There are two aspects to a thing of this kind. One is your judgment in the field of action, and the other is your judgment as a metaphysical observer. You can’t say there shouldn’t be poisonous serpents-that’s the way life is. But in the field of action, if you see a poisonous serpent about to bite somebody, you kill it. That’s not saying no to the serpent, that’s saying no to that situation.

There’s a wonderful verse in the Rig Veda that says, “On the tree”-that’s the tree of life, the tree of your own life-“there are two birds, fast friends. One eats the fruit of the tree, and the other, not eating, watches.” Now, the one eating the fruit of the tree is killing the fruit. Life lives on life, that’s what it’s all about.

A little myth from India tells the story of the great god Shiva, the lord whose dance is the universe. He had as his consort the goddess Parvathi, daughter of the mountain king. A monster came to him and said, “I want your wife as my mistress.” Shiva was indignant, so he simply opened his third eye, and lightning bolts struck the earth, there was smoke and fire, and when the smoke cleared, there was another monster, lean, with hair like the hair of a lion flying to the four directions. The first monster saw that the lean monster was about to eat him up. Now, what do you do when you’re in a situation like that? Traditional advice says to throw yourself on the mercy of the deity. So the monster said, “Shiva, I throw myself on your mercy.” Now, there are rules for this god game. When someone

throws himself on your mercy, then you yield mercy. So Shiva said, “I yield my mercy. Lean monster, don’t eat him.”

“Well,” said the lean monster, “what do I do? I’m hungry.

You made me hungry, to eat this guy up.” “Well,” said Shiva, “eat yourself.” So the lean monster started on his feet and came chomping up, chomping up-this is an image of life living on life.

nothing left of the lean monster but a face. Shiva looked at the face and said, I have never seen a greater demonstration of what life is all about this.I will call you Kirtimukha-face of glory.” And you will see that mask, that face of glory, at the portals to Shiva shrines and also to Buddha shrines. Shiva said to the face, “He who will not bow to you is unworthy to come to me.” You’ve got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on the condition that it follows your rules. Otherwise, you’ll never get through to the metaphysical dimension.

There is a ritual associated with the men’s societies in New Guinea that actually enacts the planting-society myth of death, resurrection, and cannibalistic consumption. There is a sacred field with drums going, and chants going, and then pauses. This goes on for four or five days, on and on. Rituals are boring, you know, they just wear you out, and then through to something else. you break

At last comes the great moment. There has been a celebration of real sexual orgy, the breaking of all rules. The young boys who are being initiated into manhood are now to have their first sexual experience. There is a great shed of enormous logs supported by two uprights. A young woman comes in ornamented as a deity, and she is brought to lie down in this place beneath the great roof. The boys, six or so, with the drums going and chanting going, one after another, have their first experience of intercourse with the girl. And when the last boy is with her in full embrace, the supports are withdrawn, the logs drop, and the couple is killed. There is the union of male and female again, as they were in the beginning, before the separation took place. There is the union of begetting and death. They are both the same thing.

Then the little couple is pulled out and roasted and eaten that very evening. The ritual is the repetition of the original act of the killing of a god followed by the coming of food from the dead savior. In the sacrifice of the Mass, you are taught that this is the body and blood of the Savior. You take it to you, and you turn inward, and there he works within you.

The nature of life itself has to be realized in the acts of life. In the hunting cultures, when a sacrifice is made, it is, as it were, a gift or a bribe to the deity that is being invited to do something for us or to give us something. But when a figure is sacrificed in the planting cultures, that figure itself is the god. The person who dies is buried and becomes the food. Christ is crucified, and from his body the food of the spirit comes. The Christ story involves a sublimation of what originally was a very solid vegetal image. Jesus is on Holy Rood, the tree, and 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 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.

“A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life.”
– Joseph Campbell

The people on the plains, the hunters, the people in the forest, the planters-are participating in their landscape. They are part of their world, and every feature of their world becomes sacred to them.

The sanctification of the local landscape is a fundamental function of mythology. You can see this very clearly with the Navaho, who will identify a northern mountain, a southern mountain, an eastern mountain, a western mountain, and a central mountain. In a Navaho hogan, the door always faces east. The fireplace is in the center, which becomes a cosmic center, with the smoke coming up through the hole in the ceiling so that the scent of the incense goes to the nostrils of the gods.

The landscape, the dwelling place, becomes an icon, a holy picture. Wherever you are, you are related to the cosmic order.

Again, when you see a Navaho sand painting, there will be a surrounding figure-it may represent a mirage or the rainbow or what not, but there will always be a surrounding figure with an opening in the east so that the new spirit can pour in.

When the Buddha sat under the bo tree, he faced east-the direction of the rising sun.

Sacred Places don’t exist.

There are a few historical spots
where people may go to think about something important that happened there. For example, we may go visit the Holy Land, because that’s the land of our religious origins. But every land should be a holy land. One should find the symbol in the land- scape itself of the energies of the life there. That’s what all early traditions do. They sanctify their own landscape.

That’s what the early settlers of Iceland did, for example, in the eighth and ninth centuries. They established their different settlements in a relationship of 432,000 Roman feet to each other (432,000 is an important mythological number known to many traditions). The whole organization of the Icelandic land- scape was in terms of such cosmic relationships, so that wherever you go in Iceland, you are, so to say (if you know your my thology), in accord with the universe. This is the same kind of mythology that you have in Egypt, but in Egypt the symbology took a different shape because Egypt is not circular, Egypt is long. So there you have the sky goddess as a Sacred Cow, two feet in the south and two feet in the north-a rectangular idea, so to speak. But the spiritual symbolization of our own civilization is basically lost to us.

Going to visit holy places are secondary things:

This is an absolute necessity for anybody today.

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe any-body, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation.

At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

What, it must be asked, is the ultimate meaning of this Crucifixion itself? Why did Christ have to die?

There were two principal interpretations in the medieval period.

Gregory the Great’s view was that the Devil was thereby tricked.

When Man fell to the Devil, the Devil came to hold a legal claim over Man, breaking up the tradition of creation. How is God going to get Man back? The theological notion is that God offered his own son in exchange for Man’s soul. That is the Redemption. Through it God redeems a bet, as one would say about something that was lost, “I’m going to redeem it.” God bought Man’s soul by giving the Devil Christ instead, but the Devil could not hold Christ because Christ is incorruptible and so the Devil was cheated.



The second theory is that God the Father was so greatly offended by the sin of Adam and Eve that atonement had to be made for it. The only atonement that would be equal to the terrible sin would be rendered by God himself, because Man was unready to atone to the extent required. So Christ became a man so that Man could atone as God, through Him, and then receive the benefits from this atonement that Christ himself could not use. He passes them on to mankind. We have in this theory the vicarious atonement and the benefit for mankind through Christ himself.