Nature Is Still Ours - Akira the Don, Joseph Campbell

What happens

Is that

The old

Fascination

Disappears

An echo remains

And you

The old

Fascination

Disappears

An echo remains

The old

Fascination

Disappears

An echo remains

And you have, as it were

The

Vestige

Of mythology

The problem of our

Present

Age

Is to

Recreate

The mythology

For today

On which people

Will live

On which the society

Will grow

It is being done

It is being done well

People aren’t always looking in the right place for it

But it is

Taking shape

Our

Great artists

Our great poets

Our great scientists

Erwin Schrodinger’s

Little book

‘My View of the World'

This is a vision of a poet, and of a first-rate physical scientist

And it has the same song in it

That one reads and hears

In the old

Upanishads

And in the sayings of the great prophets

Nature is still ours

It’s still ours

It is in us

It is in the universe

Nature is still ours

It’s still ours

It is in us

It is in the universe

Secondary to that

Is the social

Situation

Now in our society, the social problem is turned over largely to the police

And to

Congress

As a purely

Practical matter

However

The creatures

That constitute the society

These are today

The neighbor

They really are

The idea of a personal God

Living

Somehow

Somewhere else

Out there — there is no «out there» anymore

There is no «up there»

It’s awfully difficult

To

Validate

But it seems to me if one’s looking for the personality of God

It’s right here

In the multitudinous personalities of those

Around us

Nature is still ours

It’s still ours

It is in us

It is in the universe

Nature is still ours

It’s still ours

It is in us

It is in the universe

Everything I find

In the poets

In the scientists

Who push through

To this

Mystery

Points

Not to the animals

As our neighbors

Not to the plant

Not to the planet

But to that

Other one

That «thou»

Whom you face

Who’s not the thou you would want him to be

He’s other

And it’s that recognition of otherness

That is absolutely basic and necessary

Now this doesn’t mean that you have to

Give up your otherness

In recognition of him

It may darn well be

Collision

But it has to be collision

With reverence

And respect