This Business of the Gods

Yoga Leaflet 11

Some notes on transcendence taken from Joseph Campbell from an interview "This business of the Gods" with Fraser Boa (from a Windrose Films production ISBN 0-9693254-1-X).

In Yoga we develop a capacity to literally take up residence in our bodies and our minds. Here presence is a quality of being that is open and aware in all directions. This growing awareness can lead us to learn to transcend the many contradictions we may experience and confront in ourselves and our circumstances at different times and stages of our life experiences.

Joseph Campbell has a wonderful way of expressing archetypal life challenges in Mythic terms. His attitude towards mythology is that mythology is a function of biology. That is to say, it is an expression in visual dream images of the energies that inform the body (p22) and since we are fractions of nature, the energies that inform nature, are the same energies that inform our bodies and the energies that inform our bodies are the same energies that inform life (p23).

Inwardly we experience the energies of nature from the body's impulse system. The impulses come to us through the various organs of the body which represent different functions of our lives and since the functions are basically in conflict with each other, there is a conflict of energies in the body. Images in myths represent the many aspects of this conflict, meeting in conflict, resolution in conflict and harmonization of conflict. So it is not only the personal life that is rendered in dreams, but on the deeper, what might be called Mythic level of a dream, it is the stalemate of bodily powers which have to be dealt with.

The use of the dream image or fragment or whole dream is frequently used in therapy in order to approach the deeper aspect of our nature. A function of therapy is that we must become transparent to transcendence. Transcendence in the broadest sense refers to those energies that are informing the body which come from you-don't-know-where!
The problem with therapy is to bring "the head" into harmony with the energies that inform the body so the transcendent energies can come through. Only when this occurs are you transparent to transcendence. Campbell continues:"This implies yielding to nature, putting yourself in accord with nature and I would say that is the main aim of most of the mythologies of the world."(p24)
Campbell illustrates this with Jung's distinction between a symbol and a sign. A sign is a reference to something that is known or knowable in a perfectly rational way (e.g. Cape Town). A symbol, a mythic symbol, does not refer to something which is known or knowable in that rational way. It refers to a spiritual power that is operative in life and is known only through its effect.

This is the secret of the symbol, the spiritual, mythological symbol. The symbol itself must be transparent to transcendence. A God is a personification of an energy, a natural energy that comes either through the external world or from the world of our inner nature. When it comes from the inner world of nature, it appears as the imagery in our dreams and then of the myth. The deeper you get, the closer you are to the mythic order; the shallower you get the closer you are to the "head" order. The gods are personifications of the energies that inform life, the very energies that are building the trees and moving the animals and whipping up the waves in the ocean. The very energies that are in your body are personified by the gods. They are alive and well in everybody's life. Most traditions realize this that deities are personifications, not facts. They are metaphors. They are not references to anything that you can put your finger on, or your eye on. They are metaphors, transparent to transcendence (p28).

One of the things that has happened in our Western religions is that many of the symbols have been misinterpreted as signs according to Campbell and our whole mythology is read as pseudo-history, which never took place historically. That is why, when people realise that it could not have taken place, they lose their faith and their religion and then they are without the vocabulary of the communication between the transcendent and rationality of a living human being.

An example we can take is the concept of love. In religious discussions of Eros there are two aspects of Eros- the purely biological zeal and agape or spiritual love, which can be defined as love thy neighbour as thyself. Joseph Campbell sees both of them as impersonal. He mentions the 12th century emergence of the troubadour concept of Amour, a new interpretation of love. Amour is seen as personal and as a primary principle in the shaping of an aristocratic society. Here the eyes are the scouts for the heart and the eyes go forth to find an image to recommend to the heart. When the image is found and recommended, if the heart is a gentle heart- that is to say a heart that is capable of love and not simply of lust, then love is born. The noble heart represents a stage of psychological transformation. He goes on to say that the whole Grail tradition has to do with the problem of a person living an authentic life out of the spontaneity of his heart when that heart is a noble heart, whose spontaneity is based on compassion rather than possession and conquest. In the Grail tradition the individual was conscious of facing the wasteland, a land of people who simply do what they are supposed to do, people professing beliefs because they have to, holding jobs that have been inherited, not earned and so forth. That is what the story of Perceval represents in the Grail romance, the principle of compassion with suffering in which you recognise your essential transpersonal identity within the very life that is facing you. That is what the Grail legend is about.

The crucible of the Alchemist in which he purifies the metals (lead) in order to extract gold is perhaps a fitting symbol- the lead traditionally representing the ego and the more primitive energies which need to be transmuted into gold or spirit and transcended. It is a slow process of osmosis as we move into a greater consciousness or gold and an awareness of our transcendent self.
And what has that to do with yoga? Everything as yoga ultimately is the practice of refining our sensibilities to what is and as such a process of self-realisation. The fact that we take time out of our busy schedules and away from an overload of information and realign with ourselves is a step in that direction. Building our intuition through the inclusion of our day-dreams, real dreams and dream fragments is a way of connecting to our deeper energies and learn to discern and reconcile opposing tendencies within ourselves.

(This is taken from notes I found and which I took some years ago and which I felt may have relevance to some of us) Printed on tree free paper.
Marjolein 2015-06-16