If the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, “Oh, no! I couldn’t do that!” that’s the dragon locking you in. “No, no, I couldn’t be a writer,” or “No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what So-and-so is doing.”
In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we’re not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. If you have someone who can help you, that’s fine, too. But, ultimately, the last deed has to be done by oneself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.
What’s my ego?
What you think you want, what you will believe, what you think you can afford, what you decide to love, what you regard yourself as bound to. It may be all much too small, in which case it will nail you down. And if you simply do what your neighbors tell you to do, you’re certainly going to be nailed down. Your neighbors are then your dragon as it reflects from within yourself.
Western dragons represent greed. However, the Chinese dragon is different. It represents the vitality of the swamps and comes up beating its belly and bellowing, “Haw ha ha haww.” That’s a lovely kind of dragon, one that yields the bounty of the waters, a great, glorious gift. But the dragon of our Western tales tries to collect and keep everything to himself. In his secret cave he guards things: heaps of gold and perhaps a captured virgin. He doesn’t know what to do with either, so he just guards and keeps. There are people like that, and we call them creeps. There’s no life from them, no giving. They just glue themselves to you and hang around and try to suck out of you their life.
Jung had a patient who came to him because she felt herself to be alone in the world, on the rocks, and when she drew a picture for him of how she felt, there she was on the shore of a dismal sea, caught in rocks from the waist down. The wind was blowing, and her hair was blowing, and all the gold, all the joy of life, was locked away from her in the rocks. The next picture that she drew, however, followed something that he had said to her. A flash of lightning strikes the rocks, and a golden disk is being lifted out. There is no more gold locked within the rocks. There are golden patches now on the surface. In the course of the conferences that followed, these patches of gold were identified. They were her friends. She wasn’t alone. She had locked herself in her own little room and life, yet she had friends. Her recognition of these followed only after the killing of her dragon.
Unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we are not going to save the world but to save ourselves.But in doing that, you save the world.
You don’t understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death. I would say that the story of Christ assuming the form of a human servant, even to death on the cross, is the principal lesson for us of the acceptance of death. The story of Oedipus and the Sphinx has something to say of this, too. The Sphinx in the Oedipus story is not the Egyptian Sphinx, but a female form with the wings of a bird, the body of an animal, and the breast, neck, and face of a woman. What she represents is the destiny of all life. She has sent a plague over the land, and to lift the plague, the hero has to answer the riddle that she presents: “What is it that walks on four legs, then on two legs, and then on three?” The answer is “Man.” The child creeps about on four legs, the adult walks on two, and the aged walk with a cane.
The riddle of the Sphinx is the image of life itself through time-childhood, maturity, age, and death. When without fear you have faced and accepted the riddle of the Sphinx, death has no further hold on you, and the curse of the Sphinx disappears. The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure-fearlessness and achievement.
I remember reading as a boy of the war cry of the Indian braves riding into battle against the rain of bullets of Custer’s men. “What a wonderful day to die!” There was no hanging on there in life. That is one of the great messages of mythology. I, as I now know myself, am not the final form of my being. We must constantly die one way or another to the selfhood already achieved.
CORRESPONDING to the spatial order of the world mountain, the four quarters, and the ever-cycling spheres, there is everywhere an associated temporal order of precisely measured days, months, years, and eons.
In India, for example, where the first form to appear in the lotus of Vishnu’s dream is seen as Brahma, it is held that when the cosmic dream dissolves, after 100 Brahma years, its Brahma too will disappear-to reappear, however, when the lotus again unfolds. Now one Brahma year is reckoned as 360 Brahma days and nights, each night and each day consisting of 12,000,000 divine years. But each divine year, in turn, consists of 360 human years; so that one full day and night of Brahma, or 24,000,000 divine years, contains 24,000,000 times 360 or 8,640,000,000 human years, just as in our own system of reckoning the 24 hours of a day contain 86,400 seconds-each second corresponding to the length of time, furthermore, of one heartbeat of a human body in perfect physical condition. Thus it appears not only that the temporal order written on the faces of our clocks is the same as that of the Indian god Vishnu’s dream, but also that there is built into this system the mythological concept of corresponding between the organic rhythms of the human body as a microcosm and the cycling eons of the universe,the macrocosm.
Every day of a Brahma lifetime of 100 Brahma years, the god’s eyes slowly open and close 1,000 times. When they open a universe appears, and the moment they close it fades, appearing, enduring, fading, and disappearing thus in a cycle of four stages called yugas, named in descending series after the four throws of a die:
Krita, 4, “the lucky throw”
Treta, 3
Dvapara, 2
Kali, 1, “the worst”
These correspond to the four ages in our own classical tradition, of gold, silver, bronze, and iron; also to the meaning of the prophetic dream attributed in the Book of Daniel to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon; which was of an idol “mighty and of exceeding brightness,” the head of which was “of fine gold, its breast and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay” (Daniel 2:31-33).67
The four ages of the Indian cycle are described in the sacred books as follows: Krita Yuga, a golden age of 4,000 divine years, preceded by a dawn of 400 years and followed by a twilight of equal length; in sum, 4,800 divine years, during the whole of which the Cow of Virtue stands on all four legs, men are perfectly virtuous, and the laws of caste strictly honored.
Treta Yuga, one quarter less virtuous, blissful, and long; in sum, including its dawn and twilight, an age of 3,600 divine years, when the Cow stands on three legs. Dvapara Yuga, a second quarter gone, and the Cow is balanced on two legs; a period lasting, with its dawn and twilight, but 2,400 divine years.
Finally Kali Yuga, our own world age: wicked and consequently miserable, with the Cow of Virtue on one leg. And just as in the prophecy of Daniel it is declared that the races of this age “will mix with one another in marriage,” texts of India the fourth period is characterized by “the mixture of castes.” This law- SO in the sacred less terminal age, declining toward catastrophe, is believed to have commenced on February 17, 3102 B.C., and it will endure, including its dawn and twilight, only 1,200 divine years.
Translating, now, divine into human years, we arrive at the following sums:
4,800 × 360 = 1,728,000 human years
3,600 × 360 = 1,296,000
2,400 × 360 = 864,000
1,200 × 360 = 432,000
12,000 divine = 4,320,000 human years = 1 Great Cycle or Mahayuga
Furthermore:
1,000 Mahayugas = 1 daytime (or 1 night) of Brahma (1 kalpa): i.e., 12,000,000 divine years or 4,320,000,000 human years.
360 days and nights of Brahma (720 kalpas) = 1 Brahma year: i.e., 8,640,000,000 divine or 3,110,400,000,000 human years.
100 Brahma years =1 Brahma lifetime:
i.e., 864,000,000,000 divine or 311,040,000,000,000 human years.
At the close of each Brahma lifetime, Brahma and all dissolve into the body of the cosmic dreamer, who remains then absorbed in dreamless sleep for a period equal in length to another Brahma lifetime-until presently something within him stirs, the lotus dream again unfurls, and all begins anew. Moreover, in the distances of infinite space innumerable lotus universes are everywhere unfurling, flowering, and fading, each with its Brahma, as on a boundless lotus lake. Nor in the infinitudes of time will there ever be an end-as in the past there was no beginning of this flowering and fading of Brahma worlds.
When the time arrives for the reabsorption of such a lotus dream into the timeless state of deep dreamless sleep within the body of the world-dreamer, the work of destruction is absolute. As told in the Matsya Purana, reviewed and retold by Heinrich Zimmer in a chapter on “The Waters of Non-Existence”;
In this Indian conception of the process of destruction, the regular course of the Indian year-fierce heat and drought alternating with torrential rains-is magnified to such a degree that instead of sustaining, it demolishes existence. The warmth that normally ripens and the moisture that nourishes, when alternating in beneficent,co-operation, now annihilates. Vishnu begins the terrible last work by pouring his infinite energy into the sun. He himself becomes the sun. With its fierce, devouring rays he draws into himself the eyesight of every animate being. The whole world dries up and withers, the earth splits, and through deep fissures a deadly blaze of heat licks at the divine waters of the subterranean abyss; these are caught up and swal- lowed. And when the life-sap has entirely vanished from both the egg-shaped cosmic body and all the bodies of its creatures, Vishnu becomes the wind, the cosmic life- breath, and pulls out of all creatures the enlivening air. Like desiccated leaves the sear substance of the universe leaps to the cyclone. Friction ignites the whirling tumult of highly inflammable matter; the god has turned into fire. All goes up in a gigantic conflagration, then sinks into smoldering ash. Finally, in the form of a great cloud, Vishnu sheds a torrential rain, sweet and pure as milk, to quench the conflagration of the world. The scorched and suffering body of the earth knows at last its ultimate relief, final extinction, Nirvana. Under the flood of the God-become- Rain it is taken back into the primal ocean from which it arose at the universal dawn. The fecund water-womb receives again into itself the ashes of all creation. The ultimate elements melt into the undifferentiated fluid out of which they once arose. The moon, the stars, dissolve. The mounting tide becomes a limitless sheet of water. This is the interval of a night of Brahma.Vishnu sleeps. Like a spider that has climbed up the thread that once issued from its own organism, drawing it back into itself, the god has consumed again the web of the universe. Alone upon the immortal substance of the ocean, a giant figure, submerged partly, partly afloat, he takes delight in slumber. There is no one to behold him, no one to comprehend him; there is no knowledge of him, except within himself.
