|
|
 |
|
| Author |
 Topic  |
|
|
Black Rebel Radio
USA
98 Posts |
 Posted - Apr 07 2008 : 3:23:15 PM
|
Joseph Campbell has influenced me unconsciously for many years through the likes of George Lucas, Bob Dylan, etc.
He had a major interest in the study of Kundalini in the last twenty years of his life.
He has been popping up so often in my life that I decided to consciously pursue his writings, such as Hero With A Thousand Faces and at the moment, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space-Metaphor as Myth and as Religion.
I was reading the introduction and I wanted to share a couple of quotes within the text. He quotes his own master, Heinrich Zimmer, saying.."{The best things cannot be told: the second best are misunderstood.} The second best are misunderstood because, as metaphors poetically of that which cannot be told, they are misread prosaically as referring to tangible facts. The connoted messages are thus lost in the symbols, the elementary ideas in local "ethnic" inflections.
Inevitably, in the popular mind, where such metaphors of transcendence become known only as represented in the rituals and legends of the local, mythologically inspired control system, the whole sense of the symbology remains locked to local practical aims and ethical ideas, in the function chiefly of controlling, socializing, and harmonizing in strictly local terms the primitive
bioenergies of the human animal, to the popular ends of health, progeny, and prosperity as the proper aims of a human life.
Whereas, in a fundamental contrast, the way of the mystic and of proper art(and we might also add, religion) is of recognizing through the metaphors an epiphany beyond words. For, as told in the Kena Upanisad:"There the eye goes not, speech goes not, nor the mind,We know not, nor can we imagine, how to convey it. For it is other than the known; also beyond the unknown. Thus we have heard from the ancients, who have told of it...If known here, then there is truth, if not known, there is great destruction."
The wise, discerning it in all beings, become on departing this world, immortal."
|
|
| |
Topic |
|
|
|
| AYP Public Forum |
© Contributing Authors (opinions and advice belong to the respective authors) |
 |
|
|
|
Epiphany Beyond Words
