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

by Joseph Campbell

  Sometimes the death is, as it were, enacted. In primitive puberty rites, there is often an enactment of dying or the young person thinks he’s about to be killed and actually experiences a going into death. I know of a number of examples in contemporary life of people who have been in a blocked situation and then have actually experienced death.

  One case I know was a woman caught in an automobile accident where two trucks collided with her in the middle, and she thought she was dead. When she came out of it, the whole life that she had been living just dropped off, and she had an entirely new life. So it is a valid psychological theme, this one of death out of which life comes.

  Among primitive hunting people, where the men continually kill animals, this killing of the animals is the principle sacrifice, and among those people typically we have no human sacrifices. But in early planting cultures, there is almost a fury of sacrifice, sacrifices of all kinds, and it’s in those cultures that we have human sacrifice.

  Only the best are sacrificed.

  Being sacrificed is a way to go home.

  “He who loses his life shall find it.“

  Generally, the principle sacrifice is of a major food animal. For instance, in Southeast Asia, it’s the pig; in Europe, principally, it’s the bull. Both of these animals are symbolic of the moon. The tusks of the pig are the crescents of the moon, with the black face between; the horns of the bull, the same. The moon is that which dies and is resurrected, dies and is resurrected. The bull represents, in a way, the death of the moon out of which a new life can come.

  Snake and moon both die to the old,

  shed their shadow to be reborn.

  In Rome, suicide was a noble act. When one was about to be captured, which would mean living a disgraceful life, there was suicide, a practice that went on among the Celts too. There is a Hellenistic picture of a Celt killing himself and his wife as they’re about to be captured.

  In Japan, the highest example of ceremonial suicide is hara-kiri, an interesting and subtle ritual act. A man who has conspicuously failed in the performance of his duty, which he places above his personal wish, commits hara-kiri, for it is the only thing that can redeem him from the disgrace. The man who is to commit hara-kiri kneels in the center of a tatami mat, the four corners of which are marked off by objects—like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John around Christ: the motif of the center and the four points. He inserts his sword, the symbol of his nobility and honor, into the right side of his belly, and carries it across and down. He must fall face for-ward. It is an extremely painful way to kill yourself. You can’t just stab and go out. It is a deliberate act, and a matter of honor that you experience the whole thing. In the woman’s counter-part of hara-kiri, she cuts her jugular vein—a different act, but the sense is the same.

  An Indian aristocrat, whose sword is his honor, can behead himself. You can’t practice this one either. The way it’s done, according to the illustrations, is you bend down a pliant sapling, attach a rope to it, put the rope around your head, bend over, take your sword, and cut off your head. The further the tree pitches your head, the greater the merit you’ve gained by the act. You are immediately translated to wherever the merit has brought you, and your friends ‘round about know what has happened. This type of suicide has high dignity and belongs to the ritual practice of the community.

  I think the idea of life after death is a bad idea. It distracts you from appreciating the uniqueness of the here and now, the moment you are living. For example, if you think that when you die your parents will be there and you’ll live with them forever, you may no longer appreciate the significant moments that you share with them on earth.

  Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now. I think that’s washed out a bit by the notion that everyone will be happy in heaven. You had better be happy here, now. You’d better experience the eternal here and now.. Being “happy with Him forever in heaven” means that while you are here on earth you should be happy: that is to say, your life should be identified with the divine power, the eternal power in all life. If you concretize the symbol of heaven, the whole situation disintegrates. You think, for example, that eternity is there, and your life is here. You believe that God, the source of energy, is there, and you are here, and He may come into your life or He may not. No, no—that source of eternal energy is here, in you, now.

  That is the essence of Gnosticism, Buddha consciousness, and so forth. St. Paul got close to the idea when he said, “I live now, not I, but Christ in me.” I once made this observation in a lecture, and a priest in attendance said, “That’s blasphemy.”—an example of the church not conceding the very sense of the symbol.

  On the other hand, since the function of the heaven image is to help you to die, to yield to where nature’s taking you rather than resist, I think you would tell a Christian child who is going to die that he is going to go to heaven.

  The resistance to death

  has to do with not knowing

  where you’re going when you die.

  In one of the sūtras, the Buddha is asked how one person helps another face death. He responds: “Suppose a house caught fire, and in the house was a father with three little children, and the children were afraid of the flames, but they wouldn’t go outside. The father says, ‘Now, look, outside we have a darling little goat cart. The goats are all waiting for you, so let’s go out and get in the cart.’” That is to say, you put something out past the flames for the person who is not able to experience anything else. This approach is a convenient means of bringing about a desirable and necessary act that the person would otherwise be incapable of performing.

  When you support someone who is dying, you are helping that person to identify with the consciousness that is going to disengage from the body. We disengage from various things all of our lives. Finally, we identify with consciousness and disengage from our bodies.

  In Buddhism,

  the central thought is

  compassion without attachment.

  And so, the death of one for whom you feel com-passion shouldn’t be an affliction. Your attachment is the temporal aspect of the relationship; your compassion is the eternal aspect. Hence, you can reconcile yourself to feelings of loss by identifying with that which is not lost when all is lost: namely, the consciousness that informs the body and all things. This yielding back into undifferentiated consciousness is the return, and that is as far as you can think, as much as you can know. The rest is transcendent of all conscious knowledge.

  [Discuss]

  Coming into Awareness

  THE first aphorism of Patanjali’s classic handbook of yoga supplies the key to the entire work:

  “Yoga consists in the intentional stopping

  of the spontaneous activity of the mind-stuff.”56

  …Any person unused to meditation, desiring to fix in his mind a single image or thought, will find within seconds that he is already entertaining associated thoughts. The untrained mind will not stand still, and yoga is the intentional stopping of its movement.

  It may be asked, why should anyone wish to bring about such a state?

  The mind is likened, in reply, to the surface of a pond rippled by a wind.…The idea of yoga is to cause that wind to subside and let the waters return to rest. For when a wind blows and waters stir, the waves break and distort both the light and its reflections, so that all that can be seen are colliding broken forms. Not until the waters will have been stilled, cleansed of stirred-up sediment and made mirror-bright, will the one reflected image appear that on the rippling waves had been broken; that of the clouds and pure sky above, the trees along the shore, and down deep in the still, pure water itself, the sandy bottom and the fish. Then alone will that single image be known of which the wave-borne reflections are but fragments and distortions. And this single image can be likened to that of the Self realized in yoga. It is the Ult
imate—the Form of forms—of which the phenomena of this world are but imperfectly seen, ephemeral distortions: the God-form, the Buddha-form, which is truly our own Knowledge-form, and with which it is the goal of yoga to unite us.57

  In kuṇḍalinī yoga, largely through the exercise of meditation and breath control, called prāṇāyāma—breathing in through one nostril for a certain number

  of counts, holding the breath, filling the body with the prana, the breath, then breathing out for a number of counts, holding briefly, breathing in through the other nostril, and so forth—one gradually stills the whole psyche, calms the waters, as it were.

  There is a notion that breath and emotion are linked. When you are shocked, your breathing changes. When you are full of rage or passion of any kind, your breathing changes. When you are at rest, your breath-ing changes. So the goal here is to make your breathing regular, to still and calm the mind. And at the same time there is a meditation that activates the kuṇḍalinī serpent and starts her up the spine.

  [Kuṇḍalinī]…the figure of a coiled female serpent—a serpent goddess not of “gross” but of “subtle” substance—which is to be thought of as residing in a torpid, slumbering state in a subtle center, the first of the seven, near the base of the spine: the aim of the yoga then being to rouse this serpent, lift her head, and bring her up a subtle nerve or channel of the spine to the so-called “thousand-petaled lotus” (sahasrara) at the crown of the head.…She, rising from the lowest to the highest lotus center, will pass through and wake the five between, and with each waking the psychology and personality of the practitioner will be altogether and fundamentally transformed.58

  The word cakra means “wheel.” Cakras are also called padmas, which means “lotuses.” There are seven: three associated with the pelvic area, three with the head, and one in between—the heart cakra—in that great cavity of all the pulses: the pulsation of the heart and the pulsation of the breath.

  Cakra I, Mūlādhāra, the “Root Support,” is located at the base of the spine. The world view is of uninspired materialism, governed by ‘hard facts’…and the psychology, adequately described in behavioristic terms, is reactive, not active. There is on this plane no zeal for life, no explicit impulse to expand. There is simply a lethargic avidity in hanging on to existence; and it is this grim grip that must finally be broken so that the spirit may be quit of its dull zeal simply to be.…

  The first task of the yogi, then, must be to break at this level the cold dragon grip of his own spiritual lethargy and release the jewel-maid, his own shakti, for ascent to those higher spheres where she will become his spiritual teacher and guide to the bliss of an immortal life beyond sleep.59

  Cakra II, Svādhishṭhāna, “Her Special Abode,” is at the level of the genitals. When the kuṇḍalinī is active at this level, the whole aim of life is in sex. Not only is every thought and act sexually motivated, either as a means toward sexual ends or as a compensating sublimation of frustrated sexual zeal, but everything seen and heard is interpreted compulsively, both consciously and unconsciously, as symbolic of sexual themes. Psychic energy, that is to say, has the character here of the Freudian libido. Myths, deities, and religious rites are understood and experienced in sexual terms.60

  Cakra III, Maṇipūra, “City of the Shining Jewel,” is located at the level of the navel. Here the energy turns to violence and its aim is to consume, to master, to turn the world into oneself and one’s own. The appropriate Occidental psychology would be the Adlerian of the “will to power”: for now even sex becomes an occasion, not of erotic experience, but of achievement, conquest, self-reassurance, and frequently, also, revenge.61

  The function of Cakra III is organizing your life, establishing a family, building a business, learning how to master the world in terms appropriate to your condition and place. Self maintenance, family maintenance. society maintenance, world maintenance—but maintenance in the sense of transformation: life is maintained, not in a petrified condition, but in a growth condition, as is a tree by the gardener that cultivates it.

  All three of these lower cakras are of the modes of man’s living in the world in his naive state, outward turned: the modes of the lovers, the fighters, the builders, the accom-plishers. Joys and sorrows on these levels are functions of achievements in the world “out there,” what people think of one, what has been gained, what lost.62

  These three cakras are of functions that we share with the other animals. They are also clinging to life, begetting, building nests, making their way. Popular religion works on these levels, and the individual living on these levels is ego-oriented and his action must be controlled by social law.

  …a religion operating only on these levels, having little or nothing to do with the fostering of inward, mystical realizations, would hardly merit the name of religion at all. It would be little more than an adjunct to police authority, offering in addition to ethical rules and advice intangible consolations for life's losses and a promise of future rewards for social duties fulfilled.63

  Cakra IV, Anāhata, meaning “not hit,” is at the level of the heart. It is the beginning of the religious life, the awakening where the new life begins, and its name refers to the sound that is not made by any two things striking together. All the sounds that we hear are made by two things striking together. What would the sound be that is not made by two things striking together? It is the sound of the energy of which universe is a mani-festation. It is, therefore, antecedent to things.

  The heart cakra, then, is the opening of the spirit-ual dimension: all is metaphoric of the mystery. Once you have got that point of all being metaphoric of the mystery, then these lower powers become spiritualized. The very doing of the things of the first three cakras become the realizations of Cakras V, VI, and VII.

  When you reach the upper cakras,

  you don’t do without the first three:

  survival, sex, power.

  You don’t destroy

  the first three floors of a building

  when you get to the fourth.

  Cakra V, called Viśuddha, “Purified,” is at the level of the larynx. This is the cakra of spiritual effort to hold back the animal system from which the energies come. One has gone through the lower cakras to get to here, but the pelvic cakras have not been rejected. They now have to be turned to a spiritual, rather than a merely physical, aim. Cakra V is commonly referred to by Tibetan images of deities standing on prostrate forms, putting down the merely physical with weapons and ferocity: the ferocity with which you have to handle yourself.

  Cakra VI, Ājñā, the lotus of “Command,” located between the eyebrows, is what we would call the cakra of heaven, the highest cakra in the world of incarnate forms. The forms of the pharaohs from Egypt show the Uraeus Serpent coming out of this point between the brows. When the kuṇḍalinī has reached this point, one beholds God. Any god you have been meditating on or have been taught to revere is the god that will be seen here. This is the highest obstacle for the complete yogi. As Ramakrishna says, “One is tempted to stay there tasting the juice.” It is so sweet, so blissful.

  On the brink of illumination,

  the old ways are very seductive

  and liable to pull you back.

  The Sufis have a wonderful image connected with Cakra VI. This is the story told by Hallaj: One night a moth sees a lamp, a burning flame enclosed in glass. It spends the whole night bumping against the glass, trying to become one with the flame. In the morning it returns to its friends in the morning and tells them of the beautiful thing it has seen. They say, “You don't look the better for it.” This is the condition of the yogi trying to break through. So it goes back the next night and, somehow or other, gets through. For an eternal instant it achieves its goal: it becomes the flame—tat tvam asi—”thou art that.” And so, here is the subject and here is the object—the Soul and God—between is a pane of glass. Remove the pane and there is neither subject nor object, because to have an object you have to
have a subject.

  The final barrier to enlightenment is the barrier that prevents you from becoming God. The pane of glass is a way of speaking about the dividing factor. Removing the glass suggests the annihilation of the veil of ignorance that keeps you from knowing God. Beholding God—God with characteristics—is the final whisp of ignorance. At this level you have to have a symbol, an experience because you are still holding the last whisp of you. I am beholding God. That’s the final barrier.

  It is so sweet that one is reluctant to yield, but the ultimate yielding is the yielding of your own being. If you’re going to hang onto your soul, you can’t become one with God. You can’t even become one with your spouse. This is what has to be given up. I hear OM. I know God is ubiquitous. Divine energy is all around me. It is here. It is here. It is here.

  When you come to fulfillment, you have come to that high point. The god’s name doesn’t matter, they are all included. The different gods are personifications of aspects of the total functioning. The ultimate thing is going past gods. Meister Eckhart said, “The ultimate leave-taking is the leaving of God for God.”64 That means leaving the folk idea of God—the ecclesiastical idea of God, what you’ve been taught of God—for that transcendent reference of which God is the metaphor. Where are you between two thoughts? Where is God between two Gods?