A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (2 page)

When we talk about

settling the world’s problems,

we’re barking up the wrong tree.

The world is perfect. It’s a mess.

It has always been a mess.

We are not going to change it.

Our job is to straighten out

our own lives.

W
e
must be willing to get rid of

the life we’ve planned, so as to have

the life that is waiting for us.

The old skin has to be shed

before the new one can come.

If we fix on the old, we get stuck.

When we hang onto any form,

we are in danger of putrefaction.

Hell is life drying up.

The Hoarder,

the one in us that wants to keep,

to hold on, must be killed.

If we are hanging onto the form now,

we’re not going to have the form next.

You can’t make an omelet

without breaking eggs.

Destruction before creation.

O
ut
of perfection

nothing can be made.

Every process involves

breaking something up.

The earth must be broken

to bring forth life.

If the seed does not die,

there is no plant.

Bread results

from the death of wheat.

Life lives on lives.

Our own life

lives on the acts

of other people.

If you are lifeworthy,

you can take it.

What we are really living for

is the experience of life,

both the pain and the pleasure.

The world is a match for us.

We are a match for the world.

O
pportunities

to find deeper powers

within ourselves

come when life

seems most challenging.

Negativism

to the pain and ferocity of life

is negativism to life.

We are not there

until we can say

“yea” to it all.

To take a righteous attitude

toward anything is to denigrate it.

Awe is what moves us forward.

As you proceed through life,

following your own path,

birds will shit on you.

Don’t bother to brush it off.

Getting a comedic view

of your situation

gives you spiritual distance.

Having a sense of humor saves you.

F
ollow
your bliss.

The heroic life is living the
individual
adventure.

There is no security

in following the call to adventure.

Nothing is exciting

if you know

what the outcome is going to be.

To refuse the call

means stagnation.

What you don’t experience positively

you will experience negatively.

You enter the forest

at the darkest point,

where there is no path.

Where there is a way or path,

it is someone else’s path.

You are not on your own path.

If you follow someone else’s way,

you are not going to realize

your potential.

E
ternity

is a dimension

of here and now.

The divine lives within you.

Live from your own center.

Your real duty

is to go away from the community

to find your bliss.

The society is the enemy

when it imposes its structures

on the individual.

On the dragon there are many scales.

Everyone of them says “Thou Shalt.”

Kill the dragon “Thou Shalt.”

When one has killed that dragon,

one has become The Child.

Breaking out

is following your bliss pattern,

quitting the old place,

starting your hero journey,

following your bliss.

You throw off yesterday

as the snake sheds its skin.

T
he
goal of the hero trip

down to the jewel point

is to find those levels in the psyche

that open, open, open,

and finally open to the mystery

of your Self being

Buddha consciousness

or the Christ.

That’s the journey.

It is all about finding

that still point in your mind

where commitment drops away.

I
t
is by going down into the abyss

that we recover the treasures of life.

Where you stumble,

there lies your treasure.

The very cave you are afraid to enter

turns out to be the source of

what you are looking for.

The damned thing in the cave

that was so dreaded

has become the center.

You find the jewel,

and it draws you off.

In loving the spiritual,

you cannot despise the earthly.

The purpose of the journey

is compassion.

When you have come past

the pairs of opposites,

you have reached compassion.

The goal is to bring the jewel

back to the world,

to join the two things together.

T
he
separateness

apparent in the world

is secondary.

Beyond that world of opposites

is an unseen (but experienced)

unity and identity in us all.

Today, the planet is

the only proper “in group.”

You must return

with the bliss

and integrate it.

The return is seeing

the radiance everywhere.

Sri Ramakrishna said:

“Do not seek illumination

unless you seek it

as a man whose hair is on fire

seeks a pond.”

If you want the whole thing,

the gods will give it to you.

But you must be ready for it.

T
he
goal is to live

with godlike composure

on the full rush of energy,

like Dionysus riding the leopard,

without being torn to pieces.

A bit of advice

given to a young Native American

at the time of his initiation:

“As you go the way of life,

you will see a great chasm.

Jump.

It is not as wide as you think.”

[Discuss]

G
OD
had a garden, and he needed a gardener, so he created Adam. Adam was bored. He was doing the job, but it was no fun. God saw that he needed entertainment, and so he created the animals to entertain him. All Adam could think of to do with the animals was to give them names.

Then God said, “Well, here goes.” So he put Adam to sleep and pulled Eve out of his rib—as Joyce said, she was “the cutletsized consort.” Then the trouble started and we were in the game.

Male and female, life and death,

good and evil: problems of opposites.

The trouble that began was the discovery of duality. That was the Fall. There was no real recognition of duality before this. How did duality take place in this garden? There were two trees that were forbidden trees. “You can eat the fruit of any tree in the place but not of this or of that one.” Tree number one was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, of duality. Tree number two was the tree of the knowledge of eternal life.

The serpent—who represents lunar consciousness and life in the field of time, where there are pairs of opposites—saw Eve and thought she must be bored, as most wives are when their husbands are working all the time. When that happens, there’s always a friend that appears, and this one was a little serpent.

The serpent said: “Look there’s an interesting thing about this tree. Don't mind that old buzzard—have a taste and you will really know something.” Well, she had a taste, and when Adam came along, she said, “Look, this is okay.”

So, he had a taste, and then God, who walked in the cool of the evening in the Garden, saw the pair of them wearing fig leaves, and he said, “What’s this? You’ve got leaves on.”

The female activates the male;

then he is the action,

and she has to take the results.

They told God what happened, and that ran the usual way: the man blamed the woman, and the woman blamed the snake. God then cursed the lot of them in increasing degrees. Man got it fairly easy: all he had to do was to work and sweat. The woman had to bring forth children in pain, and the serpent had to crawl on his belly for the rest of his life. God kicked them out of the Garden and put at the gate two cherubim, door guardians, with a flaming sword between them. And that’s the explanation of why we’re out here in the cold and not in the Garden.

Christianity and Judaism

are religions of exile:

Man was thrown out of the Garden.

It seems impossible today, but people actually believed all that until as recently as half a century or so ago: clergymen, philosophers, government officers and all. Today we know—and know right well—that there never was anything of the kind: no Garden of Eden anywhere on this earth, no time when the serpent could talk, no prehistoric “Fall,” no excl-sion from the Garden, no universal Flood, no Noah’s Ark. The entire history on which our leading Occidental religions have been founded is an anthology of fictions. But these are fictions of a type that have had—curiously enough—a universal vogue as the founding legends of other religions, too. Their counterparts have turned up everywhere—and yet, there never was such a garden, serpent, tree, or deluge.
⁷

The serpent

was the wise one in the Garden.

Adam and Eve

got thrown into the field of time.

“…in the beginning this universe was but the Self in the form of a man. He looked around and saw nothing but himself.…

“He was just as large as a man and a woman embracing. This Self then divided himself in two parts; and with that, there were a master and mistress.—Therefore this body, by itself, as the sage Yajnavalkya declares, is like half of a split pea. And that is why, indeed, this space is filled by a woman.—He united with her, and from that mankind arose.…

“She became a cow, he a bull and united with her; and from that cattle arose. She became a mare, he a stallion; she an ass, he a donkey and united with her; and from that solid-hoofed animals arose. She became a goat, he a buck; she became a sheep, he a ram and united with her; and from that goats and sheep arose.—Thus he poured forth all pairing things, down to the ants.”—
Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad
⁸

Marriage is reconstruction

of the androgyne.

If you marry only for the love affair,

that will not last.

You must also marry on another level

to reconstruct the androgyne,

to make the perfect whole,

male and female.

…consider the allegory in Plato’s Symposium, where it is said by Aristophanes—playfully, yet in the form of the same myth—that the earliest human beings were “round and had four hands and four feet, back and sides forming a circle, one head with two faces looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainders to correspond.” According to this Platonic version of the great theme, these original creatures were of three kinds: male-male, male-female, and female-female. They were immensely powerful; and since the gods were in fear of their strength, Zeus decided to cut them in two, like apples halved for pickling.… “After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one, and would have perished from hunger without ever making an effort, because they did not like to do anything apart… : so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two and healing the state of man. Each of us when separated is but the indenture of a man, having one side only like a flat fish, and he is always looking for his other half.
⁹

When seeking your partner,

if your intuition is a virtuous one,

you will find him or her. If not,

you’ll keep finding the wrong person.

H
ow
does one talk about whether or not there is a destiny between couples? I feel it, but I don’t believe it. In my case, at Sarah Lawrence College I was teaching all these beautiful girls, and there were certain classes when I’d feel a little hopped up. It took me six months to locate the one who was responsible for this, and when I did, I knew I was gone.

When I first saw the woman who is now my wife, I felt like that and didn’t know it. She was in the class, and I was hopped up—who the hell is doing this? Then I finally located who she was, and there was a whole constellating of relationship that I didn’t let her know about until I gave the mildest sign: she was about to leave school, so I gave her a book: Spengler’s
Decline of the West
. It was a little present, but a loaded one.

There was something behind that projection of mine. Why does this projection come out of me instead of someone else? Because it’s based upon my deep life experiences, and that’s where one’s destiny is. It is structured by your own life. It is my life that put the projection that way—experiences that I’ve had of the female, even in my infancy.