Building the Cathedral | 6. The Master Plan (II)

Becoming the Waking Eye of God

Jul 10, 2023

LINES CONVERGING: THE MYTH OF MYTHMAKING

This process has been going on for millennia. Indeed, every religion at every stage of its development has been engaged in this task of tasks, in building The Cathedral. As new stages in development are reached, old symbols lose their efficacy and new symbols appear. New sections of The Cathedral are worked at. Now it is sacrifice, now mastery of desire, now law, now forgiveness, now love—and so forth. The myths shift through the ages, until…

the myth itself becomes the myth of God’s transformation.

By means of this process, the God slumbering in the unconscious grows more and more awake. Albion stirs. Edinger expresses the New Myth in his own mythic image this way:

Suppose the universe consists of an omniscient mind containing total and absolute knowledge. But it is asleep. Slowly it stirs, stretches and starts to awaken. It begins to ask questions. What am I? — but no answer comes. Then it thinks, I shall consult my fantasy, I shall do active imagination. With that, galaxies and solar systems spring into being. The fantasy focuses on earth. It becomes autonomous and life appears. Now the Divine mind wants dialogue and man emerges to answer that need. The deity is straining for Self-knowledge and the noblest representatives of mankind have the burden of that divine urgency imposed on them. Many are broken by the weight. A few survive and incorporate the fruits of their divine encounter in mighty works of religion and art and human knowledge. These then generate new ages and civilizations in the history of mankind. Slowly, as this process unfolds, God begins to learn who He is.[i]

This is humanity’s great task of tasks—to awaken the God slumbering in our collective unconscious so that we may know God and God may know God’s Self. This is the divine labor we work at. This is our version of assisting the sun transverse the sky. We do it by bringing forth the God within us by means of our personal myths. All of our efforts thus work together into one great project.

This is the New Myth still attempting to break into greater and greater consciousness. This is the significance of the symbols seething in the world’s big dreams. Recall Bond’s patient, who dreamed of his life’s line forming the sacred geometry of the One mandala Self:

Now I see that my one red line that I was walking is but one of many lines. Other lines connect and intersect with my line. In fact, as I get higher still I see that all of the lines are connected in a vastly complicated beautiful living circle burning in space. My line is now one line among many in a great pattern that connects each in a subtle harmony. I see that I have been walking toward the center of the circle. Then I have the recognition I have been seeking. I realize, “This is my life.” That is why it was so absolutely familiar to me.

Edinger relates a similar dream, recounted by a woman:

I saw the earth covered by a single great Tree whose multiple roots fed on the Inner Sun of Gold, the lumen naturae. It was a tree whose limbs were made of light and the branches were lovingly entangled so that it made itself a network of beauteous love. And it seemed as if it were lifting itself out of the broken seeds of many, countless egos who had now allowed the One Self to break forth. And when one beheld this, the sun and the moon and the planets turned out to be something quite, quite other than one had thought. From what I could make out, the Lord Himself was the Alchemist, and out of collecting swarming and suffering, ignorance and pollution, He was “trying” the gold.[ii]

So the new God emerges—from the collective unconscious to the collective consciousness. But, the dream suggests, God is not passive in the process. While we add our own part into the mix, the emerging God tests our metal, “trying” the gold, passing judgment on His own taking-shape, confirming or rejecting. So it is a dialectic—humans bringing God to greater Self-consciousness, and that Self-consciousness assessing our work along the way: indeed, using us to bring Himself into expression.

The waking Kaleidoscopic Eye of Emergentism

In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James relates a number of visionary experiences people have reported in the course of dreams, trances, hallucinations, ether intoxication, and the like. One powerful narrative struck me upon first reading the book many years ago. Now, in retrospect, I wonder if it doesn’t express the same myth, simmering even then in the collective unconscious at the turn of the century. A woman relates her vision:

A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway. The lightning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might to do was to change his course, to bend the line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I saw. I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute angle, I should have both suffered and ‘seen’ still more, and should probably have died.
He went on and I came to. In that moment the whole of my life passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress, and I understood them. This was what it had all meant, this was the piece of work it had all been contributing to do. I did not see God's purpose, I only saw his intentness and his entire relentlessness towards his means. He thought no more of me than a man thinks of hurting a cork when he is opening wine, or hurting a cartridge when he is firing. And yet, on waking, my first feeling was, and it came with tears, ‘Domine non sum digna’ [Lord, I am not worthy], for I had been lifted into a position for which I was too small. I realized that in that half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before, or than I am capable of desiring to do. I was the means of his achieving and revealing something, I know not what or to whom, and that, to the exact extent of my capacity for suffering. While regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had gone so deep, I had seen nothing of what the saints call the love of God, nothing but his relentlessness. And then I heard an answer, which I could only just catch, saying, ‘Knowledge and Love are One, and the measure is suffering.’[iii]

Deep within, God is working—on His own “task of tasks,” you might say, achieving His own aim relentlessly. Here it is not the dreamer riding the line of their life, but God moving, like a locomotive, along His, traveling—by means of us. Indeed, we ourselves come into our short consciousness only so that God can travel His way. In this, our lives are the means by which God works his Purpose. And, by means of certain individuals, He changes course—His Way is transformed. This is our divine service, the labor we lend to help God achieve His purpose. It is experienced as suffering, the depth of which measures both our love and our knowledge of the Ultimate Mystery.

OUR NEW HORIZON

Such dreams and visions are nothing less than the nascent scriptures of the New Myth on the horizon. As yet, it remains mostly underground, a subterranean theology brimming with energy beneath the threshold of consciousness. Myths such as this bring it to the surface, put it into the world, making the new God-image conscious. Ultimately, this is the task our personal myths can serve as well, as we devote our individual lives to the mythic service of the Mystery. Edinger writes:

As it gradually dawns on people, one by one, that the transformation of God is not just an interesting idea but is a living reality, it may begin to function as a new myth. Whoever recognizes this myth as his own personal reality will put his life in the service of this process.[iv]

Indeed, every individual effort here is helpful. No experience is wasted. In this sense, the cultural meaning crisis can actually turn out to be a necessary and constructive process, provided that enough people work through its implications toward some personal psychological growth: the expansion and development of their God-image. In his book The New God-Image, Edinger writes:

If enough individuals have had that transformative experience within themselves, then they become seeds sown in the collective psyche which can promote the unification of the collective psyche as a whole. …[T]he collective psyche of the human race is the sum total of all the individual psyches. If a certain number of individuals psyches have had the experience whereby the God-image, by reaching consciousness, has achieved the transformation, then those few individuals will function something like yeast in the dough.[v]

Bond imagines this communal construction of God rather beautifully. Writing at the end of Living Myth, he concludes:

The world of many generations elaborates a myth. …Line by line it slowly crystallizes. Image by image it becomes living myth. Like a temple of vast dimensions, in the early stages we do not see how the pieces fit together, because we do not know the blueprint. It is as if each life is a vehicle of crystallization in which something takes shape, something is given substance. As if an individual life is a work station, or probably just a single shift at work because our time is so limited. We take the work as far as we can take it and then hand it off to others. It is often lonely labor done in secret. In the morning we receive instruction from the night shift. They tell us how the work’s progressed and try to bring us up to date on what’s been done so far. As best they can, they try to tell us the task that lies before us. If they’ve done well, we feel a certain admiration and see clearly what is to be done next. If they faltered, we begin the day by going back and reworking the unfinished pieces. Perhaps from time to time we meet others who with different skills are working the same piece as our own. …We work our piece as skill and talent allow straight through until evening. …If we are fortunate we earn the satisfaction of a good day’s labor and, retiring for the evening, catch a glimpse of the larger structure taking shape as we walk away. And then smile.[vi]

This is The Cathedral we are all working on, whose foundations have already been laid by countless personal myths the world over. With every evocative new image, every compelling new form, every illuminating new symbol, we are transforming God, building God. As Jung noted, “that is the temple we all build on. We don’t know the people because, believe me, they build in India and China and in Russia and all over the world. That is the new religion.” And it is taking shape slowly and, still, mostly unconsciously. Indeed, making it more conscious is our first task—and this is precisely what the opus of your personal myth does—no solitary task, but the basis of what could be a global movement, a social aspiration for a world still without myth.

Campbell remarked, “The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.”[vii] So, for example, the cathedrals, which united Europe at the height of an aspirational spirituality to construct something good and beautiful, together, for the future. It was a shared myth that united them in collective effort. Indeed, it was participating in that myth that excited people’s imaginations toward their own collective opus. Campbell writes:

The cathedrals, the great temples of the world, or the work of any artist who has given his life to producing these things—all of these come from mythic seizure, not from Maslow’s values. That awakening of awe, that awakening of zeal, is the beginning, and, curiously enough, that’s what pulls people together.[viii]

It is the call of Purpose that unites us. Not just to bring together the disconnected fragments of our lives into a coherent whole, but to bring together each of our disconnected lives into a unifying endeavor. Personal mythmaking becomes social mythmaking. We labor to build The Cathedral together.

In this way, we can imagine that personal mythmaking, thus developed toward the New Myth, could also fulfill the sociological function of myth: namely, to validate and maintain a certain moral order of laws for living with others in society. The New Myth is a social myth. It calls us all to collective work. Inherent within it is an ethic rooted in the project itself. That ethic is not dogmatic in the sense of imposing a creed, but invitational in the sense of encouraging individualistic participation. It eschews strict rules, rigidity, and conformity, and welcomes playfulness, inventiveness, imagination. At the heart of everything, a profound reverence, a solemnity of calling, a sense of mission, and a worshipful appreciation for life as it is as a microcosmic expression of the Ultimate Reality as it is—the mysterium tremendum et fascinans that rides our life like an unstoppable locomotive and yet also depends upon us for achieving its own Self-actualization.

THE CATHEDRAL

A man dreams:

I have been set a task nearly too difficult for me. A log of hard and heavy wood lies covered in the forest. I must uncover it, saw or hew from it a circular piece, and then carve through the piece a design. The result is to be preserved at all costs, as representing something no longer recurring and in danger of being lost. At the same time a tape recording is to be made describing in detail what it is, what it represents, its whole meaning. At the end, the thing itself and the tape are to be given to the public library. Someone says that only the library will know how to prevent the tape from deteriorating within five years.[ix]

Our individual lives are all utterly unique, and thus precious. No one will ever have your experience, come to your realizations, encounter the unconscious in just the way you will. Your life is significant. And to the extent that you labor at some meaningful descent into the psyche to bear God back to the surface for the world to integrate, you participate in the New Myth. You build God out of your own life. The God that emerges reflects your experience, your life. In this way, your life is literally saved, preserved, as part of God.

Edinger, who relates the above dream, interprets it as an image of the New Myth. The difficult task is the individual’s life—and it is to be preserved at all costs, added into a treasury that will keep it from disappearing. “The new myth postulates that no authentic consciousness achieved by the individual is lost. Each increment augments the collective treasury.”[x] We all become part of the Whole. The Cathedral is that treasury. It is made of us.

Edinger sees this idea prefigured in various mythic images that have already come to consciousness, even if their full import has not been grasped. It is already in the Bible, for instance, in the Book of Revelation. So, at the final culmination of history, we read:

He who is victorious—I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God; he shall never leave it. And I will write the name of my God upon him, and the name of the city of my God, that new Jerusalem which is coming down out of heaven from my God, and my own name.

In the end, we become the Temple. The development of the God-image in the New Myth culminates in this Temple comprised of all our individual consciousnesses—our multitude of personal myths all intersecting their lines together to form the great Circle.

The image, I think, appears likewise in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the poet’s vision of Heaven culminating in the sight of the sempiternal Celestial Rose, where all the souls of the faithful persist for eternity around divinity.

“Understood psychologically,” says Edinger, such texts

refer to a transfer or translation from the temporal, personal life of the ego to the eternal, archetypal realm. Presumably the essential accomplishments of egohood, its final sublimatio in the collective, archetypal treasury of humanity. Jung seems to be saying the same thing in describing the visions he had when on the verge of death:
I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away….Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me. …I consisted of my own history, and I felt with great certainty: this is what I am. [xi]

Freed of temporal limitations, the sum of individual consciousness continues on, forever—built into the very architecture of The Cathedral of the emerging God. Towards a vision such as this the new God-image has been developing. The Great Self, a vast mandala—the symbol of psychic wholeness—made up of countless selves.

EPILOGUE: GETTING TO WORK

We must start somewhere, though. Even for the most towering structures, we work one small piece at a time. The first is always the hardest. Ultimately, all you need is yourself to make a beginning. The New Myth, if it is to emerge, must begin with single individuals laboring at their own lives, their own direct encounters with the numinous, their own personal myths.

Personal myth opens up into the domain of something akin to a personal religion when you apply the same “Yes-saying” that you did to your life to the whole of existence. With this, you affirm the meaning of your life as it is within the matrix of an infinitely vaster cosmic Mystery as it is. This Mystery, when directly encountered as a meaningful Whole, affects a sense of awe, wonder, and gratitude. It is the Ultimate Reality that is both incomprehensible and fascinating, evoking your affirmation and assent not through reason or morality, but through sheer overwhelming grandeur.

Experiences of this sort are called numinous experiences. Though once communicated via traditional religious systems, the numinous connection with the world has dwindled as modern forces undermined religion and forced a break between objective reality and subjective experiences of meaning. Today, it has fallen to the individual to re-forge this link, by crafting new living myths that activate the archetypes as the old religions once did. With the traditional symbols serving as our guide and our raw material, we can build new myths out of the rubble. Such personal myths can serve as oases within our modern spiritual desert—islands of meaning amidst the contemporary barrenness. The individual is now the bearer of mythic meaning. As Campbell writes:

And just as in the past each civilization was the vehicle of its own mythology, …so in this modern world…each individual is the center of a mythology of his own, of which his own intelligible character is the Incarnate God, so to say, whom his empirically questing consciousness is to find. The aphorism of Delphi, “Know thyself,” is the motto. And not Rome, not Mecca, not Jerusalem, Sinai, or Benares, but each and every “thou” on earth is the center of this world…[xii]

To date, the idea of personal myth has remained too modest. Campbell’s “four functions of myth” provide a very useful schema for thinking about what a robust mythology truly accomplishes, personally and collectively. As we have seen, personal mythmaking, developed into a way of life, is able to fulfill all of the functions of myth, not just one or two. It is far more than just a form of therapy, or a way of thinking about the events of your life. Rather, it has the potential to transform the world, and render a service even to the Divine. It is the way to transform our horizons, the power by which we learn to tell a new story and gain a new aspiration for mankind.

Fortunately, we are not called to build this Cathedral all by ourselves, only to do our part. Every life is an addition, another canvas for a unique insight into consciousness. Every moment is an opportunity for the divine to develop. Every time you go your own way, another brick is laid. Every time you reach a deeper understanding of yourself, the Deity grows more awake. In the New Myth, stasis is the only sin. To grow, to learn, to live: that is your worship. God does not need another reciter of orthodoxy or Scripture-thumping conformist. God needs individuals, characters, weirdos. God needs you—as you are. So make a beginning. Your life is mythic. Live mythically.

In A Religion of One’s Own, Thomas Moore reflects on one particular man’s cathedral—Henry David Thoreau’s. While visiting Walden Pond, Moore’s mind wandered; he became lost in fantasy:

I had a little daydream of Thoreau making the short journey from the town of Concord to the outpost of Walden and building his ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin in the spirit of the old cathedral builders. They were building a house for God, as was Thoreau in his more modest way. In the end, he wrote a small bible, Walden, a verbal companion to his tiny cathedral that contains a myriad of mundane details as a perfect background for profound insights into the spiritual life. You could do no better than to read his words again and again, placing them next to Tao Te Ching and the Gospel stories and some poems from Rumi and Hafiz. But the main task would be to emulate Thoreau and follow your own inspiration and build your own “cathedral,” however personal and freely adapted, and create your own Bible and Walden.[xiii]

Our horizons tell our stories.

Help change them—by telling yours.

If you enjoyed this series, you can buy a print copy of the book HERE. If you would like to make a contribution to my work, you can support me through my Patreon HERE.

[i] The Creation of Consciousness, 56.
[ii] The Creation of Consciousness, 31.
[iii] James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 392-393.
[iv] The Creation of Consciousness, 113.
[v] Edward F. Edinger (1996) The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image (Chiron Publications, Ashville, NC), 113.
[vi] Living Myth, 191.
[vii] Campbell, Creative Mythology, p. 5; emphasis added.
[viii] Pathways to Bliss, 91.
[ix] The Creation of Consciousness, 25-27.
[x] The Creation of Consciousness, 25-27.
[xi] The Creation of Consciousness, 27.
[xii] Campbell, Creative Mythology, 36.
[xiii] Moore, A Religion of One’s Own, 9.