Secular Mysticism

by Dennis Green

Funny how we forget, lose track of so many of the things we learn. So many things we find that resonate for us, with magic and with meaning…

For me, this morning, it was Joseph Campbell, who suddenly reappeared in my thoughts after vanishing for a long stretch of time. I had read his Hero With A Thousand Faces in college, had followed the interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, and poured over his The Mystic Vision, and then, “Poof!” he was gone into the mists of my own history.

Our pre-occupations since 1968 — with politics and economics and technology — have been secular, and largely pragmatic. “What works?” Without even realizing it, we’ve all been practicing the Pragmatism of William James for the better part of the past 40 years. Energy, war and peace, global economics, computer chips, entrepreneurship, red and blue states — we abandoned the rich and vibrant territory of the Spirit to the religious right.

And in the meantime, we’ve shown some disdain for mythology, calling it, along with faith, “going with what you know just ain’t so!” If there were any truths in the Bible, or the Koran or the Upanishads, we reasoned, they would just prove to be inconvenient truths, getting in the way of human progress. The Cold War, and “Star Wars Missile Defense,” now that was something we could wrap our best minds around.

In the Middle East, tensions between the Abrahamic tribes, the Persians, the Shia, Sharia Law, schisms in Islam, resentment of occupations and interference by the West boiled over. But these enemies, we told ourselves, are just backward, primitive, 14^th Century whackos. Religious fanatics. Pay no mind.

But at the same time, a small tribe of western scholars, including men like Campbell, persisted in attempting to document and understand the various mythologies from around the world, and what they might have in common. In cultural anthropology, this is called diffusion. An uncontroversial example of cultural diffusion is the practice of agriculture, which shares much in common from one tribe to another.

Moreover, some scholars realized that they could appreciate the beliefs inherent in mythologies only so much from the outside looking in. And this is when scholars like Campbell encouraged the practice of certain ancient traditions, such as meditation and contemplation. Campbell goes so far as to invent a new philosophy some call “following your bliss.” The phrase came about in an exchange with Moyers:

Campbell: "Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt?

Moyers: "Not in a long time."

Campbell: "Remember the last line? 'I have never done the thing that I wanted to do in all my life.' That is a man who never followed his bliss."

At the same time that such scholars as Campbell appreciated the truth in the various mythologies, they remained scholars, secular observers of these truths, even as they witnessed them from the inside, through practice.

In Wikipedia, we get this: “A fundamental belief of Campbell's was that all spirituality is a search for the same basic, unknown force from which everything came, within which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return. This elemental force is ultimately ‘unknowable’ because it exists before words and knowledge. Although this basic driving force cannot be expressed in words, spiritual rituals and stories refer to the force through the use of ‘metaphors’—these metaphors being the various stories, deities, and objects of spirituality we see in the world. For example, the Genesis myth in the Bible ought not be taken as a literal description of actual events, but rather its poetic, metaphorical meaning should be examined for clues concerning the fundamental truths of the world and our existence.”

In my own way, I’ve been one of these secular mystics too, experiencing many of the spiritual truths from the inside, but never forgetting that they are still mythologies, symbolic reference points. Today, working on my novel, Mescalero City Blues, doing the research, imagining the many myths from the inside, I re-discovered Joseph Campbell, and my love for secular mysticism. I hope you will too.

©2010 Dennis Green