The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [458]
By this first view, therefore, human beings are merely fleeting embodiments of that universal spirit which lies behind all creation, like bubbles coming to the surface of a pool. With death the individuality of each bubble dissipates, but the pool it emerged from remains. This view is summed up in the instruction given to Buddhist monks in the words from the Tibetan Book of the Dead quoted at the head of this chapter:
`Try to submerge yourself in that light, giving up all belief in a separate self and all attachment to the illusory ego. Recognise that the boundless Light of this true Reality is your own true self, and you shall be saved.'
On the other hand, so all-pervasive is the power of ego-consciousness and the sense that each human being enjoys a unique existence, that it has been difficult to shake off the hope that in some way death might not mark the extinction of the individual personality; and that some non-physical essence of each person, the `soul, might still carry on after death. This was why those prehistoric tombs had contained food and other material possessions, to assist the dead when they crossed over into that mysterious `other world' beyond the grave. This was why one religion after another had conceived of an `after-life, where individual souls or spirits might live for eternity. And this became further refined by the idea that they would here be rewarded or punished according to how they had lived their lives on earth. This sprang from that archetypal pattern, coded into the unconscious, which tells us that to live by the ego must lead ultimately to destruction, whereas to live in accordance with the Self reconnects us with `the One' which is eternal. Hence the idea in folklore that the hero or heroine who meet all the archetypal requirements which connect them to the Self will `live happily ever after': because they are now identified with that ego-transcending part of them which lives forever.
In the eastern religions this sense that all life is ultimately one and indivisible had been expressed through the belief that, as each human being relinquishes its hold on life, so that indestructible substance takes on new bodily form through its `re-incarnation' in another creature. But even here the power of ego-consciousness retained its hold, in that the soul which passes from one physical body to another was still viewed as possessing its own individual essence; unless or until that moment comes when it attains such complete consciousness that it can merge back into indistinguishable unity with the World Soul, the universal light.
How this great question was answered therefore lay ultimately in whether the answer was coming from the ego or the Self. And although the ruling consciousness now emerging in the West might have seemed to be offering its own unequivocal response, as we can see from two of the greatest stories arising from the centuries which followed the answer which emerged from the unconscious was not always so clear cut.
`The love that moves the sun and the other stars'
By the eleventh century, we can begin to speak of a 'Christian Europe, and the emergence of that civilisation we associate with the `Middle Ages: At its centre, now acknowledged all over Europe as the supreme source of spiritual authority, stood the Papacy, still based on Rome. Its secular counterpart, at least in theory, was the `Holy Roman Empire, centred on Germany and established since the crowning of Charlemagne as its first `emperor' in 800. For the people of Europe, from kings and feudal lords to the humblest serf, the symbols and rituals of the Christian religion had come to provide a transcendent framework to every aspect of their lives, from birth and marriage to death and beyond. And in nothing was