The Middle Path

I've been watching, again, Bill Moyers's interviews with Joseph Campbell, collectively titled Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. And, as always when I pay attention to Campbell's teachings, my head is exploding. (But in a good way. The best way.)

In the second episode, "The Message of the Myth," they talk about a statue of Shiva in a cave near Mumbai in India. You enter the cave, which is carved with friezes in every direction, and at first you are blinded by the darkness. As your eyes adjust, you begin to see the central carving of the cave, at the end of the path. Nineteen feet high, its most important feature is the depiction of three faces. In the middle, a serene face looks out, toward you. Behind it, two other faces look away from you, to the left and right. These faces represent duality: good and evil, male and female, even mortal and immortal. But that face in the middle represents the unity of transcendance, the perfect oneness from which we have come and must return. "We always think in terms of opposites," Campbell says. "But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it."

Now bear in mind that here Campbell means not the Christian God but the larger, more difficult idea. "The ultimate word in our English language for that which is transcendant is God. But then you have a concept, don't you see?" He quotes Meister Eckhart: "...the ultimate and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God, leaving your notion of God for an experience of that which transcends all notions."

At first, upon hearing this, I was tempted to look upon it judgmentally in terms of my own religion. "Well," I thought, "here's a place where the Eastern religions get it right. Again. They begin and end with the idea of transcendance, whereas in Christianity, they're stuck on the ethics of good and evil, trapped in duality." But it only took a moment to see past that narrow view. Look at the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: at first Adam and Eve knew nothing of shame, knew nothing of the differences between them, until they ate of the fruit of knowledge and were cast out. This is, of course, all metaphorical: they existed in bliss, innately transcendant, and then were corrupted by this knowledge of duality, and ever since their descendants have been trying to find their way back to that original perfect bliss. This perfectly mirrors the experience we all have as individual human beings: whatever we were before we were born, that was our Garden of Eden, our perfect bliss, and as infants we retain much of that transcendance, completely content to eat and breathe and love and be loved; then we learn about the world, we acquire knowledge, and the rest of our lives mirror the journey of the descendants of Adam and Eve, trying to find our way back to the Garden.

This ain't New Age babble, friends. As Moyers notes during the interview, "Far from undermining my faith, your work in mythology has liberated my faith from the cultural prisons to which it had been sentenced." The evils of the world can be directly traced to these cultural prisons. "...[M]y notion of the real horror today," Campbell said in 1987, "is what you see in Beirut. There you have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical god, they can't get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don't realize its reference. They haven't allowed the circle that surrounds them to open. It is a closed circle. Each group says, "We are the chosen group, and we have God.'"

I wonder sometimes whether I am open to these ideas because I am a writer or whether I am a writer because I have always been open to these ideas. Probably the latter. This is not to say I'm better than anyone else; I tend to think of the writerly impulse as a gift and a task together. Maybe I am able to see, for example, the conflict in the Middle East from an infinitesimally larger perspective; but that also means that I have the responsibility to try, in my very limited fashion, to report back to the world what that perspective is. (And I already regret what I wrote about the death of al-Zarqawi a couple weeks ago.) In "City of Truth," the screenplay that Marc and I just finished (the first responses are coming in from people we sent it to, and it's been very positive so far), we tried to deal with exactly the ideas Campbell and Moyers talk about. There is a City of Truth in which no one can lie, and a City of Lies in which people take the opposite path and will only lie; our protagonist starts in the first, journeys to the second, and at the end of the story he leaves both behind as they destroy each other. Taking the middle path into the unknown. In our next draft, Campbell has already shown me one change we will need to make: our protagonist, when he enters the City of Lies, must really embrace it whole-heartedly, must be seen to swing wildly from one opposite to the other before he can have the transcendant revelation that leads him away from both opposites, away from dogma, and into the truer, unknowable path that lies beyond the end of our story.

To end, Campbell on the idea of sin:

Ramakrishna once said that if all you think of are your sins, then you are a sinner. And when I read that, I thought of my boyhood, going to confession on Saturdays, meditating on all the little sins that I had committed during the week. Now I think one should say, "Bless me, Father, for I have been great, these are the good things I have done this week." Identify your notion of yourself with the positive, rather than with the negative.
You see, religion is really a kind of second womb. It's designed to bring this extremely complicated thing, which is a human being, to maturity, which means to be self-motivating, self-acting. But the idea of sin puts you in a servile condition throughout your life.