LET YOUR PSYCHE SOAR!

“Today, as we all know, such thoughts and forms are of a crumbling past and the civilizations dependent on them in disarray and dissolution. Not only are societies no longer attuned to the courses of the planets; sociology and physics, politics and astronomy are no longer understood to be departments of a single science. Nor is the individual interpreted (in the democratic West, at least) as an inseparable subordinate part of the organism of a state. What we know today, if we know anything at all, is that every individual is unique and that the laws of his life will not be those of any other on this earth. We also know that if divinity is to be found anywhere, it will not be ‘out there,’ among or beyond the planets. Galileo showed that the same physical laws that govern the movements of bodies on earth apply aloft, to the celestial spheres; and our astronauts, as we have all now seen, have been transported by those earthly laws to the moon. They will soon be on Mars and beyond. Furthermore, we know that the mathematics of those outermost spaces will already have been computed here on earth by human minds. There are no laws out there that are not right here; no gods out there that are not right here, and not only here, but within us, in our minds. So what happens now to those childhood images of the ascent of Elijah, Assumption of the Virgin, Ascen-sion of Christ—all bodily—into heaven?” (MYTHS TO LIVE BY, p. 251 of Joe Campbell’s 1972, Bantam Book edition)

There are times when I read Joe Campbell’s work which are like reading Carl Sagan or S. J. Gould, when something he says makes me grateful to have shared a fragment of my life span with a fragment of his. His thoughts serve as a springboard to my imagination, and I realize just what humankind is capable of or will be capable of when the dead superstitions of the past finally do really die and the new mythologies set in. The passage above was just such a moment as I sat in Hammer’s coffee shop downtown and read it, and I was so glad to be a human and to able to appreciate what I was reading and so grateful not to have been born in the 17th or any past century!!! Then, again, even in those days, if one was looking to be attuned to the myth of his day, he could soar in those days too, so I take this last sentence back.

Certain local blogs have been full of the screaming rage of religious people who are unable to accept that the face of Terri Schiavo is only a representation of the face of nature in all its brutal reality. Because they are stuck in the old mythologies which they really no longer believe in, they can’t seem to transcend the moment and navigate to the larger vision. I don’t find anything about the Schiavo case to be pleasant, but I am not fixated on it like so many religious persons who do not seem to remember that Terri’s going to a better place according to their mythologies. In fact, that’s how we know that their mythologies no longer work—they’re fighting to keep her alive rather than accepting their supposed reality of death and heaven. No—divinity is not “out there” and they know it in the deepest realms of their psyches. They know there is no heaven and their desperation proves it.
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“[Fox TV News editors] are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.” —Adlai Stevenson [I do know that Fox News wasn’t around when Adlai was! Allow me a little poetic license here.]