The goal of life
is to make your heartbeatmatch the beat of the universe,
to match your nature with Nature.The goal of life is to be a vehicle
for something higher.Art is the transforming experience.
The goal of life is rapture
Art is the way we experience it.The return
is seeing the radiance
everywhere.The goal of the hero's journey
is yourself, finding yourself.- Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell has had a huge influence on my life and work. I encountered him during a period of turmoil and uncertainty in my life, and his work guided me through.
The following are my favorite Joseph Campbell quotes. Perhaps my favorite book about him is Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion by Diane K. Osbon, from which the first excerpt below is taken. Osbon attended a month long workshop with Campbell at the Esalen Institute in 1984.
As we love ourselves, we move toward our own bliss, by which Joseph Campbell meant our highest enthusiasm. The word entheos means "god-filled." Moving towards that which fills us with the godhood, that place where time is not, is all we need to do to change the world around us. Then we, naturally and without effort, love others and allow them to move beyond their self-imposed limitations, and in their own ways. The goal is to evolve to that place where the energy that had been projected outward to correct the world is turned around to correct oneself -- to get on our own track and to dance, in balance, between the worlds.
Following your bliss, as Joseph meant it, is not self-indulgent but vital; your whole physical system knows that this is the way to be alive in this world and the way to give the world the very best that you have to offer. There is a track just waiting for each of us, and once on it, doors will open that were not open before and would not open for anyone else. Everything does start clicking along, and yes, even Mother Nature herself supports the journey.
I have found that you do have only to take that one step toward the gods and they will then take ten steps toward you. That step, the heroic first step of the journey, is out of, or over the edge of, your boundaries, and it often must be taken before you know that you will be supported. The hero's journey has been compared to a birth; it starts out warm and snug in a safe place; then comes a signal, growing more insistent, that it is time to leave. To stay beyond your time is to putrefy. Without the blood and tearing and pain, there is no new life.
- from A JOSEPH CAMPBELL COMPANION. Selected and Edited by Diane K. Osbon
. . .
Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in an dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials.
- Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces
. . .
The creator's mindset. Going on the journey that transforms consciousness through trials and illuminations. That's the real adventure of life. It takes courage--dealing with life as a adventure.
The real objective of the journey is the experience of being really alive. The purpose is the transformation of the searcher. The journey brings the searcher to that place where he or she is in contact with the inner self--that quiet place of strength, of wisdom and peace. The journey is an attempt to escape -- escape modern life with its limits, its desire for things, its fear, its expectations and commitments. It is a hunt for a deeper awareness, an exploration of the soul, an attempt to reach the reservoir of goodness, the repository of energy, that resides deep inside each of us. The creator is in search of that reservoir as the source of healing and of transformation.
- The Hero's Journey, Edited and with an introduction by Phil Cousineau
. . .
The goal of the journey is a transformation of consciousness through trials and illuminations.
It takes courage to deal with life as an adventure.
The objective of the journey is the experience of being really alive.
The journey brings the searcher to that place where he or she is in contact with the inner self -- that quiet place of strength, of wisdom and peace.
. . .
How to Find Your Bliss: Joseph Campbell on What It Takes to Have a Fulfilling Life
by Maria Popova (From Brain Pickings, now Marginalian)
“You have to learn to recognize your own depth.”
In 1985, mythologist and writer Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904–October 30, 1987) sat down with legendary interviewer and idea-monger Bill Moyers for a lengthy conversation at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in California, which continued the following year at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The resulting 24 hours of raw footage were edited down to six one-hour episodes and broadcast on PBS in 1988, shortly after Campbell’s death, in what became one of the most popular series in the history of public television.
As Moyers notes in the introduction, Campbell saw as the greatest human transgression “the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert, not quite awake.” This, perhaps, is why the most rewarding part of the conversation deals with the dictum that has come to encapsulate Campbell’s philosophy on life: “Follow your bliss.” Decades before the screaming tyranny of work/life balance reached its modern crescendo, Campbell put a sympathetic ear to the soul’s cry and identified with enormous elegance and precision the root of our existential dissatisfaction. He tells Moyers:
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are — if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
Discerning one’s bliss, Campbell argues, requires what he calls “sacred space” — a space for uninterrupted reflection and unrushed creative work. Far from a mystical idea, this is something that many artists and writers have put into practice by way of their peculiar workspace rituals, as well as something cognitive science has illuminated in exploring the psychology of the perfect daily routine. But Campbell sees past the practical rituals of creativity and into the deeper psychic and spiritual drivers — that profound need for a “bliss station” into which to root ourselves:
[Sacred space] is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
[…]
Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.
Two centuries after Kierkegaard admonished against the cowardice of the crowd, Campbell argues that we often lose our way on the path to our bliss station as society’s limiting notions of success peer-pressure us into unimaginative, fail-safe pursuits:
It’s characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.
[…]
The majority’s function in relation to the spirit is to try to listen and to open up to someone who’s had an experience beyond that of food, shelter, progeny, and wealth.
Opening up to those more meaningful dimensions of bliss, Campbell insists, is simply a matter of letting your life speak:
We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth.
In a sentiment that calls to mind Mark Strand’s beautiful meditation on the poet’s task of bearing witness to the universe, Campbell points to poets as the most attentive of listeners to the language of bliss:
Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. Most people are concerned with other things. They get themselves involved in economic and political activities, or get drafted into a war that isn’t the one they’re interested in, and it may be difficult to hold to this umbilical under those circumstances. That is a technique each one has to work out for himself somehow.
But most people living in that realm of what might be called occasional concerns have the capacity that is waiting to be awakened to move to this other field. I know it, I have seen it happen in students.
Looking back on how he arrived at this notion of finding one’s bliss, Campbell touches on the crucial difference between religious faith and secular spirituality:
I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked.
[…]
The religious people tell us we really won’t experience bliss until we die and go to heaven. But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you are still alive.
[…]
If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.
The most uncomfortable but essential part of finding your bliss, Campbell argues, is the element of uncertainty — the willingness to, in the timeless words of Rilke, “live the questions” rather than reaching for the ready-made answers:
The adventure is its own reward — but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control. We are following our own way, not our daddy’s or our mother’s way… Life can dry up because you’re not off on your own adventure.
[…]
There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.
. . .
Our life evokes our character and you find out more about yourself as you go on.
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.
― Joseph Campbell
We have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination,
we shall find a God.
And where we had thought to slay another,
we shall slay ourselves.
And where we had thought to travel outward,
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone,
we shall be with all the world.”
― Joseph Campbell
Follow your inner heart and the world moves in and helps.
― Joseph Campbell
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”
― Joseph Campbell
"People say that what we're seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. What we seek is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel that rapture of being alive".
Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell, Quotes From The Hero With a Thousand Faces and - The Power of Myth
Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in an dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials.
When you are teaching a bunch of boys, you’ve got to wear them out. They’ve got to participate in athletics. So you send them out in the fields where they can knock each other around. In primitive societies the violence delivered to young men in their teens is prodigious and it is taming them. The young male is a completely violent piece of biology and you’ve got to integrate that.
One of the experiences of life is a good fight. Remember that old Irish question: “Is this a private fight or can anybody get into it?” It heightens your experience of being alive, being in a good fight. And that’s the advantage of the experience in athletics -— there’s organized violence and it does everybody good. And those who can’t even wiggle a finger can at least properly sit and look at it and get a certain satisfaction out of seeing people knock each other around.
When you open A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, my copy I bought back in Paris in 1927, on the title page we see in Latin, “Et ignotas anuimum dimittit in artes,” “And he sets his mind to unknown arts.” The name of the hero is Stephen Dedaulus, who created wings of art by which he flew.
The epigraph of James Joyce's Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man.
Originally from a description of Daedalus in the Metamorphoses of Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso), VIII:188.
Translation: "And he sets his mind to unknown arts" (in Metamorphoses the line continues, "and changes the laws of nature").
The full line, in Latin, is:
...et ignotas animum dimittit in artes naturamque nouat.
L’art fait ressortir les grandes lignes de la nature. Art brings out the grand lines of nature. And this is what myths are also about.
The goal of the journey is a transformation of consciousness through trials and illuminations.
It takes courage to deal with life as an adventure.
The real objective of the journey is the experience of being really alive.
The journey brings the searcher to that place where he or she is in contact with the inner self--that quiet place of strength, of wisdom and peace.
The journey is an attempt to escape--escape modern life with its limits, its desire for things, its fear, its expectations and commitments.
It is a hunt for a deeper awareness, an exploration of the soul, an attempt to reach the reservoir of goodness, the repository of energy, that resides deep inside each of us.
The creator is in search of that reservoir as the source of healing and of transformation.
The hero's journey may last a month or it may last a lifetime, but whatever else it is, it is a step away from the life of relationships and "busyness" that squeeze out a relationship with one's self.
As the myths and wisdom of many indigenous peoples have said, it is a search, a vision quest, for the state where the beauty and radiance within link up with the beauty and radiance of the natural world, of the universe.
It is a journey into mystery because there are no clear answers in the creator's life. The answers are few. Wonder takes the place of answers and certainty.
The mindless pursuit of certainty, of control, of answers is ultimately claustrophobic and deadening to the senses and the spirit.
The first function of mythology -- myths and mystical rituals, sacred songs and ceremonial dances -- is to awaken in the individual a sense of awe, wonder, and participation in the inscrutable mystery of being.
. . .
An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms
There's a wonderful question Schopenhauer asks: How is it that an individual can so participate in the danger and pain of another that, forgetting his own self-protection, he moves spontaneously to the other's rescue, even at the cost of his own life? Schopenhauer's answer is that a metaphysical realization is showing its force in action, namely, the realization that you and the other are one, and that the sense of separateness is simply a function of the way we experience things in space and time.
All compassion, all sympathy is irrational. That's the point. Love is irrational. The rational is stressing I-thou opposites. The mind is in the world of separateness and angular structures. It's a world put together in a way that can be calculated. Compassion, love--these jump mathematics.
There are two ways of living a mythologically grounded life. One way is just to live what I call "the way of the village compound," where you remain within the sphere of your people. That can be a very strong and powerful and noble life. There are, however, people who feel this isn't the whole story. And today, all historical circumstances are changing, and we no longer have the enclosing horizons that shut us in from knowledge of other people -- new worlds are breaking in on us all the time. It's inevitable that a person with any sense of openness to new experience will say to himself, "Now, this won't do, the way we're living." Do you see what I mean? And so, one goes out for one's self to find a broader base, a broader relationship.
On the other hand, there's plenty of reason for those who don't have this feeling to remain within the field because our societies today are so rich in the gifts that they can render. But if a person has had the sense of the Call -- the feeling that there's an adventure for him -- and if he doesn't follow that, but remains in the society because it's safe and secure, then life dries up. And then he comes to that condition in late middle age: he's gotten to the top of the ladder, and found that it's against the wrong wall.
If you have the guts to follow the risk, however, life opens, opens, opens up all along the line. I'm not superstitious, but I do believe in spiritual magic, you might say. I feel that if one follows what I call one's "bliss" -- the thing that really gets you deep in the gut and that you feel is your life -- doors will open up. They do! They have in my life and they have in many lives that I know of.
The problem of the grail quest is the revivification of what is known as the Waste Land. The Waste Land is a world where people live not out of their own initiative, but out of what they think they're supposed to do. People have inherited their official roles and positions; they haven't earned them. This is the situation of the Waste Land: everybody leading a false life. T. S. Eliot used that idea in his poem, The Waste Land, and he actually quotes several lines from Wolfram's Parzival. The Waste Land is a place where the sense of the vitality of life has gone. People take jobs because they have to live, and then they find in mid-life that the job doesn't mean a thing.
I don't know what your impression is, Michael, but mine is that the majority of my friends are living WasteLand lives. In teaching, you have people who haven't come into the Waste Land yet. They're at the point of making the decision whether they're going to follow the way of their own zeal -- the star that's dawned for them -- or do what daddy and mother and friends want them to do. The adventure is always in the dark forest, and there's something perilous about it. Now, since retiring I've been lecturing for the most part to adults, many of whom feel they need a new start; they have to find a center in what they do that really meets their lives. And my impression is that many of my friends just are baffled; they're wandering in the Waste Land without any sense of where the water is -- the source that makes things green.
You have to strive every minute to get rid of the life that you have planned in order to have the life that's waiting to be yours. Move. Move. Move into the transcendent. That's the whole sense of adventure, I think.
That's the whole mystery: to have the mind submit. It must serve, not dominate, life. That's a major point in so many mythologies. The mind dominating life is really Satan, and life speaking through the mind is the power of Christ. That's basic, that's the Buddha.
The work of poets and artists is to know what the world-image of today is, and to render it as the old seers did theirs. Today we lack poets and artist who speak of the mystery. The function of the poet to open the mystery dimension has been, with few great exceptions, forgotten. We have science, but we lack poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize.
The human being is a biological phenomenon. He has a body which is like the body of the grass or the tree: a product of this good earth. And, on the other hand, in contrast to the tree and the grass and the little bug, he has this great brain which has a structuring character that is not of nature. It has this rational thinking of the mathematical kind. IT is rectangular, lets say, whereas corporal thinking is circular. One is the wisdom that digests our meals, which brings the grass up, and which we share with the whole world of nature. But then there is this intelligence which has plans for how life should be, and its not always the way life wants to be. So there's conflict between these two worlds.
There are two aspects of the hero, I think. The hero is somebody whom you can lean on and who's going to rescue you; he is also an ideal. To live the heroic life is to live the individual adventure, really. One of the problems today is that with the enormous transformations in the forms of our lives, the models for life don't exist for us. In a traditional society -- the agriculturally based city -- there were relatively few life roles, and the models were there; there was a hero for each life role. But look at the past twenty years and what has come along in the way of new life possibilities and requirements. The hero -- as-model is one thing we lack, so each one has to be his own hero and follow the path that's no path. It's a very interesting situation.
As I grow older, more and more of the economic and political details keep pushing in, and I wonder what became of that early inner quietness that allowed me to move out of my own center.
When the world seems to be falling apart, stick to your own trajectory; hang onto you own ideals and find kindred spirits. That's the rule of life.
Spengler has an image of the ideal when all's falling apart; he says it's the soldier in Pompeii who stayed right at his post when the volcanic ash was coming down. Even at the worst moment, if you are holding on to your trajectory, you've won. It’s those who get thrown off track who are lost.
The whole thing in marriage is the relationship and yielding. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That's why it is a sacrament: you give up your personal simplicity to participate. And you are not giving to the other person, you are giving to the relationship. Because you are not giving to the other person, it is not impoverishing--it is life building, life fostering, enriching.
The beautiful thing is the growing; each helping the other to flower. We often want to freeze the other person, but you can't have that and love too. Wherever love takes you, there you are.
I see marriage in two stages. One is that wonderful impulse stage of youth where everything is "coming up roses" and the birds are singing and all of that. Then there comes the time when the vital energies aren't there, but at the same time there is an awakening of the spiritual relationship. When that doesn't happen, you see people getting divorced. I've been shocked at the number of my friends who brought up a family, everything seems wonderful, the kids are gone, and they get divorced!
The story about the priest, the minister and the rabbi who try to answer the question: When does life begin?
The priest says at conception. The minister says after twenty days or something like that. The rabbi says: When the kids have graduated and the dog has died. That is when people grow apart. With everything gone, what's next?
. . .
A JOSEPH CAMPBELL COMPANION. Selected and Edited by Diane K. Osbon
The privilege of a lifetime
is being who you are.
The warrior's approach
is to say "yes" to life
"yeah" to it all.
The goal is to live
With Godlike composure
on the full rush of energy
like Dionysus riding the leopard,
without being torn to pieces.
Opportunities
to find deeper powers
within ourselves
come when life
seems most challenging.
The Bhagavad Gita says:
"Get in there and do your thing.
Don't worry about the outcome."
Desire for mortal gains
and fear of loss
hold you back from giving
yourself to life.
Recognize sorrow as of the essence.
When there is time, there is sorrow.
We can't rid the world of sorrow,
but we can choose to live in joy.
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.
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.
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.
Negativism
to the pain and ferocity of life
is negativism to life.
Awe is what moves us forward.
Our job is to straighten out
our own lives.
The divine lives within you
Live from your own center.
Your real duty
is to go away from the community
to find your own bliss.
The society is the enemy
when it imposes its structures
on the individual.
The world is perfect. Its a mess.
It has always been a mess.
Ideals are dangerous
Don't take them seriously
You can get by on a few.
The warrior's approach
is to say "yes" to life:
"yea" to it all.
Hell is life drying up.
Destruction before creation.
You can't make an omelet
without breaking eggs.
Out of perfection
nothing can be made.
Deep life experiences are where you find your destiny.
To live you are killing and eating something, aren't you? You can reduce what you eat to fallen leaves if you want, by you're still eating life. You are taking the common good, you might say, and focusing it in your direction. And that is a decision on one side rather than on the other. So, decide to be imperfect, reconcile yourself to that, and go ahead. That's "joyful participation in the sorrows of the world."
Life lives on lives.
Saying grace before meals
lets you know that you're about to eat
something that once was alive.
The life of the animal that you've taken
is given back when you recognize
what you've done.
All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it--in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.
The bondages from which the Buddha disengaged--desire, fear, and social duty--are temporal matters. You can engage in them voluntarily, but compulsive engagement is linked to maya (the veil of illusion, the biological and social urges). If you have gotten that, you have gotten all I can give you.
The biological urges to enjoy and to master (with their opposites, to loathe and to fear), as well as the social urge to evaluate (as good or evil, true or false) simply drop away, and a rapture in sheer experience supervenes, in which self-loss and elevation are the same.
The world is there in both modes. It is not that the world changes, it's your consciousness.
The world becomes a display of things from which you are disengaged, and yet, voluntarily, you can become engaged: "joyous participation in the sorrows of the world." It is very different from being compulsively linked.
OM is the sound nature makes when its pleased with itself....The soul is to be propelled both by and from this syllable AUM into the silence beyond and all around it: the silence out of which it rises and back into which it goes when pronounced--slowly and rhythmically ...as AUM--AUM--AUM.
The Buddha image, then, isn't a picture of the Buddha. It is a tool to help you meditate on the Buddhahood within yourself.
In meditating,
meditate on your own divinity.
The goal of life is to be a vehicle
for something higher.
Remain "radiant,"
as Joyce put it,
in the filth of the world.
Art consists of wholeness, harmony and radiance.
Synergy is the behavior of whole systems, unpredicted by the behavior of their parts. The most extraordinary example of it is what we call mass attraction. One great massive sphere and another massive sphere hung by tension members are attracted to one another. We find there is nothing in one sphere in its own right, that predicts that its going to be attracted to another. You have to have the two. It is, then, synergy which holds our earth together with the moon; and it is synergy which holds our whole universe together.
Cezanne: "Art is a harmony parallel to nature." There are, of course, two natures involved: Nature, the world out there, and the world of nature within. It is the function of art to open the consumable things of the tangible, visible world, so that the radiance--the same radiance that's within you--shines through them.
The artist is someone who has completed an art work, not a person who merely intended to. Whether or not it is saleable either this year or next affects neither its intrinsic value nor its intrinsic definition as an art work. Van Gogh never sold a thing but a couple of his works can make a museum. He was in great psychological trouble, but that man was an artist.
Any work whatsoever can be a meditation if you have the sense that everything is Brahman: the process, the doing, the thing that is being looked at, the one that is looking--everything.
My experience is that I can feel that I'm in the Grail Castle when I'm living with people I love, doing what I love. I get that sense of being fulfilled. But, by god, it doesn't take much to make me feel I've lost the Castle, it's gone. One way to lose the Grail is to go to a cocktail party. That's my idea of not being there at all.
When one thinks of some reason for not going or has fear and remains in society because it's safe, the results are radically different from what happens when one follows the call. If you refuse to go, then you are someone else's servant. When this refusal of the call happens, there is a kind of drying up, a sense of life lost. Everything in you knows that a required adventure has been refused. Anxieties build up. What you have refused to experience in a positive way, you will experience in a negative way.
If what you are following, however, is your own true adventure, if it is something appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness, then magical guides will appear to help you. If you say, "Everyone's going on this trip this year, and I'm going too." then no guides will appear. Your adventure has to come right out of your own interior. If you are ready for it, then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have courage. Its the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.
The great problem is bringing lift
back into the wasteland
where people live inauthentically.
Unless you seek art as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond, don't pursue it.
Bringing back the gift to integrate it into a rational life is very difficult. It is even more difficult than going down into the underworld. What you have to bring back is something that the world lacks--which is why you went to get it--and lacking it, the world does not know that it needs it. And so, on the return, when you come with your boon for the world and there is no reception, what are you going to do?
There is a time to go into the woods and a time to come back, and you know which it is. Do you have the courage? It takes a hell of a lot of courage to return after you have been in the woods.
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.
You wear the outer garment of the law, behave as everyone else and wear the inner garment of the mystic way.
The field of time is the field of sorrow. "All life is sorrowful." And it is. If you try to correct the sorrows, all you do is shift them somewhere else. Life is sorrowful. How do you live with that? You realize the eternal life within yourself. You disengage, and yet, reengage. You--and here's the beautiful formula--"participate with joy in the sorrows of the world." You play the game. It hurts, but you know that you have found the place that is transcendant of injury and fulfillments. Your are there, and that's it.
To get involved with my relation to some achievement or system that is tangential to the real centering of my life. And I know when I am on track--that is, when everything is in a harmonious relationship to what I regard as the best I have got in me.
I find working for money to be a wasteland--doing something that somebody else wants instead of the thing that is my next step. I have been guided all along by strong revulsion from any sort of action that does not correspond to the impulse of my wish.
The person of noble thought
acts spontaneously
and will avoid the wasteland,
the world of "Thou shalt."
In choosing your god, you choose
your way of looking at the universe
There are plenty of Gods.
Choose yours.
The god you worship
is the god you deserve.
Your Sacred Place
Your sacred place is
where you can find yourself
again and again.
You don't really have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that's not a Waste Land, some field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia--a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you--a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there. The joy is there.
A sacred place is hermetically sealed off from the temporal world. When you're in such a space, there is no penetration through the enclosure. You are in an eternal zone that is protected from the impact of the stimuli of the day and the hour.
The Grail Castle--for that's what this sacred space is: the place where your associations are not with the field of phenomenal experience, but with the field of your own inward life. To visit the Grail Castle, you have found a sacred space. Then, once you have found the connection in your sacred space, you can perhaps translate it into other parts of your life. But first you have to have a little oil well, that goes down deep.
To live in sacred space
Is to live in a symbolic environment
where spiritual life is possible
where everything around you
speaks of exaltation of the spirit.
Find a place where there's joy,
and the joy will burn out the pain.
The Goal of Life
One in full quest of the spirit
knows that the goal of life is death.
One great thing about growing old
is that nothing
is going to lead to anything.
Everything is of the moment.
I am more and more convinced that there is a plane of consciousness that we are all sharing, and that the brain is a limiting machine that pulls it in. It is possible to sink back, lose this definition, and participate in that plane of consciousness. How else do you explain extrasensory perception? And since time is a form of sensibility--meaning, that which is going to happen has already happened in a certain sense-- you cannot say that premonitions are coincidences. They are not. They happen too often to be attributed to chance.
Tea
, . . the act of drinking tea is a normal, secular, common day affair; so also is sitting in a room with friends. And yet, consider what happens whe you resolve to pay full attention to every single aspect of the act of drinking tea while sitting in a room with friends, selecting first your best, most appropriate bowls, setting these down in the prettiest way, using an interesting pot, sharing with a few friends who go well together, and providing things for them to look at; a few flowers perfectly composed, so that each will shine with its own beauty and the organization of the group also will be radiant: a picture in accord, selected for the occasion; and perhaps an amusing little box, to open, shut, and examine from all sides. Then, in preparing, serving and drinking, every phase of the action is rendered in such a gracefully functional manner that all present may take joy in it, the common affair might well be said to have been elevated to the status of a poem.
Delight is yoga.
. . . you, who were bored, are in exactly the same place, but in rapture, simply because you have shifted your level of consciousness....The Tantric saying, "to worship a God, you must become a God" means you must find in yourself the level of consciousness and love that the deity epitomizes and symbolizes. When you do, you are worshipping that deity.
Saying you are a member of this church, that church, or the other is a social notion, a sociological phenomenon that has nothing to do with religion.
What is the Kingdom?
It lies in our realization of the ubiquity
of the divine presence in our neighbors,
in our enemies, in all of us.
The big lesson in Buddhism, then, the sense of what we have been saying is, "Get away from your rational system and get into the wonderful experience that is moving through all things all the time."
The original, biological function of the eye, to seek out and identify things to eat and to alert the mind to danger, is for a moment, or (in the case of a true artist) for a lifetime suspended....
Spirituality
As anyone who has tried to be a poet knows, when you've had a spiritual experience, the words don't render it. All they can do is give a clue. The experience goes beyond anything that can be said. The religious sense is implied in the metaphoric language of religion. "But," he said, "the lay clergy who have never had the experience, but have only read the books, are in collision all of the time."
Marriage
The idea of the gentle heart involves a sense of responsibility to the person. If that is not there, you have not got love, you've got something else. If that is there, it will last.
II don't think you are married unless your relationship to your spouse has primary consideration in your life....On the other hand, if your life is threatened, or even the love of your life, and the situation cannot be transformed or you don't think it is worth the commitment, you have got to clear out.
When I was a student in Germany, an old German professor said that the way to choose a wife is to look at her mother. If the mother is a good woman and the kind that you regard as ideal, then marry any one of her daughters, and she will shape a life for you.
In marriage
the woman is the initiator,
and the man rides along.
That idea of the wife being the one that shapes a life for you is one that I took to heart, and it's a good idea. The woman is the energy, the sakti, of life. The male must learn to ride on that energy and not dictate the life. I'm certain of that. He's the vehicle of the woman's energy.... marriage requires the dissolution of the male initiative.
I my twenties, I lived with artists, many of them women. I noticed that when they approached the age of thirty, the marriage problem came up with each one. "I have to get married now and have a child." When the female within calls the sculptor who has found her instruments of power, the mallet and chisel, her art falls apart because she can't carry a serious art career unless she is at it, and nothing else, all day long.
It took me a long time to get around to marriage, principally because I felt that women always wanted to have fun, and that was not my interest at all. I would interfere with my reading. That's really the truth. But another reason was that every time I would really get involved with a woman, I'd have a feeling of weight: life was heavy. And pretty soon I'd just get fed up with that heaviness, with that feeling of everything being so goddamn important and all these little bits of things becoming mountainous problems, and--Jesus!: "I'm out." And then, a little while later, here it is again.
Joseph Campbell Reading List
Frobenius
Joyce, Mann and Spengler
Nietzsche
Schopenhauer
Kant
Goethe--esp Wilhelm Meister's Student Years
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you want to be living is the one you are living.
One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that. Joseph Campbell.
If you realize what the real problem is -- losing yourself -- you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial. Joseph Campbell.
Notes from the introduction by Phil Cousineau to The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life And Work
Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
You are the mystery which you are seeking to know.
True art comes from the anonymous self. Rainer Maria Rilke
Epitaph on the grave of a gunslinger, Boothill Cemetery, Tombstone Arizona:
Be what you is, cuz if you be what you ain't, then you ain't what you is.
The conversion of passion into compassion is the whole problem of marriage.
The way of the mystic and the way of the artist are very much alike, except that the mystic doesn't have the craft.
- Jean Erdman, dancer, wife of Joseph Campbell