Who sees the variety and not the unity must wander on from death to death.
- Katha Upanishad
The word religion comes from the Latin ligare, to bind, as in ligature and ligament. The prefix ‘re-‘ implies the re-establishment of a connection which has been lost.
The primary purpose of myths is to bring human beings into contact with a deeper component in their psyche, which gave them the sense of belonging to something far transcending their own individual ego-existence. Where this level could be reached, it gave a sense of meaning and purpose to life; a sense of connection, not just to other people and all the world but to a dimension beyond time and existence altogether.
Compared with the majesty of God which has created every last minute detail of the universe, man knows nothing. Yet the very fact that he is part of this creation, that he is part of its complex purposes and that it is somehow connected with his existence, gives man a sense that, although in himself he is nothing, he is also identified with something infinitely greater than himself. He is part of the totality, ‘the One’.
Man used to be an animal, part of nature, life completely dictated by instinct.
Then man opened up Pandora’s Box, ate the Apple, was awoken and became aware, conscious. Instinct no longer dictated man’s life. Ego ruled.
With freedom and consciousness, man was free from nature’s bound, and soon fell prey to envy, greed, lust, hatred, cruelty, depression, loneliness, sin.
Now humans live in lives of constant tension. At the deepest level, there is nothing they want more than to re-establish the lost unity to live at peace with each other, with nature and with themselves.
But to do this they have to make a constant, conscious efforts. To assist them in that effort they have evolved a whole array of devices, mechanisms and rituals: from laws and political institutions to codes of morality; from every kind of artistic expression to the framework of religion. What all these creations have in common is that they all originate in a desire to underpin or to re-establish that sense of unity which every animal enjoys without thinking all its life long.
...The need to resolve this psychic split gives rise to other distinctive features of human behaviour for which the animal kingdom offers no real parallels. One conspicuous means whereby human beings sublimate their tendency to egocentricity is through their love of games and sport. Not only does the rivalry between teams and individuals provide a socially acceptable channel for competitive impulses which might otherwise become socially disruptive. By disciplining physical or mental activity within a strict framework of rules, the participants in a game or sport become subordinated to something higher than themselves. A psychological model for all sporting activity is the spiritual discipline of Zen archery, in which the archer's purpose is so to eliminate the distortions arising from his own ego that the arrow naturally flies to its target. Whenever a game is played well it produces those moments when body and mind come into such instinctive co-ordination that the players seem to have been lifted above themselves. This was why, until it became corrupted, the original Olympic Games were one of the central religious ceremonies of the ancient Greek world. The skill of the competitors expressed an ideal of perfection which elevated not only the athletes themselves but all those who watched them. Something of the same sense of transcendence, although it is similarly open to corruption by the ego, accounts for the extraordinary glamour which surrounds sport in our modern world.
An even more significant instance of how human beings express this urge to transcend the limitations of their ego-existence is through every kind of artistic expression. The underlying purpose of all art is to create patterns of imagery which somehow convey a sense of life set in a framework of order. From music to painting, from architecture to poetry, from a finely worked piece of jewellery to the disciplined exuberance of folk-dance, any effective work of art always combines these two elements: on one hand, the imagery of movement, vitality, imagination and colour we associate with the energy of life; on the other, that sense of pattern, rhythm and harmony by which it is structured. Whatever its outward form, the aim of any artistic creation is to weave these essential elements together in a way which gives us a sense of a perfect resolution. Any work of art thus seeks to create a marriage between those complementary aspects of the psyche we see as masculine and feminine. Analyse the appeal of a Beethoven symphony and we see how it is made up of that familiar fourfold combination of strength and mind, heart and soul. The music commands our attention by its masculine power. It appeals to our intellect by the formal subtleties of its structure. It moves us by its feminine grace and delicacy, its flowing life, its appeal to our feelings. It elevates us by evoking something beyond ourselves, a sense of perfect totality. Like all great art it thus harmonises consciousness with the ego-transcending Self.
Any work of art can be analysed along similar lines, even if only in terms of how it may fall short of such perfect balance. Whenever we sense any artistic creation to be in some way deficient, this is either because it somehow lacks life or because it is inadequately organised, or both. Any work of art which succeeds, however, can make us feel mysteriously more alive, by connecting us with the sense of a perfection beyond the limitations of our own ego. Such is what the artistic impulse in mankind is all about. But no device for re-establishing that sense of unity with our inner life is more ingenious than one coded into us by the process of evolution itself: to conjure up inside our heads those patterns of imaginary events we call stories.
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