We can’t change it, but we can
change our attitude toward it.
There is a story of the Buddha, in a little company of yogis, and he says, “At one time I starved my body to such a degree that, when I touched my stomach, I could grab my backbone. The thought occurred to me that this is not the way to achieve enlightenment. There is not enough strength in the body to absorb the experience or even to achieve it. So it was then that I ate my first meal.”
There was a lovely little girl around who was the daughter of a cattleherder, and she took the milk of a thousand cows and fed it to a hundred, that of a hundred she fed to ten, and the milk of those ten cows she fed to one. There was such power in that concentrated milk that, when she gave the bowl to the Buddha and he drank of it, his whole body was refreshed. When he was finished, he threw the bowl into the river and said, “If this bowl goes upstream, I shall become a Buddha.” It went upstream. That night the illumination came.
Fear of your power
is what commits you
to the lower system.
If in me there is the kind of power that can stand against the tide of history, then I can become disengaged from it. Nietzsche says, “Beware of spitting against the wind.” You know what will happen. But if you can spit against the wind and it hits somebody else in the eye, then you’re going to be a Buddha.
I’ve always looked for signs like that. When I had to register for the drafts, behind the desks there were three men and one woman. I said if the woman calls me, I won’t be drafted. The woman called me, and just when it was time for me to be taken in, they learned that I was thirty-eight, and they could not use people of that antiquity. I think, as do the Buddhists, that what is to be is somehow implicit in what is, and that to look for such signs is a natural and amusing thing to do.
In our tradition, we do not operate in accordance with those fixed patterns. We believe that the ego, which makes value judgments and decisions for action, brings about change. Freud speaks of the ego as “the reality principle,” that which puts you in touch with “reality,” reality with a small “r”: meaning, the individual circumstances of your life and your relationship to those circumstances. And in our culture, the ego, the evaluating principle, is developed. The mother asks, “What kind of ice cream do you want, Johnny, strawberry or vanilla?” “I want vanilla.” And he gets vanilla.
In the East, by contrast, where everything you do is what you are told to do, they put something in front of you and you get what you are given. And if everything you do is what you are told to do, your ego is not being developed. Consequently, in the East, people have no concept of the ego. They don’t know what the ego is. It doesn’t play any role. There is no individual evaluation.
In Freudian psychology, the pleasure principle, the id, the zeal of life for holding on to food, comfort, sex, and life itself—the context I call “health, wealth, and progeny”—is what most people live for. Against the id, Freud posits the superego, the social laws that discipline the individual, so that one does, not what one wants, but what society says one should do. In the East, in psychological terms, the whole conflict is between superego and id. No ego principle is even considered.
So, without anything that we would call an ego, the Easterner seeking illumination leaves his family, goes to a guru, and brings a little ball or shell, his ego, and he asks the guru to break it. And the guru takes a little mallet, the yoga discipline, and—“bing!”—his ego is gone. But the Westerner going to a guru brings with him a rock-solid ego that’s been the guiding force of his whole life. And when he asks the guru to break his ego, the guru takes the same little mallet and goes “bing! bing! bing!” for forty years and nothing happens. The person just feels increasingly unhappy.
I submit that if you are a person with an evaluating psyche. who is having thoughts no guru ever had, there must be another way to have illumination. I think what Ramakrishna calls “the monkey way” can, in our culture, turn into the equivalent of the Buddhist “middle way.” That is to say, when you have found the center within yourself that is the counterpart of the sacred space, you do not have to go into the forest. You can have a technique for extracting your own repose from that center. You can live from that center, even while you remain in relation to the world.
There is a popular Indian fable that Ramakrishna used to like to tell, to illustrate the difficulty of holding in mind the two conscious planes simultaneously, of the multiple and transcendent. It is of a young aspirant whose guru had just brought home to him the realization of himself as identical in essence with the power that supports the universe and which in theological thinking we personify as “God.” The youth, profoundly moved, exalted in the notion of himself as at one with the Lord and Being of the Universe, walked away in a state of profound absorption; and when he had passed in that state through the village and out onto the road beyond it, he beheld, coming in his direction, a great elephant bearing a howdah on its back and with the mahout, the driver, riding—as they do—high on its neck, above its head. And the young candidate for sainthood, meditating on the proposition “I am God; all things are God,” on perceiving that mighty elephant coming toward him, added the obvious corollary, “The elephant also is God.” The animal, with its bells jingling to the majestic rhythm of its stately approach, was steadily coming on, and the mahout above its head began shouting, “Clear the way! Clear the way, you idiot! The youth, in his rapture, was thinking still, “I am God; that elephant is God.” And, hearing the shouts of the mahout, he added, “Should God be afraid of God? Should God get out of the way of God?” The phenomenon came steadily on with driver at its head still shouting at him, and the youth, in undistracted meditation, held both to his place on the road and to his transcendental insight, until the moment of truth arrived and the elephant, simply wrapping its great trunk around the lunatic, tossed him aside, off the road.
Physically shocked, spiritually stunned, the youth landed all in a heap, not greatly bruised but altogether undone; and rising, not even adjusting his clothes, he returned, disordered, to his guru, to require an explanation. “You told me,” he said, when he had explained himself, “you told me that I was God.” “Yes,” said the guru, “you are God.” “You told me that all things are God.” “Yes,” said the guru again, “all things are God.” “That elephant, then, was God?” “So it was. That elephant was God. But why didn’t you listen to the voice of God, shouting from the elephant’s head, to get out of the way?”112
Wisdom and foolishness
are practically the same.
Both are indifferent
to the opinions of the world.
According to legend, when Avalokiteśvara looked down upon this suffering world he was filled with such compassion that his head burst into innumerable heads…while from his body sprang a thousand helping arms and hands, like an aura of dazzling rays, and in the palm of each hand there appeared an eye of unimpeded vision.…
Every pore of the body of Avalokiteśvara contains and pours forth thousands of Buddhas, saints of all kinds, entire worlds. From his fingers flow rivers of ambrosia that cool the hells and feed the hungry ghosts.…He appears to brahmans as a brahman, to merchants as a merchant, to insects as an insect, to each in the aspect of its kind.…113
"THE goddess alone knew of the all-moving, secret world energy which had helped the gods to victory; it was the power within them, of which they were unaware. They believed that they were strong in themselves, but without this force, or against it, they could not so much as harm a blade of grass. The goddess knew of the universal force, which the Vedic priests called brahman and which Hindus call śakti, for śakti, i.e. energy, is the essence and name of the Great Goddess herself, hence she could explain the mysterious being to the gods, she could teach them its secret—for it was her own secret.”—Zimmer114
In Hinduism, all power, śakti, is female. So, the female represents the totality of the power, and the male is imaged as the agent of the female. In that sense, the pow
er that a female feels from the male—the animus, in Jungian terms—is a specification of the female power, a mode of application of that power.
Every being has a twofold aspect, reveals a friendly and a menacing face. All gods have a charming and a hideous form, according to how one approaches them; but the Great Goddess is the energy of the world, taking form in all things. All friendly and menacing faces are facets of her essence. What seems a duality in the individual god, is an infinite multiplicity in her total being.…
She is the mute security of life in itself; from the ashes of burned forests she raises eager fresh flowers whose decay is pregnant with new life, a new life which all around it sees only life in its transitions and transformations with no shadow of death, just as we ourselves, when we sink our teeth into a ripe fruit, or draw a living plant from the garden, are without awareness of death.
Whatever you do, in waking or sleeping, consciously or involuntarily in the cycle of your flesh to the accompanying music of your soul; whatever you do as your body builds and destroys, absorbs and excretes, breathes and procreates, or bestows joy infringing on the limits of rage and pain—all this is a mere gesture of the Great Mother, jaganmayi (consisting of all worlds and beings), who unremittingly does likewise with her world body in endless thousands of forms.…To see the twofold, embracing and devouring, nature of the goddess, to see repose in catastrophe, security in decay, is to know her and to be saved.…She is the perfect figuration of life’s joyous lures and pitiless destruction: the two poles charged with the extremest tension, yet forever merging.—Zimmer115
Also, in Hinduism, the sun is female and the moon is male: he is born of her, dies into her, and is born of her again every month. Śiva, this great power, is the moon god. Pārvatī, his consort, is the sun power. And although the worship in the masculine-oriented action systems in India is directly to Śiva, it’s to the goddess Kālī, that the worship finally goes. So that, actually, in India, Kālī is the great divinity.
…the Hindu goddess Kālī…is shown standing on the prostrate form of the god Śiva, her spouse. She brandishes the sword of death, i.e., spiritual discipline. The blood-dripping human head tells the devotee that ”he that loseth his life for her sake shall find it.” The gestures of “fear not” and “bestowing boons” teach that she protects her children, that the pairs of opposites of the universal agony are not what they seem, and that for one centered in eternity the phantasmagoria of temporal “goods” and “evils” is but a reflex of the mind—as the goddess herself, though apparently trampling down the god, is actually his blissful dream.116
The Goddess
gives birth to forms
and kills forms.
It’s interesting that in the North, in the European systems—and in the Chinese system, where one hears of yang and yin—the man is the aggressor, the active principle, and the woman is the receptive and passive aspect. It’s just the opposite in India. The Hindu position is that woman is the śakti, the serpent power that comes up the spine, the life-energy principle. She’s the activator, and the man just wants to be left alone. The man, psychologically, is interested in other things, but when this power field goes by, he’s activated. As Joyce writes in Finnegans Wake, “With lipth she lith-peth to him all to time of thuch on thuch and thow and thow. She he she ho she ha to la.”117 And wouldn’t it be nice to sthart the world again? And he thinks, “My god, yeah, it would.” And that’s it, he’s gone. He gets involved that way because she’s the whole damned energy in any of it’s aspects.
Similarly, in the mythological systems of what we call, basically, the Bronze Age, the female was the great divinity and the source of all power. For instance, in the Egyptian image of the Pharaoh on the throne, the throne being what gives him his authority, the throne is the goddess Isis. The same mythic image comes up in Byzantine iconography of the Virgin and the Christ: the Christ Child sits on the Virgin’s knee just the way the Pharaoh sits on the throne: she is his power. He is called the world ruler, but she’s behind him all the way. Likewise, in old pictures of Presidents of the United States, one usually sees the President’s wife standing behind him. She’s Isis, and he’s the child on the throne.
There is a Pygmy dance where the woman ties the whole male community up with a rope. They stand there completely immobilized and one of them says, “She has made us all silent.” Then she loosens them, and as each one is loose, he sings. They know this basic, basic mythological stuff that we’ve lost.
Her womb is the field of space, her heart the pulse of time, her life the cosmic dream of which each of our own lives is a reflex; and her charm is the attractive power, not of a yonder shore, but of this. In short: in Biblical terms, she is Eve; or rather, Eve extended to be the mother, not only of mankind but of all things, the rocks and trees, beasts, birds and fish, the sun and moon and stars.118
The male power comes in with the Semites and Indo-European Aryans, masculine-oriented societies of herding peoples for whom the specific function of the energy was to control the animals on the plains. Then you have the problem of the relationship between male and female mythologies.
Where agriculture
is a main means of support,
there are earth and goddess powers.
Where hunting predominates,
it’s male initiative
that empowers the killing of animals.
In the Semitic tradition, the goddess is wiped out, and a prominent feature of that orthodoxy is a masculine fear of the female body, the prime anthropomorphic symbol of Nature’s allure and power. This went to such extremes in Christianity that nuns were not even allowed to look at their bodies. In Islam, the most male-oriented of the modern religions, a woman is nothing but a vehicle for producing sons, and the male function is, in large part, the protection of the women. I was in PakistanI for only a few hours, but what I saw! Those women were going around in tents! Even their eyes were covered with cheesecloth, so you did not know if it was an old hag or a glorious goddess walking around. And you can’t respond to a tent.
Male = social order.
Female = nature order.
The male’s job is to relate to life.
The female’s job is to become it.
The prime function of the male is to set up an eco-logical situation in which the woman can give birth, to prepare the field so that the female may bring forth the future, because she is the life. She is the totality. He is a protecting factor, the agent of her power. If a woman loses her husband, she has to take over a male role, but it is a mistake to regard that as something foreign to her own energy. The animus function is in every woman, but it is usually delegated to somebody.
What I think has happened now—with so many women, left without husbands, being thrown into the field of male achievement—is that women have been sold a bill of goods—perhaps not intentionally, but actually. With our strong emphasis on such dramatic and conspicuous male activities as building cities filled with skyscrapers and sending jet-propelled rockets to the moon, women have come to believe that only the aims and virtues of the male are to be considered, and that male achievement is the proper aim for everyone, as though that is what counts. No indeed.
Women used to know how to run the world, but when they move into the secondary energy position of doing the job of the man—who is, in fact, just the agent of the female power—women lose their real power and become resentful. Spengler said, in a telling sentence that got into me when I read it: “Man makes history. Woman is history.” She’s what it is about, and the man fashions the field within which she can produce history and be history.
The man’s function is to act.
The woman’s function is to be.
She’s “It.” She is Mother Earth.
So, the female is “It.” When you say the woman brings forth children, that’s part of just being, fulfilling a role that is already there in the very body itself. And the production need not be children. It can be in represent-ing that power, that qua
lity, that being in life which the woman represents. This is why the woman’s beauty or quality of character is so important in mythological tales, which does not mean that a woman who’s not physically beautiful does not have this power. It’s right there in the female presence.
The mythological figure of the Universal Mother imputes to the cosmos the feminine attributes of the first, nourishing and protecting presence. The fantasy is primarily spontaneous; for there exists a close and obvious correspondence between the attitude of the young child toward its mother and that of the adult toward the surrounding material world. 119
When Heinrich Zimmer, a great devotee of the Goddess, was trying to find his place in America, he was helped by the old ladies of the Jung Foundation. They were getting him jobs, helping his wife to find a place and so forth. He said, “When I look into those eyes, I say, ‘I see you there.’” So, she’s operative in every woman in a way that the god is not operative in a man. I’ll never forget that wonderful twinkle in his eye when he said, “I see you there.”
Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. As he progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigurations: she can never be greater than himself, though she can always promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters. And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world. 120
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Page 17
