The gods
Now, the energies of nature are present in the outer world, but also
inside ourselves, because we are particles of nature. So when
you are meditating on a deity, you are meditating on powers of your own spirit
and psyche, and on powers that are also out there. One
finds in practically all the religious traditions of the world (with a few
exceptions) that the aim is for the individual to put himself into accord with
nature, with his nature,
and that’s both physical and psychological health. These are
what in our traditions are called the nature religions, and the deities are not
final terms; they are references to spiritual energies. So
when mythology is properly understood, the
object that is revered and venerated is not a final term; the object venerated
is a personification of an energy that dwells within the individual, and the
reference of mythology has two modes – that of
consciousness
and that of the spiritual potentials within the individual.
If a mythology doesn’t have that accent, what’s it all about? The way to misunderstand mythology is to think that the image is the final term. And of course this is one of the problems in what we call the monotheistic systems. God is not transparent – he’s a final term. And when the deity is a final term and is not transparent to transcendence, then the worshipper is the final term also and is not transparent to transcendence, and what you have then is a religion of a relationship of the individual to the god. But as soon as you open the god and realize that he’s a personification of a power, then you yourself open as another personification and vehicle of that power. In such a system, you can have such a saying as comes from the Chāndogya Upanisad: Tat tvam asi (Thou art that). That is hereby when the god is closed.
Caesar, in the sixth chapter of his Gallic Wars,
describes the gods of the Celts but gives them Roman names.
This is wonderful: the Romans, and before them the Greeks, could see that the
gods of other people were the same gods they worshiped, because those gods are
personifications of the
energies that shape and maintain the universe. So Caesar
could go into
The Roman Empire was vast and
included the whole world of the Near East, North Africa, and
In
The nature rules live in the heart.
The society rules and gods are always “out there.” But
the source of the lyric is in here, in the heart. And that is
the sense of the inward-turned meditation. There is where the
god is that is dictating to you. There is where the muses
live, in your own heart, not out there in some book. TMD 184
In
most mythologies, whether primal or from the high civilizations, deities are
personifications of the energies of nature. The energies are
primary, while the deities are secondary.
Gods
are metaphors transparent to transcendence. And my
understanding of the mythological mode is that deities and even people are to be
understood in this sense, as metaphors. It’s a poetic
understanding. It is to be understood in the same sense as
Goethe’s words at the end of Faust. “Alles
Vergängliche ist nu rein Gleichnis” (Everything transitory is but a
reference”). The reference is to that which transcends all
speech, all vocabularies, and all images. I think of the more
prosaic style of thinking about these references as theological rather than
mythological. In theology, the god is taken as a final term,
a kind of supernatural fact. When the deity is not
transparent, when he doesn’t open up like that to the transcendent, he doesn’t
open up to the mystery of our own lives. G 101