I greatly admire the psychologist Abraham Maslow. As I was reading one of his books, however, I found a sort of value schedule, values that his psychological experiments had shown that people live for. He gave a list of 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 loseth 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.”)

The awakening of awe is the key here, what Leo Frobenius, the won- derful student of African cultures, called Ergriffenheit, being seized by something so that you are pulled out.

Now, it’s not always easy or possible to know by what it is that you are seized. You find yourself doing silly things, and you have been seized but you don’t know what the dynamics are. You have been struck by that awakening of awe, of fascination, of the experience of mystery-the awareness of your bliss. With that, you have the awakening of your mind in its own service. The brain can enable you to found a business in order to maintain your family and get you prestige in the community; given the right mind, it can do these things very well. But the brain can also impel you to give all that up because you become fascinated with some kind of mystery.

What is it? That enforces the persona system (the folk idea system)in jungian psychology. 

1st Level: What will the neighbours think ?
Ohh. I should not do it this way or that way.what will the neighbours think?

I should not quit my study just because I am not interested in that.what will the neighbours think.

When the Sati would not throw herself at the husband’s funeral. What will the neighbours think ?So we throw around the funeral.

2nd Level: Rules and conduct of institutions.  Ohh I am a teacher and a teacher should not be so light or polite and so forth

Ohh I am a doctor.I must be looking like a serious temperament..What Yet Christ told his disciples, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.

Suppose that I am a railway ticket examiner and I unfortunately found a passenger without a ticket and he is requesting me about their excuses like his mom’s health is critical and it seems he is right but still does not let him go to their destination.Here, I am right according to the role (a ticket examiner)I am playing but I am totally wrong as a human being which makes a big circle around the circle of railway or any institution rules.

“You judge according to your persona context, and you will be judged in terms of it. Unless you can learn to look beyond the local dictates of what is right and what is wrong, you’re not a complete human being. You’re just a part of that particular social order.

Now, the individual in this system must fill a role within the order as dictated by the knowers of the order, the priestly group. They understand the order and decipher its pattern, while the individual participates as the priests dictate. This pattern is called, in Sanskrit, dharma. It is the order of the universe; the word dharma comes from the root dhr, which means “support.” The support of the universe is this order. As the sun should not wish to be the moon, as a mouse should not wish to be a lion, so the indi- vidual born into one caste, one category of society, should not wish to be anything else. The individual’s birth determines his role, his character, his duty, and everything else. In such a society, education consists of being trained to one’s proper role.

3rd Level:Then,we have the idea of nature. People speak nature’s moral laws.

Let me remind you of that moment in which Christ transcended all the laws. It is the story of His forty days in the desert. In this case, the Devil represented the Law that had to be transcended. The very first question the Devil put to Christ was, “Why don’t you turn these stones into bread?” Christ replies that man lives not by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. He rejects the economic theory of the spiritual life, thereby refuting Bernard Shaw’s notion that one must be economically well-off before one can practice spiritual exercises.

In the second temptation, the Devil takes Christ up onto the mountain top, showing and offering to Him the lands of the world if He will bow down to him. And Christ says, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” thereby transcending the seduction of political power as life’s aim.

The Devil then takes Him up to the pinnacle of the temple, suggesting that if Christ is so spiritual, He can cast himself down and God will bear Him up. Christ rejects this temptation to spiritual inflation by saying, “You shall not tempt the Lord thy God.” Christ returns then from the desert to preach to the people the new message of the spirit, the message of love.

Just like Moses refused to sacrifice his son as God says in his dream to sacrifice his son.He refuge the notion of God.

And finally this represents the idea of transcendent,this is the sun door through which the soul goes burning out all the temperality into eternal life.

whatever is ultimate is beyond the categories of being and nonbeing. Is it or is it not? As the Buddha is reported to have said: “It both is and is not; neither is, nor is not.” God as the ultimate mystery of being is beyond thinking.

There is a wonderful story in one of the Upanishads about the god Indra. Now, it happened at this time that a great monster had enclosed all the waters of the earth, so there was a terrible drought, and the world was in a very bad condition. It took Indra quite a while to realize that he had a box of thunderbolts and that all he had to do was drop a thunderbolt on the monster and blow him up. When he did that, the waters flowed, and the

world was refreshed, and Indra said, “What a great boy am I.” So, thinking, “What a great boy am I,” Indra goes up to the cosmic mountain, which is the central mountain of the world, and decides to build a palace worthy of such as he. The main carpenter of the gods goes to work on it, and in very quick order he gets the palace into pretty good condition. But every time Indra comes to inspect it, he has bigger ideas about how splendid and grandiose the palace should be. Finally, the carpenter says, “My god, we are both immortal, and there is no end to his desires. I am caught for eternity.” So he decides to go to Brahma, the creator god, and complain.

Brahma sits on a lotus, the symbol of divine energy and divine grace. The lotus grows from the navel of Vishnu, who is the sleeping god, whose dream is the universe. So the carpenter comes to the edge of the great lotus pond of the universe and tells his story to Brahma. Brahma says, “You go home. I will fix this up.” Brahma gets off his lotus and kneels down to address sleeping Vishnu. Vishnu just makes a gesture and says something like, “Listen, fly, something is going to happen.”

Next morning, at the gate of the palace that is being built, there appears a beautiful blue-black boy with a lot of children around him, just admiring his beauty. The porter at the gate of the new palace goes running to Indra, and Indra says, “Well, bring in the boy.” The boy is brought in, and Indra, the king god, sitting on his throne, says, “Young man, welcome. And what brings you to my palace?”

“Well,” says the boy with a voice like thunder rolling on the horizon, “I have been told that you are building such a palace as no Indra before you ever built.”

And Indra says, “Indras before me, young man-what are you talking about?” The boy says, “Indras before I have seen them come and

you. go, come and go. Just think, Vishnu sleeps in the cosmic ocean, and the lotus of the universe grows from his navel. On the lotus sits Brahma, the creator. Brahma opens his eyes, and a world comes into being, governed by an Indra. Brahma closes his eyes, and a world goes out of being. The life of a Brahma is four hundred and thirty-two thousand years. When he dies, the lotus goes back, and another lotus is formed, and another Brahma. Then think of the galaxies beyond galaxies in infinite space, each a lotus, with a Brahma sitting on it, opening his eyes, closing his eyes. And Indras? There may be wise men in your

court who would volunteer to count the drops of water in the oceans of the world or the grains of sand on the beaches, but no one would count those Brahmin, let alone those Indras.”

While the boy is talking, an army of ants parades floor. The boy laughs when he sees them, and Indra’s hair stands on end, and he says to the boy, “Why do you laugh?” across the

The boy answers, “Don’t ask unless you are willing to be hurt.” Indra says, “I ask. Teach.” (That, by the way, is a good Ori- ental idea: you don’t teach until you are asked. You don’t force your mission down people’s throats.)

And so the boy points to the ants and says, “Former Indras all. Through many lifetimes they rise from the lowest conditions to highest illumination. And then they drop their thunderbolt on a monster, and they think, ‘What a good boy am I.’ And down they go again.”

While the boy is talking, a crotchety old yogi comes into the palace with a banana leaf parasol. He is naked except for a loincloth, and on his chest is a little disk of hair, and half the hairs in the middle have all dropped out.

The boy greets him and asks him just what Indra was about to ask. “Old man, what is your name? Where do you come from? Where is your family? Where is your house? And what is the meaning of this curious constellation of hair on your chest?”

“Well,” says the old fella, “my name is Hairy. I don’t have a house. Life is too short for that. I just have this parasol. I don’t have a family. I just meditate on Vishnu’s feet, and think of eternity, and how passing time is. You know, every time an Indra dies, a world disappears-these things just flash by like that. Every time an Indra dies, one hair drops out of this circle on my chest. Half the hairs are gone now. Pretty soon they will all be gone. Life is short. Why build a house?”

Then the two disappear. The boy was Vishnu, the Lord Pro- tector, and the old yogi was Shiva, the creator and destroyer of the world, who had just come for the instruction of Indra, who is simply a god of history but thinks he is the whole show. Indra is sitting there on the throne, and he is completely disillusioned, completely shot. He calls the carpenter and says, “I’m quitting the building of this palace. You are dismissed.” So the carpenter got his intention. He is dismissed from the job, and there is no more house building going on.

Indra decides to go out and be a yogi and just meditate on the lotus feet of Vishnu. But he has a beautiful queen named Indrani. And when Indrani hears of Indra’s plan, she goes to the priest of the gods and says, “Now he has got the idea in his head of going out to become a yogi.”

“Well,” says the priest, “come in with me, darling, and we will sit down, and I will fix this up.”

So they sit down before the king’s throne, and the priest says, “Now, I wrote a book for you many years ago on the art of politics. You are in the position of the king of the gods. You are a manifestation of the mystery of Brahma in the field of time. This is a high privilege. Appreciate it, honor it, and deal with life as though you were what you really are. And besides, now I am going to write you a book on the art of love so that you and your wife will know that in the wonderful mystery of the two that are one, the Brahma is radiantly present also.’

And with this set of instructions, Indra gives up his idea of going out and becoming a yogi and finds that, in life, he can represent the eternal as a symbol, you might say, of the Brahma. So each of us is, in a way, the Indra of his own life. You can

make a choice, either to throw it all off and go into the forest to meditate, or to stay in the world, both in the life of your job, which is the kingly job of politics and achievement, and in the love life with your wife and family. Now, this is a very nice myth, it seems to me.