Its Dissolution and Transformation (1970)
When at the service of Morning Prayer a priest of the Church of England addresses himself to the origin and foundation of the Universe, he will usually make the following statement:
Almighty and Everlasting God, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the only Ruler of Princes, Who dost from Thy Throne behold all the dwellers upon Earth, most heartily we beseech Thee with Thy favor to behold our sovereign lady Elizabeth the Queen and all the royal family. Endue her plenteously with heavenly gifts, health and wealth, long to live, etc.
This is obviously the language of a professional flatterer in court. For the most basic model or image of the world that has governed Western civilization has been the idea of the universe as a political monarchy, and this is something extremely troublesome to citizens of the United States, a country in which we are supposed to believe that a republic is the best form of government. But an enormous number of our citizens believe that the universe is a monarchy and, obviously, if the universe is a monarchy, monarchy is the best form of government. Thus until quite recently you could not be a conscientious objector to fighting in a war unless you solemnly declared that you believed in a Supreme Being from whom your orders came, and therefore from a higher echelon of command than the President of the United States.
This proved to be difficult for people who declared themselves to be Buddhists or Taoists who do not believe in a Supreme Being in that sense, although I did advise many conscientious objectors that when the lawmakers put in words “Supreme Being,” they were trying to find a vague phrase rather than to define a kind of theistic belief. In 1928 the British Parliament was called upon to authorize a new prayer book for the Church of England. They didn’t authorize it because they found it too “high church.” But in the course of the debate, somebody got up and said, “Isn’t it sort of ridiculous that this secular legislative body should be asked to rule upon the affairs of the Church because, after all, there are many atheists among us?” And another member got up and said, “Oh, I don’t think there are any atheists here. We all believe in some sort of something somewhere.” And so, I suppose the phrase “the Supreme Being” means some sort of something somewhere.
The foundation of common sense behind a great many of the laws and social institutions of the United States is a theory of the universe based on the ancient tyrannical monarchies of the Near East. Such titles of God “King of Kings” and “Lord of Lords” were in fact titles of the Persian emperors. The Pharaohs of Egypt and the lawgiver Hammurabi provided a model for thinking about this world. For the fundamental idea that underlies the imagery of the book of Genesis, and therefore of the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions, is that the universe is a system of order that is imposed by spiritual force from above, and to which we therefore owe obedience. In this idea there is a complex of subideas as follows:
(1) That the physical world is an artifact. It is something made or constructed. Furthermore, this involves the idea that it is a ceramic creation. In the book of Genesis, it is said that the Lord God created Adam out of the dust of the earth, and having therefore made a clay figurine, he breathed the breath of life into its nostrils and this clay figurine became the embodiment of a living spirit. This is a basic image that has entered very deeply into the common sense of most people who have lived in the Western world. Thus it’s quite natural for a child brought up in Western culture to say to its mother, “How was I made?” We think that that’s a very logical thing to ask, “How was I made?” But actually this is a question that I don’t think would be asked by a Chinese child. It wouldn’t occur. The Chinese child might say, “How did I grow?” But certainly not, “How was I made?” In the sense of being constructed, being put together, being formed out of some basic, inert, and therefore essentially stupid substance. For when you take the image of clay you don’t expect ever to see clay forming itself into a pot. Clay is passive. Clay is homogenized. It has in itself no particular structure. It’s a kind of goo. And therefore if it is to assume an intelligible shape, it must be worked upon by an external force and intelligence. So you have the dichotomy of matter and form, which you find also in Aristotle and therefore later in the whole philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Matter is a kind of basic stuff that becomes formed only through the intervention of spiritual energy. This has been, of course, a basic problem of all our thinking—the problem of the relationship between mind and matter.
For how can mind exercise influence upon matter? After all, all good ghosts walk straight through walls, and if a ghost in its passage through a wall does not disarrange the bricks how can the ghost in the machine, the ghost in the body, lift an arm or move a head? This has been a fundamental problem for Western thought because we have made this distinction between the unintelligent brute matter and the intelligent active spirit.
In much of our philosophy of art, in the West, we have thought of the work of the artist as that of imposing his will upon an intractable medium. The sculptor beating stones into submission to his will. The painter taking inert oils and pigments and making them conform … and so many of our sculptors and painters feel all the time that the media in which they work are intractable, and that they can never quite get it across because the physical, material, and therefore in some way diabolical nature of the media always resists the vision that the spirit wants to represent. Even such a great historian of art as Andre Malraux speaks of this tension between the vision of the artist, his will and his technique, and the base, material intractability of the medium. So, also, in everybody’s everyday common sense we think of the world, the material world, as being a sort of amalgam of clay, of matter that is formed. We might even be so strangely depraved as to think that trees are made of wood. Or mountains made of rock in the same way as this podium is made of wood by a carpenter, and perhaps it is not insignificant that Jesus was the son of a carpenter as well as being the son of the Architect of the universe. Obviously a tree is not made of wood. A tree is wood. A mountain is not made of rock. It is rock. The whole point of western science to understand the nature of the physical world was originally, of course, a quest to find out what is the basic material and beyond that, what is the plan, the design, in the mind of the maker?
At this time, Western physics has abandoned the question, “What is matter?” because of the realization that you can describe physical processes only in terms of structure, in terms of form, in terms of pattern. You can never say what stuff is. Whenever a scientific description comes in the form of an equation, say a + b = b + a or 1 + 2 = 3 everybody understands what it means. It’s a perfectly intelligible statement. Without anyone having to say what “a” signifies, what “b” signifies, or one-what, two-what, or three-what. The pattern itself is sufficient. For it is the understanding of modern physics that what is going on in the world, what we are, is simply pattern. Imagine, for example, a rope in which the first three feet are made of hemp, the second of silk, the third of cotton, and the forth of nylon, and you tie a knot in the rope, a simple granny knot, and you move the knot along the rope. The material of the knot keeps changing but the pattern of the knot remains the same. In just this way, each one of us is recognizable as an individual by virtue of being a consistent pattern of behavior. Anything that could be described as our substance, that is to say, the milk, the water, the beefsteak, etc., that composes us (for we are what we eat) is constantly changing, and anything that could be considered as a kind of component stuff of our bodies is always passing through, but today you know your friend of yesterday, because you recognize a consistent pattern of behavior. So what science studies, what science now describes, is simply patterns. But the average individual has not yet recovered from the superstition that underneath patterns, inside patterns, there is basically some kind of stuff. For when we examine anything we see first of all the pattern, the shape, and then we ask the question, “What is the shape composed of?” So we get out our microscope to look very carefully at what we thought was the substance of, say, a finger. We find that the so-called substance of the finger is a minute and beautiful design of cells. We see a structure, but then when we see these little patterns called individual cells, we ask again, “What are they made of?” and that needs a sharper microscope, a more minute analysis. Turning up the level of magnification again, we find that the cells are molecules but we keep asking, “What is the stuff of the molecules?” What we are in fact discovering through all of this is that what we are calling “stuff” is simply patterns seen out of focus. It’s fuzzy, and simply fuzziness is stuff. Whenever we get fuzziness into focus, it becomes patterns. So there isn’t any stuff, there is only pattern. This world is dancing energy.
Though this is the point of view of the latest scientific thought of the West, it is not the average person’s common sense. This is not yet the image in terms of which individuals make sense of the world, and that is my definition of “myth.” Myth, not meaning falsehood, but in a much deeper sense of the word, is an imagery in terms of which we make sense out of life. When somebody is trying to explain electricity to the nonscientific laymen, he uses, say, the imagery of water, of how water flows, and he explains, through water, which the laymen understands, the behavior of electricity that the layman does not understand. Or an astronomer in trying to explain the nature of curved space will liken the construction of space to the surface of a balloon on which there are white dots. As you inflate the balloon, the dots get further and further away from each other, and this is somewhat like the expanding universe. He is using an image; he’s not saying, “The world is a balloon;” he is saying, “It’s like a balloon.” So in, of course, the same way, no sensible theologian ever said that God is literally the father of the universe—that God is a cosmic male parent—but that God is like a father. This is analogy. But the image always has a more powerful influence on our feelings than abstract and sophisticated ideas. Therefore the image of God as the political king, the authority father, has had a vast influence upon the emotions and feelings of Christians, Jews, and Moslems throughout many, many, centuries. But in the course of time it became an embarrassing image that had to be abandoned, for nobody wants to feel that he is watched all the time by a judging authority however beneficent his intentions may be. You well remember when you were children in school, sitting at your desks writing some sort of composition or performing a mathematical exercise, and the teacher would sometimes wander along behind you and look over your shoulder to see what you were doing. Nobody likes this. Even though you respect your teacher very much you don’t want to be watched while you are working. So the idea that we are constantly observed by one who knows us through and through and judges us is profoundly embarrassing; we simply had to get rid of it. Thus there came about the “Death of God,” that is to say, the death of that particular idea of God. For it was substituted, in the course of the development of Western thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a different model of the universe, which had, however, continuity with the model of the universe handed down to us through the Holy Scriptures and the Christian tradition.
Let me remind you that the model of the world, the world made by God, was basically an artifact, a construct, a mechanism, and therefore something governed by law. All processes in the universe were looked upon as operating in obedience to the word of God. For as it says in the Bible, “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made and all the hosts of them by the breath of his mouth.” In the beginning was the Word … so
There was a young man who said, “damn!”
For it certainly seems that I am
A creature that moves
In determinate grooves:
I am not even a bus, I’m a tram.
The whole quest for knowledge in the Western world was to ascertain the laws, the Word, which is laid down in the beginning and which is obeyed by all living processes. If we could understand the word of God, we could predict the future. Much, therefore, of the Scriptures, especially of the Old Testament, consists of books of prophecy written by those who had heard the word of the Lord and who knew what was going to happen. This is the foundation of Western science. The idea of prophecy, of prediction, because if you know the future, you can prepare for it and control it. But at the same time this also contains within itself a kind of nemesis, because if you know the future, the one thing the future tells you for certain is “death and taxes.” Especially death … you are going to die. You are going to come to an end. The future can only be successful for a while, but in the end comes the doom, unless you can project that, by supernatural intervention, beyond the doom, the inevitable decay of all physical forms, there will be a resurrection of the body. Death follows from the inherent intractability and stupidity of matter. The spirit cannot finally conquer matter and all the things that we create out of our clay will fall apart, because the formlessness and heaviness of matter will overcome it. But we project beyond this the hope that spirit will in the end be more powerful and will be able to miraculize matter and make it immortal. The idea of the resurrection of the body involves the transformation of matter into everlasting life.
That is the technological enterprise of the West. That is what we are after. All technology, especially in medicine where we now transplant hearts, is trying to make matter subservient to the will, to spirit, and to immortalize it. But is that what we really want? I think that on entrance to college every student should be obliged to write an essay called “My idea of Heaven,” and it would be emphasized that he had to be extremely specific and really spell out in most particular terms what it is that he wants. Blow the expense, forget practicalities, what would you like to have? What would your greatest ideal of pleasure be? It might well be that if we thought that through, we would not want immortality of the individual personality. We might find that, in the end, it would turn out to be a horrible bore. But ordinarily we don’t think these things through. I’m fascinated with all the various kinds of imagery of heaven, with what people would expect it to be like. But they only touch on it, they never go into detail. People go into much more detail about the imagery of hell; that’s been worked out in very fine detail. All the tortures have been specified. But of the imagery of heaven we just say, “Oh, it’ll be great. We’ll have streets paved with gold, harps to play,” and children get disgusted right away. “Do you mean that after we’re dead, we’re gonna have to be in church forever?” Well, that’s horrible! Look, too, at the religious art of the Western world. I think particularly of the painting by Jan Van Eyck, The Last Judgment. Above there is heaven, below there is hell. Heaven is a solid mass of people sitting in pews, a row of heads like cobblestones on a street. They’re looking very demure and just sitting there, and below … wowee! The squirming mass of writhing bodies all naked and erotic being eaten up by serpents, presided over by a bat-winged skull. Hell is something to look at! Heaven isn’t. So, somehow or other we don’t think through what we think we desire. As the proverb says, “Be careful of what you desire, you may get it.”
We had, then, to get rid of this image of God as the autocratic ruler because it was very uncomfortable. But we justified this by making a still more uncomfortable image as a sort of rationalization. We began to feel belief in a universe that cares about us, in a “ground of being” that is personal and interested in us. This is woolly and wishful thinking. It was all right for little old ladies and perhaps as a story for children, but tough-minded people, to borrow a phrase from William James, faced the facts and the facts are that the universe does not give a damn about human beings or any other species. It is a completely mindless mechanical process whose principles are to be explained by analogy with the game of billiards. This was, of course, the model upon which Newton thought about the physical world. In line with Newton, Freud thought about the physical world in terms of hydraulics—psycho-hydraulics is basic to Freud’s thinking—the idea of the unconscious as a river that can be damned up and the dam has to be controlled in some way because the river is also mindless. It is also called libido, and that means “blind lust.” Likewise Ernst Haeckel thought of the energy of the world as blind energy. It was all mechanical, and our second great model of the world, which I shall call the fully automatic model, was a carryover from the Judeo-Christian model; it was an artifact, and thus a machine, but the artificer and the controller, the personal God, had disappeared, and you were simply left with the mechanism.
Now in this scheme of things the human being was regarded as a fluke, a statistical fluke, as when you have a million monkeys working on a million typewriters for a million years, the chances are that at some point they will type the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But the human being regarded as a fluke is not really very different from the human being regarded as the product of a divine whim. God is very whimsical in the book of Genesis. Suddenly he created great whales. Like that! He looked at them, and saw that they were good. He didn’t know that they were going to be good, but when he saw what he had done he said, “That’s okay. I approve of it.” There is always that kind of fluky feeling. Thus the belief that you are a fluke in a mindless, mechanical gyration is, as a matter of fact, what most people believe today.
We have very few religious people in the Western world because most people really do not believe in Christianity even though they may be Jehovah’s Witnesses. What they feel is what they ought to believe, and they feel very guilty because they don’t really believe. So they preach at each other and say, “You really ought to have faith,” but don’t really believe it because if they did they’d be screaming in the streets. They’d be taking enormous full page ads in the New York Times every day, and having horrendous television programs about the Last Judgment. But even when the Jehovah’s Witnesses call at your door, they’re quite courteous. They don’t really believe it. It’s simply become implausible and what everybody does in fact believe is the image of the fully automatic model, that we are chance gyrations in a universe where we are like bacteria inhabiting a rock ball that revolves about an insignificant star on the outer fringes of a minor galaxy. And, after a while, that will be that. When you’re dead, you’re dead. It’ll be over. In our ordinary, everyday thought and common speech, we use such phrases as, “I came into this world,” or we could quote the poet Housman saying,
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
There is a sense of somehow not belonging. Of course, if you are a fluke, in that sense you don’t belong. Likewise, if you are an incarcerated spirit from a spiritual world quite other than this material world, you don’t belong. There is in most civilized people’s common sense the feeling that you look upon this world as something outside you, foreign to you, alien to you, and so we naturally say, “You must face the facts. You must confront reality.” The “Existential Encounter!” The truth of the matter is that you didn’t come into this world at all. You came out of it, in just the same way that a leaf comes out of a tree or a baby from a womb. You are symptomatic of this world.
Thus if you are intelligent (and I guess we just have to assume as a leap of faith that human beings are intelligent) you are symptomatic of an intelligent energy system, just as Jesus said that one doesn’t gather figs from thistles or grapes from thorns. So also you don’t gather people from a world that isn’t peopling. Our world is peopling just as the apple tree apples, and just as the vine grapes. We are symptomatic of an extremely organized and complex environment. You do not find an intelligent organism in an unintelligent environment in exactly the same way that you do not find apples growing on cottonwood trees. Isn’t it curious then, that, especially in the nineteenth century, when the prevailing philosophy of science was called scientific naturalism (involving repudiation of the notion that the world was governed by external and supernatural intelligence) that people calling themselves naturalists began to wage an unprecedented war on nature. The naturalists were those who thought nature is stupid, and therefore that if the values and the intelligence of mankind are to persist, we must beat nature into submission to our wills. We thus initiated a form of technology whose basic premise was that man must dominate rather than cooperate with nature. Our technology has been motivated by a hostile spirit whose two great mythological symbols are the space rocket and the bulldozer.
The space rocket is, quite obviously, a phallic symbol, and a hostile phallus. This has something to do, I suppose, with our sexual inadequacies. A phallus in the biological sense is not a weapon at all; it is a caressing instrument. The whole idea of the phallus is to give a woman ecstasy, and perhaps a baby. It’s not to pierce her as if it were a sword. Thus the proper conception of a rocket should not be to conquer space … but could you possibly imagine the idea of giving pleasure to space, or our going out into space to confer love and delight upon any other beings that may be out there, and to fertilize naked planets? In the same way the symbol of the bulldozer is to make a horrible fulfillment of the biblical prophecy that “every valley shall be exalted and every mountain laid low and the rough places plane,” an attitude of pushing the world around. It is therefore absolutely urgent for our survival that we put behind technology a completely new spirit and attitude. This is not an antitechnological attitude. It is not saying that science is a ghastly mistake, but that what we need is not less science but more. We need more and more study and understanding of our complex relationships to and dependence upon plants, insects, bacteria, gases, astronomical processes—and the more we understand how our existence is one process with the existence of all these other creatures and things, the more we can use technology in an intelligent way, regarding the world outside of ourselves as simply an extension or part of our own bodies.
But the transformation of Western mythology must involve yet another step. We have been through the political image of the universe as ruled and dominated by an essentially violent lawgiver. Incidentally, all preaching, the whole organization of our churches, is violent, it’s military. In Paradise Lost Milton described what was going on in heaven before Lucifer even thought of rebelling. There were armies with banners and all the heraldic emblems of battle and force. Who’s looking for trouble? Think of all the imagery that we love in our churches, of how many people have a heartthrob when they sing the hymn “Onward Christian Soldier?” And the “Cross of Jesus, going on before,” the military banner. In hoc signo vinces. But the military model of imposing order upon the world by violence hasn’t worked, and the whole history of religion is the history of the failure of preaching. Preaching only makes hypocrites, people imitate righteousness because they are afraid of the wrath of God, or afraid in a more sophisticated way of being unreal or unauthentic persons, which is the new version of going to hell. It doesn’t work. The fully automatic model doesn’t work either, because that is simply another form of hostility. It’s saying “I’m a real tough guy because I face the facts, and this universe is just a stupid affair, and if you’re a realistic fellow, you’re going to face it, see? If you want to believe in God, or that something cares, you’re just a sentimental old lady. This is a tough thing, see? The more I believe that the universe is horrible, the more it advertises me as a tough personality, facing the facts.”
But somehow more in line with twentieth-century science would be an organic image of the world, the world as a body, as a vast pattern of intelligent energy that has a new relationship to us. We are not in it as subjects of a king, or as victims of a blind process. We are not in it at all. We are it! It’s you. Every individual in this organic myth of the world must look upon himself as responsible for the world. You can’t look back at your parents and say, “You got me mixed up in this, damn you!” In juvenile courts, children who have learned a little about psychoanalysis can say, “It’s not my fault I’m a criminal type. It’s that I got mixed up by my mother, and I had Oedipus complex.” Then the press says, “Well, then, it’s not the children who’re at fault; we’ve got to take care of the parents,” and the parents say, “We really can’t help it that we’re neurotic, it was our parents got us mixed up.” It goes right back to the story in the Garden of Eden: when Adam was asked by the Lord God “Didst thou eat the fruit of the tree whereof I told thee thou shouldst not eat?” Adam replied, “This woman, that thou gavest to me, she tempted me, and I did eat.” And when he said to Eve, “Didst thou eat, etc., she said, “The serpent beguiled me …” and the Lord God looked at the serpent and the serpent said nothing. He didn’t pass the buck. He knew the answer because the serpent and the Lord God had agreed, long before all this happened, behind the scenes before anything started, that they were going to play out this drama because the serpent is the left hand of God and “let not your right hand know what your left hand doeth.” So you see, that’s the game, the game of hide-and-seek. I don’t see any possibility of, what I would call, a basically healthy attitude to life in which you blame other people for what happens. As it would be said in Buddhism, everything that happens to you is your karma; that means your own doing. It may sound a little megalomaniac, as if to say, well I’m responsible for all this, like I’m God. That’s megalomania only if you use the monarchical image of God, which is why we cannot say in the West, “I am God.” They then put you in the nut-house because you’re saying, “I’m the boss, and you owe me divine honors.”
But if we have another image of God, an organic image, similar to the human body, who’s in charge? The head? The stomach? The heart? You could make an argument for each of them. You could say that the stomach is fundamental, it was there first. It is the organ that distributes vitality through food to all other organs. Therefore the stomach is primary. You can argue that the head, a ganglion of nerves on the top end of the alimentary canal, is an adjunct of the stomach and was evolved in order to scrounge around more intelligently to get some stuff to feed the stomach. Then the head stands up and argues, “No, I came later, and of course, the stomach was there first, but John the Baptist came before Jesus Christ, and I as the head am latest and most evolved product, and the stomach is my servant. The stomach is scrounging around to give me energy so that I can indulge in philosophy, culture, and religion and art.” Both arguments are equally valid or equally invalid. The point about an organism is that it’s a cooperation, that is, as Lao-Tzu says, “To be or not to be arise mutually. Long and short subtend each other; difficult and easy imply each other.” So do subject and object, I and thou. Inside and outside. They all come into being together. So do heart and head, head and stomach. They are mutual and there is a cooperation in which the order does not derive from imposition from above, from an orderer. So Lao-Tzu speaks of the Tao, the course and order of nature, saying, “The great Tao extends everywhere, both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things but does not lord it over them, and when merits are accomplished, it lays no claim to them.” Likewise, “In governing a great state, do it as you cook a small fish,” for when you cook a small fish, don’t fuss with it; be very gentle. Don’t overdo it.
So we can look forward, perhaps, to a day when the President of the United States may be someone as anonymous as chief sanitary engineer of New York City, who is a very valuable individual performing a most useful function. But when the chief sanitary engineer of New York City goes out in the streets, there is no fanfare, there are no huge escorts of police, for who could care about the sanitary engineer? Even in the Christian tradition there is an odd hint of this. In his Epistle to the Philippians, St. Paul says: “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, did not think equality with God a thing to be clung to, but made himself of no reputation and was found in fashion as a man and became obedient to death, even to the death of the cross.” The self-emptying or renunciation of power by the godhead is called in Greek kenosis, self-emptying. The idea that God creates the world by giving up power, by instituting a constitutional monarchy instead of a tyrannical one.
For everybody who has really understood power and the power game, like certain great sages and yogis in Asia who have practiced all sorts of psychic powers, realizes that psychic powers are not the answer. All manuals of yoga and Buddhistic practice will tell you that the siddhi or supernormal powers ought to be abandoned because power is not the answer. That’s not what you want. See, we get back to the question of thinking through what you want. If you get absolute power and you are in perfect control of everything that happens, which would be the final ideal of technology, you realize what would happen? You have a completely predictable future, you’re the perfect prophet, you know everything that’s going to happen, and the moment you know everything that’s going to happen, you’ve had it. Because the perfectly known future is a past. When in the course of playing games, it becomes quite certain what the outcome of the game will be, we always, of course don’t we, abandon the game and begin a new one because what we want is a surprise. And as one very wise man whom I knew once said to me, “Gnosis, the perfect wisdom or enlightenment, is to be surprised at everything.”
From Myths, Dreams, and Religion, edited by J. Campbell, 1970. New York, NY: Dutton. Copyright ©1970 by Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture. Reprinted with permission of the Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture.