Alias Eliot - Active Empathy - Chapter 2: The Tree

Chapter 2: The Tree

Contents

II. The Shape of the Universe

III. The Lote Tree

I. Introduction

The Tree of Life, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Lote Tree, the Bo Tree, Yggdrasil - the World Ash....these are just a very few examples of the universal Tree in religion and mythology. In recent years, science too has discovered the tree as a recurring image - whether in neurology, topography, computer science, or cosmology.

The tree, this organic, connective bridge binding earth to sky, is the perfect symbol for the unity of the many in the one (like the many branches, twigs and leaves stemming from a single trunk), as well as the oneness of the material and spiritual (the evolutionary tree of life compared to the mystical Tree of Life). I wanted to begin this guide with a discussion of the tree because it presents the most familiar and most perfect union of so many seemingly disparate subjects.

Howard Rheingold, a computer scientist, author, artist, and professor will start us off with a summary of the Tree as it appears in everything from Buddhism to biology. Then specific trees will be explored, in writings both sacred and academic, religious and scientific in scope. I've included links to the original source material, as well as a list of resources for anyone interested in pursuing the subject further. This is simply a starting point, a condensation of the clearest, most lucid syntheses of symbol and implication, metaphor and meaning. Read on.

II. The Shape of the Universe

Article: The Shape of the Universe
Howard Rheingold, as found at www.rheingold.com

If you are fortunate enough to share a neighborhood with a leafy elm, a gnarly oak, a soaring redwood, take another look at its silhouette against the sky. That self-similar 4-D explosion of branching branches is a clue to a cosmic riddle or two and a key concept in fields as unrelated as vascular surgery and software design.

The Buddha knew this, and so do neurologists, database programmers, and mythologists.

Axis mundi, the axis of the world, is the tree at the center of everything sacred. Mythologist Joseph Campbell, referring to the Buddha's awakening, noted that: "This is the most important single moment in Oriental mythology, a counterpart of the Crucifixion of the West. The Buddha beneath the Tree of Enlightenment (the Bo tree) and Christ on Holy Rood (the tree of redemption) are analogous figures, incorporating an archetypal World Savior, World Tree motif, which is of immemorial antiquity."

To Hindu dream adepts, the question of how you know that you are awake is at once psychological and metaphysical. David Shulman, in Tamil Temple Myths, discussing a character in a myth who realizes that he is dreaming the tragedy of his life, notes: "The nature of his delusion is clear from the moment he first catches sight of the upside-down tree -- a classic Indian symbol for the reality that underlies and is hidden by life in the world, with its false goals and misleading perceptions."

To say nothing of the Garden of Eden and its two special trees. Why do trees always happen to be on the set when God talks? It doesn't matter whether your cosmology is Hebrew, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Pagan, Shamanist or Animist: trees are always part of the scenery when a theophany happens.

Tradition has it that the Buddha's tree was the type known as "pipal" (ficus religiosa), and that it was precisely as old as the fellow who sat down in its shade to catch a case of satori. The legends linking "the one who awakened" and this particular variety of tree hold that Sakyamuni, as he was known pre-enlightenment, had a lifelong habit of sitting under pipal trees that were exactly his age. It was also written that Buddha's mother (aka Maya Devi) held onto the branches of a pipal when she gave birth to him. This tree-grasping birth pose is important enough to rate its own name: salabhanjka pose).

Why a tree? Why not a seashell, a lightning bolt, an old man with a beard? The iconography is not strictly Asian. Ygdrassil, the world-Ash, is Norse. The Druids were far from India and China. The theme surfaces in folk tales, holy books, cave paintings, tiled mosques, and frescoed chapels in every part of the globe. The Chinese saw it as a giant peach tree that bears the fruit of immortality. Every year, as the winter solstice approaches, hundreds of millions of Christians place a symbolic pine tree in their houses and cover it with ornaments. The Yule log dates back to Druid and Celtic customs of pre-Christian Britain, which at one time was covered in dense forests. In the nineteenth century, German scholars discovered that the word temple is derived from the Indo-European roots meaning "sacred grove."

The visual representation of atree that branches at both ends is a model of the universe as a living organism, a metaphorical map that serves equally well for the cosmos external to the individual and the spectrum of consciousness deep within -- with its highest branches in the heavens and its roots deep within the dark underrealm.

Are we also drawn to trees because our minds know that our brain structures are tree-shaped? Do these signatures of our internal informational systems keep emerging in symbols of our deepest religious impulses because they are what nineteenth-century anthropologist Adolf Bastian called Elementargedanken -- "elementary ideas" that are hardwired into our brains? Our nervous systems are shaped like trees, and so are rivers, capillaries, data structures, probability worlds, solution-spaces, chess games, and chain reactions. Our ancestors lived in trees, not too long ago. It's no wonder that Sakyamuni sat under one when he was ready to awaken.

Trees are talismans of sanity and wholeness to Western psychotherapists as well as to Eastern mystics. According to Jungian psychoanalysts, the appearance of a tree in a dream can be fortuitous, in the sense that it often symbolizes, empowers, and heralds a movement toward wholeness of the personality. Marie-Louise von Franz notes that: "Since...psychic growth cannot be brought about by a conscious effort of wiill power, but happens involuntarily and naturally, it is in dreams frequently symbolized by the tree, whose slow, powerful involuntary growth fulfills a definite pattern."

One characteristic that doesn't vary much from one tree to another is the way components of the tree, the larger and smaller branches and twigs, reflect the shape of the entire tree; a computer programmer would recognize the tree as a "recursive structure" (because the same pattern "recurs" at both the top and bottom levels of organization). As the European alchemists of the middle ages would say: "As above, so below."

This shape that makes trees and other things look treelike brings a new perspective to several important questions about the way things work: How can you keep track of a billion units of anything and make sure you can find each unit as quickly as possible? How do you move things from one point to many other points most efficiently? A recursive, branching, tree shape is the visual analog of the answer for both questions.

A tree of the botanical variety is shaped that way because a branching plant efficiently collects moisture from the earth via ten thousand roots and distributes it rapidly to ten thousand leaves. (Kabbalism, the Jewish mystical tradition, depicts the path to God-consciousness as a tree-shape with the explanation that this is the way to distribute God-consciousness to numberless sentient beings.)

Examine an aerial photograph of a river delta next to an X-ray arteriogram of a human lung and you'll see that branches aren't limited to forests. Rivers branch as they run into their own sedimentary deposits because an arboreal shape is the most efficient way to distribute the river's flow when the main channel suddenly becomes shallow. Pulmonary arteries branch because the enables the lungs to distribute oxygen to the blood rapidly. The branching of nerves and blood vessels in the brain is known as "arborization."

Quantum physicists even dreamed up fourth-dimensional trees. Because of certain aspects of the equations describing the transformations of electromagnetic energy, it is possible to hypothesize that the universe is an infinitely branching entity. This formally permissible (if as-yet-unconfirmed) logical consequence of the equations describing the transformations of electromagnetic energy is known as "the many-worlds interpretation." Your lifeline and mine, called "worldlines" by quantum physicists, branch when we make decisions, take action, hesitate, move, or stand still. There are worlds in which you are the Buddha and worlds that are exactly the same as this one, except you part your hair on the opposite side. The abstract space of such a universe, filled with infinities of non-intersecting branch universes, is a fourth dimensional tree that grows at a rate incomprehensible to 3-D mindsets.

A tree can be a map of space or time or psyche, or it can be a map of information. Tree-shaped data structures are essential parts of all computer software systems because trees offer an effective and orderly way to store and retrieve large amounts of binary information. Trees in which each branchpoint leads to exactly two branches is the direct visual analog of a binary code, because you can get from the trunk to any one of the leaves by making either one of two decisons at each branchpoint.

You could assign a unique address to every leaf on a tree by specifying the binary decisions that a bug would have to make directly from the trunk to that leaf. You could specify the leaf on the first right branch after the first left branching of the right fork of the main trunk and call it "right-left-right," or, for that matter, "010" or "101" -- which happens to be the fundamental alphabet of digital computers.

To programmers who are trying to write software to emulate human problem-solving, tree-shaped strategies are "a way to fan out quickly into a solution space." The first computer chess programs tried the "brute force" method of evaluating the consequences of every possible move at every step of the game, but the most powerful computers then and now bog down in the explosion of possiblities that happens if you try to look down too many branches in a recursively branching structure. It was Claude shannon, the father of information theory, who demonstrated that the explosively branching tree of possiblities is destined to destroy any brute-force approach after only a few steps. Among AI programmers, the creation of increasingly effective search-tree-pruning algorithms has become a grail.

Kids know about trees, and the easiest way to remember what the world like when you were a kid is to climb a tree. Kids climb them, lie down under them and look up at the dappled sunlight, hang swings from them, build houses in them, paint pictures of them, collect their leaves. Today's kids know that trees are disappearing because of human activity, and they know that trees are the lungs of the biosphere. Which means the act of planting a tree with a child has taken on ecological as well as psychological and spiritual significance. Years ago, I discovered a Bantu word that can teach us something valuable: mahamba.

A mahamba is a "spirit-tree" that is planted when a child is born. Can we make tree-planting both a part of family life and a sacred act again? We could start with a new meme Ñ an idea deliberately designed to be infectious.

As soon as possible after birth, take the child and its parents to plant a mahamba. Make sure that the tree is native to the local environment and that it will be accessible in the future. Finding a proper place to plant and obtaining an appropriate seedling might not be easy; overcoming these obstacles is the spirtual offering of the child's sponsor. As soon as the child is able to walk, bring him or her out to meet the tree and to feed it. Encourage the child to take over the care and feeding, and seal the responsibilites with gifts. Continue reinforcing the merit to be gained from the act, in whatever terms the child understands: The legend of a tree that brings good fortune might be one of those harmless myths that can teach more than a hundred hard facts. And the simple act of nurturing a tree, distributed memetically, repeated recursively, might help our species get a grip on our planet's runaway throttle.

References:

Martin Buber, I and Thou, Scribners, 1958.
Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1949.
V.S. Nararane, The Elephant and the Lotus, Asia Publishing House, 1965.
M.S. Randhawa, The Cult of Trees and Tree Worship in Buddhist-Hindu Sculpture, All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society, New Delhi, 1964.
David Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths, Princeton University Press, 1949.
Marie-Louise von Franz, "The Process of Individuation," in C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, Doubleday 1964.

III. The Lote Tree

Excerpt: The Lote-Tree of the Furthest Boundary
From the Sufi Tradition of Islam, as found at www.naqshbandi.org

The Prophet and Gabriel travelled once more until they reached the absolute limit of the created intellect, named sidrat al-muntaha: "The Lote-Tree of the Furthest Boundary." There they saw nothing which the tongue could describe. The effect of the sight they beheld on the Prophet is a secret which took place in his heart. A sound came to them from above which dissipated some of the Prophet's astonishment. At that time he saw a large tree which does not resemble any of the trees of Paradise, a tree without description, covering all the Paradises, heavens, and universes. The trunk of the Tree was a huge angel named Samrafil. The Prophet could see nothing else besides it. It grew from an infinite, unimaginable, indescribable ocean of musk. The tree had an infinite number of branches, created from a heavenly element that has no name in a created language. The distance between one branch and another was five hundred thousand light-years. On every branch there was an infinite number of leaves. If all the created universes were placed on a single one of these leaves they would disappear, like an atom disappears inside an ocean of water. On every leaf sat a huge angel in a multi-colored light. On his head was a crown of light and in his hand a staff of light. Written on their forehead was the inscription: "We are the inhabitants of the Lote-Tree." Their praise was: "Praise be to God Who has no end." Their names are the sarufiyyun or Seraphim, "The Secret Ones," because they are created from the absolute secret of their Lord.

From the trunk of the tree four absolute springs issued. The first was a pure, transparent, crystal water; the second was a river of white milk; the third was a river of pleasurable, untarnished wine that elevates without abasing; the fourth was a river of pure honey mixed with gold. Inside the trunk was the prayer-niche of Gabriel, and his constant words of praise are:

Allahu Akbar: God is Great!

to which the reply always comes from above:

Ana Akbar: I am Greater!

Gabriel entered his prayer-niche and he called for the prayer. All the seraphim stood in rows and the Prophet led them in prayer. The prayer finished and all the seraphim were ordered to give their greetings to the Prophet one after the other. After this, a great angel came out from behind Gabriel's prayer-niche and asked the Prophet to approach.

The Prophet and Gabriel entered the trunk of the tree and reached in a glance the entire sight of creation. On the top of the tree they saw Adam and Eve and Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and all the other prophets whom they had just visited. With them they saw all their respective nations, sitting with them in spirit together with those of the Prophet's nation who had already left this world. All were sitting there together, happy, basking in the love and beauty of their Lord's mercy and praising Him.

That Lote-Tree carries the knowledge of all of God's creation from the beginning of its sequence in time. Whatever is created is part of it and contained in it. It was called the tree "of the furthermost boundary" because everything ends in it and after it begins a new life. God decorated it with the light of His own essence. It has three characteristics: a continuous shade of light extending over every creation, a continuous pleasure reaching everyone from the fruit of its branches, and a continuous fragrance from its flowers scenting with beauty the life of creation.

Then the Prophet and Gabriel moved forward. A stern and severe angel appeared and covered the horizon before them. Gabriel said: "O Prophet! this is the angel of death Azra'il." The angel of death said: "Welcome, O Muhammad! you who bear goodness, and welcome to all the Prophets and their nations. This is the place from which I gaze at the destinies of every person and seize the spirits of those whom I am commanded to bring to eternal life."

The Prophet asked: "Tell me how you take the souls of the dying." The angel of death revealed to the Prophet: "When God orders me to take the spirit of a human being at the last hour of his life and the first hour of his afterlife, I send to him my deputies who carry with them the smell of Paradise and a branch from the tree of paradise which they put between his eyes. When that sweet smell reaches him and he catches a glimpse of that heavenly branch, his spirit is attracted and his soul begins to ascend to paradise, until it reaches his throat. At that time, I descend from my place and I take his spirit with the greatest care, because God wants this moment to be easy on His servant. I then carry his soul to Paradise. On the way, whenever I pass by angels, then angels will greet this soul and salute it until it reaches the presence of its Lord. God the Exalted says to that soul at that time: "Welcome to the good spirit which I created and placed in a good body! O my angels! write the upper layer of Paradise as a reward for that person." Then angels take him up to Paradise, where he will see what God has prepared for him and he will be happy to stay there. However, God orders the spirit to go back to his body on earth, where he can see the people washing him, crying for him, and all those who love him standing around him until they take the body to the grave. There the soil says to him: "Welcome, O my beloved one! I was always yearning for you when you were above me. Now you are in me and I will show you what I am going to give you." Immediately, his grave will be enlarged beyond sight, until the two angels of the grave come and ask him about his Lord and about his belief. He will give them the correct answers by God's permission. At that time they will open for him a door leading to Paradise and his spirit will go back upward to the same place where God first called him to His presence."

"I remember when death had separated us.
I consoled myself with the thought of the Beloved Prophet.
I said: All of us go on this way one day.
Who does not die today, he will die tomorrow.
Be happy, O my soul, because your Lord is waiting for you
And the beloved one is calling you."

Then Gabriel moved forward another five hundred thousand light-years, mounted on the Buraq, until they reached a place where Gabriel began to slow down. The Prophet said: "O Gabriel! why are you slowing down? Are you leaving me?" Gabriel replied: "I cannot go further." The Prophet said:

"Gabriel, don't leave me alone." "O Muhammad!" Gabriel said, "you now have to step down from the Buraq and move to a place which no-one has entered before you." At that moment the Buraq stopped and was unable to move further. The Prophet stepped down and moved hesitantly. Gabriel said: "O Prophet, move forward without fear. If I were to continue with you I would be annihilated for the greatness of the Light."

The Prophet moved, and moved, and moved. He saw Michael standing ahead of him, afraid and trembling. The light of his face was changing quickly from one color to another. The Prophet asked: "Michael, is this your station?" "Yes," Michael answered, "and if I were to trespass it I would be annihilated. But you go on and don't stop." The Prophet moved, and moved, and moved. Then he found Israfil with his four huge wings, one of which covered his face to veil him from the light which came from the horizon of everything. The Prophet asked him: "Is this your station, Israfil?" Israfil said, "Yes. If I trespassed it that light would burn me. But you move on and do not fear." And the Prophet moved, and moved, and moved. He saw the Spirit to whom God gave the power of earth and the heavens. From the top of his head to the bottom of his feet and from every cell of his there were faces with traits of subtle light, the number of which no-one knows but God, and from the each of which God creates an angel-spirit which looks like the Spirit, whom He then takes to himself as the spirit-angels of the Divine Presence.

Every day the Spirit looks into hell three times, and because of the cool light of his angelic gaze the fire of hell melts until it becomes as a rainbow. The Spirit also looks into Paradise three times every day and extends to it the divine light which God gives him. If God gathered the tears of the eyes of the Spirit it would flood all the created universes and make Noah's flood seem like the drop gathered by an needle dipped into the ocean. This is the Spirit whom God mentioned in the Koran:

"The day when the Spirit and the angels rise, no-one shall speak except with permission from His Lord."

The Prophet said: "O Spirit! is this your station?" The spirit replied: "Yes, and if I trespass it I will be annihilated by the light which I am receiving. O Muhammad! move forward and do not be afraid. You are invited and you have permission." The Prophet moved forward. God inspired his heart with the following discourse: "I the Lord, have veiled myself from the inhabitants of Paradise, as I have veiled myself from the inhabitants of the earth. As I veiled Myself from their minds, I veiled myself from their vision. I am never in anything, and I am never away from anything."

The Prophet then moved through one veil after another until he passed through one thousand veils. Finally he opened the Veil of Oneness. He found himself like a lamp suspended in the middle of a divine air. He saw a magnificent, great and unutterable matter. He asked his Lord to give him firmness and strength. He felt that a drop of that presence was put on his tongue and he found it cooler than ice and sweeter than honey. Nothing on earth and the seven paradises tasted like it. With this drop, God put into the Prophet's heart the knowledge of the First and the Last, the heavenly and the earthly. All this was revealed to him in one instant shorter than the fastest second. He was ordered to move forward. As he moved he found himself elevated on a throne that can never be described, now or later. Three additional drops were given to him: one on his shoulder consisting in majesty, one in his heart consisting in mercy, and an additional one on his tongue which consisted in eloquence. Then a voice came from that presence, which no created being had heard before: "O Muhammad! I have made you the intercessor for everyone." At that moment the Prophet felt his mind enraptured and taken away to be replaced with an astonishing secret. He was placed in the Fields of God's Eternity and Endlessness. In the first he found no beginning and in the second he found no end. Then God revealed to Him: "My end is in My beginning and My beginning is in My end." Then the Prophet knew that all doors were absolutely closed except those that led to God, that God cannot be described within the confine of a place in speech, and that God encompasses the everywhere of all places. This is a secret that no tongue can be stirred to express, no door opened to reveal, and no answer can define. He is the Guide to Himself and the Lord of His own description. He is the Beauty of all beauty and the speech by which to describe Himself belongs to Him alone.

O God My Creator, in Your infinity do I stand amazed.
In Your ocean of unity do I drown submerged.
O God, at times You closet me in familiar intimacy.
At times You leave me without, veiled and strange,
Hidden in Your sovereign Majesty.
Give me to drink the wine of Your love,
For only drunk from it am I able to say:
My Lord! Let me see You.

The Prophet then looked on his right and saw nothing except His Lord, then on his left and saw nothing except his Lord, then to the front, to the back, and above him, and he saw nothing except his Lord. He hated to leave that honored and blessed place. But God said: "O Muhammad, you are a messenger to My servants as all messengers, if you stay here you would never be able to communicate My Message. Therefore descend back to earth, and communicate My message to My servants. Whenever you want to be in the same state as you are now, make your prayers, and I shall open this state for you." This is why the Prophet stated: "Prayer is the apple of my eyes," and he called it also: "Our rest."

Then the Prophet was ordered to go back to earth, but he left the self in heaven and his spirit at the Lote-tree, and his heart in the unutterable divine presence while his secret was left suspended without place. His self wondered: "Where is the heart?" and the Heart wondered: "Where is the spirit?" and the spirit wondered: "Where is the secret?" and the secret wondered where it was. And God revealed: "O self of the Prophet! I granted you the blessing and the forgiveness, and O spirit! I granted you the mercy and the honor, and O heart! I granted you the Love and the Beauty, and O secret, you have Me." God then revealed to the Prophet the order to recite: "He is the one who sends blessings on you, together with His angels, in order to bring you out from darkness into light" (33:43). "O Muhammad! I have ordered the angels of all My heavens, those created and those yet uncreated, to send blessings on you and My creation unceasingly, with My own praise. I am your Lord Who said: My Mercy has taken over My anger. And all My angels I have created for you human beings." And God ordered the Prophet to descend with this angelic message back to earth.

IV. Self-Sacrifice and the Big Bang

Excerpt: The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell

The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the transcending mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form - all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void....

This is the highest and ultimate crucifixion, not only of the hero, but of his god as well. Here the Son and the Father alike are annihilated - as personality-masks over the unnamed. For just as the figments of a dream derive from the life energy of one dreamer, representing only fluid splittings and complications of that single force, so do all the forms of all the worlds, whether terrestrial or divine, reflect the universal force of a single inscrutable mystery: the power that constructs the atom and controls the orbits of the stars.

That font of life is the core of the individual, and within himself he will find it - if he can tear the coverings away. The pagan Germanic divinity Othin (Wotan) gave an eye to split the veil of light into the knowledge of this infinite dark, and then underwent for it the passion of a crucifixion:

I ween that I hung on the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was
To Othin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs.

The Buddha's victory beneath the Bo Tree is the classic Oriental example of this deed. With the sword of his mind he pierced the bubble of the universe - and it shattered into nought. The whole world of natural experience, as well as the continents, heavens, and hells of traditional religious belief, exploded - together with all their gods and demons. But the miracle of miracles was that though all exploded, all was nevertheless thereby renewed, revivified, and made glorious with the effulgence of true being. Indeed, the gods of the redeemed heavens raised their voices in harmonious acclaim of the man-hero who had penetrated beyond them to the void that was their life and source:

"...Throughout the ten thousand worlds the flowering trees bloomed; the fruit trees were weighted down by the burden of their fruit; trunk-lotuses bloomed on the trunks of trees; hanging-lotuses in the sky; and stalk-lotuses burst through the rocks and came up by sevens. The system of ten thousand worlds was like a bouquet of flowers sent whirling through the air, or like a thick carpet of flowers; in the intermundane spaces the eight-thousand-league-long hells, which not even the light of seven suns had formerly been able to illumine, were now flooded with radiance; the eighty-four-thousand-league deep ocean became sweet to the taste; the rivers checked their flowing; the blind from birth received their sight; the deaf from birth received their hearing; the crippled from birth the use of their limbs; and the bond and fetter of captives broke and fell off."

V. Unity and Duality

Excerpt: The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers
An Interview with Joseph Campbell

Moyers: What is the myth of Adam and Eve trying to tell us about the pairs of opposites? What is the meaning?

Campbell : It started with the sin, you see—in other words, moving out of the mythological dreamtime zone of the Garden of Paradise, where there is no time, and where man and women don't even know that they are different from each other. The two are just creatures. God and man are practically the same. God walks in the cool of the evening in the garden where they are. And then they eat the apple, the knowledge of the opposites. And when they discover they are different, the man and women cover their shame. You see, they had not thought of themselves as opposites. Male and female is one opposition. Another opposition is the human and God. God and evil is a third opposition. The primary oppositions are the sexual and that between human beings and God. Then comes the idea of good and evil in the world. And so Adam and Eve have thrown themselves out of the Garden of Timeless Unity, you might say, just by that act of recognizing duality. To move out into the world, you have to act in terms of pairs of opposites. Out of one comes two. All things in the field of time are pairs of opposites. So this is the shift of consciousness from the consciousness of identity to the consciousness of participation in duality. And then you are into the field of time.

Moyers: Is the story trying to tell us that, prior to what happened in this Garden to destroy us, there was a unity of life?

Campbell : It's a matter of planes of consciousness. It doesn't have to do with anything that happened. There is the place of consciousness where you can identify yourself with that which transcends pairs of opposites.

Moyers: Which is?

Campbell : Unnameable. Unnameable. It is transcendent of all names.

Moyers: God?

Campbell : God is an ambiguous word in our language because it appears to refer to something that is known. But the transcendent is unknowable and unknown. God is transcendent, finally, of anything like the name ''God''. God is beyond names and forms. The mystery of life is beyond all human conception. Everything we know is within the terminology of the concepts of being and not being, many and single, true and untrue. We always think in terms of opposites. But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it.

Moyers: Why do we think in terms of opposites?

Campbell : Because we can't think otherwise. (p. 49)

Campbell : There is a standard folk tale motif called the One Forbidden Thing. Remember Bluebeard, who says to his wife, ''Don't open that closet''? And then one always disobeys. In the Old Testament story God points out the one forbidden thing. Now, God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of his own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience.

Excerpts: Themes of Joseph Campbell - The Best Cannot Be Told
Bruce A. Bode

I might begin by saying that, basically, Campbell opened up to me a whole different way of looking at things, and, in particular, a whole different way of reading religion and the stories associated with religion - to read them, not first of all factually, literally, historically, or scientifically; but rather symbolically, psychologically, spiritually, metaphorically, mythologically, poetically, figuratively, artistically all these terms come to pretty much the same thing for me.

The stories of religion that in my teens and twenties troubled me most from a literal, scientific, and modern point of view stories from the Judeo-Christian tradition in which I had been raised, and in particular the Calvinist Protestant aspect of that tradition these stories that had troubled me most as a younger person, to the point of just throwing them all out, now, under Campbell’s influence, often proved to be the very stories that were most meaningful and interesting to me.

Take, for example, the story of the Garden of Eden, which earlier in my life I had dumped into my mental garbage bin because, well, you know, snakes don’t talk and gods don’t walk in gardens. But look once again at this primitive story, says Campbell, look from a psychological perspective at those two Trees there in the center of that paradisiacal Garden. And observe the picking of the fruit from that Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil by our first parents, and their subsequent experience of duality, which means expulsion from that Garden of Innocence.

And, what about the other Tree, the Tree of Eternal Life? Is there any way to pick from that Tree and so to find the eternal that is to say, to recover and to re-connect with that original psychological innocence and unity in the midst of the duality we now experience?

....

The first function of myth and religion is to assist the individual in making a direct, experiential connection with the unity, depth, and mystery of being. The idea here is that “beyond” or “beneath” or “above” or “in the midst of” our time-and-space world there is another dimension of reality that we can only point to a larger and different reality, a “reality” that, as Campbell said in our earlier reading, “transcends” our time-and-space-bound reality and all our categories of thought.

And why can we only point to this “reality” and not grasp it directly? Because our thinking-system, which is made possible by the miraculous evolutionary development of the neo-cortex of our brain, is a system that works through splitting into parts, through dividing reality into yes and no, good and evil, yin and yang that’s the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil from which we have eaten.

Our thinking-system operates and must operate in such a fashion. That’s its nature; that’s the grid, as it were, that organizes all perception and sensation as it comes to us. This is no knock on the thinking-system none at all but it does point to its limits and its uses.

But the idea that grounds this first function of mythology is that reality is larger than, or other than, or different than, or more than our thinking-system can take into itself; and that there is a “unity of being” that is prior to and beyond the dualities of life that the ego-mind beholds and creates.

That “unity of being” cannot be directly grasped by the conceptualizing mind. The conceptualizing mind would like to grasp it directly but in the very act of grasping it, it splits apart the reality it would grasp.

An analogy

In my ministerial column in this month’s newsletter, I used an analogy related to the

electromagnetic spectrum to illustrate this idea that our conceptualizing minds only take in reality in certain limited ways. The analogy was this: That just as our eyes make use of only a small band of the wave lengths in the entire electromagnetic spectrum, thus making reality “visible” to us but imagine if our “eyes” made use of x-rays waves instead of the waves they do, how differently we would perceive reality so, too, the conceptualizing capacity of our brains grasps reality only in certain limited ways.

The more to which religion points

Yet, says religion, there is more to reality. Before we humans split reality up into “pairs

of opposites” with our conceptualizing brains, there is a “unity” to reality. And this “unity of reality” that is beyond or in the midst of these “pairs of opposites,” says religion, is the ground of our being and our truest home.

This “unity,” says Campbell, is a “metaphysical truth.” The law of survival, he says, is the second law of life, not the first. The first law is the metaphysical realization of “our identity and unity with all life.” (The Power of Myth, p. 110)

Or, mythologically speaking, there is a Tree of Eternal Life, a place that is no place, beyond all division. And you can experience that “place” in time; you can pick from that Tree of Eternal Life here and now and in this incarnation of being.

It’s the first function of religion to help you with that, to point the way to that Tree of Eternal Life - which is the “reality” that transcends all thinking - and which is the best there is.

But that best cannot be told directly; it cannot be grasped by the intellect. The intellect can only point, can only symbolize, can only tell stories about, can only produce images and metaphors of that which is the ground of its own capacity.

And these images, stories, metaphors, and symbols, then, are the second best - because they direct us to the best.