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“The stress on the sexual character of the deity—whether male or female—is secondary and, in certain contexts, baffling. It was originally oriented toward the masculine to establish the superiority of the patriarchal societies over the matriarchal. . . . Folks in the Orient don’t have this problem. Eastward of Persia, in India and China, the old mythology carries the idea of the cosmic cycle—the impersonal order behind the universe—up into the contemporary world. You have the Indian idea of dharma and the kalpa, the Chinese concept of the Tao and so forth. These concepts, which are as ancient as the written word, transcend gender.”
The amazing thing about Indian mythology is that it could absorb the universe we talk about now, with the great cycles of stellar lives, the galaxies beyond galaxies, and the comings and goings of universes. What this does is diminish the force of the present moment.
People ask, "Did Jesus go to India?" He didn’t have to—India had already come to the Near East. One wonders how this idea of the inward Christ came to this young Jewish prophet, because it’s not in the Jewish tradition at all. This I think is what knocked St. Paul off his horse—when he realized that the actuality of Christ’s death and alleged resurrection was an actual historical enactment of the sense of the mystery religions.
The universal doctrine teaches that all the visible structures of the world ... are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during their manifestation, and back into which they must ultimately dissolve. This is the power known to science as energy, to the Melanesians as mana, to the Sioux Indians as wakonda, the Hindus as Shakti, and the Christians as the power of God.
There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river. One was a god; he drank ambrosia. One was a man; he drank water. One was a demon; he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness.
“There’s a word being used here this evening that I don’t understand.” He said, “What’s the word?” I said, “God.” “You don’t understand what God means?” he replied. I said, “I don’t know what you mean by God. You’ve told us that God has hidden his face, that we are in exile. I’ve just come from India, where people are experiencing God all the time.” And do you know what (Martin) Buber said? “Do you mean to compare?” There you have revealed two sides of looking at the idea of God.
What the virgin birth represents is the birth of the spiritual life in the human animal. It has nothing to do mythologically with a biological anomaly. In the Indian kuṇḍalinī system the first three cakras are our animal zeal to life, animal erotics, and animal aggression. Then at the level of the heart there is the birth of a purely human intention, a purely human realization of a possible spiritual life which then puts the others in secondary place. The symbol in the kuṇḍalinī system for this cakra is a male and female organ in conjunction—an upward facing and a downward-facing triangle. At this level the spiritual life is generated, and that is the meaning of the virgin birth.
When one looks at the glorious panorama of Indian art one sees a repetition of themes; beautiful themes, dependable themes, motifs that recur time and time again. And if you compare that galaxy of forms with their counterparts in post-Renaissance Europe, you'll be struck by the absence of individual inflection in any of these works.
When you just now rang my doorbell, I was right in the middle of a sentence about an American Indian initiation: an initiation myth having to do with two boys––twin heroes––born of a virgin. Their father is the Sun. Monsters are troubling the land, and the boys––one a warrior and the other a medicine man––journey to their father the Sun to get weapons. The father puts them through a series of four terrible tests, and when they survive these tests, he initiates them, tells them what their true names are. That's it––the awakening to the inward self, to the knowledge of who you truly are.

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