A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (5 page)

The key to the Grail is compassion,

suffering with, feeling another’s sorrow

as if it were your own.

The one who finds

the dynamo of compassion

is the one who’s found the Grail.

The question is: “Can I open myself to compassion?” Compassion for me is just what the word says: it is “suffering with.” It is an immediate participation in the suffering of another to such a degree that you forget yourself and your own safety and spontaneously do what’s necessary.

I think this has something to do with what’s meant by the image of the Grail, since the thing that effected the healing of the Grail King was the spontaneous act of asking that question and not withholding it. Often you feel that such a spontaneous act will make a fool out of you and so you don’t do it—I will look like a fool if I do that. That’s the failure in the Grail Castle.

“How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action?”
—Schopenhauer
¹⁶

And in the third chapter of
Ulysses
, Joyce writes that Stephen, as he walked along the seashore, asked himself essentially this question: Would I forget my own self-protection to the extent of risking a swim out there and be at the mercy of someone whose power out there I wouldn’t know anything about? When you rescue someone from drowning, you never know if they’ll pull you down with them.

“This is something really mysterious, something for which Reason can provide no explanation, and for which no basis can be found in practical experience. It is nevertheless of common occurrence, and everyone has had the experience. It is not unknown even to the most hard-hearted and self-interested. Examples appear every day before our eyes of instant responses of this kind, without reflection, one person helping another, coming to his aid, even setting his own life in clear danger for someone whom he has seen for the first time, having nothing more in mind than that the other is in need and in peril of his life.”
—Schopenhauer
¹⁷

There was an article in the New York papers a few months ago about a kid who dove into the Hudson River to save a drowining dog and then had to be saved himself. When asked why he’d dove in, he said, “Because it was my dog.” Then there was the girl who went into a burning building—twice—to save her little brother and sister, and when she was asked why she’d done that, she said, “Because I loved them.”

Such a one is then acting, Schopenhauer answers, out of an instinctive recognition of the truth that he and that other in fact are one. He has been moved not from the lesser, secondary knowledge of himself as separate from the others, but from an immediate experience of the greater, truer truth, that we are all one in the ground of our being.
¹⁸

That’s the power. These people didn’t know if they had the strength or not. It’s not duty, not reckoning. It is a flash: a breakthrough of the reality of this life that lives in us. At such moments, you realize that you and that other are, in fact, one. It’s a big realization.

Survival is the second law of life.

The first is that we are all one.

I
T
is possible to observe, in the earliest phases of the development of the infant, symptoms of a dawning “mythology” of a state beyond the vicissitudes of time. These appear as reactions to, and spontaneous defenses against, the body-destructive fantasies that assail the child when it is deprived of the mother’s breast.
¹⁹
“The infant reacts with a temper tantrum and the fantasy that goes with the temper tantrum is to tear everything out of the mother's body. …The child then fears retaliation for these impulses, i.e., that everything will be scooped out of its own inside.”
²⁰
Anxieties for the integrity of its body, fantasies of restitution, a silent, deep requirement for indestructibility and protection against the “bad” forces from within and without, begin to direct the shaping psyche; and these remain as determining factors in the later neurotic, and even normal, life activities, spiritual efforts, religious beliefs, and ritual practices of the adult.
²¹

The myths are clues

to unite the forces within us.

And so we have…this critical problem as human beings of seeing to it that the mythology—the constellation of sign signals, affect images, energy-releasing and -directing signs—that we are communicating to our young will deliver directive messages qualified to relate them richly and vitally to the environment that is to be theirs for life, and not to some period of man already past, some piously desiderated future, or—what is worst of all—some querulous, freakish sect or momentary fad. And I call this problem critical because, when it is badly resolved, the result for the miseducated individual is what is known, in mythological terms, as a Waste Land situation. The world does not talk to him; he does not talk to the world. When that is the case, there is a cut-off, the individual is thrown back on himself, and he is in prime shape for that psychotic break-away that will turn him into either an essential schizophrenic in a padded cell, or a paranoid screaming slogans at large, in a bughouse without walls.
²²

Myth makes a connection between our waking consciousness and the mystery of the universe. It gives us a map or picture of the universe and allows us to see ourselves in relationship to nature, as when we speak of Father Sky and Mother Earth. It supports and validates a certain social and moral order. The Ten Command-ments being given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai is an example of this. Lastly, it helps us pass through and deal with the various stages of life from birth to death.

We have, consequently, the comparatively complex problem in educating our young of training them not simply to assume uncritically the patterns of the past, but to recognize and cultivate their own creative possibilities; not to remain on some proven level of earlier biology and sociology, but to represent a movement of the species forward.
²³

Basically, everyone needs a father. The father has a vital role. The mother represents nature, but the father introduces the son and daughter to social relationships.

From your mother you get your body.

From your father you get

your role in the social world.

The son has to play a role like that of his father, so the father is a model, either a positive or a negative one. You may be disgusted with the kind of life your father lives, but you have that model, and responding negatively to it will be your life. If he’s not there, it’s almost impossible to relate effectively from where you are in your family to the outside world.

For the girl, the father is the first intimate relation-ship to the male principle in some way or other. With the father gone, the mother must play both roles, and I think the child, down deep, blames the mother for there being no father there. It’s a sense of “you have deprived me of the person who would have been absolutely my guide and my messenger.”

M
ONEY
is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities. You realize that the possibilities of life in an economically oriented society are really a function of how much money you’ve got.

On the other hand, money has never meant any-thing to me. I got back from my student years in Europe three weeks before the Wall Street crash. The only money I had was what I’d made playing in a jazz band in college. I’d earned several thousand dollars—which was a lot in those days—and that was what I had until it disappeared. I didn’t make another cent for five years. I found that, if you had no responsibilities, you could live wonderfully without any money. In fact, I thought anybody who worked for money was a fool. I took a vow never to do anything for money. Now, that does not mean that when I do something for somebody I don’t ask for money. I want as much as I can get, but that’s the secondary part of the game. My life course is absolutely indifferent to money. As a result, a lot of money has come in by my doing what I feel I want to do from the inside. If you do that, you are doing things that attract money, because you are giving life and life responds in the way of its counterpart in hard coin.

If you follow your bliss,

you will always have your bliss,

money or not.

If you follow money,

you may lose it,

and you will have nothing.

Being as I was, and given the field I was interested in, I had a certain disdain for people who gave their lives to making money. Now that I have made money, in dealing with it I’ve had to be in touch with people whose business is money, whose whole life has been in that field, and I’ve had an interesting and surprising experience: I’ve met some magnificent people.

Money experienced as life energy is indeed a medi-tation, and letting it flow out instead of hoarding it is a mode of participation in the lives of others. There’s a beautiful thing that can grow out of a life devoted to money that surprised me.

In the living of a life today, money is a facilitating energy source. With money in the tank like gasoline, you can get places you other wise couldn’t go.

You’ve got to use the advantages that you have cultivated. Otherwise, if you drop those, you are going to have a negative reaction in ten years or so. What I mean is, as you go from threshold to threshold, it must be the same you that makes the jump. You don’t go down again, you start from where you are. From that, more and more will blossom. The potentialities from your center are used for further extrapolation in the next venture.

From what I have seen in the history of the arts in New York, when money is poured on something it flowers. With money there has to be a flow. I had a beautiful experience of a man with money when I was a trustee of the Bollingen Foundation, which was founded by Paul Mellon, an enormously wealthy man. He and his wife had been in analysis with Carl Jung when the war came and they had to leave Switzerland. They asked Jung what they could give him in the way of a gift to express their gratitude for what he had done. He suggested they establish a foundation for the interpretation and study of symbols. That’s what they did, and it is an example of a lot of money being put to the right use. The influence of that Bollingen Series on the literature and science of America has been enormous. Without that money it would never have happened.

You have to have not only the energy, but also the capacity of mind that gives the model of the channel—with that, life really flowers. When you put the money in the wrong place. it can be devastating. Where is the money going and where is it coming from in the economy of a nation, the economy of a city? That’s one of the big problems. You can turn a flowering culture into a desiccating culture just by wrong channeling.

I always think you can translate sociology into psychology. It has to do with energy distribution. What are you going to do with your money? What factor in your own consciousness are you going to favor in the spending of the money? For instance, I have a seventy-five-dollar book coming out. Some people will say that is expensive, but those same people will spend one-hundred-and-fifty dollars to have dinner in a restaurant with another couple. So, is the money going up here in your mind or is it going down here in your stomach? Up here, you can’t replace the book I would have given you; but down here, you could have bought cheaper food that would have been just as nourishing.

I
F
you’re getting a degree to compen-sate for an inferiority complex, give up the complex, because it’s an artificial thing.

When you’re going for a degree, you don’t do what
you
want to do. You find out what the professor wants you to do to get the degree, and you just do it. If you want a degree so you can teach, the idea is to get the degree in the quickest, easiest way. When you have it,
then
you can expand and get your education.

I was given a fellowship to go to Europe, and I went to the University of Paris. I was working on medieval French and Provençal and on the troubadour poetry. When I got to Europe, I discovered Modern Art: James Joyce, Picasso, Mondrian—the whole bunch of them. Paris in 1927–28 was something else. Then I went to Germany and started studying Sanskrit and got all involved in Hinduism. I discovered Jung while in Germany. Everything was opening up—this way, that way. Well, my question then was, “Am I going to go back into that bottle?” My interest in Celtic Romance was gone.

I went to the university and said, “Listen, I don’t want to get back into that bottle.” I had put in all the hours necessary for the degree; all I had to do was write that goddamn thesis. They wouldn’t let me move into another place and continue my education, so I said to hell with it. I went up into the woods and spent five years reading. I never got the Ph.D. I learned to live on absolutely nothing. I was free and had no responsibilities. It was marvelous.

It takes courage

to do what you want.

Other people

have a lot of plans for you.

Nobody wants you to do

what you want to do.

They want you to go on their trip,

but you can do what you want.

I did. I went into the woods

and read for five years.

It was from 1929 to 1934, five years. I went up to a little shack in Woodstock, New York, and just dug in. All I did was read, read, read, and take notes. It was during the Great Depression. I didn’t have any money, but there was an important book firm in New York called Stechert-Hafner, and I would write to them for books—the books of Frobenius were expensive—and they’d send me copies, and I wouldn’t pay. That was the way people behaved during the depression. They waited until I got a job, and then I paid them. That was noble. I really appreciated that.