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X. India and the Mythopoetic Mind of Man (1967) <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 There is a story about one of these saints. According to the myth he lived for a thousand years and inflicted terrible austerities upon himself. He gained such spiritual power (power over that soul stuff), such purity of soul, that he was able to command Vishnu into his presence and Vishnu had to come, because he exerted so much power. What kind of power is this? Is it extra-sensory perception? How did he exert this? God knows, what concentration of mind? In any event Vishnu had to come, he had to obey this holy man. He appeared before him and said:
To which the saint replied:
Maya is supposed to be a kind of trick of the gods, the way in which they deceive us about reality. Maya can change time, can change space, and finally everything turns out to be an illusion. Now this holy man wanted to have the means, the secret by which Vishnu produces this maya. So Vishnu answers:
They travel together, and finally they come to a desert. Vishnu sits down on a stone and says to the saint:
He goes, the door opens, and he sees a beautiful young girl. He speaks to her, and upon entering the hut forgets everything Vishnu had told him. He stays with her and eventually he marries her. They have children and eventually he becomes king of that country. He rules it, and grows to be an old man, and finally a big catastrophe, a flood comes, and destroys everything. He finds himself drowning and starts to reach out for his (God only knows why) mother in law, and suddenly he finds himself in the middle of the desert at the feet of Vishnu groping around in the sand, and Vishnu says to him:
Have you ever experienced that? When you wake up in the morning with a noise that somebody is knocking on your door. Somebody has knocked on your door, and you wake up out of a long dream that ends with a big noise. That dream started before you heard the knocking. It seems to be so long, and yet it takes place all in that split second when you hear the knocking. You see, in dream life time and space play no role. They can be interchanged permanently and voluntarily, and that is the lesson that Vishnu teaches the saint. That is how his maya is performed. The Hindus are compelled to find a solidarity of everything with everything else. If there is a soul you have to respect it. They are brothers of animals, of snakes, and they have to be mild to them. It is one big solidarity that runs all through the world, but if we look at it in practice, it is all very different. As Krishna says in the Bhagavad-Gita "This (the phenomenal world) is all an illusion".(2)
This is their way. Now Vishnu, who is their highest God at this time, is said to be the great world dreamer. He sleeps and dreams up new worlds, and these worlds come into being (which means the world is a dream) and they are composed of changing dreams. But one thing is certain, and that is that Vishnu (and later Brahma) sleep, and that means they are the stuff out of which the whole world is made. It is, so to speak, an iron-clad picture; the first great world explanation we find in all literature. (3) Fortunately, it has survived. We can still study it. We really don't need psychology, or anthropology, to explain to us the sense of myth, because we have it before us. That is the reason why Hinduism is still alive. You can always convince most modern peoples to believe in some superstition or other, like extra-sensory perception, or that L.S.D. will give them religious visions, and they can go and join the Hindus and they will be in good company. We have gotten rid of our myths. We are out of the world of mythical thinking, but the Indians can always go back. When Buddhism arose in India, it challenged the myths and tried to destroy them. Well, where is Buddhism now? Hinduism managed to ease Buddhism out by infecting it with the ideas of myth. Buddha himself became partly a myth, and Buddhism was changed through Hindu influences. They assimilated Buddhism into Hinduism and new myths arose, reinterpreted and then Buddhism was drawn back into the mother's womb. That is the reason why this great world religion has almost completely vanished in India. Everywhere else it was very victorious, and I am not speaking about contemporary Buddhism which is decaying almost as fast as Christianity, but rather about ancient Buddhism. Buddhism became entirely remythologized, because it got squeezed out step by step. For the historian, that is a very useful thing to analyze. Buddhism has prevailed in other countries, and we will talk about it, but in India Hinduism has been absolutely victorious, especially since it has become international. And in the twentieth-century why shouldn't the Indians become international? Why not assimilate all the other gods and put them all in one bunch under one condition; namely, that they are all merely appearances or reincarnations of this same soul stuff (Brahma, or the world soul) which sucks everything back into itself. Although I have only been able to sketch it out briefly, in a way it is the most encompassing world view (of metaphysical speculation) that mankind has ever developed. It is a sheer wonder to look at it. It is so rich you can study it your whole life, and it changes permanently and remains permanently the same, the same as the world of which it speaks. It changes permanently and remains permanently the same. Both at once. Considered aesthetically (as a kind of poetry, or poetic invention) it is one of the greatest inventions the human mind has ever made. It claims to fully explain everything. Everything hangs together, the universe works perfectly, and there is no riddle left. That means we can stop thinking and go on speculating merely within a framework that always leads to the same results. That means that it can survive for centuries (even millenniums), but there is one thing that it cannot do. It cannot change the world, and that it cannot change the world can be seen in India today where human beings live under the same miserable conditions, and believe in the same mythical thinking that they always have. It is a religion of people who have agreed to become servants of misery, which is why it is so hard to carry on a revolution in India. The English intellectuals who are trying to reform education have a very very hard time. Gandhi was there, and Gandhi was a great synthesizer of East and West. He spent his whole life trying to change one little thing, which is a tremendous thing; namely, to receive the outcastes, the untouchables, back into society. He failed completely. Other intellectuals came after him. Step by step they are trying to change things, and are facing a task, the dimensions of which they are not even conscious of yet. They have to recondition the whole of society (my God, to modernize that society means that they will finally have to break every framework of metaphysical thinking that ever existed there). That is what is being done in China today only there it has been much easier, because Chinese myth is just a little thing when compared to Indian myth. Indian myth is really a growth, like a plant that grows over everything. So in all of its glory, we can see it now mainly as a product of the human imagination, as the first, or one of the first attempts at an orientation in the world. It is quite a work of art and it always gives new nourishment to speculative thinking. If you take any Indian myth you will immediately start thinking speculatively, and you will be more or less in philosophy. You might say that you are not a mythical person, and that you don't believe those things; that for you it is not reality, but just a product of the mind. Yet if it is for us just a product of the mind, then it is still very stimulating and fascinating. This is why Nietzsche said, mentioning the gift of speculative thinking, "India and England". This is the beginning of metaphysics. Real metaphysics has not yet developed, and it cannot develop, because no distinctions can be made. The unity of this world is paid for by never trying to make real distinctions. This is how they can unify everything. Every thing flows each into the other; it all seems so clear, and then you find out that you cannot really use it. It cannot be used for any purpose whatsoever, let alone the fact that myth (in general) and Indian myth (in particular) rules out any kind of scientific thinking. There are no objects for them. There are only subjects (living souls) and they have no idea of a thing. A thing for them is not a substance. A thing is a thou (you, this chair, everything in the universe). It is very hard to learn to make distinctions, especially if one has such a basic theory. In order to learn to make distinctions you need reason, and you don't have reason yet. This is a world before the idea of freedom has emerged, and it shows still today. There is no freedom in India. They are free from the English, that is true, but there is no development of freedom. It is a world without truth (in our sense of truth), because they think that they are the true world and that they live in truth, which is a very different thing. We make distinctions. If we cannot prove something then it is not true. But how could a humanity imprisoned in this kind of thinking (where distinctions cannot be made) ever develop? How could it ever get out of this state of affairs? That is the question we have to ask. Other people asked that question. Other religions did also. They came out of myths, and it seems to be such a terrible job to break out of this ironclad framework. In India this is exemplified by the effort of one great thinker, an outstanding man who has been called the Buddha, and who tried to smash it. He did not succeed, because the philosophy he tried to found has become overgrown again by all kinds of mythical speculation. It is a kind of tragedy, but in a way we are the happy heirs. We have this tremendous literature, we can enjoy it, and that is the wonderful thing about myths. To be able to read myths, and read about myths, but not to live in it. Not to live there. <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 |
