APPENDIX D - THE MYTH MASTER
Religions have reason
West and East always separate?
Why the weight on this subject?
The individual's wisdom
Masculine against feminine
Input into Theory W
Mythology [is] sacred to primitive
people; it was as
if their myths contained their very souls.
Their lives
were cradled within their mythology, and the death
of
their mythology...meant the destruction of their
lives
and spirit. (265 1)
The study of philosophy leads
to the concept of
universals, and the concept of universals leads to the
concept of mysticism. For contrast, mystic awe sits on
the
side of freedom - on the side of fear sits daemonic dread.
On the side of sitting, sits bewilderment - on the side of
not sitting, sits salvation, redemption, or release in
action. To the extent that certain religions emphasize
freedom and action, they promote good feelings. To the
extent that they promote fear and bewilderment, they promote
bad feelings. Thus, in general, religion mixes good and
bad
- and philosophy offers a more pure approach to
understanding the why of salvation, redemption, or release
by the action of the individual. And some religions
accentuate individuality more than others - the world of
religion offers untold complexity to the possible conclusion
of bewilderment. Yet there are general differences - East
and West, for example.
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Theory W a244
The religions of West and East
support human actions
for different purposes. First the reasons for religion
are
presented, then comes a differentiation between West and
East, followed by an emphasis on individual wisdom.
Works cited
196 J.Campbell (1949,1968) The hero with a thousand faces.
Princeton NJ: University Press.
197 J.Campbell (1962) The masks of god: Oriental mythology.
New York: Viking.
255 R.A.Johnson (1974) He: Understanding masculine
psychology. New York: Harper & Row.
265 J.A.Sanford (1974) Mythology and our knowledge of god.
The introduction to 265 R.A.Johnson p.1.
St.Paul's Episcopal Church, San
Diego CA.
Religions have reason
Religions of the world.
They are not the same. They
have different histories. The first and the
earlier to
appear we may term wonder in one or another of its
modes,
from the mere bewilderment in the contemplation
of
something inexplicable to arrest in daemonic dread
or
mystic awe. The second is self-salvation:
redemption or
release from a world exhausted of its glow.
(197 35)
West and East always separate?
Two completely opposed mythologies
of the destinity
and virtue of man...have come together in the modern
world. And they are contibuting in discord
to whatever
new society may be in the process of formation....the
wise men westward of Iran have partaken of the fruit
of
the knowledge of good and evil, whereas those on
the
other side of that cultural divide, in India and
the Far
East, have relished only the fruit of eternal life.
(197 9)
Mythology definition.
Mythology has been interpreted
by the modern intellect
as a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world
of
nature (Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy
from
prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages
(Muller); as a repository of allegorical instruction,
to
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shape the individual to his group (Durkheim); as
a group
dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the
depths
of the human psyche (Jung); as the traditional vehicle
of
man's profoundest metaphysical insights (Coomaraswamy);
and as God's Revelation to His children (the Church).
Mythology is all of these. The various judgements
are
determined by the viewpoints of the judges.
(196 382)
Why the weight on this subject?
Tell...that new-born babies are
brought by the stork.
He [the learner] hears only the distorted part of
what we
say, and feels that he has been deceived....
(196 vii)
The unconscious sends all sorts
of vapors, odd beings,
terrors, and deluding images up to the mind....These
are
dangerous because they threaten the fabric of the
security into which we live, and of ourselves and
our
family. But they are fiendishly fascinating
too, for
they carry keys that open the whole realm of the
desired
and feared adventure of the discovery of the self....
Psychoanalysis, the modern science
of reading dreams,
has taught us to take heed of these unsubstantial
images.
(196 8)
The bold and truely epoch-making
writings of the
psychoanalysts are indispensible to the student
of
mythology; for, whatever may be thought of the detailed
and sometimes contradictory interpretations of specific
cases and problems, Freud, Jung, and their followers
have
demonstrated irrefutably that the logic, the heros,
and
the deeds of myth survive into modern times.
In the
absence of an effective general mythology, each
of us has
his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly
potent pantheon of dream. (196 4)
Relationship without individuality.
The myth of eternal return, which
is still basic to
Oriental life, displays an order of fixed forms
that
appear and reappear all through time....
There is therefore nothing to
be gained, either for
the universe or for man, through individual originality
and effort. Those who identified themselves
with the
mortal body and its affections will necessarily
find that
all is painful, since everything - for them - must
end.
But for those who have found the still point of
eternity,
around which all - including themselves - revolves,
everything is acceptable as it is; indeed, can even
be
experienced as glorious and wonderful. The
first duty of
the individual, consequently, is simply to play
the given
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role...without resistance, without fault; and then,
if
possible, so to order his mind to identify its
consciousness with the inhabiting principle of the
whole.
(197 3-4)
Individuality without relationship.
For the West, however, the possibility
of such an
egoless return to a state of soul antecedent to
the birth
of individuality has long since passed away; and
the
first important stage in the branching off can be
seen to
have occured in that very part of the nuclear Near
East
where the earliest god-kings and their courts had
been
for centuries ritually entombed: namely Sumer, where
a
new sense of the separation of the spheres of god
and man
began to be represented in myth and ritual about
2350
B.C. The king, then, was no longer a god,
but a servant
of the god, his Tenant Farmer, supervisor of the
race of
human slaves created to serve the gods with unremiting
toil. And no longer identity, but relationship,
was the
paramount concern. Man had been made not to
be God but
to know, honor, and serve him; so that even the
king,
who, according to the earlier mythological view,
had been
the chief embodiment of divinity on earth, was now
but a
priest offering sacrifice in tendance to One above
- not
a god returning himself in sacrifice to Himself.
(197 6-7)
In the course of the following
centuries, the new
sense of separation led to a counter-yearning for
return
- not to identity, for such was no longer possible
of
conception (creator and creature were not the same),
but
to the presence and vision of the forfeited god.
Hence
the new mythodology brought forth, in due time,
a
development away from the earlier static view of
returning cycles. A progressive, temporally
oriented
mythology arose, of a creation, once and for all,
at the
beginning of time, a subsequent fall, and a work
of
restoration, still in progress. The world
no longer was
to be known as a mere showing in time of the paradigms
of
eternity, but as a field of unprecedented cosmic
conflict
between two powers, one light and one dark.
(197 7)
The first historic manifestation
of the force of this
new mythic view was in the Achaemenian empire of
Cyrus
the Great (died 529 B.C.) and Darius I (reigned
c.521-486
B.C.), which in a few decades extended its domain
from
India to Greece, and under the protection of which
the
post-exilic Hebrews both rebuilt their temple
(Ezra 1:1-11) and reconstructed their traditional
inheritance. The second historic manifestation
was in
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the Hebrew application of its universal message to
themselves; the next was in the world mission of
Christianity; and the fourth, in that of Islam.
(197 8)
Individual relationship to external
reality.
But now - and here, I believe,
is a point of
fundamental importance for our reading of the basic
difference between the Oriental and Occidental approaches
to the cultivation of the soul - in the Indian myth
the
principle of ego, "I" (aham), is identified completely
with the pleasure principle, whereas in the psychologies
of both Freud and Jung its proper function is to
know and
relate to external reality (Freud's "reality
principle"): not the reality of the metaphysical
but that
of the physical, empirical sphere of time and space.
In
other words, spiritual maturity, as understood in
the
modern Occident, requires a differentiation of ego
from
id, whereas in the Orient, throughout the history
of at
least every teaching that has stemed from India,
ego
(aham-kara: the making of the sound I) is impugned
as the
principle of libidinous delusion, to be dissolved.
(197 15)
In the classic Indian doctrine
of the four ends for
which men are supposed to live and strive, love
and
pleasure (kama), power and success (artha), lawful
order
and moral virtue (dharma), and, finally, release
from
delusion (moksa) - we note that the first two are
manifestations of what Freud has termed "the pleasure
principle," primary urges of the natural man, epitomized
in the formula "I want." In the adult, according
to the
Oriental view, these are quelled and checked by
the
principles of dharma, which, in the classic Indian
system, are impressed by the training of his caste.
The
infantile "I want" is to be subdued by a "thou shalt,"
socially applied (not individually determined),
which is
supposed to be as much a part of the immutable cosmic
order as the course of the sun itself. (197
21)
The problem of mankind today,
therefore, is precisely
the opposite to that of men in the comparatively
stable
periods of those great co-ordinating mythologies
which
now are know as lies. Then all meaning was
in the group,
in the great anonymous forms, none in the self-expressive
individual; today no meaning is in the group - none
in
the world: all is in the individual. But there
the
meaning is absolutely unconscious. One does
not know by
what one is propelled. (196 388)
We know today that those [the
above] mythologies are
undone - or, at least, are threatening to come
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undone: each [of the following four] complacent within
its own horizon, dissolving, together with its gods,
in a
single emergent new order of society.... (197
22-3)
[1] Human reason and the responsible individual,
[2]
supernatural revelation and the one true community
under
God, [3] yogic arrest in the immanent great void,
and [4]
spontaneous accord with the way of earth and heavens...
have been brought together. And it is time,
now, to
regard each in its puerility [childlikeness], as
well as
in its majesty, quite coldly, with neither indulgence
nor
distain. (197 33-4)
The individual's wisdom
Respect of personal tradition.
In his life-form the individual
is necessarily only a
fraction and distortion of the total image of man.
He is
limited either as male or as female; at any given
period
of his life he is again limited as child youth,
mature
adult, or ancient; furthermore, in his liferole
he is
necessarily specialized as craftsman, tradesman,
servant,
or thief, priest, leader, wife, nun, or harlot;
he cannot
be all. Hence, the totality - the fullness
of man - is
not in the separate member, but in the body of the
society as a whole; the individual can be only an
organ.
From his group he has derived his techniques of
life, the
language in which he thinks, the idea on which he
thrives; through the past of that society descended
the
genes that built his body. If he presumes
to cut himself
off, either in deed or in thought and feeling, he
only
breaks connection with the sources of his existence.
(196 382-3)
Campbell's challenge.
In the European West...where the
fundamental doctrine
of the freedom of the will essentially dissociates
each
individual from every other, as well as from both
the
will in nature and the will of God, there is placed
upon
each the responsibility of coming intelligently,
out of
his own experience and volition, to some sort of
relationship with - not identity with or extinction
in -
the all, the void, the suchness, the absolute, or
whatever the proper term may be for that which is
beyond
terms. And, in the secular sphere likewise,
it is
normally expected that an educated ego should have
developed away from the simple infantile polarity
of the
pleasure and obedience principles toward a personal,
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uncompulsive, sensitive relationship to empirical
reality, a certain adventurous attitude toward the
unpredictable, and a sense of personal responsibility
for
decisions. Not life as a good soldier, but
life as a
developed, unique individual, is the ideal.
And we shall
search the Orient in vain for anything quite comparable.
There the ideal, on the contrary, is the quenching,
not
development, of ego. That is the formula turned
this way
and that, up and down the line, throughout the
literature: a systematic, steady, continually drumming
devaluation of the I principle, the reality function
-
which has remained, consequently, undeveloped, and
so,
wide open to the seizures of completely uncritical
mythic
identifications. (197 22-3)
Input into Theory W
Taken from the above, Campbell
(1) confirms the
societal process of becoming, (2) claims that myths deceive,
(3) identifies that the Oriental plays the role for the good
of the whole, (4) identifies that the Occidental serves the
whole by playing the role, (5) challenges the individual to
identify as part of a whole, and (6) challenges the
individual to communicate the whole empirically.
Paralleling Theory W against the
above summary, Theory
W - (1) places the becoming individual within the context of
a pure functional organization, (2) offers pure functional
organization authority so that the myth of formal
organization authority can be exposed, (3) confirms the good
of the organization as a whole, (4) provides individualized
roles which are vital to the whole as an organization, (5)
challenges the individual to be an expert part of the whole,
and (6) provides a reliable and valid representation of the
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whole.
Christian male against female
Johnson (1974) interprets the
12th century (255 57)
Story of the Holy Grail, but maintains the myth of the
feminine never leaving the Grail castle while the masculine
dies early.
The parallel in the girl's life.
She never leaves the
Grail castle. Women keep a sense of beauty,
a sense of
connectedness, a sense of at-homeness in the universe....
The boy eventually becomes a crotchety old man....Man
in
his Grail quest is the tragic man. (255 53)
When he loses it all, he becomes
a Grail searcher, an
urgent, questing beast, fairly pawing the earth
to find
again the beauty...His spiritual hunger forces him
to
climb everything that is climbable, to try this,
to try
that, in a restless search...The Grail gives complete
satisfaction and wholeness. (255 51)
The Benedictine monks observed
this possibility in the
days of the monastery. They took boys very
young, as
babies, raised them in the Grail castle, and never
let
them out, psychologically speaking. (255 56)
The reality answer.
If you will serve your reality,
you will be flooded
with happiness. (255 76)
He accepts and relates to the
feminine side of himself
and of life and it gives him warmth and freedom.
(255 33)
Goethe came to the astounding
observation late in his
life that the providence of man is to serve woman;
then
she will serve him. He was talking about the
inner
woman, the muse. She is the carrier of the
beauty, the
inspiration, the delicacy of the whole feminine
side of
life. (255 44)
Then I must provide reality, innate
happiness which
has been my norm, warmth, freedom, joy and love, service of
myself, musing, beauty, inspiration, delicacy, and thus
wellness and wholeness.
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Jung against Freud.
The great falling out between
Jung and Freud occured
over the nature of the consciousness. Freud
said that
the unconscious is a scrap heap consisting of all
the
unvalued things in one's life that had been repressed
to
the unconscious. Jung insisted that the unconscious
is
also the matrix, the artesian well from which all
creativity springs. (255 15-6)
The psychology of individuation
shows that the goal of
the process of becoming whole is not perfection,
but
completeness. (255 4)
Self is me.
The self is the name given to
the total personality,
the potential person who is within us from the beginning
and seeks in our lifetime to be recognized and expressed
through the ego. (255 3)
A person who understands a dream
understands himself
better; a person who grasps the inner meaning of
a myth
is in touch with the universal spiritual questions
life
asks all of us. (255 2)
Conscious against unconscious.
There comes such a
breath and depth of myth, dreams, and conscious rationality,
that the individual must put aside some challenges to get on
with their life tasks of the statistically significant
universal human needs as existence, relatedness, and growth
(Alderfer, Maslow, Dyer).
Growth into reality.
Every boy has naively blundered
into something that is
too big for him, gotten halfway through, realized
that he
couldn't handle it, and collapsed. Then he
is wounded,
he is hurt terribly, and he goes off to lick his
wounds.
A certain bitterness arises in the boy because he
tries
so hard and actually touches his...individuation
- yet he
cannot hold it. (255 9-10)
Then he turns to his own introverted
hermit living...
that is where he gets the next bit of strength or
power.
(255 71)
Though everything one needs is
virtually within arm's
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reach, one can't use it. This is the agonized
condition
of the neurotic structure of the torn or divided
man.
(255 19)
But if he can't, he must regress
a little just to save
himself and function again. (255 62)
She sends everybody off, each
on his task. (255 67)
So it is a matter of his ego becoming
strong enough so
that he cannot be overcome...but can use the power...for
conscious purposes, that is, to overcome obstacles
in his
path and achieve his goals. (255 25)
Addiction to the unreal.
Grail hunger accounts for all
kinds of things. It's
terrifying to approach this hunger in ourselves.
If a
man is courageous enough, he will understand the
hunger...It is a hunger that has to be filled.
He's got
to have something, he's not sure what. He
has to have
something or he will explode. (255 52)
