Standing on a Whale

I'll tell you, uh
Mythology I think of
As the, uh, homeland of the muses
The inspirers of art
The inspirers of poetry
And to see life as a poem
And yourself participating in a poem
Is what the myth does for you
I mean a, a vocabulary
In the form not of words
But of acts and adventures
Which connote something transcendent
Of the action here
And which yet informs the whole thing
So that you always feel in accord
With the universal being

[Chorus]
Every mythology, every religion
Is true
Every myth, every mythology
Every rеligion
Is true
In this sense
It is truе as metaphorical
Of the human
And cosmic mystery
Every religion is true

Jesus ascended to Heaven
The story is he ascended bodily to Heaven
The story is that his mother
Uh, still alive, asleep
Ascended to Heaven
This is metaphorical of something
You don't have to throw it away
All you have to find is what it's saying
What it's saying is he didn't go out there
He went in here
Which is where you must go, too
Ascend to Heaven
Through the inward space
To that source from which you and all life came
That's the sense of that
Now, uh, according to the normal way
Of thinking about the Christian religion
Uh, we cannot identify with Jesus
We have to imitate Jesus
But to say, "I am God," as Jesus said I am a God
Is, for us, uh, blasphemy
However, in the Thomas gospel, Jesus says
"He who drinks from my mouth
Will become as I am and I shall be he"
Wow, that's Buddhism

[Chorus]
Every mythology, every religion
Is true
Every myth, every mythology
Every religion
Is true
In this sense
It is true as metaphorical
Of the human
And cosmic mystery
Every religion is true

Heaven and Hell are within us
And all the gods are within us
This is the great realization
Of the Upanishads of India
Already in the ninth millennia
Ninth century BC
All the gods
All the heavens
All the worlds
Are within us
They are magnified dreams
And what dreams are
Are manifestations in image form
Of energies of the body
In conflict with each other
This organ wants this
This organ wants
That's all myth is
Myth is a manifestation
In symbolic images, metaphorical images
Of energies within us in conflict with each other

[Chorus]
Every mythology, every religion
Is true
Every myth, every mythology
Every religion
Is true
In this sense
It is true as metaphorical
Of the human
And cosmic mystery
Every religion is true

There's a Polynesian saying
That frequently comes to my mind
"Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows"
We are standing on a whale
The ground of being is the ground of our being
And uh, the outward-turned
We see all these little problems here
But inward, we are the source of them all
That's the big mystical teaching
Teaching, teaching, teaching