Creation and Eternity

In The Sacred Feminine Today I mentioned the ceaseless creativity of the cosmos, endlessly moving as it does from the "present actual" into one version after another of the "adjacent possible" — one of the central ideas in Stuart A. Kauffman's important new book, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. I presented the book as a pointer to a way in which we might recapture humankind's ancient devotion to the "sacred feminine," the mythic representation of the Mother Goddess that was symbolized primarily through images and events connected with fertility and reproduction.

In so doing, my intent was to open Kauffman's scientific worldview out onto that of the late explainer of myth, Joseph Campbell, author of such wonderful classics as The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

To Campbell, myth teaches us that there is, beneath the ceaseless creativity of the cosmos as it generates the numberless forms of the reality we consciously perceive, a deep but hidden generative power. This power can be referred to in many ways, all of them suggestive of, but ultimately inadequate to, the invisible reality behind what we see and know. This deep, hidden power can properly be described as "the ineffable," but it can also be called, with equal accuracy, "being" or "the void" — even if those two terms would ordinarily seem to us to be antonyms.

As Campbell points out, Freud, Jung, and the other psychoanalytic theorists of the early 20th century gave this ineffable power, particularly as it is manifested in the vast unconscious workings of the human psyche, the name libido — a designation that many of us lay persons suppose to be synonymous with our sexual urges. Nothing wrong with that slight misapprehension, Campbell would say: myth's understanding of creation and creativity is, after all, fundamentally sexual in character.

Within the human mind, Campbell notes, the Freudian, Jungian, psychoanalytic unconscious is analogically equivalent to the ineffable being-void out of which arises all creation, all worldly phenomena, in all their multifarious forms ... presumably including the higher-order realities Kauffman celebrates: life, agency, intention, will, value, meaning, and (yes) consciousness itself.

But to Campbell, the consciousness we are so proud of represents, in truth, a constriction of the "superconsciousness" which is our true birthright. "Superconsciousness" means an unimaginably-to-us direct awareness of the ineffable being-void whose power makes the cosmos. It is lost at the universe's very moment of Creation, though its trace remains alive in the Freudian unconscious and gives us our dreams and myths.

Campbell sees in the Christian doctrine of the Fall, properly reinterpreted, a reference to this constriction of superconsciousness into the consciousness-unconsciousness dyad, a narrowing that inevitably happens whenver a world emerges from the power of the void. The true purpose of religion, spirituality, and myth is to clue us back into superconsciousness.

To Campbell, our anthropomorphic God (along with the gods, plural, of non-monotheist religions) properly functions as a pathway back to our lost superconsciousness: our birthright awareness of the transcendent reality from which springs forth our cosmos with its own marvelous and ceaseless creativity. Redemption is, in his view, but a word for our return to superconsciousness. When Jesus teaches us in the Gospel of Luke that "the Kingdom of God is within you," he is referring to the fact that our psyche's unconscious realm already knows of the Kingdom and is in fact superconscious.

In Campbell's worldview, God is, like all the pagan and primitive gods, a mask of eternity. Owing to how our no-longer-superconscious minds work, we need at first to view the eternal being-void as if its masks were "final," meaning that we think the anthropomorphic visage we see as we gaze upon the mask of God is truly the ultimate supernal ground of all reality.

That the divine mask is not actually the ultimate truth of all reality is something that non-monotheist traditions uphold quite readily, however, for those seekers who are ready to look behind the mask. The monotheist religions are much more circumspect about this. Only so-called "mystics" have permission to explore behind the mask, and what they find there is deemed far too esoteric for the masses. Hence most believers in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are not encouraged even to speculate that God's "face" may in truth be a mask.


As I ponder such ideas as these, I find myself asking my Roman Catholic faith some "embarrassing questions." I would like to know why traditional Christian belief and practice holds itself so aloof from what Joseph Campbell calls the "perennial philosophy." Why are we ordinary, everyday, non-mystical Christians not encouraged to look into (if we want to) the ineffable being-void behind God's eyes? Why does insisting on the "face" of God as being final strike me as in some subtle way underwriting, not eliminating, some of the great problems in our culture today?

I speak principally of such problems as war, the rightful roles of women, and the rights of gays.

Compare women's roles in the West with those in the East. The Eastern cultures, as represented by the non-monotheist societies of India, China, and Japan, don't seem to be able to generate the sort of feminist movement we in the West have created, but neither is there any great anti-woman backlash in the East, as there is in Muslim lands, against Western feminism. There seems to be, rather, a sort of benign tolerance of so-called women's liberation in us Westerners.

By the same token, while the East is not particularly concerned with advancing the gay and lesbian cause, there is again a sort of benign tolerance of those in the West who insist on so doing — as if to say, "This concern with who has what 'rights' is only a mind game, and true enlightenment strives to get beyond such games."

Monotheism seems to have given the culture of the West a tendency to bifurcate: to develop splits and schisms between those who advocate this or that worldview and those who think the same worldview is the work of the devil.

So we fight with each other. We go to war over belief systems. Oh, people make war in the East, too, but not over idea systems — except in cases where a Western idea system, Islam, has taken root in places like the modern state of Pakistan. When India, following Gandhi's lead, succeeded in convincing the British to leave, Indian Muslims and Hindus made bloody war on one another, to Gandhi's chagrin. The two sides had to be separated, at the expense of abandoning hope of unity on the subcontinent, and Pakistan was born.

It seems there has to be a connection: monotheism of the type we know today was invented by nomadic Semitic tribes who invaded the settled, agrarian, peaceful, Goddess-worshiping Neolithic communities of the Fertile Crescent in the third and second millennium B.C. The nomadic conquerors' principle deities were male tribal patrons, the forerunners of Yahweh, who empowered their favored peoples' acts of conquest.

Joseph Campbell, in his lifetime, called on us to recognize the peculiar intrinsic bias of Abrahamic monotheism toward war, and particularly Holy War. He showed that the antidote was not to abandon monotheism in favor of atheism, but to revise it by recognizing its God as but a mask of eternity. As such, God is real ... but not final. Hence we need to put an asterisk by those aspects of our religion that do not comport with the perennial philosophy revealed to us by ancient myth. The asterisk should serve to remind us that where God seems to want us to make war on heathens and infidels, the dispute (like all disputes) is meaningless and foolish to the eternal source of all being behind the mask of our Creator God.