Heaven on Earth

So what does all this mean?  This website looks at five sacred sites in order to show their basic underlying blueprint.  But one of my primary aims is to look beyond the forms and shapes to what they point to.

Carl Jung once said that religion is a defense against a religious experience.  What he meant by this is that the image of a deity may become a barrier to one's understanding because, in the end, it is but an image that we have in mind and not the real thing; it is an image of what we think the deity looks like or is in essence.

Joseph Campbell illustrated this with the example of a clown.  In many Native North American stories, the trickster gods are clown-like figures that are at the same time creator gods.  The point of this, Campbell suggests, is that the image is not a fact but a reflex of some kind.  The clownish form of the trickster points toward the idea that it is not the ultimate image but is transparent to something beyond itself.  Due to the mocking and grotesque image of the trickster we are less likely to stop there and mentally "hang up our hats" upon it and worship.  Instead, we are more likely to see it for what it is, namely an image, and try to see through it for what it imagines. 

In India, for instance, the function of images is to conjure the presence of a deity.  The image serves as a yantra, an instrument that allows the beholder to catch a reflection of a deity whose light transcends the physical eye but is perhaps visible to inner-sight.  This yantra, however, is a tool of meditation and as such it is a means to an end and not an end in itself.  It is a visual metaphor used to approach the invisible, a material image that leads toward the immaterial.         

I take the “divine blueprints” of the Ezekiel-types to be a kind of yantra that we should meditate upon and consider what it points toward.