“Anything that can be said or thought of God is, as it were, a screen between us and God. If we take it literally, absolutely, we are in a way short-circuiting our own experience of an ultimately ineffable mystery, something that cannot be talked about.

Half of the people in the world think the reference of a metaphor is a fact. The other half of the world knows that it’s a lie. So we have people who believe in God as a fact and people who believe that he’s not a fact: theists and atheists.

The real position is to realize that the word God is metaphorical of a mystery, and the mystery is absolutely beyond all human comprehension. The first thing to know when you’re dealing with these symbolic forms is that the ultimate reference is beyond all categories of human thought.” –

When spiritual rights are demanded on the basis of religious metaphors as facts and geography instead of as symbols of the heart and spirit, a bitterly divided world arises with the inevitability of great tragedy. Joseph Campbell.

Was Jesus God?, __”Not unless we all are.” “Ahh!”

And that’s what Jung is saying in his Answer to Job: it is actually the work of man that is projected in the image of an imagined being called God. And so, historically, the God image is really a mirror image of the condition of man at a given time.

Yet, I think most people take their image of God very concretely. Except for the French. A survey was taken in which people were asked, “Do you believe in God? Do you believe in hell?” The French-I think, seventy-five percent of them-did not believe in God, but did believe in hell! I like Alan Watts’ reply: “If you believe in God, I don’t. If you don’t, I do.”

My belief is that nobody experiences the ultimate rapture, because it’s beyond pairs of opposities, so if anyone did, there’d be nobody there anyhow. Jung is amusing on that point. “If you go beyond subject and object,” he wonders, “who is there to have the exper- ience?” I think to give oneself a ground for anything other than monastic living, all one has to do is realize that such a thing is implied; that is to say, a mystery that is beyond subject, object, and all pairs of opposite is the mystery on the ground of which we ride.

When the physicist explores the depths of the atom or the outer reaches of space, he discovers pairs of oppo- sites and mysteries that science hasn’t been able to pen- trate. When it does penetrate to the next level, it’s still mysterious. They’ve got so many sub-atomic particles. that’s about as mysterious as you can get. There is the One is named after Joyce’s “quark.” It seems to me transcendent. Know it’s there, and then don’t worry about it.Simply behold the radiance everywhere.

“The incarnation in Christ is the prototype which is continuously being transferred to the creature by the Holy Ghost.“__Jung

In the tribe, deities were personification of power.

In later years,they became the source of power.

All the gods of the world are metaphors,not powers.

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.