Direction of Enlightenment

Direction of Enlightenment
(Vinod Anand)

I was brought up in India, a land that is imbued with a living mythology. Very early on in my childhood, it was my mother who told me that the word “inspiration” literally meant to be in spirit.

The spirit, in turn, was the spirit of God, who breathed into the dust of the earth and animated it with consciousness. The most fundamental factor of existence, then, became the awareness or consciousness of existence. Since it was impossible to imagine God as an infinite being, our collective consciousness used symbols to express divinity.

These symbols were literally the gods and goddesses in our mythical stories. Long before I became aware of Joseph Campbell and “The Power of Myth”, I was already deeply immersed in the stories of these magnificent mythological beings with supernormal powers. Everyday my mother would read to me and my younger brother Sanjiv stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana.

Here I learned of the great archetypal energies of Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom, Lakshmi, the goddess of abundance, Krishna, the When I was very young I thought of them as actual beings.

Later, I realized that they were in fact symbols of higher states of consciousness that allowed us to tap into the collective imagination and our collective longing to accomplish the extraordinary. They lift us to heights of passion, ecstasy, and extraordinary accomplishments.

As I grew up, I was immersed also in the lives of mythical characters in our own times: M K Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mother Teresa. As I delved later into the literature of mythology, I realized that “myth” was etymologically related to the following words – mother, matrix, time, measurement, music, matter, meter, mata, and mater. Myth was the womb of creation through which the infinite being became quantified and finite in the world of space-time and causality.

Myth as story reveals the creative process itself. Much later I also understood that the rituals of invocation of the gods and goddesses were actually ways to breathe in the archetypal and universal energies into myths to activate that latent power within our awareness.

Now many years later, I realize that icons and even commercial brands are encapsulated myths. They are stories with motifs and themes that capture the essentials of the human drama. The stories contain the eternal conflict between opposing themes: sinner and saint, hero and villain, forbidden lust and unconditional love. They have in them mystery, adventure, magic, wanderlust, and divine energies such as love, compassion, empathy and equanimity and the eternal battle to overcome our own demons of anger, hostility, guilt, shame, and fear.

Much later, as I started my writing career, I delved deeply into the cultural mythologies that later became institutionalized religion. I studied the lives of Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, and Buddha not with a desire to validate their historical truth, but to see them as the symbolic expression of the longing, aspiration, desire, and extraordinary accomplishments in the collective imagination of a people in a particular time and culture.

The themes were essentially the same. These great beings had lived stories that surpassed the capacity of ordinary human beings. They were not limited by social constraints. They were rebels: They did not mimic popular. My inspiration comes from the great mythological beings of our collective culture and history. These Beings spoke to our collective longing for truth, goodness, beauty, harmony and evolution in the direction of enlightenment…