The aesthetic experience is that it does not move you to want to possess the object. A work of art that moves you to possess the object depicted, he calls pornography. Nor does the aesthetic experience move you to criticize and reject the object-such art he calls didactic, or social criticism in art. The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object. Joyce says that you put a frame around it and see it first as one thing, and that, in seeing it as one thing, you then become aware of the relationship of part to part, each part to the whole, and the whole to each of its parts. This is the essential, aesthetic factor-rhythm, the harmonious rhythm of relationships. And when a fortunate rhythm has been struck by the artist, you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest. That is the epiphany. And that is what might in religious terms be thought of as the all-informing Christ principle coming through.

The peak experience refers to actual moments of your life when you experience your relationship to the harmony of being .

The aesthetic experience transcends the ethics and didactics.

“It is my belief that there is a very strong movement today to find – or at least for the individual to find in himself – that center, that centered and centering Eye. And perhaps if enough people discover it in themselves, it may be put to work in the government as well. But unless there are people who have come to the realization in themselves of the point at the center, beyond pairs of opposites, and the way of thinking in such terms, the principle of evenhandedness is not going to operate in public life. It has to be found first in private life. I would say that whatever is about to occur in the way of transformation of consciousness will have had to have occurred, first, in the hearts of individual human beings, who will then have had – as a result of their very presence – an influence in the larger community.”

That’s the radiance of the god’s dance. Shiva’s dance is the universe. In his hair is a skull and a new moon, death and rebirth at the same moment, the moment of becoming. In one hand he has a little drum that goes tick-tick-tick. That is the drum of time, the tick of time which shuts out the knowl- edge of eternity. We are enclosed in time. But in Shiva’s opposite hand there is a flame which burns away the veil of time and opens our minds to eternity.

Shiva is a very ancient deity, perhaps the most ancient wor- shiped in the world today. There are images from 2000 or 2500 B.C., little stamp seals showing figures that clearly suggest Shiva. In some of his manifestations he is a really horrendous god, representing the terrific aspects of the nature of being. He is the archetypal yogi, canceling the illusion of life, but he is also the creator of life, its generator, as well as illuminator.

What is the source of that life?

It must be a recognition of your life in the other, of the one life in the two of us. God is an image for that one life. We ask ourselves where this one life comes from, and people who think everything has to have been made by somebody will think, “Well, God made it.” So God’s the source of all this.

Well then, what is religion?

The word “religion” means religio, linking back. If we say it is the one life in both of us, then my separate life has been linked to the one life, religio, linked back. This has become symbolized in the images of religion, which represent that connecting link.

Jung, the famous psychologist, says that one of the most powerful religious symbols is the circle. He says that the circle is one of the great primordial images of mankind and that, in considering the symbol of the circle, we are analyzing the self. What do you make of that?

The whole world is a circle. All of these circular images reflect the psyche, so there may be some relationship between these architectural designs and the actual structuring of our spiritual functions.

When a magician wants to work magic, he puts a circle around himself, and it is within this bounded circle, this hermetically sealed-off area, that powers can be brought into play that are lost outside the circle.

I remember reading about an Indian chief who said, “When we pitch camp, we pitch a camp in a circle. When the eagle builds a nest, the nest is in a circle. When we look at the horizon, the horizon is in a circle.” Circles were very important to some Indians, weren’t they?

Yes. But they’re also in much that we’ve inherited from Sumerian mythology. We’ve inherited the circle with the four cardinal points and three hundred and sixty degrees. The official Sumerian year was three hundred and sixty days with five holy days that don’t count, which are outside of time and in which they had ceremonies relating their society to the heavens. Now we’re losing this sense of the circle in relation to time, because we have digital time, where you just have time buzzing by. Out of the digital you get the sense of the flow of time. At Penn Station in New York, there’s a clock with the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the tenths of seconds, and the hundredths of seconds. When you see the hundredths of a second buzzing by, you realize how time is running through you.

The circle, on the other hand, represents totality. Everything within the circle is one thing, which is encircled, enframed. That would be the spatial aspect. But the temporal aspect of the circle is that you leave, go somewhere, and always come back. God is the alpha and the omega, the source and the end. The circle suggests immediately a completed totality, whether in time or in space.

No beginning, no end.

Round and round and round. Take the year, for example. When November rolls around, we have Thanksgiving again. Then December comes, and we have Christmas again. Not only does the month roll around again, but also the moon cycle, the day cycle. We’re reminded of this when we look at our watches and see the cycle of time. It’s the same hour, but another day.

China used to call itself the kingdom of the centre, and the Aztecs had a similar saying about their own culture. I suppose every culture uses the circle as the cosmological order puts itself at the center. Why do you suppose the circle became so universally symbolic?

Because it’s experienced all the time in the day, in the year, in leaving home to go on your adventure-hunting or whatever it may be and coming back home. Then there is a deeper experience, too, the mystery of the womb and the tomb. When people are buried, it’s for rebirth. That’s the origin of the burial idea. You put someone back into the womb of mother earth for rebirth. Very early images of the Goddess show her as a mother receiving the soul back again.

When I read -The Masks of God, or The Way of the Animal Powers, or The Mythic Image-I often come across images of the circle, whether it’s in magical designs or in architecture, both ancient and modern; whether it’s in the dome- shaped temples of India or the Paleolithic rock engravings of Rhodesia or the calendar stones of the Aztecs or the ancient Chinese bronze shields or the visions of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, who talks about the wheel in the sky. I keep coming across this image. And this ring, my wedding ring, is a circle, too. What does that symbolize?

That depends on how you understand marriage. The word “sym-bol” itself means two things put together. One person has one half, the other the other half, and then they come together. Recognition comes from putting the ring together, the completed circle. This is my marriage, this is the merging of my individual life in a larger life that is of two, where the two are one. The ring indicates that we are in one circle together.

When a new pope is installed, he takes the fisher- man’s ring-another circle.That particular ring is symbolic of Jesus calling the apostles, who were fishermen. He said, “I will make you fishers of men.” This is an old motif that is earlier than Christianity. Orpheus is called “The Fisher,” who fishes men, who are living as fish in the water, out up into the light. It’s an old idea of the metamorphosis of the fish into man. The fish nature is the crudest animal nature of our character, and the religious line is intended to pull you up out of that.

A new king or new queen of England is given the coronation ring.

CAMPBELL: Yes, because there’s another aspect of the ring- it is a bondage. As king, you are bound to a principle. You are living not simply your own way. You have been marked. In initiation rites, when people are sacrified and tattooed, they are bonded to another and to the society.

Jung speaks of the circle as a mandala.

“Mandala” is the Sanskrit word for “circle,” but a circle that is coordinated or symbolically designed so that it has the meaning of a cosmic order. When composing mandalas, you are trying to coordinate your personal circle with the uni- versal circle. In a very elaborate Buddhist mandala, for example, you have the deity in the center as the power source, the illu- mination source. The peripheral images would be manifestations or aspects of the deity’s radiance.

In working out a mandala for yourself, you draw a circle and then think of the different impulse systems and value systems in your life. Then you compose them and try to find out where your center is. Making a mandala is a discipline for pulling all those scattered aspects of your life together, for finding a center and ordering yourself to it. You try to coordinate your circle with the universal circle.