The Masks of Eternity

According to a Gallup poll, the number of Americans who believe in God has
dropped to an all-time low of 81%. But what slips through the net of general questions like that are all the nuances that make religion interesting. Like what do you mean by God?

When we try to answer that question we find ourselves stumbling through the ruins of an ancient city whose long dead architects are unavailable to explain their designs, facades, and monuments. We mouth theological hearsay, second-hand creeds, and threadbare apologetics until we don’t even hear the sound of our own voices anymore.

In his own journey from altar boy to preeminent scholar of religion and mythology, Joseph Campbell brought lived experience and intellectual honesty to the journey so many of us are on—who, what, and where is God?

Campbell argued that all of our God-concepts are masks that we hang on the indefinable mystery beyond conceptual thought. Some cultures personify the mystery as a conscious entity with specific qualities and characteristics, including gender. Other cultures conceive of the mystery as a pantheon of thousands of gods and goddesses. Still others prefer to leave the mystery as it is—ineffable, beyond all names and forms, and impersonal, like Brahman, Dao, or the Force.

What matters most is not which of those conceptual masks is correct but  realizing that we are the ones who make these masks of eternity. So powerful is our longing to reconnect with the divine source from which and we and all things come that our indefatigable creativity builds a bridge across a chasm our minds cannot cross--a bridge made of myths, images, and poetic narratives.

Three factors determine the shape of our masks of eternity: our environment, our sociology, and our needs. The gods of Pacific Islanders are sea turtles and dolphins. The gods of the Navajo and Hopi of the American Southwest are coyotes, ravens, and spiders. We model our masks after the familiar things in our immediate environment.

In addition, we shape our God concepts around models of power we find in our own societies. In patriarchal cultures gods tend to be male. In matriarchal societies the Great Goddess prevails. We project our limited and local sense of power onto the heavens.

And finally, our masks of eternity are born from our unmet needs. Constantly under siege from warring enemies? You need a warrior god. Wounded and suffering? You need a healing god. Struggling to find sustenance? You need a god of abundance and prosperity. The mystery behind the masks eludes our conceptual grasp, but we never tire of creating out of the womb of our environment, sociology, and needs an infinite variety of God-concepts to protect, serve, and preserve us.

In the end, the masks become the final obstacle to be overcome. If you really want to know God, you have to forget everything you know about God. As Meister Eckhart put it, "God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction." Maybe it's best not to think about God as a separate entity at all, but the space within which we move. The apostle Paul said it best: "All can seek the Deity, feeling their way toward God and succeeding in finding God. For God is not far from any of us, since it is in God that we live and move and have our being." (Act 17:27-28)

 

[This piece was first published in my "A to Zen" column in the November/December edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

 

The Hero's Journey

 In his classic The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Pantheon, 1949) Joseph Campbell mapped out the 17 stages of the archetypal hero’s journey. Throughout mythology, literature, and film, the hero’s journey crosses all cultural and temporal boundaries, from the first Paleolithic camp fire to the surround sound multiplex. No matter the medium, the message is the same – we must journey beyond the boundaries of our ordinary life, risk it all, and, figuratively speaking, die to be reborn into our authentic nature. In the end, the hero’s stories are our story. Each of us is the hero of our own life.

            It turns out hero stories are not about extraordinary people – they’re about ordinary people unlocking extraordinary powers both within and around them. To the true-hearted hero, nature itself becomes an ally. The trick is awakening those latent powers and wielding them with wisdom. And we don’t have forever. This is it. As Campbell liked to say, “If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.”

            The only thing required to unlock these powers is the willingness to take the journey, to say the holy word “yes,” and to trust. When the hero commits, the whole of nature rises up as an ally.

            So you begin right where you are, and allies appear, the money works out, and doors open where there were only walls. This, says Campbell, is the first third of the journey – the departure. Then comes the initiation phase. You cross into the unknown and fall into the belly of the whale – think Jonah. This is a period of darkness and despair where none of the old rules apply. You’re powerless and stuck. Yet somehow you’re spit out of the other side and find yourself on the road of trials. Here you quest, struggle, and strive, usually with a band of fellow travelers, to eventually face the most powerful force in your world, what Campbell calls the atonement with the father. For Luke it’s Darth Vader. For Harry, Voldemort. In The Wizard of Oz it’s the wizard. And every time, when you muster the courage to confront the dragon, the monster, or the angry god, you realize two things – they weren’t as scary as you thought, and, you see yourself in them. You’re not that different.

            Boon or prize in hand, the challenge shifts. Now the hero, (that’s you), must begin the third and final phase of the hero’s journey, the return. Simply put, you must break away from the bliss of realization and choose, in the consciousness of service, to bring the prize home. This is often the most dangerous phase of the journey. You might collapse and need rescuing. You might succumb to your own ego and sabotage yourself – think Darth Vader. The successful hero moves finally into a state of deep reconciliation and, like a bodhisattva, has one foot in nirvana and one foot in the world. The spiritual realization that transformed you becomes the elixir that will transform the whole world.

            Then, returning home, one learns how to wield and integrate all of these insights into the ordinary world. In your heart, peace. In your mind, clarity. And in your gut a willingness to work for the healing of the world without anxiety or attachment to outcomes. And this, in the end, is the bliss that drew us out on the hero’s journey in the first place. 

[This piece first appeared in my A to Zen column in the March/April 2021 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Fear of Courage

Fear is not a weakness. Nor is it a childish indulgence. Fear plays an essential role in the unfolding of our lives. Fear keeps us from touching fire, swallowing razor blades, and kissing rattlesnakes. Fear in and of itself is not the problem. It’s the misapplication of fear that causes all the damage.

For the ancient Greeks courage was the most important of virtues, for without it, none of the other virtues are possible. How can we be compassionate without the courage to love? How can we be strong without the courage to push past the limits of our endurance? And how can we be smart without the courage to admit ignorance and press onward into new areas of learning and mastery?

            But courage is frightening. It asks us to risk everything.

I think we’re afraid of courage because courage asks us to abandon the supports we have worked so hard to construct. Courage asks us to sacrifice our safety and comfort. To be brave is to venture out beyond the reach of our protections, into an unknown field where none of the old rules apply and everything we know is irrelevant. To be courageous is to be vulnerable.

Courage begins with the willingness to let go. Courage and renunciation are two sides of one coin. Not only do we have to let go of our old support systems, we also have to let go of the idea that we are not enough. To be courageous we have to come to understand that there are qualities and strengths within us that have not yet been realized. Renouncing our old, limited, and limiting self-definition goes hand in hand with courage.

Courage is also an affirmation of the goodness of the universe. Fear, on the other hand, is often a misguided overreach of the ego feebly asserting its so-called power in an attempt to control everything. The fearful mind believes that we are not enough, and the universe is not enough either. Courage, on the other hand, means letting go of control and trusting that if the means are pure, the ends will take care of themselves. We must learn to use our egos, and not let our egos use us.

This then is the metaphysical foundation of courage – the view that all is one and that our lives are sacred expressions of the formless ground of being beyond all thoughts and forms. Debilitating fear is only possible when we have forgotten our original relationship with the divine. Again and again Jesus counsels his students to “fear not,” because anxiety and fear sever our delicate tether to the eternal. Coming out of fearfulness and into courage opens the portals to higher consciousness.

In the world’s hero journey tales the hero must face the monster again and again to be tested, and even more importantly, to have everything about them that is underdeveloped and inauthentic stripped away by the ferocity of the ordeal. While we may not literally be fighting monsters, the underlying truth remains. There are obstacles between us and the life we were born to live. Without cultivating the courage to face them, we rob ourselves and the wounded world of the healing elixir our transformation would bring both to our own lives and the lives of innumerable others, for when we heal ourselves we take an enormous step toward healing our families and communities. Instead of running away from fear, we should be running toward it. As Joseph Campbell wrote, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” Without courage we will never know who we really are. Only courage unlocks our sacred potential, latent within us and, for now, hidden behind a fog of fear. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the willingness to act in spite of the fear – to feel the fear and do it anyway.  

[This piece first appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the March/April edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]