I never knew an artist who didn’t want money, but they don’t pursue it. Their minds are elsewhere. Joyce begged everyone he knew for money. But he couldn’t make money and do what he did: sixteen years writing Finnegans Wake. Bringing that prodigious load into the “room of his life” was all that Joyce could manage.
Schiller, a sensitive and intelligent student of psy-chology in relation to art, distinguished two types of artists: one, he called the “sentimental” artist; the other, the “naive” artist. He used as his models Goethe and himself. He was the sentimental artist: the one without great means, who did not pay proper attention to his health, for whom art was his life, not the other way around. Everything went into his art. Goethe, on the other hand, was the naive artist: a man of ample life, an important person in local politics, a person for whom art was but one aspect of his life. Some such people require a bit more instruction than others, but Goethe had fantastic intuition, great energy, and vitality. He was a masterly artist.
Thomas Mann wrote an interesting paper called “Goethe and Tolstoy,” based on this idea of Schiller’s. He compared Dostoevsky to the sentimental artist, as Schiller had described himself, and Tolstoy to the naive artist. Tolstoy was a property owner, who used to put on a nice silk shirt, go out, and harvest the grain with his peasants. He would make believe he was a peasant, but that was all part of the game too.
It’s interesting to compare the works of these two types of writers. The Schiller-Dostoevsky types tend to be highly hopped up. There’s a strong, dramatic conflict in their writing. Both Tolstoy and Goethe, on the other hand, are genial authors, and their works have powerful passages of epic proportions and a wonderful majesty. Conversely, in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment it is pain, pain—a life of inward, spiritual agony. These are two different ways, two different temperaments. The pain is not something sentimental artists strive for, it results from their giving all of their energy to divinely superfluous activity and not paying attention to the living of life.
* * *
We are to fill the sacred space, then, with art. And when I say “art,” I mean “divinely superfluous beauty,” not doodling and having pretty decorations in your house. The sacred space is where things are experienced as not being of any practical use. It is through the contemplation of something “thus come”—“divinely superfluous”—that the aspects of oneself that are not of immediate practical use can come forth. I think organic growth comes in that way, not in the way of going into a practical activity.
The practical activity comes after the organism has stated itself in its maturity, or else it comes forth in a distorted way: the person thinks of himself as nothing but a plumber or something like that. That’s the problem in a traditional culture like India, where people from birth are cookie-molded into the dharma of their caste. And they are nothing but that. They never become human beings, individuals, but remain individuals: people that are elements in a larger structure.
I think that is the big difference between the Oriental and the Occidental ideal for a human being. The person in the Orient is either a warrior, or a merchant, or whatever, and nothing else. In the West, however, the person is an individual. The Greeks had the idea of the total individual and held it up as being completely different from the Oriental idea of people being trained into a pattern of life in accordance with the necessities of society. I experienced this idea of the total individual at Delphi, where you see everything related: the oracle, the art, the theatre, and the stadium up on top.
For most people, the life of art is an all-absorbing matter, and it requires a hell of a lot of work. What Ramakrishna said about illumination is also true about art: “Unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond, don’t pursue it.” It is too difficult.
For women who marry, it requires a hell of an ac-quiescence on the part of the husband, too—I can tell you about that. I know so many young women who were in dance, then married, and the husband could not stand it. And, of course, it is difficult to have a family with an art that requires the kind of discipline dance demands. The thing about dance is that if you are not disciplined, it is damned evident the next time you get on stage.
Jean once said, “The way of the artist and the way of the mystic are similar, but the mystic lacks a craft.” The craft keeps the artist in touch with the phenomenality of the world and in a relationship to it: a constant evaluation of the uniqueness of each event in the world. The mystic, by contrast, can be so darned abstract that there is no link to life except the begging bowl. Yet, sometimes those begging bowls can be very productive. Some of our gurus are pulling in millions of dollars. But that does not mean they are related to life.
I have seen the training of artists in this country and in Europe. They are trained only in the craft. They are given techniques for rendering something, but they do not know what to do with the techniques. I’ve know many of them who just cracked up. Their art technique becomes a wall they cannot penetrate, so they try to think of anecdotes and narratives to render that show off their technique. They are so loaded with sociology, that they think they do not have an art object if there is not some kind of lesson in there for fixing the world or themselves. But, in fact, an art object by definition is “divinely superfluous beauty.”
Do you see in this the projecting power of māyā and the revealing power? As long as the motifs of desire and loathing are moving you, it is the projecting aspect. You are yourself the māyā-maker, and you are the one who opens the revealing power when your attitude is that of the Buddha. When I realized this, it was thrilling to me. I think that art and this knowledge of what art is can be the modern Western way to illumination. It will release you from all kinds of linkages. It will not keep you from practicing all those things you hardly believe in, but it will help you in achieving the esthetic before you become linked to the objects of your life.
When you distinguish
between good and evil,
you’ve lost the art.
Art goes beyond morality.
The reach of your compassion
is the reach of your art.
JOYCE’S trick was
seeing symbols everywhere.
…Dr. John W. Perry has characterized the living mythological symbol as an “affect image.” It is an image that hits one where it counts. It is not addressed first to the brain, to be there interpreted and appreciated. On the contrary, if that is where it has to be read, the symbol is already dead. An “affect image” talks directly to the feeling system and immediately elicits a response, after which the brain may come along with its interesting comments. There is some kind of throb of resonance within, responding to the image shown without, like the answer of a musical string to another equally tuned. And so it is that when the vital symbols of any given social group evoke in all its members responses of this kind, a sort of magical accord unites them as one spiritual organism, functioning through members who, though separate in space, are yet one in being and belief.143
Once you understand symbolic things,
you, too, will see symbols everywhere.
The wonder is that the characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale—as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a droplet or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a flea. For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undam-aged, the germ power of its source.144
The divine manifestation is ubiquitous,
only our eyes are not open to it.
The symbol opens our eyes.
“A true symbol takes us to the center of the circle, not to another point on the circumference. It is by symbolism that man enters effectively and consciously into contact with his own deepest self, with other men, and with God.…”—Thomas Merton145
Frequently a symbol doesn’t open
our ey
es, but closes them instead.
If we concretize the symbol,
we get stuck with it.
In short, then: just as the buffalo suddenly disappeared from the North American plains, leaving the Indians deprived not only of a central mythic symbol but also of the very manner of life that the symbol once had served, so likewise in our own beautiful world, not only have our public religious symbols lost their claim to authority and passed away, but the ways of life they once supported have also disappeared; and as the Indians then turned inward, so do many in our own baffled world—and frequently with Oriental, not Occidental, guidance in this potentially very dangerous, often ill-advised interior adventure, questing within for the affect images that our secularized social order with its incongruously archaic religious institutions can no longer render.146
The world has been desanctified.
The chick from the egg
is a symbol of the spirit of Easter.
The image of the cosmic egg is known to many mythologies; it appears in the Greek Orphic, Egyptian, Finnish, Buddhistic, and Japanese. “In the beginning this world was merely nonbeing,” we read in a sacred work of the Hindus; “It was existent. It developed. It turned into an egg. It lay for the period of a year. It was split asunder. One of the two parts became silver, one gold. That which was of silver is the earth. That which is of gold is the sky. What was the outer membrane is the mountains. What was the inner me-brane is cloud and mist. What were the veins are the rivers. What was the fluid within is the ocean. Now, what was born there from is yonder sun.”147 The shell of the cosmic egg is the world frame of space, while the fertile seed-power within typifies the inexhaustible life dynamism of nature.148
The eggshell is cast off by the chick as the skin is sloughed off by the serpent, or the shadow of the moon is shed by the moon reborn.
Snake and moon both die to the old,
shedding their shadows to be reborn.
Birds in flight and Christ on the cross: both symbolize the spirit released from the bondage of earth. The moon, like Christ, dies and is resurrected. The moon is three nights darkk: Jesus was three nights in the grave with a stone covering the cave entrance—the dark disk over the moon. The dating of Easter according to both lunar and solar calendars suggests that life, like the light reborn in the moon and eternal in the sun, finally is one. The whole mystery is right there in Christian symbology.
The moon, furthermore, and the spectacle of the night sky, the stars and the Milky Way, have constituted, certainly from the beginning, a source of wonder and profound impression. But there is actually a physical influence of the moon upon the earth and its creatures, its tides and our own interior tides, which has long been consciously recognized as well as subliminally experienced. The coincidence of the menstrual cycle with that of the moon is a physical actuality structuring human life and a curiosity that has been observed with wonder. It is in fact likely that the fundamental notion of a life-structuring relationship between the heavenly world and that of man was derived from the realization, both in experience and in thought, of the force of the lunar cycle. The mystery, also, of the death and resurrection of the moon, as well as of its influence on dogs, wolves and foxes, jackals and coyotes, which try to sing to it: this immortal silver dish of wonder, cruising among the beautiful stars and racing through the clouds, turning waking life itself into a sort of dream, has been a force and presence even more powerful in the shaping of mythology than the sun, by which its light and its world of stars, night sounds, erotic modes, and the magic of dream, are daily quenched.149
Dew is an ambrosia
fallen from the moon.
This lunar symbology is ancient: the moon god in Mesopotamia was named Sin; the mountain that Moses ascended was Mount Sinai. It may have been the moon goddess mountain. When Moses came down from that mountain, he was so luminous from his reception of God’s energy that he wore a veil in front of his face, and emanating from his forehead were horns of light: the horns of the lunar mystery.
”The moon lives twenty-eight days and this is our month. Each of these days represents something sacred to us: two of the days represent the Great Spirit; two are for Mother Earth; four are for the four winds; one is for the Spotted Eagle; one for the sun; and one for the moon; one is for the Morning Star; and four are for the four ages; seven for our seven great rites; one is for the buffalo; one for the fire; one for the water; one for the rock; and finally, one is for the two-legged people. If you add all these days up you will see that they come to twenty-eight. You should know also that the buffalo has twenty-eight ribs, and that in our war bonnets we usually wear twenty-eight feathers. You see, there is a significance for everything, and these are things that are good for men to know and to remember.”—Black Elk150
Awe is what moves us forward.
…in the contemporary world of cross-cultural communication, where the minds of men, leaping the local fences, can recognize common fields of experience and realization under alien forms, what many priests and sociologists regard as eight distinct deities, the comparative mythologist and psychologist can take to be aspects of one and the same.…151
Myth deities personify energies
that are around us in nature.
The gods and goddesses then are to be understood as e-bodiments and custodians of the elixir of Imperishable Being but not themselves the Ultimate in its primary state. What the hero seeks through his intercourse with them is therefore not finally themselves, but their grace, i.e., the power of their sustaining substance. This miraculous energy-substance and this alone is the Imperishable.…152
Live from your own center.
The key to understanding the problem that’s solved with the symbolic idea of the Trinity is the Tantric saying, “To worship a god, one must become a god.” That is to say, you must hit that level of consciousness within yourself that is equivalent to the deity to whom you are addressing your attention.
In the Trinity, the Father is the deity your attention is addressed to; you are the Son, knower of the Father; and the Holy Spirit represents the relationship between the two.
It seems to me you cannot have the notion of a god without having implicit the notion of a Trinity: a god, the knower of the god, and the relationship between the two, a progressive knowing that brings you closer and closer to the divine.
The divine lives within you.
…there is still one more degree of realization…namely that termed in Japanese “ji ji mu ge”—”thing and thing, no division”: no separation between things: the analogy suggested is of a net of gems: the universe as a great spread-out net with at every joint a gem, and each gem not only reflecting all the others but itself reflected in all. An alternate image is of a wreath of flowers. In a wreath, no flower is the “cause” of any other, yet together, all are the wreath.153
The separateness
apparent in the world
is secondary.
The very great physicist Erwin Schrödinger has made
the same metaphysical point in his startling and sublime little book, My View of the World. “All of us living beings belong together,” he there declares, “in as much as we are all in reality sides or aspects of one single being, which may perhaps in western terminology be called God while in the Upaniṣads its name is brahman.”154
Beyond the world of opposites
is an unseen (but experienced)
unity and identity in us all.
For we are all, in every particle of our being, precipitations of consciousness; as are, likewise, the animals and plants, metals cleaving to a magnet and waters tiding to the moon.155
Today the planet is
the only proper “in group.”
…we are to recognize in this whole universe a reflection magnified of our own most inward nature; so that we are indeed its ears, its eyes, its thinking, and its speech—or, in theological terms, God’s ears, God’s eyes, God’s thinking, and God’s Word; and, by the same token, participants he
re and now in an act of creation that is continuous in the whole infinitude of that space of our mind through which the planets fly, and our fellows of earth now among them.156
Participate joyfully
in the sorrows of the world.
The obvious lesson…is that the first step to the knowl-edge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think—and their name is legion—that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, with-out time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think—as do many—“Let me first correct society, then get around to myself” are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.157
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living Page 22
