Let us examine some familiar religious imagery. One of the great themes in both Judaism and Christianity is the End of the World. What is the meaning of the End of the World? The denotation is that there is going to be a terrific cosmic calamity and the physical world is going to end. That, as we know, is the denotation. What is the connotation of the End of the World? In the Gospel of Mark, chapter 13, Jesus tells about the End of the World. He describes it as a terrible, terrible time with fire and brimstone devouring the earth. He says, “Better not to be alive at that time.” He also says, “This generation will not pass away, but these things will have come to pass.” These things did not, however, come to pass. And the Church, which interprets everything concretely, taking the denotation instead of the connotation as the term of the message, said that, no, this did not come to pass but it is going to come to pass, because what Jesus meant by generation is the generation of Man.

Now in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, part of the great mid century discovery of ancient texts, Jesus says, “The Kingdom will not come by expectation. The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it.” Not seeing it, we live in the world as though it were not the Kingdom. Seeing the Kingdom-that is the End of the World. The connotation is transcendent of the denotation. You are not to interpret the phrase, “the End of the World” concretely. Jesus used the same kind of vocabulary that Eastern gurus use. In their full-fledged teaching mode they speak as though they were themselves what they are speaking about; that is to say, they have in their minds identified themselves with a mode of consciousness that then speaks through them. So when Jesus says, “I am the all,” he means: “I have identified myself with the all.” That is what he means when he says, in the Gospel of Thomas, “Split the stick, you will find me there.” This does not refer to the one who is talking to you, not to that physical body; it refers instead to that which he indeed, in fact,are. Thou art that(Tat Tvam Asi).

The third function of a traditional mythology is to validate and support a specific moral order, that order of the society out of which that mythology arose. All mythologies come to us in the field of a certain specific culture and must speak to us through the language and symbols of that culture. In traditional mythologies, the notion is really that the moral order is organically related to or somehow of a piece with the cosmic order.

Through this third function, mythology reinforces the moral order by shaping the person to the demands of a specific geographically and histori- cally conditioned social group.

As an example, the primitive rites of initiation, which treated people quite harshly, were intended to solve the problem of getting growing persons over the first great threshold of their development. These rites, commonly, included scarification and certain minor surgeries. Such rites were carried out so that persons could realize that they no longer had the same body they had as children. They could look at themselves afterwards and see that they were different, that they were no longer children. This socially ordered cutting, branding, and cropping was to incorporate them, mind and body, into a larger, more enduring cultural body whose explanatory mythology became their own. The force here, it must be observed, is found in society rather than in nature.

Thus it was the social authority in India, for example, which maintained the caste system as well as the rituals and mythology of suttee. It is precisely here, we might note, that a great difficulty arises. A real danger exists when social institutions press on people mythological structures that no longer match their human experience. For example, when certain religious or political interpretations of human life are insisted upon, mythic dissociation can occur. Through mythic dissociation, persons reject or are cut off from effective explanatory notions about the order of their lives.

This point is tremendously important. Many of the images-which in our religion are dogmatically affirmed as having had historical reality-are very difficult today to interpret in historical terms. For example, the Assumption of the Virgin or the ascension of Jesus to heaven both lead us to a problem: where is heaven? Somewhere up in the sky? Our contemporary cosmology does not permit us to entertain that thought very seriously. We have a collision between these articles of faith and the historical and phys- ical sciences, which we have to admit are thing that we live by from day to ruling our lives, giving us every- day. This collision has destroyed people’s

belief in these symbolic forms; they are rejected as untrue. Now, since the primary truth is not the historical but the spiritual ref erence of these symbols, the fact that historical evidence refutes these myths on the level of objective reality should not relieve us of the symbolnd they symbols stem from the psyche, they speak from and to the spirit. And they are in fact the vehicle of communication between the deeper depth of our spiritual life and this relatively thin layer of consciousness by which we govern our daylight existences.

And when those symbols-those vehicles of communication between our greater and lesser selves-are taken away, we are left without an inter- com. This split leaves us schizoid; we live in a world up in the head, and the world down below is quite apart. We speak of schizophrenia when people, split in half like that, crack up: they plunge back into the night sea of the realities down there, which they had not been taught about. They’re terrified-by demons.

Myths derive from the visions of people who have searched their own most inward world.

Here is a basic theological formula: a deity is a personification of a spiritual power. And deities who are not recognized become demonic; they become dangerous. When you have not been in communication with them, when their messages have gone unheard or unheeded, and when they do, inevitably, break through, your conscious life is overthrown. There is, literally, hell to pay.

Carl Jung, in his analysis of the structure of the psyche, has distinguished four psychological functions that link us to the outer world. These are sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. Sensation, he states, is the function that tells us that something exists; thinking, the function that tells us what it is; feeling, the function that evaluates its worth to us; and intuition, the function that enables us to estimate the possibilities inherent in the object or its situation.Feeling, thus, is the inward guide to value; but its judgments are related normally to outward, empirical circumstance.

The wonderful thing about symbology is that it includes all four functions.

When the symbols are interpreted spiritually rather than concretely,then they yield the revelation.

God is not an illusion, but a symbol pointing beyond itself to the realization of the mystery of at-one-ment.

People often dream that they have an exam and they have not reached the exam center even after a lot of hard work, or have not written anything in the exam.Such type Dream are symbolic image of threshold guardian which is not let you cross your own living horizon. Everyone has to cross the threshold.The threshold guardian is symbolic of a barrier holds you back.

Myths, like dreams, are products of the imagination. And there are two orders of dream, the simple personal dream, in which the dreamer becomes involved in adventures reflective only of his own personal problems, the conflicts in his life between desires and fears, driving wishes and moral prohibitions, and similar materials that are typically dealt with in a Freudian psychoanalysis. There is also another dream level that can be thought of as that of vision, where one has transcended the sphere of a merely personal horizon and come into confrontation with the same, great, universal problems that are symbolized in all great myths.

For example, when disaster strikes, when you meet with a great calamity, what is it that supports you and carries you through? Do you have anything that supports and carries you through? Or does that which you thought was your support now fail you? That building myth, of your life.

The Christ story involves a sublimation of what originally was a very solid vegetal image. Jesus is on Holy Rood, the matty was he is himself the fruit of the tree. Jesus is the fruit of eternal life, which was on the second forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. When man ate of the fruit of the first tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was expelled from the Garden. The Garden is the place of unity, of nonduality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings. You eat the duality, and you are on the way out. The tree of coming back to the Garden is the tree of immortal life, where you know that I and the Father are one.

Getting back into that Garden is the aim of many a religion. When Yahweh threw man out of the Garden, he put two cher- ubim at the gate, with a flaming sword between. Now, when you approach a Buddhist shrine, with the Buddha seated under the tree of immortal life, you will find at the gate two guardians-those are the cherubim, and you’re going between them to the tree of immortal life. In the Christian tradition, Jesus on the cross is on a tree, the tree of immortal life, and he is the fruit of the tree. Jesus on the cross, the Buddha under the tree-these are the same figures. And the cherubim at the gate-who are they? At the Buddhist shrines you’ll see one has his mouth open, the other has his mouth closed-fear and desire, a pair of opposites. If you’re approaching a garden like that, and those two figures there are real to you and threaten you, if you have fear for your life, you are still outside the garden. But if you are no longer attached to your ego existence, but see the ego existence as a function of a larger, eternal totality, and you favor the larger against the smaller, then you won’t be afraid of those two figures, and you will go through.

We are kept out of the garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what think to be the goods of our life.

God’s idea, in this story, was to get Adam and Eve out of that Garden. place of oneness, of unity, of no things. When you eat the Fruit of the What was it about the Garden? It was a division in the nature of people or Knowledge of Good and Evil, however, you know about pairs of opposites which include not only good and evil, light and dark, right and wrong, but male and female, and God and Man as well.

Man has eaten the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. Lest he eat the fruit of the second tree, which is that of immortal life, God throws Man out of the Garden and places two cherubim, with a flaming sword between them, to guard the gate.

Adam and Eve are separated from God and they are aware of this break in their sense of oneness. They seek to cover their nakedness. The question becomes, how do they get back into the Garden? To understand this mystery, we must forget all about judging and ethics and forget good and evil as well.

Jesus says, “Judge not, that you may not be judged.” That is the way back into the Garden. You must live on two levels: One, out of the recognition of life as it is without judging it, and the other, by living in terms of the ethical values of one’s culture, or one’s particular personal religion. These are not easy tasks.

I said that God exiled Adam and Eve from the Garden, but actually they exiled themselves. The fear is that of death and the desire is for more of this world:fear and desire are what kept you out of Garden.It is not god who keeps us in exile but ourselves.

This story yields its meaning only to a psychological interpretation. If you explain it as an historical event that occurred at some distant time back there, it seems ridiculous. There was no Garden of Eden as a concrete place. To believe so is to misunderstand and misconstrue the metaphoric language of religion.

You cannot even find a date for the idea of it. In the evolution of the species, did it arise with Homo erectus, when the human brain measured 1,000 cubic centimeters? Or did it come later with Neanderthal man, or just prehistoric with Cro-Magnon? When did this notion come?

This idyllic spot is not an historical fact. The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites man and woman, good and evil-are as holy as that of a god.

Let us look around this Garden now that we stand imaginatively within it.