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X. India and the Mythopoetic Mind of Man (1967) <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next>> Friedrich Nietzsche once observed, that India and England represented the two different poles of the gift of speculative thinking. India is the richest in terms of speculative, or metaphysical thinking. What is the world picture of this type of man? Here, in the beginning, we see a kind of hidden history. The development of man's world consciousness in union with the development of his self consciousness. That is really all that interests me in this philosophic course. The fact that man can orient himself in the world, can learn more and more about himself, and finally, in the end, can even come to himself; that, is the real inner history of the development of mankind. This very important and decisive historical development is what we are analyzing and watching. It all starts with this first conception. Now I have, of course, analyzed many myths (Babylonian and so on). I have studied the field, and I have found finally that there exists one common denominator in Indian myths. This common denominator is that man behaves, or thinks as if his primary task is to relate everything to everything else. In a way this task has already been accomplished. It is no longer a task, because it has been done. It is there. Later, men will reduce it all to a method, or give it an abstract formula. Mythical people never give abstract formulas. In later India, as the myths develop, we will see the beginning of abstract thinking, of philosophy and so on, but it is all merely based on myths. They are never really broken with. The religion of Hinduism is today a world religion, or it claims to be. It claims to be the only religion possible, because it already has accomplished what we Europeans are only starting to do. Namely, assembling Protestants, Jews, Catholics, and trying to unite them. They welcome everyone. Jesus of Nazareth, every God you can invent, is welcome in the Hindu pantheon. This tremendous power, which still rules millions of men, is a very interesting phenomenon, because it is the culmination of the greatest mythical development humanity has ever witnessed. It can always be renewed. It grows like a kind of jungle overgrowing everything. Jehovah, Krishna, are all just incarnations of the God Head or divinity, which continually appears in newer and different incarnations. Hinduism, strangely enough, has many more adherents than we would like to believe, because the Theosophists in America (as well as other sects throughout the world) whether they confess it or not, share with Hinduism this basic belief. The Theosophists are religious or pseudo-religious. They care only for their own souls and they take over as much of Hinduism as they can. Hinduism wants to take over every kind of speculation, and even our dear friends who try in vain with drugs (with L.S.D. and so on), who try to have visions, are only using Hindu methods in order to pray themselves into those visions. It is a strange mixture, and that means that the power and beauty of this mythical world view is still tremendous. It has a single basic principle. All is One. As simple as that. Man is not distinguished from nature. The gods are not distinguished from nature or from man. It is all the same and it is All One. This All that they are speaking of is a kind of pretension to explain the whole of Being. What ever can happen is already in the All. It is One with It, because in every simple thing there is something invisible, a soul so to speak, which partakes of it. Henri Frankfort has said that one of the preconditions for myth is the incapacity to distinguish between our dream life and our real life. Another precondition is that a myth must work by sympathy. Everything in the world, a stone or a snake, is a brother and belongs to an overall brotherhood, because every thing definitely contains some thing in it; some thing, not some body because all mythical religions in the end recognize only One holy thing. That holy thing is the stuff out of which they suppose the soul is made. In the Brahminic time (ancient Hinduism) a Brahman would teach his son the basis of his religion by maintaining one principle. He would tell his son to put salt in a glass of water and then shake it:
Hinduism has indeed become a mixed religion. It has taken in many many religions, has become a kind of hodge podge, but it represents (especially in its later form) the most refined metaphysical speculation of our time. We (in the west) have done a great deal of philosophy in the mean time, and yet we still cannot get away from the basic belief that the soul is a substance. The Hindus call it the self (atman) and there is one final God above everything and that is Brahman. They are always basically monotheists and are the worst polytheists you can imagine. They take everybody in. Brahman is the world soul to which we all belong, and in life we can only do one thing and that is return to the world soul. This is not easy, because you have to constantly purify yourself ethically. Hinduism teaches that we will all be born according to our karma (what we have done), and this will go on endlessly. Friedrich Nietzsche thought he had invented the concept of eternal reoccurrence, but my God, it had been invented long before by the Indians. Because everything in the world is supposed to return to Brahman forever and ever. It is an eternal circulation of life. The secret of life is to be found in this invisible soul which can change into everything (like the basic idea of the alchemists who wanted to change every element into every other element). There is a strange story that illustrates this interchangeability. It is a mythical story, but it says that in the earliest times when Vishnu was still the major God in the pantheon of the gods, there appeared before him one day a man who had taken the figure of a boy.(1) This man had been servant (in the form of an architect) to the God Indra, a lower God, who had begun to behave like a tyrant. He has mishandled his heaven, he has mishandled his underlings, he permanently wants new palaces to be built for him, and he is working this poor man to death. So finally this man appears before Vishnu, and explains the matter to him. Vishnu listens, and then sends him home with the promise that he will give him peace. On the next day there is a knock at the door of Indra's palace, and a boy appears. Indra receives him, and he starts to wonder about the eyes of this boy. He asks "what do you want of me" to which the boy replies by asking several questions of a metaphysical nature which Indra answers insufficiently. Then, the boy suddenly says to him:
Indra looks at the ant and says "what about him"?
What we see here, is a story about the eternal interchangeability of a certain stuff that holds forever. This is the way the children are brought up in India. They believe in such things. They wash themselves ceremoniously every day. In the higher castes the tradition has been written down, and so they learn these stories. In the lower castes the tradition is still oral. It has to be learned by heart, and spoken again and again and again. This eternal repetition of the mythical stories runs parallel to the eternal repetition in time and space of the phenomenon of life. They achieve, in one stroke, everything within the human imagination. Where we must try to relate everything to everything else step by step, to make some sense out of it, and to give a meaning to it, they have it all with this one stroke-just by that little means of the life substance itself. This is a substance, don't forget it. There is no question of personality, or something human. It is merely a stuff, which the holy men of India know very well. There are really no gods. All of the gods are in the world, but by being in the world, they are only the worlds highest appearances, the highest incarnations of that life stuff, or life soul. There is nothing else. The appearances can go down again. They can change. The holy men of India are supposed to compete with these gods, but there is no transcendent God. There is no Jehovah. The gods are in the world, they are part of the world, and are interchangeable with the world, for how else could the life cycle run? The gods are immanent, so to speak. An immanent monotheism within a polytheism. Hinduism has both. Everything must ultimately return to Brahman, and so in order to reach him the holy men live lives of austerity. Yoga, self torture, no worldly desires, everything blotted out until exhaustion. He becomes an ascetic, sitting in the woods all alone, doing these things in order to rejoin the world soul, to rejoin Brahman. <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next>> |
