i have no idea how to do an lj cut, sorry
this message comes from my mythology professor, the beautiful philip bishop.
"What if this is what you're here for--to represent in life of the world
the immanence (the inherent existence) of the mystery of the divine?
To help you, I've attached a text of Campbell's telling of the story of
Indra's humbling.
I think it's a true story.
P."
Myths of Light by Joseph Campbell
Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal
Introduction: The Humbling of Indra
Myths do not belong, properly, to the rational mind. Rather, they bubble up from deep in the wells of what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious.
I think what happens in our mythology here in the West is that the mythological archetypal symbols have come to be interpreted as facts. Jesus was born of a virgin. Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Jesus went to heaven by ascension. Unfortunately, in our age of scientific skepticism we know these things did not actually happen, and so the mythic forms are called falsehoods. The word myth now means falsehood, and so we have lost the symbols and that mysterious world of which they speak. But we need the symbols, and so they come up in disturbed dreams and nightmares that are then dealt with by psychiatrists. It was Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacob Adler who realized that the figures of dreams are really figures of personal mythologization. You create your own imagery related to the archetypes.
At present, our culture has rejected this world of symbology. It has gone into an economic and political phase, where spiritual principles are completely disregarded. You may have practical ethics and that kind of thing, but there is no spirituality in any aspect of our contemporary Western civilization. Our religious life is ethical, not mystical. The mystery has gone and society is disintegrating as a result.
The question is whether or not there can ever be a recovery of the mythological, mystical realization of the miracle of life of which human beings are a manifestation.
We take the Old Testament God to be a fact, not a symbol. The Holy Land is a specific place and no other, man is superior to the beasts, and nature has fallen. With the Fall in the Garden of Eden, nature becomes a corrupt force, so we do not give ourselves to nature as Chief Seattle did. We will correct nature. We develop ideas of good and evil in nature, and we are supposed to be on the side of the good, which creates an obvious tension. We don’t yield to nature. The term nature religions has become the object of rejection and abuse. But what else are you going to worship? Some figment of your imagination that you have put up in the clouds? A strange thing has happened. It is so extreme that if you don’t believe in a figure, you don’t have any worship. Now everything is lost!
In the Puritan period we had the rejection of the whole iconography of the Christian myth and of the rituals by which it was delivered to your soul. The whole thing was rendered simply as a rational performance of bringing people of goodwill together, particularly those in that particular church. But even that has been torn apart bit by bit.
What do we read? We read newspapers concerned with wars, murders, rapes, politicians, and athletes, and that’s about it. This is the reading that people used to devote to worship, to legends of deities who represent the founding figures of their lives and religion. People today are hunting around for something they have lost. Some of them know that they’re hunting. The ones who don’t are having a really hard time.
Now I will tell you a little story. I have only a tiny television set, the size of a postcard, which I bought many years ago when I was on TV and wanted to see myself. After that I never watched it much, but when the Moon shots started, I spent day after day glued to the screen, just watching them. One of the thrilling moments for me was when the astronauts were on the way back and Houston ground control asked them, “Who is navigating now?” The reply that came back was, “Newton.”
I immediately thought of Kant’s “Transcendental Aesthetic,” the first section of his Critique of Pure Reason, where he says that time and space are forms of sensibility and that they are essential to our mode of experience. We can’t experience anything outside of them. They are a priori forms. So it seems we know the laws of space before we get there. In his introduction to metaphysics, Kant asks, “How is it that we can be certain that mathematical calculations made in this space here will work in that space there?” The answer came to me from these men. “There is only one space because there is only one mind at work here.”
Here were these chaps spinning around, hundreds of thousands of miles out in space. Enough was known of the laws of space to know just what energy should be put out of the rockets and at what angle to bring them down within a mile of a boat waiting for them in the Pacific Ocean. This was fantastic.
The knowledge of space is the knowledge of our lives. We’re born from space. It was from space that the Big Bang came that sent forth galaxies, and out of the galaxies, solar systems. The planet we are on is a little pebble in one of these things, and we have grown out of the earth of this pebble. This is the fantastic mythology that’s waiting for somebody to write poems about.
Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.
The other thing those young men said upon their return was that the Earth was like an oasis in the desert of space. The appreciation and the love for our Earth that came through in that moment rang like the words of Chief Seattle: “The Earth does not belong to Man; Man belongs to the Earth.”
“Let’s take care of it” - I heard this theme from Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, and it was, to me, a fabulous statement. He was in a module on one of those trips, and he was given what was called an EVA (Extravehicular Assignment). He was to go out of the module wearing his space suit, attached to the ship by an umbilical. Well, inside the module they had a little trouble and so he had five minutes with nothing to do. He was traveling through space at eighteen thousand miles an hour, and there was no wind and no sound and over there was the Sun and over here was the Earth and there was the Moon and this beautiful man said, “I asked myself, What have I ever done to have this experience?”
This is what is known as the sublime, the experience either of space or of energy that is so prodigious that the individual simply diminishes out of sight. I have talked with people who were in some of the German cities during the British and American saturation bombings in World War II, and they told me it was a sublime experience. So there is more than beauty in the world - there is the sublime. The mythology coming to us from space is sublime.
It is interesting that all of these mythologies that we talk about involve the Moon and the Sun. It was thought by the ancients that the Moon and the Sun were the realms of the spirit. But we know that they’re made of the same stuff we’re made of, and so the earlier separation of Earth and spirit doesn’t work anymore. The amusing thing to me is that the mythology that really fits this worldview is Hinduism.
The Earth is the energy of which some god is a personification and of which matter is a concretization, and these things exist in eons and eons and eons of time.
Let me tell you an Indian story.
A monster named Vrtra once managed to enclose (his name means “encloser”) all the waters of the universe so that there was a great drought that lasted for thousands of years. Well, Indra, the Zeus of the Indian pantheon, finally got the idea, Why not throw a thunderbolt into this chap and blow him up? So Indra, who apparently was a slow thinker, took a thunderbolt, threw it into the midst of Vrtra, and pow! Vrtra blows up and the waters flow forth and the Earth and universe are refreshed.
Well then Indra thinks, “How great I am,” so he goes up to the cosmic mountain, Mount Meru, the Olympus of the Indian gods, and notices that all the palaces there had fallen into decay. “Well, now I’m going to build up a whole new city here - one worthy of my dignity.” He gets hold of Vishvakarman, the craftsman of the gods, and tells him his plans.
He says, “Look, let’s get to work here and build up this city. I think we could have palaces here and towers there, lotus plants here, etc. etc.”
So Vishvakarman starts to work, but every time Indra comes back, he has bigger and better ideas about the palace, and Vishvakarman begins to think, “My god, we’re both immortal, so this thing’s going to go on forever. What can I do?”
He decides to go and complain to Brahma, the so-called creator of the phenomenal world. Brahma is seated on a lotus (that’s the way Brahma is enthroned), and Brahma and the lotus grow through Vishnu’s navel. Vishnu is floating on the cosmic ocean, couched on a great serpent, whose name is Ananta (which means “never ending”).
So here’s the scene. Out in the water Vishnu is asleep and Brahma is sitting on the lotus. Vishvakarman comes in and after much bowing and scraping, he says, “Listen, I’m in trouble.” Then he tells his story to Brahma, who says, “That’s okay. I’ll fix everything.”
The next morning the porter at the gate of a palace being built notices a blue-black brahmin boy whose beauty has drawn a lot of children around him. The porter goes back to Indra and says, “I think it would be auspicious to invite this beautiful young brahmin boy into the palace and give him hospitality.” Indra agrees that this would be a propitious thing to do, so the young boy is invited in. Indra is seated on his throne, and after the ceremonies of hospitality, he says, “Well young man, what brings you to the palace?”
With a voice like thunder on the horizon, the boy says, “I have heard that you are building the greatest palace that has ever been built by any Indra, and now that I have surveyed it, I can tell you that, indeed, no Indra has ever built a palace like this.”
Nonplussed, Indra says, “Indras before me? What are you talking about?”
“Yes, Indras before you,” says the young boy. “Just think, the lotus grows from Vishnu’s navel, the lotus opens, and on it sits Brahma. Brahma opens his eyes and a universe comes into being, governed by an Indra. He closes his eyes. He opens his eyes - another universe. He closes his eyes ... and for three hundred and sixty Brahma years, Brahma does this. Then the lotus withdraws, and after endless time another lotus opens, the Brahma appears, he opens his eyes, he closes his eyes ... Indras, Indras, Indras.
“Now, consider all the galaxies in space and outer space, each one a lotus, each one with his Brahma. There may be wise men in your court who would volunteer to count the drops in the ocean and the grains of sand on the beaches of the world, but who would count those Brahmas, let alone Indras?”
While he’s talking, there comes walking across the floor of the palace a parade of ants in perfect rows, and the boy looks at them and laughs. Indra’s beard prickles; his whiskers rise; he says, “Now what? What are you laughing at?”
The boy says, “Don’t ask me unless you’re ready to be hurt.”
Indra says, “I ask.”
The boy waves his hand at the ranks of ants and says, “All former Indras. They have gone through innumerable incarnations and they have risen in the ranks of the heavens and they have all come to the high throne of Indra and killed the dragon Vrtra. Then they all say, ‘How great I am,’ and down they go.”
At this point a crotchety old yogi comes in who is wearing nothing but a waistband, and he has an umbrella made of banana leaves over his head. On his chest is a little circle of hairs, and the young boy looks at him and asks the very questions that are in Indra’s mind. “Who are you? What’s your name? Where do you live? Where’s your family? Where’s your home?”
“I don’t have a family, I don’t have a house. Life is short. This parasol is good enough for me. I just worship Vishnu. As for these hairs, it’s curious; every time an Indra dies, one hair drops out. Half of them are gone. Pretty soon they’ll all be gone. Why build a house?”
Well, these two were actually Vishnu and Siva. They had come for the instruction of Indra, and once he had heard them, they left. Well, Indra is shattered, and when Brhaspati, the priest of the gods, comes in, Indra says, “I’m going out to be a yogi. I’m going to worship Vishnu’s feet.”
So he goes to his wife, the great queen Indrani, and he says, “Darling, I’m going to leave you. I’m going out into the forest to become a yogi. I’m going to drop all this monkey show about the kingship of the world and I’m going to worship Vishnu’s feet.”
Well, she looks at him for a while, and then she goes to Brhaspati and tells him what has happened. “He’s got it in his head that he’s going to go out and be a yogi.”
So the priest takes her by the hand and they go and sit down in front of the throne of Indra, and the priest says to him, “You are on the throne of the universe. You represent virtue and duty - dharma - and you incarnate the divine spirit in this earthly role. I have already written a great book for you on the art of politics - how to maintain the state, how to win wars, etc. Now I am going to write a book for you on the art of love so that the other aspect of your life, with you and Indrani here, will also become a revelation of the divine spirit dwelling in us all. Anyone can become a yogi, but how about representing in the life of the world the immanence of this mystery of eternity?”
So Indra was saved from the trouble, you might say, of going out and becoming a yogi. He had it all within himself now, as we all do. All you have to do is wake up to the fact that you are a manifestation of the eternal.
This story, known as “The Humbling of Indra,” appears in the Brahmavaivarta Purana. The Puranas are Indian holy texts from around 400 A.D. The amazing thing about Indian mythology is that it could absorb the universe we talk about now, with the great cycles of stellar lives, the galaxies beyond galaxies, and the comings and goings of universes. What this does is diminish the force of the present moment.
All of our problems about atom bombs blowing up the universe, so what? There have been universes and universes before, every one of them blown up by an atom bomb. So now you identify yourself with the eternal that is within you and within all things. It doesn’t mean you want to see the atom bomb come, but you don’t spend your time worrying about it.
One of the great temptations of the Buddha was the temptation of lust. The other temptation was the temptation of the fear of death. This is a nice theme for meditation on the fear of death. Life throws up around us these temptations, these distractions, and the problem is to find the immovable center within. Then you can survive anything. Myth will help you do that. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go out on picket lines about atomic research. Go ahead, but do it playfully. The universe is God’s play.
"What if this is what you're here for--to represent in life of the world
the immanence (the inherent existence) of the mystery of the divine?
To help you, I've attached a text of Campbell's telling of the story of
Indra's humbling.
I think it's a true story.
P."
Myths of Light by Joseph Campbell
Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal
Introduction: The Humbling of Indra
Myths do not belong, properly, to the rational mind. Rather, they bubble up from deep in the wells of what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious.
I think what happens in our mythology here in the West is that the mythological archetypal symbols have come to be interpreted as facts. Jesus was born of a virgin. Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Jesus went to heaven by ascension. Unfortunately, in our age of scientific skepticism we know these things did not actually happen, and so the mythic forms are called falsehoods. The word myth now means falsehood, and so we have lost the symbols and that mysterious world of which they speak. But we need the symbols, and so they come up in disturbed dreams and nightmares that are then dealt with by psychiatrists. It was Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacob Adler who realized that the figures of dreams are really figures of personal mythologization. You create your own imagery related to the archetypes.
At present, our culture has rejected this world of symbology. It has gone into an economic and political phase, where spiritual principles are completely disregarded. You may have practical ethics and that kind of thing, but there is no spirituality in any aspect of our contemporary Western civilization. Our religious life is ethical, not mystical. The mystery has gone and society is disintegrating as a result.
The question is whether or not there can ever be a recovery of the mythological, mystical realization of the miracle of life of which human beings are a manifestation.
We take the Old Testament God to be a fact, not a symbol. The Holy Land is a specific place and no other, man is superior to the beasts, and nature has fallen. With the Fall in the Garden of Eden, nature becomes a corrupt force, so we do not give ourselves to nature as Chief Seattle did. We will correct nature. We develop ideas of good and evil in nature, and we are supposed to be on the side of the good, which creates an obvious tension. We don’t yield to nature. The term nature religions has become the object of rejection and abuse. But what else are you going to worship? Some figment of your imagination that you have put up in the clouds? A strange thing has happened. It is so extreme that if you don’t believe in a figure, you don’t have any worship. Now everything is lost!
In the Puritan period we had the rejection of the whole iconography of the Christian myth and of the rituals by which it was delivered to your soul. The whole thing was rendered simply as a rational performance of bringing people of goodwill together, particularly those in that particular church. But even that has been torn apart bit by bit.
What do we read? We read newspapers concerned with wars, murders, rapes, politicians, and athletes, and that’s about it. This is the reading that people used to devote to worship, to legends of deities who represent the founding figures of their lives and religion. People today are hunting around for something they have lost. Some of them know that they’re hunting. The ones who don’t are having a really hard time.
Now I will tell you a little story. I have only a tiny television set, the size of a postcard, which I bought many years ago when I was on TV and wanted to see myself. After that I never watched it much, but when the Moon shots started, I spent day after day glued to the screen, just watching them. One of the thrilling moments for me was when the astronauts were on the way back and Houston ground control asked them, “Who is navigating now?” The reply that came back was, “Newton.”
I immediately thought of Kant’s “Transcendental Aesthetic,” the first section of his Critique of Pure Reason, where he says that time and space are forms of sensibility and that they are essential to our mode of experience. We can’t experience anything outside of them. They are a priori forms. So it seems we know the laws of space before we get there. In his introduction to metaphysics, Kant asks, “How is it that we can be certain that mathematical calculations made in this space here will work in that space there?” The answer came to me from these men. “There is only one space because there is only one mind at work here.”
Here were these chaps spinning around, hundreds of thousands of miles out in space. Enough was known of the laws of space to know just what energy should be put out of the rockets and at what angle to bring them down within a mile of a boat waiting for them in the Pacific Ocean. This was fantastic.
The knowledge of space is the knowledge of our lives. We’re born from space. It was from space that the Big Bang came that sent forth galaxies, and out of the galaxies, solar systems. The planet we are on is a little pebble in one of these things, and we have grown out of the earth of this pebble. This is the fantastic mythology that’s waiting for somebody to write poems about.
Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.
The other thing those young men said upon their return was that the Earth was like an oasis in the desert of space. The appreciation and the love for our Earth that came through in that moment rang like the words of Chief Seattle: “The Earth does not belong to Man; Man belongs to the Earth.”
“Let’s take care of it” - I heard this theme from Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, and it was, to me, a fabulous statement. He was in a module on one of those trips, and he was given what was called an EVA (Extravehicular Assignment). He was to go out of the module wearing his space suit, attached to the ship by an umbilical. Well, inside the module they had a little trouble and so he had five minutes with nothing to do. He was traveling through space at eighteen thousand miles an hour, and there was no wind and no sound and over there was the Sun and over here was the Earth and there was the Moon and this beautiful man said, “I asked myself, What have I ever done to have this experience?”
This is what is known as the sublime, the experience either of space or of energy that is so prodigious that the individual simply diminishes out of sight. I have talked with people who were in some of the German cities during the British and American saturation bombings in World War II, and they told me it was a sublime experience. So there is more than beauty in the world - there is the sublime. The mythology coming to us from space is sublime.
It is interesting that all of these mythologies that we talk about involve the Moon and the Sun. It was thought by the ancients that the Moon and the Sun were the realms of the spirit. But we know that they’re made of the same stuff we’re made of, and so the earlier separation of Earth and spirit doesn’t work anymore. The amusing thing to me is that the mythology that really fits this worldview is Hinduism.
The Earth is the energy of which some god is a personification and of which matter is a concretization, and these things exist in eons and eons and eons of time.
Let me tell you an Indian story.
A monster named Vrtra once managed to enclose (his name means “encloser”) all the waters of the universe so that there was a great drought that lasted for thousands of years. Well, Indra, the Zeus of the Indian pantheon, finally got the idea, Why not throw a thunderbolt into this chap and blow him up? So Indra, who apparently was a slow thinker, took a thunderbolt, threw it into the midst of Vrtra, and pow! Vrtra blows up and the waters flow forth and the Earth and universe are refreshed.
Well then Indra thinks, “How great I am,” so he goes up to the cosmic mountain, Mount Meru, the Olympus of the Indian gods, and notices that all the palaces there had fallen into decay. “Well, now I’m going to build up a whole new city here - one worthy of my dignity.” He gets hold of Vishvakarman, the craftsman of the gods, and tells him his plans.
He says, “Look, let’s get to work here and build up this city. I think we could have palaces here and towers there, lotus plants here, etc. etc.”
So Vishvakarman starts to work, but every time Indra comes back, he has bigger and better ideas about the palace, and Vishvakarman begins to think, “My god, we’re both immortal, so this thing’s going to go on forever. What can I do?”
He decides to go and complain to Brahma, the so-called creator of the phenomenal world. Brahma is seated on a lotus (that’s the way Brahma is enthroned), and Brahma and the lotus grow through Vishnu’s navel. Vishnu is floating on the cosmic ocean, couched on a great serpent, whose name is Ananta (which means “never ending”).
So here’s the scene. Out in the water Vishnu is asleep and Brahma is sitting on the lotus. Vishvakarman comes in and after much bowing and scraping, he says, “Listen, I’m in trouble.” Then he tells his story to Brahma, who says, “That’s okay. I’ll fix everything.”
The next morning the porter at the gate of a palace being built notices a blue-black brahmin boy whose beauty has drawn a lot of children around him. The porter goes back to Indra and says, “I think it would be auspicious to invite this beautiful young brahmin boy into the palace and give him hospitality.” Indra agrees that this would be a propitious thing to do, so the young boy is invited in. Indra is seated on his throne, and after the ceremonies of hospitality, he says, “Well young man, what brings you to the palace?”
With a voice like thunder on the horizon, the boy says, “I have heard that you are building the greatest palace that has ever been built by any Indra, and now that I have surveyed it, I can tell you that, indeed, no Indra has ever built a palace like this.”
Nonplussed, Indra says, “Indras before me? What are you talking about?”
“Yes, Indras before you,” says the young boy. “Just think, the lotus grows from Vishnu’s navel, the lotus opens, and on it sits Brahma. Brahma opens his eyes and a universe comes into being, governed by an Indra. He closes his eyes. He opens his eyes - another universe. He closes his eyes ... and for three hundred and sixty Brahma years, Brahma does this. Then the lotus withdraws, and after endless time another lotus opens, the Brahma appears, he opens his eyes, he closes his eyes ... Indras, Indras, Indras.
“Now, consider all the galaxies in space and outer space, each one a lotus, each one with his Brahma. There may be wise men in your court who would volunteer to count the drops in the ocean and the grains of sand on the beaches of the world, but who would count those Brahmas, let alone Indras?”
While he’s talking, there comes walking across the floor of the palace a parade of ants in perfect rows, and the boy looks at them and laughs. Indra’s beard prickles; his whiskers rise; he says, “Now what? What are you laughing at?”
The boy says, “Don’t ask me unless you’re ready to be hurt.”
Indra says, “I ask.”
The boy waves his hand at the ranks of ants and says, “All former Indras. They have gone through innumerable incarnations and they have risen in the ranks of the heavens and they have all come to the high throne of Indra and killed the dragon Vrtra. Then they all say, ‘How great I am,’ and down they go.”
At this point a crotchety old yogi comes in who is wearing nothing but a waistband, and he has an umbrella made of banana leaves over his head. On his chest is a little circle of hairs, and the young boy looks at him and asks the very questions that are in Indra’s mind. “Who are you? What’s your name? Where do you live? Where’s your family? Where’s your home?”
“I don’t have a family, I don’t have a house. Life is short. This parasol is good enough for me. I just worship Vishnu. As for these hairs, it’s curious; every time an Indra dies, one hair drops out. Half of them are gone. Pretty soon they’ll all be gone. Why build a house?”
Well, these two were actually Vishnu and Siva. They had come for the instruction of Indra, and once he had heard them, they left. Well, Indra is shattered, and when Brhaspati, the priest of the gods, comes in, Indra says, “I’m going out to be a yogi. I’m going to worship Vishnu’s feet.”
So he goes to his wife, the great queen Indrani, and he says, “Darling, I’m going to leave you. I’m going out into the forest to become a yogi. I’m going to drop all this monkey show about the kingship of the world and I’m going to worship Vishnu’s feet.”
Well, she looks at him for a while, and then she goes to Brhaspati and tells him what has happened. “He’s got it in his head that he’s going to go out and be a yogi.”
So the priest takes her by the hand and they go and sit down in front of the throne of Indra, and the priest says to him, “You are on the throne of the universe. You represent virtue and duty - dharma - and you incarnate the divine spirit in this earthly role. I have already written a great book for you on the art of politics - how to maintain the state, how to win wars, etc. Now I am going to write a book for you on the art of love so that the other aspect of your life, with you and Indrani here, will also become a revelation of the divine spirit dwelling in us all. Anyone can become a yogi, but how about representing in the life of the world the immanence of this mystery of eternity?”
So Indra was saved from the trouble, you might say, of going out and becoming a yogi. He had it all within himself now, as we all do. All you have to do is wake up to the fact that you are a manifestation of the eternal.
This story, known as “The Humbling of Indra,” appears in the Brahmavaivarta Purana. The Puranas are Indian holy texts from around 400 A.D. The amazing thing about Indian mythology is that it could absorb the universe we talk about now, with the great cycles of stellar lives, the galaxies beyond galaxies, and the comings and goings of universes. What this does is diminish the force of the present moment.
All of our problems about atom bombs blowing up the universe, so what? There have been universes and universes before, every one of them blown up by an atom bomb. So now you identify yourself with the eternal that is within you and within all things. It doesn’t mean you want to see the atom bomb come, but you don’t spend your time worrying about it.
One of the great temptations of the Buddha was the temptation of lust. The other temptation was the temptation of the fear of death. This is a nice theme for meditation on the fear of death. Life throws up around us these temptations, these distractions, and the problem is to find the immovable center within. Then you can survive anything. Myth will help you do that. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go out on picket lines about atomic research. Go ahead, but do it playfully. The universe is God’s play.