Mythological images are the images by which the consciousness is put in touch with the unconscious. That’s what they are. When you don’t have your mythological images, or when your consciousness rejects them for some reason or other, you are out of touch with your own deepest part. I think that’s the purpose of a mythology that we can live by. We have to find the one that we are in fact living by and know what it is so that we can direct our craft with competence.

Now, many of us live by myths that guide us,

There is a level of your dream consciousness that springs from your nature, not from your personal biography. Your nature itself is of two orders. First comes the order of animal nature: the instinct system which is the same in all human beings. Next comes the order of your spiritual life: what goes from the neck up.

No other animal has this great thing up there, this mind. When Dr. Freud began interpreting the inspirations and zeals of the top end of the spinal column in terms of the other end, he misunderstood the whole thing. Since the whole sense of mythological imagery is to propel you up into the spiritual realm, interpreting these things in a purely physical, biological way pulls you down again; it punctures and deflates the symbol. We share with the animals the desire to live, the urge toward survival and security. We share with the animals the zeal for sex and the zeal for winning and pres- tige-I’m the winner. Yet we bear within us the potential for an entirely dif- ferent level of experience, a level that can come to us in a moment.

Dante described this enlightened moment in his Vita nuova-the mo ment when he beheld Beatrice, the moment that turned him from a mere human animal into a poet. One might see her as an erotic object, yet what he saw was a manifestation of beauty; he experienced her presence on a different level altogether.

Five values: survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, and self- development. I looked at that list and I wondered why it should seem so strange to me. I finally realized that it struck me as strange because these are exactly the values that mythology transcends.

Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development- in my experience, those are exactly the values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for. They have to do with the primary biological mode as understood by human consciousness. Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth. Christ gives you the clue when he says, “He that loses his life for my sake shall find it.”

Maslow’s five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to. These are the bores. (In a marvelous footnote to an essay on Don Quixote, Ortega y Gasset once wrote, “A bore is one who deprives us of our solitude without providing companionship.

How do we find this thing in ourselves, that which truly moves us? Well, as I’ve said, mythologies are basically the same everywhere. Consequently, mythic images do not refer primarily to historical events. They come from the psyche and talk to the psyche; their primary reference is to the psyche-to the spirit, as we call it-and not to a historical event.

Now, there’s no doubt about it that there are certain sensations which spontaneously activate responses in the human body. You don’t have to be told what sexual signals are; in fact, very often one isn’t told at all, yet the biological imperative takes hold, and everything works just fine. Everything gets started and the parents begin to wonder what’s happening. So we don’t have to receive instructions there-though it doesn’t hurt.

Libresse, certain odors immediately start the salivary glands going. Sleep overtakes you when you find a place to lie down. There are given sig- nals to which the human body responds. These we share with the animals: torpor, activity, sexual zeal, mother love for the just-born creature, aggres- sion toward the one who threatens you, and so on.

There’s another level of consciousness in the human psyche, which I would associate with those levels of the wonderful thing that is human consciousness from the heart up to the crown of the head. When the awe and the zeal and the human mind yearning to know are awakened, a new sense of what it is to be human is born. Just as we have a physical body that we share with each other so that we can respond similarly to the same smells, so also we have a spiritual consciousness that is responding comparable to signals, and the whole concept of the archetypes of the human psyche is based on the notion that in the human brain, in the human sympathetic nervous system, there are structures that create a readiness to respond to certain signals. These are shared by all of humanity, with variations individually, but essentially pretty close along the line. And when these are triggered, there is the automatic response, just as there would be to an odor, whether that odor of bananas comes from an African cooking pot or from the fruit basket in my beautiful hotel room. Over the millennia, we have developed some experience of how people respond to spiritual symbols and how contemplating a particular symbol slants the mind places the mind on a certain plane of consciousness, which activates deeper spiritual powers in the individual. Everyone has his own favorites; everyone is ready for an experience unlike that of anybody else. The symbol which you are ready for

evokes a response in you. In our tradition, however, these images-these symbols- have been applied to historical events. In our religious traditions, we interpret the motifs of the Virgin Birth, death, Resurrection, and ascension as particular, temporal episodes. If you begin to doubt the possibility of these occurrences, your faith may be troubled. You will lose the symbol because you reject it. It was

given to you as a kind of newspaper report of something that’s supposed to have happened somewhere; now, you’ve studied biology, and you don’t even want to consider whether or how a virgin birth can have been accomplished. Is that what it referred to; is that what the mystery is? No, the mystery does not refer to something that might or might not have happened at a certain date in a certain place. It is a motif that is found in myths all over the world, and so must speak to the human psyche in another way entirely.

When these symbols disappear, we have lost the vehicle for communication between our waking consciousness and our deepest spiritual life. We have to reactivate the symbol, to bring it back to life, and to find what it means, to relate it to ourselves in some way or another.

Now, what did Jung do when he decided to seek out his myth? His process of discovery is interesting in that it was so childish. Here he was, thirty-seven years old or so, and he asked himself, What was it I most enjoyed doing as a little boy when I was alone and allowed to play? As it turned out, what he liked to do was put rocks together and make little cities out of stone.

So he said, Why, I’m a big man now, so I’ll play with big stones. He bought himself a piece of property in a beautiful place on the lake opposite the city of Zürich. He began planning and building a house in this lovely place, Ascona, and as he worked with his hands, he activated his imagination.

Now, that’s the big thing, to activate your imagination somehow. You can’t do this by taking suggestions from somebody else. You must find that which your own unconscious wants to meditate on. With his imagination activated, Jung found all kinds of new fantasies coming, dreams of all kinds. He began making records of what he had dreamed and then amplifying it by all kinds of associations.

By doing this, he began the work of discovering his myth. He found that his dreams were becoming very important to him and very rich; he began writing about his dreams in a little journal. He put down each silly little impulse, each theme that came up in his dreams. He recorded the dreams so as to bring them up into his consciousness, and as he kept the journal, the underlying images began coming through. Then he would take pictures of some of these dream things always in a very solemn way. Now, this book is the kind of thing one would not wish to have published; it is just too private. It was his ceremonial, ritualistic exploration of the place from which the mystery of his life came.

A mythologically grounded culture presents you with symbols that im- mediately evoke your participation; they are all vital, living connections, and so they link you both to the underlying mystery and to the culture it- self. Yet when that culture uses symbols that are no longer alive, that are no longer effective, it cuts you off. The marga or the Elementargedanken provide a path back to the heart of the issue. Looking at the symbol in terms of its universal meaning rather than its local, specific reference takes you down the path to self-discovery and illumination.

The way to find your own myth is to determine those traditional sym- bols that speak to you and use them, you might say, as bases for medita- tion. Let them work on you.

A ritual is nothing but the dramatic, visual, active manifestation or rep- resentation of a myth. By participating in the rite, you are engaged in the myth, and the myth works on you-provided, of course, that you are caught by the image.

But when you just go through the routine without real commitment, expecting it to work magically and get you into heaven-because you know that when you’re baptized, you get into heaven, after all-you’ve turned away from the proper use of these rites and images.

First, think about your own childhood, as Jung did-the symbols that were put into you then remain. Think not how they relate to an institu- tion, which is probably defunct and likely difficult to respect. Rather, think how the symbols operate on you. Let them play on the imagination, acti- vating it. By bringing your own imagination into play in relation to these symbols, you will be experiencing the marga, the symbols’ power to open a path to the heart of mysteries.

It is my belief, drawn from experience, that there’s nothing better than comparative mythological studies to let you grasp the big, general form of an image and to give you many different ways of approaching that image. Images are eloquent in themselves; they talk to you. When the intellect tries to explicate an image, one can never exhaust its meaning, one can never ex- haust its possibility. Images don’t essentially mean anything: they are, just as you are. They talk to some kernel in you that is.

So ask an artist, “What does your picture mean?” Well, if he despises you enough, he’ll tell you.

The point is that if you need him to tell you what it means, then you haven’t even seen it. What’s the meaning of a sunset? What’s the meaning of a flower? What’s the meaning of a cow?

The Buddha is called the tathāgata, “the one thus come.” He is as he is. The universe is “thus come,” too. Every piece of it arises out of the same ground. This is called the Doctrine of Mutual Arising.