Transcription
Hallelujah.
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Hello, I'm Susan Sandon. In the previous program of Mythos, Joe Campbell told us that the Christ idea and the Buddha idea were equivalent mythological symbols. The gods are projections of powers within us, not somewhere out there.
One day when Joe was on his way to lunch in Midtown Manhattan, he was stopped on the street by a man handing out religious pamphlets. The man asked suddenly, "Do you believe in God?" Stepping back to consider his questioner, Campbell responded, "I don't think you have time for my answer."
For Joe, to reduce the idea of God to a question of belief is to miss the point. The single god of Judeo-Christian tradition or the many gods of Hinduism are personifications of what he calls transcendent energy consciousness. In this program, Joe uses the spiritual discipline of yoga to explain what this transcendent energy consciousness is. He begins with the popular Hindu story to set the stage.
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Now let me tell you a little story. It's a wonderful story and it uh it comes in one of the uh upanishads the brahav upanishad uh Indra the king of the vadic pantheon uh had just slain a monster serpent called Vitra the encloser who had enclosed all the waters of the earth and created a drought and this drought lasted for many hundreds of years so that things were in pretty bad shape when Indra who apparently thought slowly in those days suddenly thought well why don't I just throw a thunderbolt into this chap and blow him up so Indra reaches into his thunderbolt box throws a thunderbolt boom that's the end of Vitra and the waters flow back to the earth and uh Indra thinks what a great boy am I so he goes up onto the top of the cosmic mountain on which the gods have their palaces and he sees the palaces in pretty bad disrepair. So he decides he'll go to work and uh build a palace worthy of his great dignity. So he gets Vishvakan, the carpenter of the gods, the great craftsman, and he says, "Now I'd like um some lotus ponds over here and uh you know this kind of tower there and pillows over here and all kinds of things. A grand grand affair." And every time he came back to [clears throat] look at how things were going, he had more ideas until Vishvakama thought, "My god, I'll never be able to satisfy this chap." And we're both immortal, so this is going to go on a long time.
And uh so in great distress, he went to Brahma. Now Brahma is the god with four faces that sends the light of consciousness out over the world that Vishnu has dreamed. And Brahma sits on the lotus Padma the goddess lotus which is Vishnu's dream and Vishnu as I say is asleep on the cosmic serpent out there on the cosmic waters. So Vishvakan comes to the shore and he prays to Brahma up there on the lotus and tells him his story. Brah says okay I'll fix this up. So Brahma gets off his lotus and uh prays to Vishnu and tells Vishnu what's going on here and Vishnu asleep just says like that.
So next morning, the porter at the gate of the palace that's being built sees a beautiful blue black boy uh kind of a Krishna type uh surrounded by children who are amazed at the beauty of this youth and um the porter runs back to Indra who's on his throne and says to Indra, it's auspicious to invite this beautiful boy in and I suggest you do so Indra. Indra says, "All right, show him in." So the boy is invited in and he comes and stands before Indra's throne. Hospitality is off in the way of fruits and so forth and so on. And then Indra asks, "A young man, what brings you here?" And with a voice like thunder rolling on the horizon, the boy replies, "I've been told that you're building a greater palace than any palace that was ever built by any Indra before you. I've come to give it a once over and indeed this is so."
And Indra is sitting there and he thinks uh and he says Indra is before me young man what are you talking about and the boy says just consider Vishnu lies on the serpent. The lotus of a universe rises. On the lotus sits a Brahma. And every time Brahma opens his eyes, a world age comes into being governed by an Indra. He closes his eyes. He opens his eyes. Another world age. He closes his eyes. This goes on for 360 divine years. Eyes opening and closing. And then the lotus dissolves and it goes back. Another lotus. Another brahma opening, closing. And then he says, "Consider the galaxies in the infinitudes of space, each with its lotus, with its brahma, eyes opening, eyes closing." There may be those in your court who would be willing to count the sands, the grains of sand on the beaches of the world or the drops of water in the ocean. But who would count those brahmas, let alone Indras?
And as he's talking, a parade of ants is coming across the floor in perfect rank. And when the boy sees them, he laughs. And Indra's whiskers go up and he says, "What are you laughing at?" The boy says, "Don't ask unless you want to be hurt." And Indra says, "I ask." The boy says former Indras all through many incarnations they have climbed the scale of virtue and they have gained the point of becoming an Indra sitting in the role of Indra. Then they kill Ritra the serpent and they think, "What a great boy am I." And zoom, they go down to the bottom. They start up again.
Well, while he's talking, a crotchety old yogi comes in uh wearing a loin cloth, carrying a um umbrella of banana leaves, and on his chest is a circle of hairs, and all the hairs have gone out of the middle. So, it's just a kind of ring. The boy asks the questions which are in Indra's mind. Who are you? What's your name? Where do you live? Where's your family? Why do you carry that parasol? And what's the meaning of this curious circle of hair on your chest? Well, says the old fellow. Hair is my name. I don't have a house. Life's short. This umbrella is good enough for me. I simply spend my days in the worship of Vishnu's lotus feet. And as for these hairs, curious. Every time an Indra dies, one hair drops out. Half of them are gone. Pretty soon, they'll all be gone. Life's short. Why build a house?
Well, Indra is pretty smitten by this. And the two of them uh go out. And he thinks, I'm going to quit this throne. I'm going to quit the whole thing. I'm going out. I'm going to become a yogi. I'm going to worship Vishnu's lotus feet. And he tells his wife this, Indrani. You've seen her picture sitting on the lion, this great gal. And uh see, oh this is ridiculous. And uh so she goes to the priest of the gods and says, "Now look, he's got this idea in his head. He's going out to be a yogi." And he says, "Oh, come on, darling. We'll go in and uh we'll talk to him." So taking Indraani by the hand priest goes in sits down and he begins to talk to Vishnu to uh Indra and he tells him there are two aspects there's the aspect of infinity and there's the aspect of the revelation of infinity in the forms of the world and here you are on the throne as the highest manifestation in the social world of this this miracle of being and in knowing your role and what you're doing, you can at the same time be worshiping the feet of Vishnu. Now he says, I've written you a book already on the art of war. This is the art of shastra and believe me makes um uh navell look like a kindergarten uh book. And uh now I'll write one on the art of love. So that in both aspects of your life as the teacher and ruler of men and as the lover of your wife you will be experiencing the rapture of the divine eternal pouring through you.
So that's good Indian stuff. Uh there are these these many ways and in the ways of being in the world or in the ways of leaving the world there the rapture can show through. Now who were the two creatures that came into the palace? Because the boy was Vishnu and the old yogi was Shiva and they came in to instruct this old vadic god uh Indra. It's called the humbling of Indra.
Well, here's here's Vishnu, this grand deity who is the counterplay to Shiva. Now, in the popular way of talking about Indian uh gods, we say Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer. But actually the two great gods are Vishnu and Shiva. Shiva the world dancer. He's dancing on a little dwarf whose name is forgetfulness. That's ourselves forgetful of our eternal identity with Shiva. Uh this right hand holds a little drum and the drum goes tick tick tick tick. That is the tick of time which creates the world of time. And the world of time is as a veil thrown across the face of eternity and we cannot penetrate it. Eternity is not a long time. It has nothing to do with time. It is the dimension that is oluded from our experience by the veil of time. This hand holds a flame and that is the flame that is to burn away the veil of time. This hand says do not be afraid. This hand is called the elephant hand or teaching hand. It points to the lifted [snorts] left foot which means release the right foot down on the back of forgetfulness. And so this dance of creation, destruction and passing time holds in its center the still point of the head. And uh this is what lives in us. We do not feel the weight of Shiva, his foot on our back anymore than the little dwarf does, but he's there. And his dance is to call us to that knowledge.
Now we've got Vishnu. Vishnu is the other great deity of the uh traditional pantheon. This is his incarnation as a boar. There was a flood. The whole world was uh drowned in a flood. There are many floods in the piranic tradition. And here's the goddess earth who is down in the abyss of the waters. And Vishnu turns himself into a boar, a gigantic boar which plunges them to the bottom of the water and takes the goddess and carries her back to light. Sometimes she hangs onto his tusk there. And it's it's a grand grand story of him going down and she in the abyss seeing this light come down to her and then carry her back again. And as he's carrying her back he says every time I carry you this way that means every 90 billion years this thing happens. The wonderful thing is this expansion of the notion of time which diminishes our notion of the importance of the present moment and makes it possible for us to see it as but a flash on the uh surface of the waters of eternity.
This is another appearance of Vishnu as the man lion naringha. This was an atheist and like many atheists he had the misfortune to have a very religious son and he was sick and tired of hearing his son talk about Vishnu. So one day he said well if Vishnu is everywhere let him come out of that column. The column split. Out comes Vishnu who is a lion. Grabs this chap whose name is golden garment. Rips up his belly, lays him on his knee and begins eating his guts like spaghetti. And this is a favorite story in the in the popular theater. I'm going Vishnu is eating those guts. Everybody loves it.
In the story the humbling of Indra, Shiva tells Indra that there are two aspects of life. The eternal and the revelation of the eternal through our experiences in the world. What exactly is the revelation? What is the eternal that Shiva speaks of? He is speaking of the transcendent energy consciousness that Joe talks about. There are different ways to define it, all difficult and all just approximations. Because as Joe says, these ideas are beyond words. But to begin to understand them, we must take our own ideas of consciousness and God and turn them on their head. Joe does just this as he explores the spiritual tradition of yoga as it has been practiced and refined for thousands of years in India.
Now what I'm going to be talking about is this morning is yoga and the idea of yoga is already given in the name yoga. It comes from a root yug that means to yoke yoke something to something else. And what is being yolked is our ego consciousness the a consciousness to the source of consciousness. Now just as the idea of deity in these uh perennial traditions uh greatly differs from our idea of deity uh so does the idea of consciousness in uh speaking of deities in the terms that are proper to these mythologically grounded traditions I say the deity is a personification of the energy it's a personification of an energy that informs life, all life, your life, the world's life. The nature of the personification will be determined by historical circumstances. The personification is folk. The energy is human and so deities proceed from the energies and they are the messengers and vehicles so for so to say of the energies. Whereas our idea of deity is that deity is a fact and it's from that fact that the energies proceed. Topsy turvy roundabout.
Likewise with respect to consciousness. Our notion is that the brain is the source of consciousness. Something of that sort. The traditional idea is that the brain is a function of consciousness. Consciousness is first and the brain is an organ that encapsulates consciousness and focuses it in a certain direction on the direction of time and space knowledge which is secondary knowledge. And the notion that we are all manifestations of that transcendent consciousness which goes beyond all our powers to think and to name is the basic idea of all of this.
Now in our western thinking there have been moments when this has come in against what might be called the mainstream philosophy or the school philosophers. Um in the middle a long before the time of the middle ages we have Dionius the Aropagite who is a a mystical philosopher and his philosophy is picked up in the 8th and 9th centuries by Scottasana in Ireland. And this is a this is a a gnostic philosopher magnificent concepts in the high middle ages. Meister Eckhart he uses the complicated concretizing language of Christianity but he blows it apart and and you you have the recognition of the relationship of the deity to the knower of the deity. And then you have people like Jordano Bruno who was burned in the main plaza of Rome in 1600 for saying these things. But then a great moment happened in uh Renaissance Italy. Uh Kosimoto Medici invited Marcelio Ficino to translate a text that had been brought from Bzantium by a Byzantine monk. And this was the Greek text of the corpus hermeticum. hermetic philosophy of the first centuries AD contemporary with early Christianity but in the pagan terminology and when this was completed the excitement in the whole world of the arts was enormous full of all this and and this wonderful flowering of Renaissance art is eloquent of these very ideas that I I'm talking about then in later times we have Emanuel Kant there are two kinds of philosophies in the world. There's English philosophy where nobody really understood what Kant was saying and there's uh the philosophies that we find uh just implicit for example in uh in the middle European uh systems.
Um what [clears throat] Kant recognized in his critique of pure reason was that all of our knowledge all of our experience experience is conditioned by the organs of experience and the organs of knowledge and our priority [clears throat] primary antecedent to our experience of anything is our knowledge of time and space. Everything comes to us in a field of time and space. And in that wonderful paper of his called the uh uh foundation of metaphysics uh he asked this question. How is it that we can make determinations for relationships in space here and know that these will work in space there? And he says it's because the laws of space are right in our own mind. Well, this struck me like dynamite. uh the flight to around the moon but just before the one where Armstrong's foot came down on the moon uh ground control Houston asked who's navigating now and the answer that came back and I heard it with amazement was Newton. Uh now the laws that would work in that space up there where nobody had ever been before were known so perfectly that it was possible to bring that little module back within a mile of a boat in the Pacific Ocean from around the moon. And no matter how far these space vehicles go out into space, we're we've enveloped it. We know it. But when Armstrong's foot came down on the moon, nobody knew how deeply it was going to sink into moon dust. That's how posteriori knowledge. But the framing order of knowledge through which all of our experiences come. This we already know. But what is the thing that we're coming to know through time and space? Is it a thing? No. Things are in time and space. Wow. You've gone into the transcendent there. So he calls this transcendent transcendental aesthetic. And then after you've seen everything, you begin thinking about it. And the laws of your thinking are what determine what you can think. These are the laws of logic the categories and you can't even think of anything that doesn't fit in those. So you're enclosed. This is Maya. Exactly. And it was Schopenhau who first recognized that the Indian concept of maya and con concept of the uh forms of sensibility and the categories of logic were equivalent. So in his world as well and idea he's able to talk about uh western thinking in terms of oriental thinking the two come right together there nature picked this up and wow this is a whole new thrust in western school philosophy so uh these are very important moments in in the western philosophical tradition that recognize the breakthrough of this elementary idea system, the perennial philosophy into what might be called the school system.
Well, with that little prelude, I'm going to come now to our our uh thoughts for the day. Yoga then is a linking of consciousness, this a consciousness, this ego consciousness to the source of consciousness. And the source of consciousness is of course transcended of all our concepts just as all that truly I don't even dare say is because is is a concept. You see you can't talk about these things when you ask is God one or many one or many. These are concepts. These are the categories of thought. And the word God is not supposed to refer to a personality. It's supposed to refer past the personality to that which is really transcendent of thought. And the mythic symbols open like that to transcendence. Jung makes a distinction between the uh the word symbol and the word sign. I mean this is an arbitrary definition that he uses. A symbol is a mythic symbol which has one leg here and the other in infinity. It uh it points to the transcendent. A sign points to something here. the as normally interpreted, God is a sign, not a symbol. [clears throat] The word God refers to what's supposed to be a fact. And then there's that saying I like to quote that came up in the Gnostic period. The problem with Yave is he thinks he's God. The uh uh that is to say, he says, "I'm it. I'm no symbol." And then of course when he's the only one that's it then any everybody else's god is no god at all [clears throat] in proper language concretizing the image concretizing the symbol is what we call idolatry. So that our whole religion from this standpoint is an idolatrous system. And perhaps that's because of this, you know, unconscious idolatry of our own that we're seeing idolatry in everybody else and busting idols. Just a little thought for the day.
Now, the uh the um classic book of yoga is called the yoga sutras. And the word sutra is related to our word sutur. The thread that a uh doctor uses to sew you up after an operation. So yoga sutras means the thread of yoga and there's a type of book a type of document from India called sutras. There are lots of sutras and what these are are the sort of books students buy the night before the examination which in very short concise formula summarize the uh work that you've been doing all year and you can't really understand the book unless you already know the subject. Now the second apherism of the yoga sutras which is attributed to a legendary sage named Patanjali. Uh the second apherism is the is the classic definition of yoga and it is as follows. Yoga is the intentional stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind stuff. Yoga is the intentional stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind stuff.
Now the mind stuff there are two aspects to the physiology of the mind. One is the nerves the gray matter and the other is the energy that lives in the nerves. And the energy is what communicates messages and all that. The gross matter is called in Sanskrit stula gross matter what we've got here. And the subtle matter that's say the energy inside the active activating principle is is uh called sukma or subtle matter. Now this subtle matter within the brain takes the forms of the of what impacts the senses. I see you all as though you're in my head because the subtle matter has taken your your forms and you're hearing me same reason and so forth so on. Move your eyes quickly and you see how quickly the subtle matter changes. Now the problem is it continues to change even when you want it to stand still. Suppose you wanted to hold in your mind one thought or one image something you think you like to hold there you will find within four or five seconds that you're having associated thoughts. The mind is is moving. The goal of this yoga is to make the mind stand still. uh why should you want to do that? Now we're coming to a basic idea in this perennial philosophy. Uh everything is experienced through the mind. This is Maya and the mind is in an active state. The image is given of a pond rippled by a wind and the rippled pond with its waves is reflecting images that are broken images and that come and go. Come and go, come and go. Read the first couple of verses in the book of Genesis. The wind, the breath, the spirit of God brooded or blew over the waters. That's the creation of the world. You start this excitement going. And now comes the point. What we do is identify ourselves with one of those broken images, one of those broken reflections on the surface of the pond. And here I come, there I go. That links us to the temporal flow. Time and space maya. Make the pond stand still. One image. What was broken and reflected is now seen in its still perfection. And that's your true being. But that's everybody else's true being also. And this is the goal of yoga to find that reality of consciousness uh which is of you and of everybody else.
Schopenhau in his world is will idea is full of this. That book is a symphony of rapture dealing with this uh this matter. And he uses an image which I I like to bring up in relation to this uh in his uh paper on the foundations of morality where he asks how is it that a human being can so participate in the danger and peril of another that forgetting his own self-p protection he moves spontaneously to that person's uh rescue. How is it that what we take to be the first law of nature preserving this separate entity ego is suddenly dissolved and as though one were that other one acts in the interest of the other even at the loss of one's own life spontaneously there's a spontaneous act of saving that little child was about to be hidden Schopenhauer answers and says this is a metaphysical realization that has broken through which is usually not there. It's the realization of the universal consciousness of which we are all manifestations. And so in that sense you and that other are one and the experience of separateness is only a secondary experience within the opriori frame of time and space which is the separating principle what nature calls the uh principium individus the individuating principle of time and space. If it weren't for time and space we would not be separate here. So this is our secondary experience. You'd have to have this experience in order to live in the world. But every now and then there's a breakthrough of the other realization. And so the function of yoga is to release us from the time space commitment, introduce us to the transcendent, and then comes the problem of bringing us back so that we can operate in both knowledges.
In thinking about yoga, Joe reminds us that it began as a spiritual discipline for both Hindus and Buddhists. It remains today a way to achieve higher levels of consciousness within whatever religious tradition one finds oneself. Also, there are many different types of yoga. Most use concentration on an object, a part of the body, a deity, or even an idea to promote meditation. We're mostly familiar with yoga that emphasizes physical control, posture, and breathing. At the highest level, all are means of merging personal consciousness with the undifferentiated consciousness of the divine. The steps along the way are marked by psychological transformation. Each step with a corresponding link to our western philosophies. Joe now introduces us to perhaps the most sophisticated form of yoga, condundalini yoga, which concentrates on the seven symbolic centers of our psychic energy.
Now the specific yoga that I'm going to talk about the dates for the sutras are usually given as sometime between uh 200 BC and 200 AD. In those 400 years there this thing took its shape apparently. Uh the yoga that I want to speak about is a specific late form of yoga that developed in the fourth and fifth centuries and it's known as kundalini yoga and it affected all of the eastern religious structures. It appears in Buddhism in Janism in Hinduism about simultaneously. So that in talking about it I'm going to use both systems both the uh Buddhist and the Hindu images to illustrate it.
Now we're going to start by meditating. This is said to be a comfortable posture and um we ought to sit there with the spine perfectly erect. Now since the human body and the cosmic body are equivalent, our spine is comparable to the world axis. So we have reached the world axis, the central point, the immovable spot and we are now in meditation. And you begin by breath control breathing to certain paces and the breath is very curious. You begin breathing in one nostril, hold out through the other nostril, hold in through the second, hold out through the so forth and so on. Um the notion is that emotion and feeling and state of the mind are related to breath. When you are at rest, the breathing is in a nice even order. When you are stirred with shock, the breathing changes. With passion, the breathing changes. All right? Change the breathing and you'll change the state. So, what we're trying to do is smooth the waters of the rippled stream by a slow. I mean, when you see one of these priests breathing this way, I mean, the length of the breath is terrific. And the practiced yoga yogi has a great chest full of uh breathing possibilities. Uh so we're going to calm the waters and when the waters are calm [clears throat] that image of images appears is known to us.
Now comes a point. This is the gross body. This is the subtle body. Do not identify the gross body with the subtle body. If you do that, you are crazy and you think you're it. And so we must disengage. Now what that image represents is the totality of the energies of life pouring into the field of time and space. And so it is what we call God. God is a personification of the energies and that's it. But these energies show themselves in the world in many aspects. the different organs of the body. Each organ of the body has its own impulse to action and the whole problem of our psychology is the conflict of those impulse systems. Um so each of the organs of nature and of the body uh has its own inflection of this form this one. And so we have five in the east. There are five elements in usual talking in the west. There are four but then there are love and hate that pull them together and separate them which represent the fifth. Here the fifth is space accasha as as they usually translate it ether and then comes air and fire and water and earth in that order of density. And the one of the modes of talking about creation is a precipitation out of space of an energy that becomes denser and denser in terms of the five elements and then each of the element involves five factors so that it can be experienced by the five senses. So what this is is a pantheon. There is a Buddha associated with each of those five. A name of the Buddha. There's the Buddha of the center and then there's the Buddha of the east, of the south, of the west and of the north. Now this whole theme of east, south, west, and north associated with the solar course is a common feature in mythologies everywhere. The sun rises the new day. [clears throat] The sun at noon is in the south. So the south represents the height the culmination moment of consciousness in the field of time. In the west it sinks into transcendence again. Then we speak about going west when one dies. And then in the north it is as it were under the earth and that's the area from which demons come, disease comes, danger comes and so forth and um let's say tyrannical force comes from the the north. It's amusing in American Indian mythologies, the little heroes who are going to save their mother from danger of monsters uh are warned by her, do not go north. That's where danger is. You can go east, south, or west. So, the boys go north. That's the only way to get past the rules of the society that you're in is to go north to break the rule. Then you find something that the society knows nothing about and you bring it back and that serves as a saving amplifying uh force. So this business of the the four is we're going to have a central Buddha and and four then representing east, south, west, and north. Now here they are. This is a a Tibetan 11th century figure and those are the five Buddhas. Here sits the Buddha himself at the immovable point. The bold tree, the tree of illumination, the bodhi tree, the tree of awakening. The word Buddha means the one who has waked up. The eyes have opened. [clears throat] [snorts] The eye is we carry it in our pocket all the time or we hope we can. It's on the back of a dollar bill at the top of the pyramid where the sides pairs of opposites come together there. The eye of knowledge opens. But in the field of action, you're down on the side and you're on this side and the other guy's on the other side. And so you have action. But uh this eye is the middle eye. It's the eye of the referee in a tennis match. It doesn't care which side wins. You can't have a tennis game unless there's some serious intention to knock the other chap out there. So, time asks for violence, but this eye asks for the recognition behind the violence of peace. Where the lion lies down with the lamb, this doesn't mean the lion isn't going to eat the lamb. Of course, he's going to eat the lamb, but [clears throat] it means nothing's happening when that happens. That's just a time, a temporal thing. And the peace you must realize the peace that lies behind that act. So here's the Buddha under the tree. His eyes have opened as a result of the influence of these five. These are meditation Buddhas, Diani Buddhas. They are not historical Buddhas. They're subtle matter. And it's through their influence that he comes to this knowledge. Uh the pig here represents ignorance and is pierced by a lance. With the opening of the eye, ignorance is wiped out. These are the subtle nerves. Each one with a name. The word up here says pra nayyama. That means breath control. You breathe in. Imagine the breath is filling all of these nerves activating all the senses, all the organs of consciousness so that we're going to become more and more conscious. That's the whole point of it. As I said yesterday, demons or monsters are what inhibit consciousness. Many of the demons are our professors and teachers and they set up rules for how we should think and they're not always helpful. So of these multitude of nerves there are three that are most important and here they are. Now here are the seven centers. We have a central spine nerve runs up the center of the spine called sushimumna and on each side is a side nerve. The one that is here rendered gray is called IDA and it refers to lunar consciousness. Now this is the this is the most important clue to the whole business. Lunar consciousness. Consciousness that dies as the moon does and is resurrected. I spoke of the serpent yesterday cast its skin to be born again. So the serpent represents the power of life, energy, and consciousness to throw off death. But it is in the field of death. It's consciousness in the field of death. Throwing off death and putting on new bodies. Reincarnation or the sequence of the generations. Every time a new generation is begotten, the death of this generation is thrown off and life has moved on. It's throwing off these bodies and putting on new. This is symbolic then of life energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, the field of death and birth. The moon sheds its shadow to be born again. The serpent sheds its skin to be born again and they are symbolic of this power. The other nerve is called bingala p i n g- a l a and represents solar consciousness. The sun does not die. When it sets, it takes light with it. It does not carry death in itself. So this is consciousness disengaged from the field of time. And now just think of the different philosophies that you know there are those who begin to feel so spiritual. You run into them in rash ashrams. They walk a little above the ground and life is vulgar. I'll never forget my experience the first time I was in an ashram. It was years and years ago. was a gorgeous, beautiful place with deer grazing on the lawns and girls in sars on bridges looking down at the goldfish swimming in pools. It was simply ravishing and and then some vulgarian I think he was a book salesman or something like that came into the group. But it seemed like how can we tolerate this kind of gross body? Um, so when you think of your spiritual life as relieving you of the physical, you're going up this track and you're going to have a great disappointment somewhere along the line because your body is still there. This is known as uh manic depressive experience. You've identified yourself with the subtle body, but you're still gross and um [clears throat] you're trying to become the immortal while you're still on Earth. The third temptation of Christ after he had rejected the devil when the devil said young man you look hungry why don't you turn the stones into bread he said one lives not by bread alone but by every word out of the mouth of God and then the devil says well come I'll take you up onto a a mountaintop and show you the kingdoms of the world and all you have to do is bow to me and you can rule these this is how to become a politician and uh Jesus says Uh uh get behind me, Satan. I'm not going to do this. So he said, "Oh, you're so so subtle. Let's go up on the top of Herod's temple and now cast yourself down. God will bear you up." And Jesus said, "No, I am still alive. I am still a body." This is the virtue known as temperance. I am still a body. Get thee behind me, Satan. He rejects him three times and the third time is this one of having surpassed economics and politics, you are just a spirit, not so. So Jesus is recognizing the gross body as well.
Now, people who don't know anything about the spiritual reference of symbols interpret them in gross matter and get involved in pretty gross activities to realize their spiritual life. I'm not going to go in that to that in detail. Uh, but I think you can see what I'm talking about. Um, as to say if you interpret the spiritual symbol as concrete then you get involved with the concrete action associated with the concrete body and you have lost the spiritual message. Now you can't bring the condalini up the center until you have recognized that these are simply two aspects of the one consciousness. The light of the moon reflects the light of the sun. The light of your body, consciousness of your body is immortal eternal consciousness in you. Consciousness first then you. And you represent a specification of the consciousness in time and place. And through the specifications of your personal life, you are to abstract the immortal to experience through the vicissitudes of your mortality your eternity. That's the whole goal here.
Here we have from 2000 BC an Indian uh little stamp seal showing a figure in yoga posture. And here are the two and pingala serpents right back 2000 BC. So that we have 4,000 years of interior exploration in India uh which we're going to find out a little bit about uh in following the kundalini. And here now this is important. At the same date 2000 BC in Mesopotamia. This is a libation cup of King Gudea of Lagos in Mesopotamia. And when you explode it look what you find. This is the symbol that is is on this vase. King Guda of Lagos. One of the cities of Sum 2000 BC in the period of the Sumerian uh Renaissance after the um uh the earlier Semitic invasions. two lion birds. These are what later are known as cherubim. opening the portals of a shrine and within the shrine one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. The two interlocking serpents with the channel up here. This is the earliest sign in the world as far as we know of the kaducious of Hermes Mercury. Now who is Hermes? Who is Mercury? Hermes is the guide of souls to knowledge of immortal life. It's the same the same principle represented as the one that is represented here. So the popular cherubim who guard the gate of paradise. The two cherubim that God placed at the gate of paradise uh to keep man away from the uh tree of immortal life. These two cherubim here are now opening the portal so you can go in. And here is the tree of life under which the Buddha sat. And where is that tree? It's right in every one of us. So you don't have to go to Bodga Gaya. If you are interpreting this whole thing purely uh materially not spiritually, you will go to Bodga. This is a folk art. These are called naga or serpent stones. There's a perfect kaducious. This is in a little town TV, a little city TV in southwest India. These are composed by folk artists. They're put in the water to receive the power of the water which has fire in it because the fire is what gives it its fertilizing character. And then they're placed under the tree. Here they are under the tree. And here are some brahminical people.
Now when I was in Kashmir, I came upon this ruined temple and in the middle of it, this object here that is a yoni. That's a symbol of the female organ and in a temple devoted to the goddess that is the altar and uh I went into one such temple in Kanji Vam with some Indian friends we brought fruit and so forth as offering and the priest then took the red powder that women put on their forage and dusted it into the yonyi reciting the 108 names of the goddess. Now 108 * 4 is 432 and that's the number of years in a cycle of time and the goddess is the cycle of time. The number always ends up as nine. [clears throat] Four, three and two add up to nine. And uh she is time. She is the womb. Nine is the grain, you might say, of her movement. And I was waked up this morning by the ring of the anggeles which rings nine times and then nine times again. [snorts] Uh what it is is talking about the angelist when it rings is the conception by Mary of the Christ child. The pouring of eternal energy into the field of time. It's what the anggeles is. That's what the 108 names of the goddess. It's all one story. And here now is a lingum. This is in the the elephant cave in Bombay. The energy of the god. So these are the two symbols of the ultimate energies. The male and the female energies both of which come into separation in the field of time and neither of which exists transcendent of time. But that which breaks them into the field of time is the female power. So the goddess in this mythology is the high power. This is from China. One, two, three and a half. Three and a half turns of the serpent power. It's exactly the condolini. It's in bronze from China. The period of the contending states. Now, this puts it around fifth century BC about the time of Confucious. And this is earlier than any uh indication of the kundalini in the symbolism of India. Here we go to Rome. This is the 50 AD, the period of Caligula. There's our serpent related to the moon. Serpent sheds the skin. Moon sheds a shadow. This is the basket or sacred uh object of the goddess Isis. I'm presenting these to show that what I'm going to be talking about covers the whole of Eurasia all the way from uh Rome to China. And it's only in India that it was brought to full expression and elucidation uh through the experiences and analyses of these uh yogic masters.
>> Once again, Campbell has made the connection. The themes expressed in condundalini yoga had been reflected in cultures across the globe. Join us next time when Joe follows the path of the condalini up through our psychological centers.
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