As a culture, and as individuals, we suffer from a case of mistaken identity. This is not just one more problem to add to our confusion—it is the central issue. Its scope is such that if you were to consider the most significant challenges that afflict us—the social problems, the environmental problems, the economic problems, the problems of alienation—and trace each of them to their origins, you would find that they all lead back to the same cultural force: the story that tells us who we are and what it means to be human. And you would find that same force exacerbating every problem we face as individuals.
Any culture is a construct of language, architecture, dress, customs, myths, values, teachings and rituals that, taken together, communicate a story that frames reality in a particular way, and so frames us too. The broad story that has been developed by the culture of the industrialized West—though it is only a story—invisibly shapes all that we do: its construct effectively takes us out of relationship with the particular life of the present, out of relationship with all-sustaining nature, out of relationship even with our own hearts and bodies, and encases our sense of self within our own skins—more specifically, within the part of us that sits above the neck. Looking out at the world around us from that vantage, we find it to be materialistic and random, shattered into its constituent bits, a world in which survival is granted only to the fittest of its specimens. We accept that version of reality because it feels right; but a shattered outer world feels right to us only because our inner world has been shattered by our culture’s tacit story. A sensibility that is not whole cannot detect wholeness—and so has no reason even to believe wholeness exists in any meaningful way.
Sometimes, of course, what feels right to us actually is right. The only indication we have that our deeply felt identity may be mistaken—that there may be more to the reality of our lives than disparate parts that occasionally overlap or bump into each other—is that every other story that has actually been held accountable to questioning and research, or that has been attuned by centuries of telling and retelling, suggests that the abiding reality of life, the abiding reality of anything, is to be found in its relationship to the whole. That is what quantum mechanics tells us, which has been tested and challenged and retested in labs around the world; that is what the world’s mystic traditions tell us, which have been shaped over aeons by countless individual journeys into the stillness that breathes through all the world’s particulars; that is what works of art tell us when their significance traverses centuries and cultures with an undiminished resonance: they present truths of such relevance to the human heart that they carry us, the viewers and listeners, into renewed and vivid relationship with the world around us and with our own lives. Their ability to do that is what gives them their power to endure. Finally, we might look to the stories of myth, which have represented the human journey with a deep, living, metaphoric verity that has been refined over millennia by telling and retelling. Despite that refined verity, though, we generally find myths remote and largely irrelevant to the story to which we have dedicated ourselves. For that very reason, they promise to provoke some fruitful questions about it. Let us start, then, by asking what myths tell us about the elements of our own humanity.
Our culture likes to take a superior stance when it comes to myth. In fact, when we call something a myth, we are calling it a lie; a mythomaniac is not someone who has a mania for myths, but a chronic liar. We depict myths as harmless cartoons or view them as superstitious carryovers from our distant past—naive explanations of natural phenomena. Joseph Campbell saw something else: in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he describes how the ageless myths are playing themselves out among us here and now—how they are reborn within us here and now. As he put it,
The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.1
In the way that the dynamic of the atom is mimicked in the orbiting of our solar system, and again in the swirl of our galaxy, the dynamic of myth orbits through our lives and shapes them on every level—from the personal to that of expanding civilizations. The Neoplatonic philosopher Sallustius wrote of myths, “These things never happened, but they always are.”2 Roberto Calasso, author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, wrote, “The myths … are still out there, waiting to wake us and be seen by us.”3 The meanings in myths are multilayered and compressed, coiled like springs, waiting to be triggered by the attentions of the human heart—which alone can unleash their timeless vitality into the world.
The premise of Campbell’s book is that through all the legends, folktales, spiritual traditions and religions of the world, a single myth—what Campbell called the monomyth—is being told over and over. At its core is the journey of a single hero, answering the “call to adventure.” To be sure, that call to adventure can take many forms, and the hero’s journey may be cast in myriad eras, settings, cultures, circumstances and adventures—but the essence of the story is fundamental to myth and, as Campbell wrote, has been “the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind.”4 And Campbell is as experienced a guide to that story as we could hope for.
So what are the most basic elements of that story? The first involves the society to which the hero belongs: hunkered against the unfamiliar, dark and shifting forces beyond its borders, the hero’s society has defined its world authoritatively and shaped itself to confirm that definition; but its very adherence to that definition compromises its ability to transform. What cannot transform is stuck. When a symbol of redemption for the society appears in the form of a task to be achieved or an object to be won (e.g., the search for the Holy Grail), the hero’s challenge is defined. Called to adventure, his spiritual center of gravity shifts to the landscape beyond the outer rim of what is familiar to either him or his society. That unknown landscape may be subterranean, distant, forested or suboceanic, but it holds terrors, treasures and strange, often shape-shifting beings who may be possessed of supernatural powers. In answering the call to adventure, the hero has to make a journey: he has to transgress the boundaries that society has set for itself. His society may honor him for that, or disdain him, or pay him no heed. In any event, as Campbell puts it, the hero
cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live,” Nietzsche says, “as though the day were here.” It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.5
The hero’s journey beyond what is set and known and familiar disorients and confuses and tests him. He usually has to face a grasping tyrant in the form of a king, ogre or monster who stifles the energies that feed and vitalize the universe. If the hero is successful in overcoming the tyrant, he wins a life-giving perspective, which may be symbolized as runes of wisdom, treasure, or a bride. His next task is “to return then to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed.”6 The effect of his return is to initiate a transformation of renewal, releasing again the flow of life into the body of his society.
Myth recognizes that any society will tend to establish and enforce norms that purport to represent reality, though in truth they only represent agreed-upon customs of thinking. The definitions within which a society shelters hold the chaos of the unknown at bay, but they also stifle a society’s plasticity—which means they stifle its creative ability to engage with reality. Take our own case, for example: if we could shed our mistaken identity and see the harmony of self and world for what it is, would we be able to persist in those pursuits that wreak havoc on the very air we breathe and the creatures whose planet we share? The need to transform beyond our “pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding” has never been more desperate, and we generally know that, but we still seem to be stuck in the very status quo that is destroying us.
The hero’s task is not to threaten his society, nor to take it over tyrannically with his newfound perspective, nor to abandon it; his task is to bring his new perspective back to be integrated in such a way that the society’s self-definition loosens and shifts to accommodate what it has hitherto excluded. By altering its defined ‘known’ to accommodate what the hero has brought back from the unknown, the society more closely harmonizes with the unseen world around it, and is newly energized in the process.
Myth tells us a great deal about the dynamics of a society, in particular about how its freedom, creativity and presence are affected by the ways in which it relates to both the individual citizen and the world around it; but that scale is only one of the levels on which the multivalent truths of myth operate. They also, for instance, reveal the dynamics of familial relationships, as Freud’s famous treatment of the Oedipus myth made clear. For me, however, the most potent revelations of myth come about once we recognize all the players in its tales as parts of the self. There is a part of the self, myth tells us, that needs to venture into the unknown and bring a new perspective to bear on its own status quo, in order that it might harmonize more closely with the world’s reality.
Joseph Campbell urged us to see that: “It’s you. All of these symbols in mythology refer to you.”7 In other words, mythic events represent the dynamics within the self that shape or thwart the transformation of our consciousness; and the symbols myth supplies “carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back.”8 The hero’s role of liberator plays itself out in each of our lives, but so does the role of the grasping, controlling tyrant. By clarifying those roles, myth explicates the nature of the fantasies that tie us back, which we have called ‘descriptions’; it points out the source of those fantasies within ourselves; and it offers the insights needed to free ourselves of their hold. More specifically, the various journeys made by myth’s heroes navigate the disjunctures that occur between mind and body in an effort to heal them. “The ancient myths were designed to harmonize the mind and the body,”9 as Campbell put it—they free our thoughts from the bottle so they can rejoin the lush garden of the body. As the myths show us, such a harmonization requires a soul-shaking abandonment of our craving for fantasy, that we might transcend the errors of any mere story and merge with the life of ‘what is’.
But exactly how is it that the host of characters who drive the storied myths of the world can be said to represent elements of the self? We can answer that by looking into the two primary themes of myth: one theme is represented by the polarity between male and female, and the other by the polarity between hero and tyrant. Myth explicates each theme, as well as the relationship between the themes, over and over—because together they map out the journey by which the parts of the self evolve into a whole. In a nutshell, the symbolic language of myth tells us that the self thrives as a marriage between male and female, in the harmony of which reside its fundamental strengths; that the uniting of male and female is the central concern of the hero’s journey; that a failure or a refusal to find balance in that union leads to tyranny; and that the effects of that tyranny show up not just in our relationship to our own bodies, but also in our relationship to the body of the earth. Myth finally affirms that until the inner tyrant is outed, there can be no true marriage within of the male and female elements of the self. That event is typically represented in myth with the slaying of the tyrant and the subsequent wedding ceremony. The central importance of that union was stressed by the great modern psychologist Carl Jung, for whom, as Marion Woodman put it, “the whole process of the soul’s journey is toward the inner marriage of the mature masculine and the mature feminine.”10
The stage is set for that marriage by creation myths, which tell us that the universe began as a primordial unity of male and female and that the dividing of that unity enabled the universe to evolve. Male and female split apart at the beginning of time—commonly into sky and earth—but they continued to long for each other, as expressed by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus,
Holy sky desires to penetrate the earth.
Love seizes the earth with longing for this marriage.
And rain, falling from her bedfellow the sky,
impregnates earth; and she brings forth for men
pasture for their flocks, and grain for them.11
As this imagery suggests, myths differentiate between male and female in a fundamental way. The male element is associated with doing: the ever-active sky brings rain and wind and thunderheads and lightning and the revolving watchfulness of the stars and planets and the blazing gaze of the sun; we are also told that the angels, who dwell in the sky and are active in the affairs of the earth, are exclusively male. The female element is associated with being: the earth just is; it receives the offerings of the sky in all their manifestations and integrates them to bring forth transformative life. As poet and myth scholar Robert Graves observed, “Man does; woman is.” Myth tells us that these two elements of the self—doing and being—unite in us to form a unity. Neither by itself can constitute an evolving whole.
In recent decades, male/female differences have been a touchy subject—and for good reason: history warns of dire consequences for women in society whenever a difference has been acknowledged. They have been vilified, shunned, segregated and even tortured for such differences. But perhaps we are ready to honor our mutual strengths, even as they become more clearly understood. Recent advances in scanning technology, for instance, enable us to actually watch the brain at work as men and women process information and emotions, assess physical challenges, and even hear, smell and feel. The differences between them prompted feminist and psychologist JoAnn Deak to comment, “I’ve come to believe that the brain is the most genderized part of the body.”12 Another researcher declared, “There’s not a gender gap, there’s a gender chasm.”13 Their comments are based on extensive clinical evidence. Gendered brain maps show that when men are given a task, such as reading for comprehension, they are likely to use a small area in one hemisphere of the brain; when women are given the same task, they characteristically use both sides of the brain and more of the brain overall. Speaking to a predominantly female audience, JoAnn Deak characterized the differences as follows:
We [women] are programmed to multitask; we are built to massively connect and communicate. Male brains are built to streamline and to go right to what they have to do.14
We use and often demand conformity to the categories ‘men’ and ‘women’ when describing ourselves, but nature pays our descriptions little heed, creating instead a range of sexual identities that express the full potential of our humanity; in the case of hermaphrodites, nature confounds the very categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ to which we would like to hold it accountable. Unlike ours, some cultures show special respect for individuals who blur those categories, considering them to have a divine perspective: after all, if we were created in God’s image, then God must include both male and female. In that regard we are all blessed with divine sensibilities, for we are all blessed with both the male element of doing and the female element of being within us.
That said, it is nonetheless true that female strengths tend to predominate in women and male strengths in men. In fact, if we look closely at the wording by which Deak characterized male and female brains, we find that it accords with what Robert Graves observed. Male brains, said Deak, are “built to streamline and to go right to what they have to do.” In other words, as Graves summarized it, “Man does.” And again I would like to emphasize that the male element in each of us does, which is in strict opposition to any silliness claiming that women can’t or shouldn’t do.
To see how the element of Being shows up in Deak’s description of the female brain asks for a subtler understanding. We might describe ‘Being’ as simply ‘that which is’ in its entirety: unfiltered, free from exclusion, replete in all its paradoxes and transformations.* Of course, the entirety of ‘what is’ is always in process—multitasking, to use JoAnn Deak’s term: as it sustains the interaction of subatomic particles, it also sustains the formation and dissolution of galaxies and the flowering of the crocus. But despite the fact that “World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural,”15 as poet Louis MacNeice put it, there is also a time-honored recognition, expressed in myth, spiritual traditions and the perennial philosophy, and dramatically demonstrated by quantum mechanics, that Being is a unity indissolubly bound by interrelationships; and its web of interrelationships is so finely woven that the slightest change anywhere in it affects all else that exists. As a phenomenon called entanglement demonstrates, particles can affect each other instantaneously over any distance. And so when we revisit Deak’s finding that women “are programmed to multitask … built to massively connect and communicate,” we find a description that might apply to Being itself. In mythological terms, the female element in each of us just is, at rest within the unfolding present—receiving, integrating and massively connecting and communicating with all that is.
Male and female elements show up differently in different cultures. Some cultures are oriented in their language and art and myths and rituals to face the mystery of what is. Because they evidence a devotion to the female element of Being, they have been called “goddess-centered.” I feel, though, that it may be our own modern prejudice towards the dualism of subject/object that fosters our belief that they worshiped an individuated Goddess. Being suffuses all and can be felt in all and does not stand independent, as a deity would, from the continuum of ‘what is’; for that reason I prefer the term matrifocal to describe such cultures. Matrifocal cultures attended primarily to the female element of Being; they learned to live in accord with the rhythms and avails of nature, leaving minimal impact on the landscape, and leaving us relatively rare evidence of incursions or warfare.
Our own culture, by contrast, is oriented by its language and art and institutions and aspirations to attend primarily to the male element of doing. For that reason our culture has been called a patriarchy. But although there are ample examples of patriarchy throughout our culture, we are not a patriarchy: specifically, our society is no longer ruled by men. What we are, I would argue, is patrifocal—focused on the fruits of the male element of doing. That focus is rampant in our culture, and it expresses itself in both men and women. In other words, in the values it expresses, in its buildings, its idioms and its daily rituals, our culture continues to be ruled by the male element of doing and offers almost no provision for a simple, attentive appreciation of Being. Our meager efforts in that direction are exemplified by those Scenic Outlook sites on highways at which you stop the car and step out to ‘do’ the view and take a picture before jumping back in the car to hit the road again. When we look for guidance in orienting ourselves to the world, it is not to Being that we turn: we ask the question, “What should I do?” Our entire field of attention is attuned to the male element and the ideas by which it runs itself: doing is what we notice, it’s what we think about, it’s what we spend our time at, it’s how we set out to solve our problems. Our enterprises of doing reshape the very landscape around us: massive concrete highways and skyscrapers reach out and up, leaving their mark; within our cities we obliterate all but the most token and closely manicured vestiges of nature; and the rural countryside is hammered into the stark, rectilinear uniformity that suits agribusiness. So entranced is our culture with the male element that we tend to justify ourselves in its terms: we commonly define ourselves by what we do and what we have to show for it, and we obsess daily over all the things we have to do or want to do—to which end we ceaselessly calculate and scheme and schematize and manage and anticipate. And so what if we are out of touch with our bodies and our breath? So what if we have forgotten how to relate to the world as it is and are almost never fully present in it? Look at what we are accomplishing, and at what we still need to get done, and at what we should be doing now.
An appreciation of Being is something of a nonissue at best for those who are addicted to doing. When we are judging ourselves or others, the ability to be present is far less important than such telling indicators as what car someone drives, for instance, or how he or she dresses. And yet despite our addiction, something nags—something seems out of place or deficient. The great ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus left us a clue to it when he wrote of those who “are as unaware of what they do when awake as they are when they are asleep.”16 What does it mean to be truly awake? We move closer to an answer when we consider that of the hundreds of actors who may cross a stage, the handful who exhibit that magic, intangible quality of ‘presence’ are those who, as director Wallace Chappell put it, “seem not to be working, but just being.”17 Working, of course, is an expression of the male element of doing. The actors who are busy working are inevitably less present, less awake—but why?
In the same way that the male element and the female element live within each of us, so do the hero and the tyrant. If we are unaware of their pull on us, we lose our ability to make conscious choices, and we come to resemble the animated sleepers of whom Heraclitus wrote, or the actors who are so busy doing that they lack presence.
We have already identified the hero as a liberator of the human spirit, and we have considered the stages of his journey: he is called beyond the familiar sphere of his society into the unknown, to which the call has now relocated his spiritual center of gravity; his journey is strange and disorienting, and he is tested in the course of it; and if he is successful, he returns from the unknown with the seeds of renewal—the insight or perspective that his society needs for its own transformation. The success of his journey may depend on his resourcefulness, physical strength, skills or cleverness—but those qualities are less important than the hero’s primary virtue: as Joseph Campbell has put it, “The hero is the man of self-achieved submission.”18 Campbell is not talking about submission to a tyrant, or to injustices, or to rule, or to the authority of any external idea. The hero’s submission is self-achieved and transformative and offered with a complete peace of mind—he chooses to die to what has been, and he finds himself reborn into the newness of the living world around him. That is, he dies to society’s description of Being and, in opening himself to the vibrant unknown, submits to ‘what is’—which can never be fully described and which cannot be accommodated without relinquishing the norms of language, perception and sensibility, allowing them to change fundamentally. It is the restorative energy of that new knowledge that he brings back to his society. As Campbell writes,
That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark?. How communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses the message of the all-generating void? Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold.19
What the hero risks, then, is direct contact with the voluble mystery of the unknown. In saying that it is direct, we understand that it is neither supervised nor mediated by foreknowledge or plans or interpretation. The encounter is naked, one-on-one. But if the hero stands as a symbol for some part of ourselves, how do we interpret that encounter?
Let’s begin at the beginning: the hero’s ordered society is a realm within which everything is objectively familiar and reassuringly defined. Campbell described it as the soul’s “exile in a world of organized inadequacies”:20 a state in which the self has so closed itself to any influences that lie beyond description or control that it has lost its ability to transform. Robert Pirsig, who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, coined the word stuckness to describe this state. Architect Christopher Alexander writes about it as our inability to “allow the forces we experience to run freely in us, to fly past each other, … to escape the locked-in conflict which oppresses us.”21 A friend once told me, “When someone tells you they’re bored, don’t believe them. They’re afraid.” Boredom is inevitable when we shut the door on newness: preferring not to risk the unknown into which transformation would carry us, we effectively box ourselves into “a world of organized inadequacies.”
That phrase of Campbell’s reminds me of my first visit to New York City. The zoo in Central Park was bleak and harsh in 1971. The gorilla sat in a pool of urine on a concrete slab, and when visitors stopped by his cage to gawk, he would sweep his knuckles across the floor and send a spray arcing through the bars. The image that most haunted me, though, was that of the tiger: a rippling powerhouse of an animal, painfully and uselessly attuned to the smells and movements outside its stark cage, relentlessly pacing around and around over the same ground, ready and needing to connect with the world beyond the bars, and unable to. That image precisely evokes the exile of the soul when our living is confined to the ‘known’: we tread round and round in a strictly bounded, controlled, tiny realm that we ourselves have staked out, usually in compliance with the description that is issued by our culture. Like the tiger, our soul is ready to connect with the world, and needs to, but can’t. The major difference is that the tiger had no choice in the matter. We do.
The nature of that choice shows up in the actor who is so busy ‘working’ on stage that she lacks presence. Like the tiger, she paces through the same steps and inflections and gestures night after night; but whereas the tiger’s freedom has been circumscribed by others, the actor’s is circumscribed by herself. Over the course of rehearsals she has made that her job: to thoroughly describe the world she is inhabiting, to look for and assign meaning to every phrase she speaks, to every gesture she makes and to every character with whom she shares the stage. Once the meaning of every moment has been established, she knows how to play it for maximum effect; she knows what to do. In other words, her allegiance is to the male element of doing; and that prevents the very transformations that bring a performance to life and give it ‘presence’.
As Heraclitus pointed out, we know all things by their opposites. So what about the actor who is just being? Alan Alda is not only a very fine actor; he is also articulate about his process:
The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues. Like so much of what I learned in the theater, this turned out to be how life works, too.22
You cannot find presence, freedom or creativity inside a world arrested by description—which is also to say you cannot find wholeness there—because any such world is a mere duplicate that has severed ties with the world it purports to represent. When you “pretend to listen,” whether onstage or off, you are actually paying attention to your own ideas about how to react and are using your face and body to ‘do’ a duplicate of “listening” that is based on them; when you really listen, you abandon the foregone knowledge of how to react and, willing to ‘be’, you pay attention instead to ‘what is’. Actor Simon Callow addressed the same issue when he advised actors to discard all willful doing: “the actor must be, with the totality of his being, in front of the audience at this moment.”23
As Alan Alda noted, that turns out to be how life works, too. When we choose willful doing, we may pretend to listen to the world, but we are actually being guided by our ideas about it: our willfulness knows what it wants and how to get it and doesn’t need to surrender to the living guidance of ‘what is’. Instead, the male element of willful doing charts its course according to its duplicates of ‘what is’: forms of objective knowledge that are disconnected from Being and so have abandoned wholeness. But we are setting up a funny implication here: objective knowledge and wholeness seem to lie in opposing camps. How can that be? After all, knowledge is virtually the altar at which our culture worships. As Francis Bacon famously observed, “Knowledge is power.” But let’s leave aside what we know about knowledge for a minute and look at it afresh.
Once we acquire knowledge of something, our knowledge remains fixed and independent of the thing it represents until we choose to amend it. In other words, it exists as a duplicate. The energy of the world is in process, moving forever onwards; the duplicate is a static scheme. Such schemes are never neutral. We construct and return to our duplicates because they are meaningful to us—and in their static abstraction they preserve that meaning, the way a photograph freezes a moment. In other words, knowledge not only stands apart from any phenomenon it represents, it designates the meaning of it; so our knowledge of a phenomenon substitutes for a meaningful experience of it, and saves us the trouble of experiencing it repeatedly. But we should also be aware that to designate the significance of the world’s phenomena is to flatten them into signs—and although the origin of those three words is uncertain, the great linguist and etymologist Ernest Klein suggests that they, and their ally assign, are all related to the Latin word secare, “to cut.” And indeed, when we assign meaning, we create a kind of sign for ourselves that is independent, cut away from the flux of the present. In the way a theater flat might be painted to represent a forest, our knowledge of the world flattens it into a duplicate.
A ketchup bottle, for instance, provides such knowledge. It saves you the trouble of smelling or tasting—experiencing—in order to know what is in the bottle. The label already tells you—and the information it delivers stands independent of the fluid meaningfulness of your experience of the present, which is gathered by the senses and defies definition. As the title of a book by Lawrence Weschler puts it, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. Like real listening, ‘seeing’ the present requires a willingness to be changed by it, and static knowledge forestalls the need for real seeing. When you forget the names, forget the labels, forget the foregone assumptions and truly open to the present, its ‘meaning’ will dawn upon you as an unmediated response in which any vestige of a line between self and world holds no more substance than a ring of smoke. Stepping out of duplicates, you enter not only the unknown, but the suddenness of your own life, which may come upon you with such meaningfulness as to give you goose bumps or pierce you with joy; it might scrabble with claws at the heart or bring tears of gratitude and relief. If we can stretch language a little to our own purposes, we might say that only by letting go of meaning do we open ourselves to meaningfulness: the bottomless meaningfulness that lies at the intersection of our life and this transient moment.
Labels, static knowledge, foregone meaning—they are all means of convenience that effectively sidestep Being. They dismiss it. And as long as the male element remains independent of the female, its primary relationship will be with its own knowledge rather than with Being. Indeed, willful doing invariably expresses such knowledge: it expresses our known relationship to the world, our assessment of its available resources, our formulation for making those resources conform to our wishes—and it expresses, above all, how we want to be known by ourselves and the world. Willful doing is created by knowledge.
The female element, on the other hand, massively connects and communicates. This does not happen through the agency of objective knowledge; it relies instead on a sensitivity that receives ‘what is’ and processes it and integrates it continuously. Those capabilities are all made possible by the agency of sensation, which reminds us that the Latin word sentire, from which sensation derives, actually means both “to feel” and “to think.” The sensations that enable us to ‘be’ constitute what we might call the thinking of being. Our sense of being is created by feeling.
Our impatience to assign rather than live meaning is widely endorsed by our culture—but there have been dissenting voices. In Against Interpretation Susan Sontag addressed that impatience:
It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings” … The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.24
To interpret a phenomenon or assign meaning to it is in a sense to solve it and thereby conquer it. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, though, reminded us that life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be experienced. When life is seen as a problem to be solved, it is presumed to be knowable. Furthermore, if only you can crack its riddle and grasp its meaning, then you can win at it. And there are countless strategies out there advising you how to do just that, from New Age pronouncements to self-help books to investment manuals to the scientifically sanctioned ‘survival of the fittest’. All may help us towards certain solutions, but no solution will help us towards an experience of life’s mystery. In fact, because solutions tend to stand apart from the present, they more often stand as obstacles to our experience of it. Joseph Campbell once commented,
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our innermost being and reality.25
The last sentence suggests that the experience of being alive involves a harmony not just of mind and body, but also of world (the physical plane) and self (our innermost being). Campbell then tackles the fiction of ‘meaning’:
There is no meaning. What’s the meaning of the universe? What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there. That’s it. And your own meaning is that you’re there. We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.26
With that in mind, we might appreciate why the great myths of the world warn against seeing the self as a “problem to be solved”: to whatever extent we succeed, the self will then be ‘known’ in a manner that isolates it, fixes it, and flattens it with foregone meaning. To solve the ‘problem of the self’ is to arrive at a static idea of the self—a duplicate that we use to define and identify ourselves. To the extent that we identify with that duplicate, our identity is mistaken. And in that our mistaken identity takes us out of relationship with the world, it leaves us incapable of coming into harmony with it. Confusion in all relationships is the inevitable outcome: in our relationship with the earth we walk on, with the sky we walk beneath, with the food that sustains us and the water we drink, with the people around us, and even with the genius of our own flesh.
The source of that confusion—our mistaken identity—will maintain its hold on us, supported by our culture’s story in countless directives every day, until we can hold it to account. As a first step, we might haul it into the light and name it. If we were to call it the ‘known self’, we would remind ourselves that it is based on the presumptions of static knowledge: our duplicates. We might also note that the realm staked out for us by the ‘known self’ is an example of the defined, closed society of ‘organized inadequacy’ beyond whose sphere of influence the hero is called to venture. Like that society, your ‘known self’ is a construct that solves the problem of who you are with a set of norms defined by a repertoire of ideas, relationships and patterns of behavior that you know you want to have, that you invest with a fixed meaning, and that you dedicate yourself to maintaining. In short, your ‘known self’ is the formulation of who you know yourself to be.
In 1980 the physicist David Bohm participated in a seminar that was published under the beguiling title Knowledge as Endarkenment. In it he comments on the work of his friend and associate, the philosopher Krishnamurti, and says, “I think that Krishnamurti has been suggesting that knowledge is the general source of our difficulty.”27 Later in the seminar Bohm talks about
the kind of knowledge which may produce darkness. That knowledge of what you are, who you are, what sort of person you’ve got to be, to whom you belong, what your desires are, what your fears are, what you can do, what you can’t do.28
“Our difficulty” is the problem of not being present. What Bohm is describing as “the kind of knowledge which may produce darkness,” we are calling the ‘known self’. In order to be present you have to appreciate that the present is an unknown—it has never been here before, and neither have you. Presupposition cannot reveal the present to you any more than you could presuppose your response to it. If the self is to be present—fully responsive to and participant in the here and now—then it too must remain untethered by objective knowledge. As the present is discovered, so too is the self; and once the present is felt as a whole, so too is the self. Everything else is a form of endarkenment.
It’s one thing to admit that the present is an unknown—but to allow that the self is an unknown is a bit of a kicker. We depend on our solution of the self to solve the problems of our living—and so we carry that solution around with us, like a framed picture. To the extent that we preserve that framed idea of who we are, we buffer the self from the present—the living source of creativity and freedom—and shackle it to the past, on which our knowledge of it is based. In other words, to the extent that we hold on to the idea of who we are, we are not quite awake; like the sleepers of whom Heraclitus wrote, we are living by duplicates.
Of course, the ‘known self’, being a duplicate, doesn’t belong to the present. In fact, its static construct can only survive if it is protected from the unwanted vagaries of experience; and so we tend to preserve the ‘known self’ within the defined walls of ‘me’, like a framed picture, or a specimen in a jar. You cannot breathe twice into the same body, but you can breathe twice into the same ‘known self’. The more you protect the idea of ‘who you know yourself to be’, the more it ossifies; and you accept that ossification because it seems to offer a sort of reliability. But so much comes to depend on it that you can never leave it unguarded. When we become defensive in social situations, that’s exactly what is happening—we are defending ‘who we know ourselves to be’ from the implications of a present event. When our self-definition is under attack, we feel we are under attack. We confuse the two. And because they become confused, we feel that when we protect the definition, we are protecting the self. We have all met people who wear their assumptions like a bulletproof vest. That is true endarkenment. Definition, like knowledge, is endarkenment. As Lao-tzu said, “He who defines himself can’t know who he really is.”29
Who you really are is the part of you that can center itself in the energy of the present, which is and always will be unknowable in any objective way. Appreciating that, we can also appreciate that the “all-generating void,” the unknown realm into which the hero ventures, is a representation of the unknowable present—for within its deep stillness lies the deepest unknown realm in all of reality. To open to that realm and allow your spiritual center of gravity to live there is to join the mythic hero. It is also to side with life. To remain within the boundaries of the ‘known self’ is to confine yourself to the endarkenment of an ‘organized inadequacy’. And I stubbornly enclose the term ‘known self’ within quotation marks to underscore that it is a mere fiction, an abstract idea that has no substantive reality. As philosopher L. L. Whyte put it,
To know yourself is no longer adequate, because static knowledge is not possible. You can realize yourself only as a developing component of the community.30
And yet our culture assures us that we can realize the self by knowing it, and advises us to let that static knowledge govern what we do, what we feel, how we react to new information, what we think, and also, more subtly, how we think—something this book ventures into in later chapters. Furthermore, we collaborate with that governance, insisting that our mistaken identity be affirmed at every turn. And so we feel horror at forgetting people’s names, or calling them by the wrong names. We feel impatience at having our routines or expectations interrupted. Naturally, too, in times of national arrogance or crisis, when we most need to reinforce the image of ‘who we know ourselves to be’, we often elect our political leaders for their ability to answer that need. Cagey political candidates capitalize on that by crafting an image of themselves with body language and speech patterns that mirror the voter, and they assure us with paternal confidence that their intolerance of doubt is a strength, because they know themselves and their country. That promise of certainty is something our culture longs for, and at times it has proven more decisive in elections than any national policy that might actually contribute to the common welfare. Rule by those skilled in the manipulation of their own image is a natural consequence of our infatuation with the idea of ‘the individual’ and the fiction of the ‘known self’.
Our culture clings so tenaciously to its fiction of the self as an independent and known entity that you just know something very big depends on it. I think the raw nerves of the issue lead back to our belief that if the self can be partitioned from the seamless whole and enclosed, it can be overseen and protected. We can control it, direct it, correct it and judge it. Enclose it sufficiently well, and we can ensure its unassailable stability in the face of life’s vicissitudes.
Or so we think. In fact, something quite different happens, and it is frankly counterintuitive. For an analogy we might look to skiing or snowboarding: when you stand as a beginner on the hill, feet clamped onto a slick board or two slippery sticks that threaten to speed down the slope, carrying you with them, the natural instinct is to try to assert control by leaning back into the hill. In fact, and contrary to intuition, you learn that only by leaning forward can you achieve stability—and only stability provides choice. I’ll never forget the time when learning to snowboard that I was sailing across the hill straight towards some trees, and instead of bailing out I actually leaned towards the trees I was about to hit—a pure act of faith that felt a lot like suicide at the time. To my astonishment and relief I went into what felt like a perfectly executed turn. Lesson learned. Only by leaning down the hill can you ride it freely. In the same way, and it is equally counterintuitive, stability and choice in life can only be learned by giving yourself over to the world as it is, unknown and on the move, and finding your ease within its flux. If you withdraw from that flux, you are separating yourself from the present and retreating to your duplicates.
We are told that the aphorism “Know Thyself” was inscribed at the oracle at Delphi. You might reason naturally enough that to abandon the idea of who you are—your ‘known self’—is also to renounce that ageless wisdom, and what is the point of living in self-ignorance? Plato assured us that an unexamined life is not worth living. And, certainly, to stray from the ‘known self’ is as counterintuitive as leaning towards the trees you wish to avoid on your runaway snowboard. As it turns out, it is also as necessary. Just as the snowboard won’t otherwise move into a turn, so too you cannot otherwise move into the world. And to move into the world is also to move into your true self—as opposed to the duplicate self that your culture instructs you to secure. That, too, is the meaning of the Delphic oracle. As Richard Tarnas writes, its advice “was seen not as the creed of an introspective subjectivist, but as a directive to universal understanding.”31 It turns out, paradoxically, that the main issue in “Knowing Thyself,” one that proves as rich as it is inexhaustible, is how to center yourself in the world of the present—in all its mystery, its evocations, its changeable particularity.
True self-knowledge is not an entity to be possessed, but a revelation of the world itself—to be felt and explored and lived. In fact, we could accurately say that your ‘true self’ is that measure of you that is continuous with the present. To center yourself in the present is to awaken to what is most true in you. All the rest is fantasy. It’s really that simple. In our culture, alas, each of us takes on so much responsibility for creating and upholding our ‘known self’ that only the lucky ones ever discover the relief of disclaiming that responsibility and giving over to the aliveness of the present; within its fluid ease, self-knowing is a moment-by-moment revelation of the harmonizing energies of the world to which you belong.
And that highlights a critical choice that we all face: you can either be ‘who you know yourself to be’, or you can be present. One or the other. Not both. And you can transcend the fractured divisions of self-definition only by risking the discovery of what it means to be whole.
To sum up, then, the hero within each of us is nurtured by our willingness to step beyond definition (“away with all duplicates”) and into the surrender of a direct, unmediated encounter with Being. Furthermore, the ‘known self’ is a tool of the male element of doing: it is a construct of ideas and instructions that is intended to guide what we do and how we do it in our everyday lives; and in that it is deliberately a duplicate, it is deliberately disconnected from the living guidance of ‘what is’. That state of disconnection is also, tellingly, the primary characteristic of the mythological tyrant.
The central story that humanity has told itself for millennia and across cultures of the world is an explication of the forces that carry us into our wholeness as humans. If myth seems remote and irrelevant to our lives, that merely indicates how our awareness has been dulled to the interplay of those forces within us. All the more reason, then, to look anew at the countless stories of myth, for they are designed to awaken us to our innermost truths. The two primary protagonists of the monomyth are the hero and the tyrant. The polarity between them, which lives in each of us, provides myth with its second great theme—a complement to the polarity between the male and female.
Joseph Campbell has described the hero and the tyrant in terms that highlight their stark differences: the hero, identified by his self-achieved submission, recognizes his spiritual center of gravity in the unknown present; the tyrant, identified by his self-achieved independence, seeks seclusion in the ‘known self’. Campbell describes the tyrant as “the monster avid for the greedy rights of ‘my and mine’ ” and notes that what drives him is “an impulse to egocentric self-aggrandizement.” He goes on to elaborate,
The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions.32
There is a heck of a lot to absorb in that description—but it is laser-sharp, and I have found that it rewards a close rereading. Examples of the tyrant present themselves to us on every scale. It is easy enough to see correlates in certain leaders of government, or in the specter of most large multinational corporations, driven to acquire more for themselves and heard in the media entertaining themselves with “humane intentions.” That such behavior should be sanctioned both legally and socially is only natural in a culture that gathers itself around the idol of the ‘known self’. And so it is that we congratulate the self-made billionaire for what he has accumulated—and even as we call him “self-made,” we ignore the fact that he depended on the whole of society as well as nature’s frail resources in order to make his fortune. We also grant privileges to political leaders, appointed to serve the people but too often seduced into using that opportunity to promote the narrow interests of themselves and their friends; or to the CEO who lays off a hundred workers whose salaries, combined, do not begin to equal his own self-assigned perks; or we adulate the ego-besotted rock star, dependent on fans to sustain the fantasy of his self-aggrandizement.* Our scale of values is so skewed that our society’s actions evince a deep belief that those who acquire a lot have ipso facto demonstrated their worth, and should therefore be granted special privileges and opportunities to acquire more. But as Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond so plainly put it, “Those people with the greatest power to make decisions in our own society today regularly make money from activities that may be bad for society as a whole and for their own children.”33 They feel entitled to do so, and our laws exonerate them in the harm they inflict. And until recent egregious excesses came to light and led to the economic collapse of 2008, the thief stealing a few thousand dollars from a bank machine has typically done more jail time than an executive who steals a few million from his shareholders.
The confusion of our values is so deep that we often respect, adulate and ourselves aspire to the fantasies of the tyrant. That is, we commonly yearn for the tyrant’s status of pampered, self-achieved independence—yearn, like him, to be shielded by wealth and influence and fame from life’s mundane inconveniences and from the need for ordinary compassion; and we are so seduced by our fantasy that we fail to appreciate the obscene cost that such wealth can exact from the soul.
The mind-numbingly disproportionate allocations of wealth within the corporate sector serve to glaze the fantasy with the special status of privilege. The idea that CEOs are a breed apart and deserving of their grossly inflated incomes was put to rest in 2008: their competence was merely mediocre, and across the board their greed and entitlement blinded them to the consequences of their actions. These people are not inventing anything to help the world, or creating anything, or even risking their own money on a venture they believe in: they are merely the head that tells the corporation—literally “the body”—what to do; and the head, our culture tells us in innumerable ways, is deservedly superior. Million-dollar bonuses are merely an affirmation of its superiority—one that indirectly flatters us all. And so, as we leave behind the recession of 2008–09, the bonuses are staging a quiet comeback. What is most disturbing about that is the number of studies demonstrating that the greater the pay inequities within a society, the more social unrest and the less general happiness are to be found there. So the CEO who argues for a multimillion-dollar bonus is inadvertently petitioning for a dissolution of the social cohesiveness on which he depends. The situation is further skewed when you look at the real value contributed to society by various professions, as the New Economics Foundation did in its A Bit Rich report. There you will find, for example, that whereas hospital cleaners create £10 of value for every £1 they earn, bankers by contrast actually destroy £7 of value for every £1 they earn.34
The issue we need to look at, though, isn’t the inequity of a CEO’s earnings, gross though they are—the problem is that most of us, in truth, would like a crack at a multimillion-dollar salary. Wealth is the primary means within our society for achieving the tyrant’s independence, and we not only long for that kind of independence—we see it as a measure of personal value, freedom, security and choice. We have been raised to believe that the pursuit of personal gain is our birthright—as if the goals of the tyrant supplied our purpose for living. The seductiveness of that belief obscures our true birthright, which is harmony and the spirit of service that enables it; it is a birthright that requires a soul’s journey, a transformation of consciousness. Wealth is not a catalyst for such a transformation, but a deterrent to it. The tyrannical independence made possible by wealth has as its prime goal the avoidance of transformation, the maintenance of the status quo of our mistaken identity. No wonder Christ compared the chance of a wealthy individual entering God’s heaven to that of a camel squeezing through the eye of a needle. Egregious wealth, let us be clear, is a measure of one thing and one thing only: your ability to ride roughshod over the world, oblivious of the inevitable damage your actions leave in their wake. In other words, wealth measures your ability to live irresponsibly. The tyrant’s dream.
Of course, personal wealth can be used to help the world; but experience cautions that even the determination to help out, in the hands of the wealthy, can initiate actions that are callously insensitive to their own consequences. To use the resources of wealth otherwise requires a humility and attentiveness to the world that continuously provoke transformation in us. Either way, though, wealth cannot be seen as a measure of your ability to do good. The true measure of your ability to do good is found only in the openness of your heart and in your soul’s ability to transform—qualities to which personal wealth often makes us feel we should be immune. In the meantime there are people armed with no more than compassion, a sense of justice and an unswerving commitment to ease suffering who have done immeasurable good in conditions of fragile poverty.
The chapters in this book are interlaced with exercises. Each exercise is intended as a point of departure, a bridge to newness, a form of practice to facilitate the voluntary sabotage of long-standing patterns. Practice comes from the Indo-European base pra-ko-, which means “leading over or beyond.” There is no ‘right’ way of doing any of these exercises. They ask only the patience to feel and the willingness to move beyond the familiar and into the unknown. What does not enter the experience of the body remains bound in the realm of idea.
The shift from the closure of willful doing to the spacious energy of Being is one against which our culture has fortified us since birth. And though it can’t be shepherded by idea, it can be initiated very simply—by an exercise as easy as this one, for example, which I learned from Kaoru Matsumoto, a Kyogen master. Kyogen is a classical, utterly charming and often quite hilarious form of theater from Japan. Matsumoto presented this exercise as an example of what he might do in preparing for a performance. It is simplicity itself. Lie on your back and relax until you can hear or feel your heartbeat. Count up to sixty heartbeats and then sit up.
The exercise carries you straight into the wholeness of your own sensitivity. It asks that the male element of doing grow passive to the fecund currents of life that constitute your being until finally the heartbeat surfaces into your field of attention. The first time I did it, I was astonished at how deeply I had to relax before I could clearly feel each heartbeat. And it also struck me as strange that I have lived for so many decades without ever doing just that—pausing to pay attention to the beating of my heart and to how that quiet awareness, in turn, revealed the pulse of the present. As this exercise shows, only a quiet mind can receive the present—and a quiet mind is nothing other than a quiet body.
* I capitalize ‘Being’ when used in this sense. When speaking of one’s ‘being’, I do not capitalize it.
* In his compelling book, Identity and Violence (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), Amartya Sen argues that the more predominately someone affiliates himself with a singular identity, the more prone he will be to violence. We can all identify ourselves in numerous ways. Someone can be at the same time a father, a squash player, a brother, a Yankees fan, a churchgoer, a feminist, a neighbor, an avid pianist, a black person and the CEO of a multinational corporation. If, however, one of those identities “drowns out the rest,” as Sen puts it, “the result can be homespun elemental violence or globally artful violence and terrorism.” To extrapolate Sen’s premise, we might also note that if one’s identity as a CEO “drowns out the rest,” one becomes capable of forms of violence that a father, a brother, a feminist, a neighbor, a Christian or a black person might find intolerable. One suspects that the CEO’s inflated salary is in part to ensure his allegiance to that narrow, overwhelming identity. A Faustian bargain, certainly.