AND THE

OTHER WORLD

OTHER WORLD

IS NECESSARY

TO SOCIAL

RENEWAL

CREATING

A NEW

MYTHOLOGY

RATIONALIZA-

TION OF LIFE

SIGNIFICANCE

IS NOT ENOUGH

PHENONENO­

LOGICAL

ANALYSIS WILL

BE NECESSARY

IN INVENTING

THE OTHER

WORLD

2. But the concern over practical implications is still real. Like many other people who share something of our comprehensive social concern, we understand that the loss of the sense of human significance is the cardinal contradiction of our time. We know that social renewal is deeply intertwined with the renewal of the human spirit, and that without a recovery of our capacities to enter the "Other World", there will be no renewal of the spirit. We have even delineated the Other World into four, sixteen and sixty­four "states of being." We have intensified consciousness of the "Other World" in ourselves and in others, and the intensification has left us all far richer. But there is still a brooding question of "what now?" in all our minds.

3. It is tempting to speak glibly of the need to create a "new mythology" for out new era, for we know that in the past, mythology has been the framework upon which men have hung their perceptions of the Other World. Hence, "practically speaking," it is not enough simply to invent new, cute or intriguing stories with either imperative or indicative moral implications for our time , and call that a mythology. Myths have provided a screen through which men order and interpret meaningful reality. But clearly, a mythology for our one­level universe will be quite different from the kind that served the multi­story world of the Babylonians or other ancients.

4. We have known for a long time that highly rational philosophical or theological analysis is not enough. Nor is historical reflection sufficient. Though we are aware that history is itself a form of mythology, insofar as it informs us of how to live. The sciences for a while promised to take the place of a mythology, but that hope has faded also. Each of these possibilities failed because the human spirit is not reducible to intellectual categories.

5. What is clear through all of this is that a new mythology must come into being if the human experiment is to continue in history. And, while no single individual nor group ever finally controls such things, a new mythology will certainly have to be intentionally invented ­­ it will not just happen along by accident. But certainly this inventing will be experienced as discovery. Indeed if we intend to have anything to do with inventing the new mythology, or if we even expect to recognize it when it is invented, then we will need to have a phenomenological understanding of how the Other World affects people.

OTHER WORLD

LENDS

SIGNIFICANCE

TO THIS WORLD

WHAT DO MEN WANT FROM THE OTHER WORLD?

PRIMARY

SOUVENIR IS

THE POWER TO

LIVE FULLY

THE OTHER

WORLD IS

DANGEROUS

7. Part of the answer is that the Other World lends significance to this world. What is the necessary relation between this world and the Other World that results in this something that we call "significance?"

8. Let us approach the question functionally. What is it that men have to gain from experience in or of the Other World? If we ask what we want of the Other World, we tend to find the question very difficult. We have been cut off from the Other World for so long that we hardly know what to ask of it. We are like the beggar who could think of nothing more grand to ask of the King than a new pair of shoes.

9. But men of the past have sought and found the power to live fully. This has been the primary "souvenir" of the experience of the Other World. Exactly what the "full life" means, however, seems to depend heavily upon the cultural context in which the Other World is experienced. For so­called "primitive" man, it included control over the natural forces of the universe - the spirits, the demons. The shaman or "witch­doctor" could control those forces to bring about healing or destruction. He gained magical power. For the Buddhist, it was the power of participation in the mystery, taking into himself some of that aura or quality, and the participation in life with a combination of full consciousness and detachment, and near absolute control over self. No one goes near the Other World without being, in some way, changed.

10. Entrance into the Other World is dangerous. Every religious tradition that points to a dimension of reality other than that immediately accessible to sense experience agrees on this point. He who does not trust the Other World finds it dangerous territory. It plays tricks on him, and sometimes even slays him. And so it does similarly to the one who perceives the Other World but says no to entering it, or to the one who enters it half­heartedly. If they return, they do so as "zombies", as those who are utterly lucid about life, but utterly hate­filled toward it. This also is common in every religious tradition. Thus, the Other World can either turn out to be heaven, or it can turn out to be hell. Like Jacob when he wrestled the angel to gain his name, sometimes the hero returns from the encounter with the Other World with a wound that remains with him until his death, though he is otherwise victorious .

TRAVELLERS ARE

THE SANCTIFIED

ONES

OTHER WORLD

TRAVELLER RE-

TAINS THE AURA

OF THE MYSTERY

SANCTIFICATION

IS INDIVIDUAL;

MYTH IS

SOCIOLOGICAL

MYTHIC CON-

SCIOUSNESS

PRECEDES

SANCTIFICATION

PSYCHOLOGY AS

A HELPFUL WAY

TO INTERPRET

THE OTHER NORLD

FOR SECULAR

MINDED MAN

WRITERS ON MYTH

NOT SOCIOLOGI

CALLY BLIND,

BUT TRAPPED

12. As the one who has returned from the Other World, the sanctified one returns as the embodiment of the Mystery in human form. He has surrendered himself. He lives without problems, though he is usually deeply engaged in the activities of the world. He is detached. He has the power of his will over his own self, and he is able to work and act with an effectiveness that often appears to others as miraculous. He also may bring back with him a wound as a sign of his struggle with the powers of the Other World

13. Sanctification is a term used to emphasize the relationship of an individual person to the Other World. It may be the personal power to live the fulfilled life. Mythology, on the other hand, holds the expression of the relationship of society to the Other World. Or, mythology is the framework which those who are sanctified use to understand their common experience of the sanctified life. Hence, until the emergence of the concept of an individual appeared in the world, probably from the experiences and understandings derived from Persian Zoroastrian thought, it was probably not even possible to talk about a concept of sanctification.

14. Mythological consciousness, or the capacity to participate in the Other World through a social or communal mythology, precedes individual participation in the state of being called sanctification both historically and conceptually. Hence, our use of the concept of the "Other World" may serve as bridge between individually oriented sanctification, and socially­oriented mythological consciousness.

15. In the twentieth century, psychology has provided the mind of secular man with a convenient way of rationalizing his half-conscious awareness of the Other World. Thus it is not surprising that Carl Jung should discover other worldly states of being cropping up in the midst of his individual psychoanalysis. Nor is it surprising that the best writers on the subject of mythology find it necessary either to box their subject in as a subordinate department of sophisticated literary criticism, or else, as Joseph Campbell does, interpret the whole matter through psychological categories. For psychology is the only way secular man has had to discuss his awareness of his own consciousness.

16. But Campbell is not blind to the understanding that myth is a sociological category. He has stated directly in a lecture given at Northwestern University in November 1972, and indirectly in various places in his writings, that the collapse of mythological consciousness is a present social block or contradiction. But he simply does not see that there is any way in which that community or social awareness can be recaptured. And so his final conclusion is essentially that each individual ought to seek out or create his own myth, for himself alone. That conclusion conditions the usefulness of everything Campbell has written on the subject.

INDIVIDUAL

SANCTIFICATION

THE MYTHOLOGICAL

FUNCTION OF

CONYEYING

SIGNIFICANCE

EFFECTIVE

SIGNIFICATION

MYTHOLOGY

AND SPACE

MYTHOLOGY AND TIME

18. The overall function of any mythological system is to convey a sense of the significance of life and existence. A mythological system gives men a screen for distinguishing the real from the unreal. A negative example is seen in the inability of both red and black men to "reap what was happening to them when their lands were occupied by white Westerners. They simply did not comprehend this novel invasion until it was far too late to take defensive measures because they had no place for such a novel event in their mythological screen. Initial experiences of exploitation were not "real", in the sense that the mythological screen had no place for them, and therefore they accorded them no significance.

19. Wherever a mythological screen has been more or less effective, it has worked in all three ontological dimensions of space, time and relations. That is, it has created significant space, significant time, and significant relations for the societies that built it. Let us look at each of these.

20. Myth has made places and objects real for men by making them transparently part of a universal framework, that is, by making space transparent. In primitive mythology, nearly every object that a man owns or uses has "holy" or "set­apart" significance, in that the myth defines not only its uses, but its origins: that is, it gives the "origin and aim" of the object. An Australian Aboriginal knows nearly every object in his environment by personal name, and has a story that accounts for its being where it is. If he has gone on "walkabout", he is never lost. This process of signification is not so very different from the practice of blessing particular objects in Western religious practice, for instance, swords or ships. However, primitive man understood every real object to be blessed, or mythologically significant.

21. For man in a mythological universe, time tends to be entirely kairotic, rather than chronological. That is, each time he performs an activity of life, such as hunting, harvesting, or creating a craft object, he is not performing a single activity along with other activities. Instead, he is reduplicating a very act of the gods. And in some understandings, he is not even reduplicating that act, he is participating with the forces of the universe in the original act of creation itself. Thus, mythology is not concerned with history. It is concerned with the intensification of time, not with its passage. Singular events, of course, which are subsequently incorporated into the mythological framework, become watersheds, by which periods of time are identified as "before" or "after". But it is the intensity of a particular period and not the sequence which is important.

GIVEN TO

SPACE AND TIME

THROUGH NAMING

WHICH RELATES

TO COSMIC

CENTER

SIGNIFICANCE

DOES NOT

REQUIRE

RATIONALITY

EXISTENTIALLY,

THE CONTEXT

GIVES

SIGNIFICANCE,

NOT

EXPLANATION

SPACIAL

SIGNIFICANCE

THROUGH THE

INTERCHANGE

ABILITY OF

PHYSICAL AND

SPIRITUAL

SPACE

23. What becomes immediately clear once the function of myth is looked at in this way, is that significance, meaningfulness in human life, has little or nothing to do with rational apprehension. The really one and only thing that human beings require for a sense of significance is that they be in possession of some story, or some series of images, that merely suggests a cross­dimensional unity in reality. A rational comprehension or logical progression is only of secondary importance.

24. Examples are provided by the common man's use of science. Very few people living in the Western world today could prove or demonstrate any of the major propositions of molecular physics or chemistry if they had to. Yet we all use the devices of twentieth century technology, and we have some generalized picture in our heads of how they work. The point is that the bare promise that a theory exists to explain the phenomena that surround us, is generally sufficient to permit us to relate to them effectively. Existentially, the questions of "how" or even "why" are relatively unimportant to us. What matters is that the phenomena that we experience can be put into a context that has a niche for it along with all the other familiar things of our world.

25. From a functional standpoint, then, the other World is therefore the transcendent order of reality, the sheer existence of which is sufficient to give a sense of "significance" to this world of mundanity. It explains nothing, It gives importance to everything by exploding immediacies and universalizing particular ties. And, phenomenologically, significance, or importance, is experienced in direct proportion to the breadth of context that an individual grasps.

IS NECESSARY

TO HAVE

SIGNIFICANCE:

TEMPORAL FLOW

SIGNIFICANCE

THROUGH

JOURNEY

PARTICIPATION

SIDELIGHT ON

SELF ­ TRANS-

CENDENCE

MISSION AND

SIGNIFICANCE

RELATIONS

AS

DRAMATURGY

27. Mythology gives men the sense of purposiveness and temporal flow by placing him on a journey, for, intuitively, every man knows that he cannot live (as opposed to mere survival) without purpose. As Eliade points out, the way this works is that men gain purpose through the principle of cosmic or primordial repetition. Men gain significance by participation in paradigmatic reality. He repeats what the gods and/or the ancestors have done before him. Thus, he focuses on his "cosmic model", either a heroic or a divine figure, and repeats in whole or in part the life and activities of that figure.

28. It is significant to note that for "primitive" man, living out of an established cultural mythology, the matter of self-transcendence as we have struggled with it in dealing with sanctification, is not an issue. He has little or no choice but to transcend himself. Individualistic behavior is, a priori, socially deviant behavior. Significance comes from the precision with which one is able to reproduce the cosmic reality. But this is really not at all foreign to the experience of western man. In times of crisis, say, for instance, in times of war or the advent of natural catastrophe, Western man experiences the ecstatic exhilaration that comes from working out of a common goal or purpose. The "London bombing blitzes" provide the commonest cliché illustration out of World War II.

29. The same reality, the same purpose­significance giving dynamic, is, of course, built into the whole of the Movement's conception of "mission." To say that "history and self­hood are two sides of the same coin," and "nothing less than being the Church is worth the expenditure of your life", are two ways of conveying a story that serve this function. What primitive man did not have to contend with, at least in the way that modern man must, was the necessity for self­consciously building the models in interaction ­with which the patterns of his life were forged.

30. This leads us to the third ontological principle of mythology which has to do with the dimension of relations. That is, in order to experience significance, man must not only experience space in context, time in flow, but he must also experience time, space and men, all in relation to one another. Let us call this the principle of dramaturgy.

CONTENTLESS

DRAMA AND

INAUTHENTIC

MYTH

MYTH AS

DRAMATURGICAL

DOING AND

ACTION

UNDIFFERENTI-

ATEDNESS AS A

CHARACTERISTIC

OF MYTHOLOGY

UNDIFFERENTI-

ATEDNESS

MANIFESTS

MYTHICAL,

DRAMATURGICAL

MYSTERY

32. A myth "happens" whenever an individual or a community performs an act out of self­conscious responsiveness or obedience. to the Mystery. For it is only possible to relate positively to the Mystery of life dramaturgically or adventurously, in a way that presumes the relation of time, space and every dimension of life. When a man or community performs activity in obedience to the Mystery, that action, and consequently the actors, the stage, the props and the plot, all take on at least some of the aura of the Mystery itself.

33. Objects and events in myth have a strange, even eerie quality of changeability Reality itself is seen as existing on a single undifferentiated plain. Non­substantials, like rhythm and music are often treated as objects or characters that can be seen and touched. Creatures, animal or human, have interchangeable forms that are altered at will, according to the direction and point of the particular myth. In mythology, the whole does not always equal the sum of its parts. All that was needed for the gods to restore Dyonisius to life, for instance, was his heart, and from this they effected a complete reconstruction of his being. In primitive black magic, or voodoo, the destruction of a person's hair or fingernail clippings affixed to a doll or effigy was considered quite sufficient to accomplish the destruction of the person himself.

34. To say the same in an analogous fashion, when acting out of obedience to the Mystery, one has entered the "Other World." The parameters of the real and the possible change radically. Hence once again, the drama and the actors take on the quality of the Mystery, and the actual outlines of their persona and actions become fluid. One finds the same sorts of things in literature of mystical experience

WORLD IN

CONTEMPORARY

LITERATURE

RELATION TO

ORDER

HISTORY


RELATION TO

THE NEW

RELIGIOUS

MODE AND THE

NEW SOCIAL

VEHICLE

THE

OTHER WORLD

CHARTS

SUMMARY

36. The crucial insights in all of this are not at all foreign to the life of the Movement. We have said for a very long time that in the act of worship, we are rehearsing the Christ drama for the sake of enacting it in the midst of daily life. We know that the only new mythology that will ever be authentic is the mythology that contemporary man invents as he stands, in his freedom, before the Mystery, his given situation, and the gift of his acceptance. And the sole purpose of his drama is to invite others to live out of their freedom through participation in the creation of the drama,

37. There are many other implied relations between dramaturgical mythology and the life of the Movement. The creation of the New Social Vehicle is, as it were, the creation of a new and fresh stage for the dramatic happenings of the Other­Worldly life. It offers stage props that give others new roles, or new possibilities. The New Religious Mode includes the exercises one performs to permit himself to invent his roles. Or, they are devotional and liturgical rehearsals that enable those roles to happen.

38. What then of the treks, the Other World charts, the "states of being"? How do the states of being, in particular, relate to what we have just been trying to say about dramaturgy and contentless myth? The very concept of a "state of being" has a quality of fixedness, of stability to it that seems almost antithetical to the dramaturgical, especially when a particular state is treated in isolation, as in a visit. But seen as a dramatic whole, the Other World charts provide four magnificent guides along the journey, that guard against reductionism and temporal successiveness. They define the flow of the acts and scenes, but do not determine the content of the drama.

39. In summary, seen from this vantage point, the Movement and the Order become a magnificent theatrical troupe ­­­ whose primary function is to teach its craft to all.