SUKHAVATI - Joseph Campbell

I am yesterday today and tomorrow;

I have the power to be born a second time;
I am the source and creator of all the gods.

The peace of nirvana in the womb;

The bliss of the relationship to the mother goddess.

And man was not breathed into the earth, man came out of the earth.

Dreams are self-luminous, they shine of themselves, as gods do;

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths;
By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth world in
which you live;
The passage from dream to vision, to the gods, and they are you;
All the gods, all the hells, all the heavens, are within you;

The god is in you.

It is not something that happened a long time ago, it is in you.

This is the truth of truths, this is what the gods and myths are all about;
So find them in yourself, and take them into yourself and you will be awakened in your
mythology and in your life.

In deep dreamless sleep, consciousness is still there, but it is covered over by darkness, but
suppose you could find that consciousness, suppose you could go into deep sleep awake.
To go awake into that sphere where there is consciousness, but consciousness of no specific
thing.

Waking consciousness deals only with what has happened;

Deep sleep holds all that is future;
Because the future can come from nowhere else but the energies of the psyche.

In the bronze age mythology, which is the basic mythology of antiquity, the lion is
associated with the solar image.
Now, the moon dies into the sun every month and is born from it again - so the sun is the
mother of the moon.

The animal associated with the sun primarily is the lion whose wonderful solar face, and his
roar scatters - the animals of the grazing plain as the rising sun scatters the stars of night.
The lion is the great image of the power of consciousness and energy.
The solar lion, the womb of woman, and the sacrificial fire are the same fire.
They are the transforming fire.

So all is within the mother - she is time, space, causality.

This is from 1500 BC in Crete a little image that is in the chapel at the royal palace.
She is the giver of life and she is the giver of nourishment.
The serpent, the goddess associated with the serpent, the garden of eden, eve and the
serpent;
The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon sheds its shadow to be born again.
The moon and the serpent represent the power of life to throw off death and come to new
birth.
The animal associated with the moon as the lion is associated with the sun typically is the
bull;
Whose beautiful horns resemble or suggest the horn's of the crescent moon.
And as the moon dies to be resurrected so in rituals the bull is killed to be resurrected.

This is the energy of consciousness of life engaged in the field of time;

Where there is time there is inevitably birth and death, where there is time there is
inevitably sorrow - the loss of what was valued.
And it is always in pairs of opposites.

In the field of time everything is experienced in terms of opposites.

But then the knowledge beyond and beneath that, of the transcendent - that which
transcends duality - Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of unity when they knew
of the pair of opposites.

The sun does not carry a shadow in itself, when the sun sets the light sets with the sun it is
not the sun that is in darkness but we who are.
And so the sun represents the light and energy of life and consciousness - not engaged in
the field of time, disengaged absolute.
In Buddhism the light is called the mother light, the light of consciousness, the
undifferentiated light of consciousness the mother light.

Or, you can read it the other way around, as in India, Kali, whose name means the black
and also means time, the black source out of which all comes and back into which it goes.
In the East, the whole universe, the sphere of the universe is the womb of the goddess and
the deities in all names and forms are within her bounds.
The gods are her children, this is a primary mythology, this is the mythology from which all
our mythologies come - this is the mythology of the goddess.

The goddess and woman as the initiator opening the eye of inner vision, the vision that goes
past the veil that is spread before us by the vision of the two eyes, opening the ears to the
music of the spheres, opening consciousness to a trans-personal realm of experience.

The opening of the wisdom body, to the voice of the wisdom of nature, and the world round
about.

That serpent in the garden, he knew where he was;

He was an old, old deity who was the consort of the goddess and Eve was that consort;
The serpent and Eve make a better pair than Eve and Adam;
The serpent and Eve were at the tree of bliss, Adam and Eve are out there having a tough
time.

This is a terrible tradition, a degradation and denial of nature, and the serpent cursed and
woman along with it.
They eat the fruit of the tree of good and evil and god thinks, I mean it says so, I'm not
making this up, God thinks, now that they've eaten of this fruit, lest they should eat the
fruit of the other tree in the garden, the tree of immortal life and become as we are
- Elohim is a plural noun.
Therefore God kicks them out of the garden.
In our religious system of the west, which is based on an idea of a fallen nature, a good
nature, into which a negative power has infused evil,we have the idea of a conflict between
good and evil. And so we are invited to stand for the good against the evil, and we don't
have a religion like everyone else in the world putting yourself in accord with nature.

I think what happens in our mythology is that the symbols, the mythological archetypal
symbols became interpreted as facts.
I think it starts with the old testament, I think with the old testament God is a fact, not a
symbol, and the holy land is that land and no other, and man is superior to beasts and
nature is fallen. With the fall of the garden of Eden, nature is corrupt. So we do not give
ourselves to nature, we will correct nature, there is good and evil in nature, and we are
supposed to be on the side of the good, so there is a tension, you don't yield to nature.
These are nature worshipers, well what else have you got to worship? Some figment of you
imagination that you've put up in the clouds?

And so we've lost the symbols, meanwhile we need the symbols, and they come up in
disturbed dreams and nightmares and so forth which are dealt with by the psychiatrists.
It was with Freud and Jung and Adler, that it was realized, and particularly through Jung
that the figures of dream are really figures of personal mythologizing you are creating your
own symbols which are related to the archetypes. But this culture has rejected them, the
culture has gone into an economic and political phase, where the spiritual principles are
completely disregarded. The religious life is ethical it not mystical. That is gone and the
society is disintegrating consequently.

It is.

The question is, will there ever be a recovery of the mythological and mystical realization of
the miracle of life, of which our society is a manifestation and all of us brothers and sisters
in the spirit of this all informing mythos.

There's no conflict between mysticism and science, but there is a conflict between the
science of 2000 BC and the science of 2000 AD, and that's the mess in our religion. We got
stuck with an image of the universe that is about as simple and childish as you could
imagine, the three level universe and all that of the bible. It's of no use to us.

We have to have poets, we have to have seers who will render to us the experience of the
transcendence through the world in which we are living.

I heard from an astronaut a fabulous statement. He was in one of the modules, on one of
these trips, and he was to go out of the module and he's going through space at 18,000
miles an hour and there was no wind and there was 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 had I ever done to deserve this experience?'.

Now there all bearings are shattered, this is what is known as the sublime.

And the amusing thing to me is that the mythology that really fits what's being discovered
now is Hinduism. The earth is the energy of which God is a personification and in which
matter is a concreteization - And the eons and eons of time.

Vishnu sleeps on the cosmic serpent, that cosmic serpent floats on the cosmic sea, and
Vishnu in that sleep dreams the dream that is the universe. The lotus of a universe rises, on
the lotus sits a Brahma and every time a Brahma opens his eyes, a world age comes into
being, governed by an Indra. He closes his eyes, he opens his eyes, another world age, he
closes his eyes. This goes on for 360 divine years, eyes opening and closing and then the
lotus dissolves, it goes back.

Another lotus another Brahma, opening, closing, and then he says consider the galaxies in
the infinitudes of space, each with its lotus, each with its Brahma, eyes opening, eyes
closing.

There was a flood, the whole world was drowned in a flood. And here is the goddess earth
who is down in the abyss of the waters. And Vishnu turns himself into a bore, a gigantic
bore which plunges then into the bottom of the water and takes the goddess and carries her
back to life.
And as he's carrying her back he says, 'every time I carry you this way.'
That means every 90 billion years this thing happens. And the wonderful thing is this
expansion of the notion of time, which diminishes are notion of the importance of the
present moment and makes it possible for us to see it as but a flash on the surface of the
waters of eternity.

Just at the time of Ignodan, let's say 1377 to 1358 or so, the Indo Europeans are invading
India. They are nomads, warrior people with their priest magicians.
And where ever they went, the priests would build a symbolic alters in the symbolic form of
the cosmos, light the fire and that would be the God. Agni, the God of fire who would be as
it were the mouth of the Gods.
They chant then hymns which invoke the Gods, these hymns are the work of poets.
But they are not invented hymns they are heard hymns.
The Vedas are called Shuruti, that which has been heard.
The ear has been opened to the song of the universe.

An unquenchable fire, the God, Agni and the offering that is poured in is also divine - this is
a God named Soma.
Just as the Greeks poured libations of wine, so the soma juice is poured into the fire.
But the word Soma refers to a deity who is identical in a way to the moon.
You could see the moon filling every month with ambrosia, amrita, the elixir of immortality,
and then it declines as though it were emptying with the dew, the dew is symbolic of this
ambrosia which refreshes the world of vegetation after the burning fierce fire of the tropical
sun which dessicate.

When you take food to your mouth and eat it, the fire in your body consumes the food.
This is equivalent to the sacrifice at the fire, so the energy is within you.
And so why put all your thoughts and mind on the Brahmin's and their sacrifices?
Why not seek to know the power that is within yourself.
This is the doctrine of what are known as the forest books, the Upanishads, sitting close in
to a teacher who teaches you close in doctrine, and it is - you are it.

Tatvamasi.

The Yogi says 'Shiva H'am', I am Shiva, I am it, I am that power, and you are.
People are caught in Samsara, in the vortex of birth, death, sorrow and so forth.
We are to renounce those actions in life which engage us in this vortex, move into the
forest, disengage ourselves, engage in meditation and achieve the raptured condition of
Nirvanic harmony.

There was an early for of Buddhism where this escape from life was taken seriously.
The Buddhism of the doctrine of the ancients, it's also know as the Hinayana Buddhism, the
little ferry boat Buddhism, because in order to follow this Buddhism, you must give up the
world and step into the little monk ferry boat that will carry you to the yonder shore.
During the 1st century AD that's 500 years after the Buddha's time a new order of
Buddhism comes into form, in northwest India.
It is the Buddhism of the Mahayana, the big or great ferry boat Buddhism.
Now to explain the difference between the two, I am going to use a little anecdote that my
fried of long ago Heinrich Zimmer once proposed.

The Bay area, with San Francisco on this side and over there across the bay, Berkley, with
all the wise men there.
So you are fed up with San Francisco, you are absolutely in disgust of life, and you've heard
about Berkley, you've heard about Nirvana and you've heard what a peaceful, wonderful
place it is and what spiritual life there is over there.
So you go down to the shore and you look day after day over at Berkley, this is the desire
for the experience, you know, of Nirvana?
One fine day a ferry boat sets out from the yonder shore, comes right to your feet and in
the ferry boat is a man who says, 'anyone for Berkley?', and you say, 'I'.
And he says, 'Get aboard, but there is a consideration, namely, this is a one way trip.'
Now the texts say, unless you are as eager for Nirvanic bliss as a man whose hair is on fire,
would be for a pond in which to dive, don't start. It's too tough.

So you get into the boat, and the boat starts out, and you have a pang, you think mother or
something like that, but, it's too late now, you are out in the water.
And now its ship ahoy, the splash of the waves on the hull of the boat, you thought it was
going to be a short trip, may take six incarnations your now a monk.
And its such a real relief and pleasure, counting the beads in this hand, then over here
putting flowers on alters and so forth, life has been reduced to such simplicities, there's
really no problems at all.
The last thing you want now is to get ashore, on the other shore, where something else
might happen.
One fine incarnation or another, the boat scrapes ashore, this is that moment of rapture,
you know. But you can't live in that.
We're there, so you get ashore, it's a new life a new breeze and all that sort of thing.
And then you think, I wonder how San Francisco looks from here...?

Now we're going to move into the other type of Buddhism, this has been Hinayana
Buddhism, only those willing to give up everything, monks, nuns, and so forth and to play
the little game of rosaries and flowers, can get onto this trip.
I wonder what San Francisco looks like from here...?

Forgetting you are in the realm beyond pairs of opposites, hmmm?

You turn around there is no San Francisco, there is no bay between, there is no ferry boat,
there is no Buddha, this is it!
This is know as the Mahayana, we're all there.
And whose there?
Well, the first doctrine of Buddhism is Anatman, all things are without a self, so who is on
the boat anyhow?
Didn't you realize that?

We are all simply illusions! Of a consciousness that is the real ground, this is the illusion
that comes with the rippling water of pond, broken images, that come and go, we've
identified ourselves with one of those that comes and goes.
That is when we were in San Francisco.
Now we've identified ourselves with the Buddha consciousness which informs all things and
we are at peace.
We can open our eyes and return to the world, we are in San Francisco. You see what we
get?
So, this is know as the Buddhism of the great delight, Mahasukha.
All is sorrowful and in perfect rapture.
And that night the Buddha comes to illumination, facing the east, and the new rising sun
beholds him as a Buddha.

He sat there so stunned with what he had experienced that he did not move for seven days.
While he sat there, there was a terrific storm of the universe, that threatened him.
And the serpent king Mutchalinda, who supports the universe from beneath, and was right
beneath that immovable spot himself the serpent supporting the world, he came up and
wrapped the Buddha with his body and his serpent hood over the Buddha's head so he was
protected from the storm.
And what is shows is that the savior, who represents the culmination of consciousness, is in
accord with the serpent power of the universe.
The tempter came to the Buddha in two forms, one in the form of Karma, desire, the other,
the form of Mara, the fear, the terror of death.
The Gods come down and they say, 'for the good of mankind and the Gods and the
universe, please teach.'
And the Buddha says, I will.

But what he teaches is not Buddhism, it is the way to Buddhism, so Buddhism is called a
Yana a vehicle, a ferry boat.
And its a ferry boat which carries you from this shore of pain and pleasure, birth and death,
pairs of opposites across the water, of the vortexes of life, to the yonder shore beyond
duality.
The ego, desires and fear, transcendence of these is the passage through the gate, to the
temple.
You have to pass through fear and desire, to get to the Buddha, whose hand says, 'Don't be
afraid of those two chaps, come on'.

The mysteries of Eleusís, this wonderful shrine just outside of Athens, which was the sacred
spot for the Athenian population, has a background way into the Bronze age.
And it survived then in the classical world, through Roman times until the conversion of the
Roman Empire into a Christian Empire.
Christianity was declared to be the only permitted religion in the Roman Empire, and so a
system of violent persecution and vandalism begins, the destruction of shrines, and the
more sacred the shrine the more violent the destruction.
Meanwhile however, in the Hellenistic period, many of the earlier mystery cults had come
back into manifestation. There is something in the way of a revelation was actually
experienced there.

And it's my belief that the great insight that St. Paul had on the road to Damascus was that
the death of Christ, of Jesus on the cross, could be interpreted in terms of the classical
mystery religions of the death and resurrection of the savior.
The death to one's purely material animal existence and the birth then of the spiritual life.

And here are the two great Goddesses, this is Demeter and here is her daughter
Persephone, who is the one that dies and is resurrected and this is the sacred cave out of
which hades came or Pluto to abduct Persephone.
So this is an old, old story.
In the Greek the demon is that unconscious impulse that is the dynamic of your life and
which comes to you in vision and dream.
But in the Christian interpretation it is a devil, all that a devil is, is a repressed demon, one
who has not been recognized, one who has not been given his due, has not been allowed to
play in your life, so becomes a violent threat.

This is the beautiful Olympian Apollo, who represents protection and represents the
consciousness and light.
The radiance, the vis of the Apollonian mind moves everywhere the muse is.

This is Dyonisis divine, wine, drunkenness who represents the dynamic of the unconscious,
from below consciousness he comes singing forth.
And the wonderful thing in the Greek world is they are in accord, Dyonisis is admitted to
Olympus.
Though the Dynosian shatters, Dyonisis is the energy that shatters in order to bring forth,
anything that is going to be created involves the shattering of what was there before it, its
what Christ came down into the world for, the shattering, the shattering the shattering.

This beautiful Nemad, snakes in her hair, going to tear a leopard apart with the thersis here
symbolic of sap, the vegetable flow of life, uncontrolled by reason, just the dynamic of
nature.
Here is an Orpheus torn apart, as Jesus was torn apart in the scourging and crucifixion.

The eternity is in love with the forms of time, but to come into those forms it has to be
dismembered, and then you as a separate entity in the form of time, in order to lose your
commitment to this little instance, you must be dismembered and open to the transcendent.
Orpheus, Bacchus crucified and he goes to the cross like a bridegroom to the bride, and you
have the death and resurrection motif of the moon, all you have to do is a spend a little
while with these things and they sing to you.

I'll never forget the experience of going to Dephi in Greece.

The temples have all been deliberate smashed from the vandalism of the Christians, but
they are still there and you can see what the Greek idea of corporal beauty was.
There is then the Oracle, where the pythoness, prophetess, received the inspiration from
the fumes, the smoke coming up from the abyss.
And prophesied and gave statements of destiny.
And then you have up on another level, the beautiful theater with the whole wonderful,
valley and landscape as its backdrop, and that accord with nature, that accord with nature,
and the bringing of nature to its high fulfillment in human nature.

This is Greek.

It's this idea of the individual and the individual quest, and of course, the great symbolic
moment in the Greek's own understanding of this matter was the great battle of Marathon.
Where the Persian slave civilization you might say; they had covered everything in Asia
from the Ionian isles to the Indus river, including all the world of the ancients, including
Mesopotamia, Egypt and all, and the Greeks stopped them.
A few years later Alexander the Great goes smashing through the whole Persian empire, a
young man in his early twenty's.
With the idea of a self-directed not overmastered field of action.
But here we have the two traditions in Europe, one, you might say the heroic one, which is
the native one of Europe, going back to the old Germanic, Celtic spirit, and then the applied
Christian one which is brought in from the near East.
By the 11th and 12th century Europe is beginning to assimilate this material and the Grail
story, the Arthurian romances represent this assimilation.
The theme of the Grail, is the, bringing of life, into what is know as the wasteland.
The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer.

What is the sense of the wasteland?

It's the world of people living in-authentic lives, if there is a path, it is someone else's path
and you are not on the adventure.
Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and
there was no path.
Now who can see and enter the castle of the Grail?

Not everybody, only those with a spiritual readiness for the experience.
The sword represents the virtue, the sword represents the energy it has come to Arthur
from the abyss, this is the world of the unconscious, the world of the Gods, the Goddess
who informs all things.
Arthur or Artehe was revered as a God, he is originally a Celtic God.
And the name Artus, Arthur, is related to Artemis, Arcturus, all of these are related to the
deity the bear.
And the bear is the oldest worshiped deity in the world.

We have bear shrines going back to Neanderthal times, in just this part of the world, from
perhaps 100,000 BC.
The fantastic traditions and the levels and levels of culture that have piled up in Europe,
which is not the youngest but the oldest culture in the world.
The Celts come into Europe in the 1st millennium BC, they come from Bavaria across
France, Switzerland and into the British aisles.
Now the people who had been in Europe before, were pre-Celt, pre-Indo European, and
there traditions might go all the way back to the caves, and their great period of flowering
was Stone Henge.

Now Merlin, he's associated with Druid mysteries, the Druids were the priests and spiritual
guardians of the Celts.
There are certain places geographically when you go to them you can see why these have
magic mystery traditions associated with them. There is something in the land.
So the tradition of Glastonbury, which is associated with the Grail castle, is associated also,
way way back with this 1500 BC period.
This is a magical place.

Here you have a statement right on earth that illustrates and allows you to experience the
relationship of lunar cycles to solar cycles, so it becomes a sacred place.
And every sacred place is the place where eternity shines through time.
The whole mystery of mythology, which is that of seeing through the forms of time the
radiance of eternity in your own life and in the forms around you, the whole mystery is that
you might say of the metaphor.

“Very deep is the well of the past, should we not call it bottomless?”
And as one who has tried himself to go back to the origins of mythic forms, I can see this, it
is bottomless.
The mythological themes don't have a beginning, they have the archetypes, the elementary
ideas, and so where is paradise? Where do they come from?
They come from desilah, the soul. The origin is the soul of man.

It is though the whole universe were a dream, dreamed by a single dreamer, in which all
the dream characters dream to.
And so all these dreams interlock.
Well this is an idea that comes up in India in what is known as the net of Indra.
The universe is as it were a net of gems in which all of the junctures of the net, at each of
these there is a jewel, and each of the jewels reflects all the others.
That's this idea of we are all particles of this great cycling dream.

And one of the great Hindu images of the 'world dream' is of Vishnu dreaming the universe;
we are all parts of Vishnu's dream.
Now in the Indian pictures we see the world dream coming from Vishnu in the form of a
lotus growing from his navel.

The lotus sprig.

The lotus is Padma, a Goddess. Laxmi Padma, the Goddess, lotus and good fortune.
That recitation from Tibet, 'Om Mani Padma Om'. Mani, the jewel of illumination, Padmi is in
the lotus, its right in the lotus of the world that illumination resides.
The illumination means you are letting go of ego.
Gone, gone, gone to the yonder shore, landed on the yonder shore, illumination, hallelujah.
Pranja-paramaita, the wisdom of the yonder sure...But, what she's doing is bringing the two
hands together, the hand of earthly experience, the hand of spiritual rapture, she's at that
point.

And that's the wisdom of the yonder shore, beyond pairs of opposites.

The one who is trying to get away from life to Nirvana, is still caught in pairs of opposites,
but when you get there you realize, this is it...right now.

This is the favorite Buddha of the East, this is Amita.

Sanskrit, Amitha Bah, Amita, means immeasurable, Bah is radiance, the Buddha of
immeasurable radiance.
Now there is a legend associated with his name, when he was on the very threshold of
illumination he made a vow. He said, 'I will not accept illumination for myself, unless,
through my illumination I can bring to illumination and release all beings.'
And so, when he achieved illumination there broke out before him a great lake, and it was a
lake of bliss, and on this lake were lotuses and anyone who during his lifetime paid devotion
to Amita would not be committed to another lifetime, but would be reborn on a lotus in
Amita's lotus pond, called Sukhavati, the place of bliss.
If the person was not even nearly illuminated his lotus would be closed, he'd be in a closed
lotus. And he'd be floating on this lake, which would be a water of the 5 colors of the 5
elements.
As the waters rippled, he would hear, 'all is impermanent all is without a self', 'all is
impermanent all is without a self.'
Around the lake would be these jeweled trees with jeweled birds singing, and they would be
singing, 'all is impermanent all is without a self.' Musical instruments in the air would be
playing, 'all is impermanent all is without a self.'
Presently he'd get the message, meanwhile, the radiance of the Buddha himself like a
setting sun on the western horizon would be penetrating the petals and they would open,
and there he would be sitting as a Buddha in mediation floating on the lotus pond, and
presently in his meditation he would dissolve into rapture and transcendence.
Now the quality of this, Buddha, is mercy, compassion, this is the Buddha who's lieutenant
is Avalokateshra and who's incarnation on earth then is in the the Dali Lama, and he is the
Bodisatva of infinite compassion.

The Bodisatava willingly comes back to the world, joyful participation in the sorrows of the
world. And his accent always in his talk on Buddhism is on the force of compassion and
mercy and love.

There was preserved in Tibet the Buddhist forms of the highest most sophisticated Tantric
development.
Now the mythology of death and birth is of reincarnation, between the moment of death
and the moment of re-conception 49 days pass. 7 x 7 days.
And during the course of this, one has gone through all the worlds of the Chacras.
The notion is that the moment of death you experience the great light. Can you stand it?

Have you prepared yourself to dissolve?

You may speak of it as the void, you may speak of it as the abyss, you may speak of it as
mother light: it is that which transcends all cojutations, there are no words for it.
So at the moment of death, the Lama will say, 'you are now experiencing the mother light,
between your consciousness and universal consciousness no obstruction.'
And the Lama will say, 'do not be afraid, these powers that are tearing you apart and all
that they're just figments of your own, imagination.

They are in the field of time, figments. There's nothing to lose, there's nothing to do, hold
the still point, the still point without moving.
You've lost it, and when you've lost it, great cliffs close behind you and the upper regions
are lost to you.
And the Lama will be telling you where you are on the way down and what to hold to and to
try to do it and here you are disintegrating, trying to have this realization which will release
you from another birth.

Now are you going to identify with the body, the vehicle, or are you going to identify with
the light?

The ultimate source is undifferentiated, undifferentiated consciousness.

An individual life represents a knot of delusions, there are a lot of things that you think are
important and that's what you are living for and if you die before you've learned that they
are not important, you are going to be born again.

And its the dissolution, the breaking of that know that is intended, Anatmanda, there is no
soul. But there is a soul as long as you are living, you understand what I mean? The goal is
to get rid of that thing, to dissolve like a dew drop into the sea.

When we come to the Indian mythology which carries right into the present the implications
of the old Bronze age, we find that a cycle of time endures for 432,000 years, this is the
Yuga. Then you get up to the Mahayuga, the great Yuga or cycle within which the other
cycles proceed and you get 4,320,000 if you add them then you get 9, this is the great
number of the Goddess.
She is time, she is the womb, 9 is the grain you might say of her movement.
Here she is as black time, and here is her prime alter, the battlefield, sacrifice. Kali dancing
at burning ground, in her hand is the head of Brahma, that's the creator, the creator of the
world, we are going past that and all its values.
She cuts off her own head to release you from her bondage. That's the burning ground and
she releasing us all.
So we have the big cycles of time, and the Biblical traditions and all right out of this Bronze
age which has to have been based on actual observation.

It is the rhythm of our own heart beat, its the rhythm of the universe, we are in accord with
the universal rhythm.

I want to move to southeast Europe, 7000 to 3500 BC, this is very, very early stuff.
And its a period when the mother Goddess is dominate. She is bird goddess, spiritual
goddess. Associated with her is the boar. Here is a pink goddess and the labyrinth. Ceramic
serpent all of the same order, here's the whole mythology in a cluster, in front of us here.

This little Venus of Lozelle is holding in her hand, her right hand elevated, a bison horn with
13 vertical strokes. That's the number of nights between the 1st crescent and the full
moon.
The other hand is on the belly. What is suggested is a recognition of the equivalence of the
menstrual and the lunar cycles.
This would be the first inkling we have of a recognition of counter parts between the
celestial and earthly rhythms of life.

Just as in the woman's body the womb is celebrated the caves in which we are, have been
wandering is the womb of the mother Goddess.
I tell you, when you go into those caves, a very interesting psychological transformation
takes place automatically. This is the place. The world of the light above is quite secondary,
and these animals that you see are the animal germs you might say the platonic ideas of
the herds that are being evoked, this is where they come from in this germinating ground.

In the beginning the animal and human forms are mixed just as they were in the early
dancer at trois freres,
Now the stag loses his antlers annually and brings them back again, and so as it were is an
incarnation of the forest spirit.

And the shaman is the one who can evoke the animals.

Mythology is a production of the wisdom body, not of the intellect, it is not.

The white man has ideas, the Indian has visions, and visions come from a deeper more
mysterious center.

This wonderful Sioux medicine man, Black Elk who was the keeper of the sacred pipe and so
forth, had an incredibly beautiful vision when he was a boy of 9, the shamanic vision, that
converted him you might say into a many of mystery and power.
Well he said in the course of that vision he saw himself on the central mountain of the
universe, the highest mountain of them all, and the highest mountain was Karney peak in
South Dakota.

And immediately after that he said, the central mountain is everywhere.

Chief Seattle, will you teach your children what we've taught our children, that the earth is
out mother. What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.
This we know, the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth, all things are
connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a
strand in it, whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
One thing we know, our God is also your God.
The earth is precious to him, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator, your
destiny is a mystery to us.

What will happen when the buffaloes are all slaughtered, the wild horses tamed, what will
happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the
view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires, where will the thicket be? Gone. Where will
the eagle be? Gone. And what is it to say good bye to the swift pony and the hunt, the end
of living and the beginning of survival.

It's natural to life that life should be dangerous and now its dangerous for the planet.
Formerly it was dangerous to this society or that society or another.
Just think of when the Spaniards arrived and wiped out all of the people in the Carribean
sea within 2 generations there were no more natives there. Then they wipe out 2
civilizations, 500 men wipe out 2 civilizations.

The world has been experiencing absolute disaster.

We've been so protected we that don't realize it, and now the fear of something blowing up,
you see what I mean? Indiras, Indras, Indras, Brahma's eyes opening and closing. And ok, I
heard one man say there is no neccessity the human race should survive.

Chief Seattle in another of his words said, “Why should I lament the disappearance of my
people? All things die, the white race will find this out to.”

So yield to what is coming. We're in a free fall into future, we don't know where we are
going.

Things are changing so fast and always when you are going through a long tunnel anxiety
comes along.
And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a
voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift in perspective, and that's all it is.

Joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.

Life throws up around us these temptations, these distractions, and the problem is to find
the immovable center and you can survive anything, and the myths will help you to do
that.
And this is the quest for the inner life that will enable you to float down the stream like a
human being instead of just like some babbitt or robot in the hands of a political institution.

And that's what I am interested in, and bringing forward here and I may not be changing
the world, but I am changing people and that's what's necessary and that's what's got to be
done.

Finally after this stage of experiences which we have all had, the person has gone past his
personal life into the life of trans-personal experiences, one comes to suddenly a stage of
understanding it all you can't talk about it, it's just the rapture of seeing and knowing what
it's all about and that it's good and that it's great and for all the pains and all that never the
less it is as it is and it is a marvel. And the pains and the pleasures are not the ends we live
for, but just the rapture of this beholding.

And finally there's one stage further beyond this symbolic rapture, it's that of a kind of a
metaphysical sense that you have struck the ground and you have found the root of being.