I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
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And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is, (…)
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855
In Section 48, of the poem Song of Myself Walt Whitman discloses, under the very eyes of the twenty first century ravished reader, two fundamental aspects of the binding affinity between the concepts of religiousness and spirituality: that myth is forged within the human mind (1) and thus that the structures of the former bequeath those which characterize the latter (2).
The first idea is conveyed by the three opening lines: either under the name of mythology or religious stories, the foundation of these both lies within the individual’s narrative nature, who creates neighboring realities - Freud and Jung locating their source within the scope of dreaming processes - through language and by basing its subjects, objects and features on what they conceive as real, as tangible. Operating in partnership with this first notion is the second one, which American theologist Thomas Merton describes so conclusively in his article Symbolism: Communication or Communion? (New Directions, 1968) as an analogical relationship between religious symbolism and consciousness of the self, of others and the world (and, for those who claim themselves as non-secularist thinkers, of a particular kind of divine being). Circumscribing the reach of religiousness to that which surrounds us all does not imply, withal, the emergence of an unfathomable adjacent universe, but rather the removal of the abstract confines outside of which that universe coalesces. In the words of Joseph Campbell: “myth, because it arose from the psyche, points back at it [...]; and whoever resolves into looking (seriously) towards their own inner self, will find these references in it”.
Furthermore, and ensuing the cited reflection, Campbell construes mythology as corollary to human existence and depicts it as the individual’s gut response to the glimpse of their own passing, and more specifically, of their own contingency - for the word itself entails the inexorable prevailing of social order notwithstanding one’s detachment from it. However and because humankind has withstood numerously diverse ambiences, these responses have permeated language so diversily that a wide range of differences among stories have subsequently emerged. Themes yet, do repeat.
A further distinction should also be drawn according to the concept of heterogeneity of myth when regarding Western and Eastern civilization’s countervailing collective pedigrees. Joseph Campbell locates the borderline between India and the Far East and the West and Europe. It is the erstwhile domain the one we will be addressing in this essay; however we might as well refer to the former in order to gain a more extrinsic and neutral approach to the subject.
The purpose of this paper is to prove that the religious stories transcend the limits of the canonical sphere into our collective grounds of perception and thereby condition how we see, think and write about the world. In order to do so, their paradigmatic images in religious stories and the expression of ontological and ethical dualism and teleology in the European ethos will be assessed and evaluated.
Dualism arises as a structure within our ability to rationalize and determines the possibility of evolution, which is the core of its effective functioning. Regarding this notion from an ontological perspective, evolution translates into change or transformation and its epiphenomenon in Eastern thought is immutability. Hence the paucity in terms of Western religious thought of the concept of reincarnation, exempli gratia, for it even bears an untrodden path towards the perception of time.
In order to cast some more light on the subject we shall contemplate another example: at the beginning of the hebrew Old Testament, in the book of Genesis, God begot - by sculpting him in blender - Adam as his imperfect - human - doppelganger on earth; then, Eve was created out of one of Adam’s ribs. Thus holiness acquired the characterization of, so to speak, divine providence. On the other hand, Creation’s equivalent in Sanskrit presents itself as slightly different. The Almighty then, while preserving its eternal, non-material and unitary nature, parts into two - female and male -. So, whereas the European individual thinks of the holy as something apart or if you will, supranatural, not only does the Asian headset contradict this but it also suggests that the configuring ends of dualisms are polar, this being, existing because of one another and as a unitary whole. That being said, Thomas Mann’s definition of man as “a lofty encounter of nature and spirit as they mutually yearn towards each other” comes as no surprise.
British writer Alan Watts provides, at the beginning of chapter one in his book The Two Hands of God, a rather enlightening account on this matter that will as well axiomatically lead us towards our second dualism. In order to do so he refers to a comparison between the postulates of Ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Heraclitus of Ephesus. “In the history and climate of Western thought” he says “Heraclitus stands somewhat alone, for a philosophy in which ‘it is one and the same thing to be living or dead, awake or asleep, young or old’ does not seem to offer any directives for action, that is, for making choices.”
This idea of humankind being able not only to identify the nature of good and evil but to choose between them is rendered by the premises set by individualism.
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