man to a bleak
existence seperate from God,
groveling for approval, mercy and
compassion.
-adapted from the
Power of Myth, interview of Joseph Campbell,
mythologist, by Bill Moyers, journalist.
Also
see Joseph Campbell on:
in the
beginning
image
myth
life
consciousness
archetype
metaphor
mystery
the
serpent
dreamtime
hero
God
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