Myth.East/West, was: How to!

[Guest guest]

Hi Tony,

>I recently was in a bit of bother, on a different

>list,now defunct because of an overeaction to Sai Baba

>saying He had nothing to do with the internet. I was

>asking for instances of Greek Philosophers showing

>'how to', Liberation. My point is that the later

>teachings that caught on from the Greeks were really

>all about the mind. This emphasis sent Western

>attempts at civilisation on to an eventual

>materialistic path. ?There was much talk about mystery

>schools, orphism, Apollonius, Pythagoras etc but not

>much evidence.

>

>In Vedanta there are scientific steps we can take, to

>work towards Realisation. Japa, meditation, Who am I?,

>snip<

>I would be interested if anyone has a quote from Greek

>or Western Philos, showing 'how to'.

 

If you mean strictly philosophers, that's difficult... how about Plotinus?

In a broader sense, there have been people in the West who talked about

"how to." Among those who helped me were D.T. Suzuki and Meister

Eckhart... and part of what helped was seeing that they were talking about

the same thing. Meister Eckhart was preaching from the pulpit about how to

go into the Godhead through "the little point" (it's a wonder he wasn't

labeled a heretic!)... and Suzuki also speaks of "the little point." I

wish I had time to hunt for a quote for you... but Eckhart's sermons

survive and have been published.

 

Just the other day I scanned something from Joseph Campbell pertaining to

what you were saying in your first paragraph, and I'll send it. The first

volume of his _The Masks of God_ is _Primitive Mythology_ and includes his

general theory. Remember the two trees in the Garden of Eden... the Tree

of Life and the Tree of Knowledge? And Adam and Eve were banished from the

garden so they wouldn't eat of _both_ of them and "become as gods."

Campbell says the West had the Tree of Knowledge, and the East had the Tree

of Life. So his next two volumes are _Oriental Mythology_ and _Occidental

Mythology_. Here's his intro to the 3rd volume, in which he talks about

East and West.

> The Masks of God:

> OCCIDENTAL

> MYTHOLOGY

>

> Part One:

> THE AGE OF THE GODDESS

>

> Introduction

>

>Myth and Ritual: East and West

>

> The geographical divide between the Oriental and Occidental ranges of

>myth and ritual is the tableland of Iran. Eastward are the two spiritual

>provinces of India and the Far East; westward, Europe and the Levant.

> Throughout the Orient the idea prevails that the ultimate ground of

>being transcends thought, imaging, and definition. It cannot be qualified.

>Hence, to argue that God, Man, or Nature is good, just, merciful, or

>benign, is to fall short of the question. One could as appropriately - or

>inappropriately - have argued, evil, unjust, merciless, or malignant. All

>such anthropomorphic predications screen or mask the actual enigma, which

>is absolutely beyond rational consideration; and yet, according to this

>view, precisely that enigma is the ultimate ground of being of each and

>every one of us - and of all things.

> The supreme aim of Oriental mythology, consequently, is not to

>establish as substantial any of its divinities or associated rites, but to

>render by means of these an experience that goes beyond: of identity with

>that Being of beings which is both immanent and transcendent; yet neither

>is nor is not. Prayers and chants, images, temples, gods, sages,

>definitions, and cosmologies are but ferries to a shore of experience

>beyond the categories of thought, to be abandoned on arrival; for, as the

>Indian Kena Upanishad states: "To know is not to know, not to know is to

>know"; and the Chinese Tao Te Ching: "Those who know are still."

> "Thou art that," declares the Vedic sage; and the Japanese: "It is

>your true self."

> "O thou," states a basic Buddhist text, "who art gone, who art gone,

>who art gone to the yonder shore, who at the yonder shore hast

>disembarked: Enlightenment! Hail!"

> In the Western ranges of mythological thought and imagery, on the

>other hand, whether in Europe or in the Levant, the ground of being is

>normally personified as a Creator, of whom Man is the creature, and the

>two are not the same; so that here the function of myth and ritual cannot

>be to catalyze an experience of ineffable identity. Man alone, turned

>inward, according to this view can experience only his own creaturely

>soul, which may or may not be properly related to its Creator. The high

>function of Occidental myth and ritual, consequently, is to establish a

>means of relationship - of God to Man and Man to God. Such means are

>furnished, furthermore, by institutions, the rules of which cannot be

>learned through any scrutiny of nature, whether inward or without.

>Supernaturally revealed, these have come from God himself, as the myth of

>each institution tells; and they are administered by his clergy, in the

>spirit of the myth.

> However, certain exclusively Occidental complications result from the

>fact that, where two such contradictory final terms as God and Man stand

>against each other, the individual cannot attach his allegiance wholly to

>both. On the one hand, as in the Book of Job, he may renounce his human

>judgment in the face of what he takes to be the majesty of God: "Behold, I

>am of small account; what shall I answer thee?" Or, on the other hand, as

>in the manner of the Greeks, he may stand by his human values and judge,

>according to these, the character of his gods. The first type of piety we

>term religious and recognize in all traditions of the Levant:

>Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The other we term, in

>the broadest sense, humanistic, and recognize in the native mythologies of

>Europe: the Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic.

> By and large, the recent history of Occidental mythology can be

>described in terms of a grandiose interplay of these two contrary pieties;

>specifically, a violent tidal seesaw of exchanges, East to West, West to

>East, East to West, and West to East again, commencing with the first

>serious Persian attempt against Greece in 490 B.C. Alexander's conquest of

>the Levant turned the Levantine tide and was followed by the victories of

>Rome. However, even in the earliest Roman period, a counter-current of

>Levantine mythologies flowing west had begun to make itself felt. During

>the Carthaginian wars, in 204 B.C., the cult of the Phrygian Magna Mater

>was introduced formally to the city. Stoicism also carried a

>Levantine-Oriental strain, and at the height of Roman power, in the period

>of the Antonines, the Persian syncretic cult of Mithra became the chief

>religion of the empire. Christianity followed, after which the European

>empire fell, and Levantine Byzantium assumed both its name and its role as

>the New or Second Rome. Next, Mohammed's revelation burst upon the world,

>in 622 A.D., and through the following millennium bade fair to become the

>ultimate religion of mankind - until, once again, the tide turned. For as

>Persia had been stopped at Marathon (490 B.C.), so at Poitiers (732 A.D.)

>was Islam; and thereafter the stirring, desert cry of the muezzin to

>communal prayer was year by year forced back. Within Christianized Europe

>itself, furthermore, the absolute authority of the One Church was

>dissolved through the irresistible return to force of the native European

>principles of individual judgment and the worth of rational man. The

>Reformation, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and present Age of Science

>followed, culminating, as of now, in the European spiritual conquest of

>the world - with, however, the next Levantine tide already on the rise.

> Much of the complexity and vitality of the Occidental heritage must

>be attributed to the conflicting claims - both of which are accepted - on

>the one hand, of the advocates of what is offered as the Word of God, and,

>on the other, of the rational individual. Nothing quite of the kind has

>ever seriously troubled the mentality of the Orient east of Iran, where

>the old hieratic Bronze Age cosmology of the ever-circling eons - static

>yet turning ever, in a round of mathematical impersonality, from

>everlasting to everlasting - endures to this day as the last word on the

>universe and the place of man within it. All, according to this vision,

>though in apparent tumult, is harmony at root, as a manifestation of the

>all-supporting, all-suffusing mystery of being, which transcends thought,

>imaging, and definition; that is to say, transcends the search of science.

>Like a jewel, ever turning facets to the light, apparently in change but

>actually unchanging, this Bronze Age image of the cosmos, still intact in

>the Orient, renders a fixed world of fixed duties, roles, and

>possibilities: not a process, but a state; and the individual, whether man

>or god, is but a flash among the facets. There is no concept, or even

>sense, of either will or mind as a creative force. And when the Westerner

>exhibits these, the sage Oriental simply gazes, baffled, yet with the

>consoling sense of watching only a devil at work whose time will surely be

>short, and of himself, meanwhile, as securely rooted in all that is

>eternally true in man, society, the universe, and the ultimate secret of

>being. All of which he knows, or at least believes he knows, out of the

>old, old store of wisdom that both he and we inherit from the Age of

>Bronze.

> For on a deeper level of the past than that of the shuttleplay of

>Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Islam, and, later, Europe, the legacy of

>the Bronze Age supplied many of the basic motifs of Occidental, as well as

>of Oriental, mythological thought. Moreover, the origins of this legacy

>were neither in India, as many still suppose, nor in China, but in the

>Near East, the Levant, where the spades of recent archaeological

>investigation have uncovered a background of preparation going back to c.

>7500 B.C. At about that time, in the high, protected mountain valleys of

>Asia Minor, Syria, northern Iraq, and Iran, the arts of agriculture. and

>stock-breeding were developed, and these produced an epochal mutation in

>both the character of human existence and its potentialities for

>development. Whereas earlier mankind had lived only precariously by

>food-collection (the hunt and vegetable-gathering), men now became

>substantial tillers of the earth. Self-sustaining villages appeared, and

>their number, steadily increasing, spread in a broad band eastward and

>westward, arriving simultaneously at both oceans, about 2500 B.C.

>Meanwhile, in the developed zone of origin, the nuclear Near East, a

>second epochal mutation occurred c. 3500 B.C., when in the river land of

>Mesopotamia the fundamental arts of all high civilization were invented:

>writing, mathematics, monumental architecture, systematic scientific

>observation (of the heavens), temple worship, and, dominating all, the

>kingly art of government. The knowledge and application of these reached

>Egypt with the first pharaohs of Dynasty I, c. 2850 B.C., Crete and the

>Indus Valley, c. 2500 B.C., China, c. 1500 B.C., and c. 1000-500 B.C.

>passed to Mexico and Peru.

> Now in the neolithic village stage of this development and dispersal,

>the focal figure of all mythology and worship was the bountiful goddess

>Earth, as the mother and nourisher of life and receiver of the dead for

>rebirth. In the earliest period of her cult (perhaps c. 7500-3500 B.C. in

>the Levant) such a mother-goddess may have been thought of only as a local

>patroness of fertility, as many anthropologists suppose. However, in the

>temples even of the first of the higher civilizations (Sumer, c. 3500-2350

>B.C.), the Great Goddess of highest concern was certainly much more than

>that. She was already, as she is now in the Orient, a metaphysical symbol:

>the arch personification of the power of Space, Time, and Matter, within

>whose bound all beings arise and die: the substance of their bodies,

>configurator of their lives and thoughts, and receiver of their dead. And

>everything having form or name - including God personified as good or

>evil, merciful or wrathful - was her child, within her womb.

> Toward the close of the Age of Bronze and, more strongly, with the

>dawn of the Age of Iron (c. 1250 B.C. in the Levant), the old Cosmology

>and mythologies of the goddess mother were radically transformed,

>reinterpreted, and in large measure even suppressed, by those suddenly

>intrusive patriarchal warrior tribesmen whose traditions have come down to

>us chiefly in the Old and New Testaments and in the myths of Greece. Two

>extensive geographical matrices were the source lands of these insurgent

>warrior waves: for the Semites, the Syro-Arabian deserts, where, as

>ranging nomads, they herded sheep and goats and later mastered the camel;

>and, for the Hellenic-Aryan stems, the broad plains of Europe and south

>Russia, where they had grazed their herds of cattle and early mastered the

>horse.

> In the following chapters, it will be our pleasure, first, to remark

>the ubiquity of the goddess, even in myths in which she is not supposed to

>be playing any part, or indeed even to exist (Chapter 1); next, to glance

>back for a moment to the period of her dominance (Chapter 2); and then

>(Chapters 3 to 9), to make a systematic progress down the richly studded

>vale where stand the temples of the godly visions of the chief creative

>peoples of the Western World.