APOTHEOSIS
Joseph
Campbell, in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, writes that the Universal
Hero from monomyth must pass through a stage of Apotheosis. According to
Campbell, apotheosis is the expansion of consciousness that the hero experiences
after defeating his foe.
Apotheosis (from Greek ἀποθεοῦν, apotheoun "to deify", in Latin deificatio, "to make divine") is the exaltation of a subject to divine level. The term has meanings in theology, where it refers to a belief, and in art, where it refers to a genre.
In theology, the term apotheosis refers to the idea that an individual has been raised to godlike stature. In art, the term refers to the treatment of any subject (a figure, group, locale, motif, convention or melody) in a particularly grand or exalted manner.
Like the Buddha himself, this godlike
being is a pattern of the divine state to which the human hero attains
who has
gone beyond the last terrors of ignorance.
Cont’d… “When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change.” 85 1000 faces, pg 127
“… the distinction between eternity and
time is only apparent – made, perforce, by the
rational mind, but dissolved in
the perfect knowledge of the mind that has
transcended the pairs of opposites.
1000 faces, pg 130
As the original intruder into the
paradise of the infant with its mother, the father is the archetypal enemy;
hence, throughout life all enemies are symbolical (to the
unconscious) of the
father.
“Whatever is killed becomes
the father”
All of the good mother-father content is
saved for home, while the “bad” is flung abroad and about: “for who is this
uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God”105
“And Slacken not in following up the enemy: if ye are suffering
hardships, they are suffering similar hardships; but ye have hope from Allah,
while they have none” 106
1000 faces, pg 133
Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively
missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem
of subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate.
Ego is not
annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of
thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the
whole of his
society.
The rest of the world
meanwhile is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because
(they are) outside the sphere of the protection of his god.
1000 faces, pg 134
Connected – If the God is a tribal, racial, national, or sectarian archetype, we are the warriors of his cause; but if he is a lord of the universe itself, we then go forth as knowers to whom all men are brothers.
Cont’d… And in either case, the
childhood parent images and ideas of “good” and “evil” have been surpassed.
We no longer
desire and fear; we are what was desired and feared.
1000 faces, pg 138!!
Instead of clearing his own heart the
zealot tries to clear the world.
1000 faces, pg 134
Cont’d … (8 circles) The laws of the City of God are applied only to his in-group (tribe, church, nation, class, or what not) while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against whatever uncircumcised, barbarian, heathen, “native,” or alien people happens to occupy the position of neighbor. 1000 faces, pg 134
Once we have broken free of the
prejudices of our own provincially limited ecclesiastical, tribal, or national
rendition of the world archetypes, it becomes possible to understand that the
supreme initiation is not that of the local motherly fathers, who then
project
aggression onto the neighbors for their own defense.
The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have
been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to
demonstrated, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that
all without exception are his children.110
1000 faces, pg 135
One would think that we had been called upon to decide or to know whom, of all of us, the Father prefers.
Cont’d … Whereas, the teaching is much less flattering: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”111
God has made different religions to suit
different aspirants, times, and countries.
All doctrines are only
so may paths; but a path is by no means God
Himself.
Indeed, one can reach God
if one follows any of the paths with whole hearted devotion…. One may eat a cake
with icing either straight or sidewise.
It will taste sweet either way.114
1000 faces, pg 135 (check quote)
Briefly, nirvana means “the
Extinguishing of the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion.”
1000 faces, pg 138
“The verb nirva (Sanskrit) is,
literally, ‘to blow out,’ not transitively, but as a fire ceases to
draw….Deprived of fuel, the fire of life is ‘pacified,’ i.e., quenched, when the
mind has been curbed, one attains to the ‘peace of Nirvana,’ ‘despiration if
God.’ … It is by ceasing to feed our
fires that the
peace is reached, of which
it is well said in another tradition that ‘it passeth understanding’”123 The
word “de-spiration” is contrived from a literal Latinization of the Sanskrit
nirvana, nir = “out,
forth, outward, out of, out from, away, away from”; vana =
“blown”; nirvana = “blown out, gone out, extinguished.”
1000 faces, pg 139
This greatly celebrated legend (Buddha’s
tangle with Mara) affords an excellent example of the close relationship
maintained in the Orient between myth,
psychology, and
metaphysics.
The vivid personifications prepare the intellect for the doctrine of the
interdependence of the inner and outer worlds.
1000 faces, pg 139
Cont’d … No doubt the reader has been struck by a certain resemblance of this ancient mythological doctrine of the dynamics of the psyche to the teachings of the modern Freudian school.
Moreover, the unconsciously grounded
delusions from which
desires and hostilities arise are in both systems dispelled
by psychological analysis (Sanskrit:
viveka) and illumination (Sanskrit: vidya).
1000 faces, pg 139
For Buddhism:
Psychoanalysis is a technique to cure
excessively
suffering individuals of the unconsciously misdirected
desires and
hostilities that weave around them their private webs of unreal terrors and
ambivalent attractions; the patient released from these finds himself able to
participate with comparative satisfaction in the more realistic fears,
hostilities, erotic and religious practices, business enterprises, wars,
pastimes, and household tasks offered to him by his particular culture.
Cont’d … But for the one who has
deliberately undertaken the difficult and dangerous journey beyond the village
compound, these interests, too, are to be regarded as based on error.
Therefore the aim of the religious teaching is
not to cure the individual
back again to the general delusion, but to detach him from delusion altogether;
and this not by readjusting the desire (eros) and hostility (thanatos) – for
that would only originate a new context of delusion – but by
extinguishing the
impulses to the very root, according to the method of the celebrated
Buddhist Eightfold Path:
1000 faces, pg 140
… in the understanding of one in whom the Threefold Fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion is dead, this world is nirvana. 1000 faces, pg 141
The Boddhisatva, however … good paragraph on form/emptiness, etc. 1000 faces, pg 141
GOD
… in Hinduism: the one freed in life
(jivan mukta), desireless, compassionate, and wise, “with the heart concentrated
by yoga, viewing all things with equal regard, beholds himself in all beings and
all beings in himself.
In whatever
way he leads his life, that one lives in God.” 128
1000 faces, pg 142