A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

by Joseph Campbell

  The third order of love is that of parent for child. It is a more intimate and intense affair than that of friend to friend. The image of this third order of love in the Christian system is the Christmas crib, in which the babe represents the coming to us of the Christ in our own hearts. This is symbolic of the awakening in your heart of the realization that the divine power is within you. It’s the dawn of the true religious life. You are fostering the spiritual child within yourself. The model for this stage in the Hindu tradition is the love of the Gopis for the little boy Kṛṣṇa, the naughty butter thief.

  There’s one very amusing Kṛṣṇa episode, in which his foster mother is told that her little boy is out-side eating mud. She goes out to clean the mud out of his mouth, and when he opens his mouth, he reveals to her all the heavens and hells and gods and demons in himself. She is , of course, stunned by this display, and her relationship to him would be pretty well damaged from then on if she remembered it, so he very kindly erases it from her memory. How we know that this event happened—since she was the only one who had the experience and then she forgot it—I do not know. But that’s the way religious things are.

  The fourth level of love is that of spouse to spouse, and here there is the business of the androgyne, of identification with the Other. You have found the god in your heart, and now the god is found in this intimate and most enduring kind of relationship. That’s why marriage is regarded, in such traditions, as a permanent affair. There is only one chance to have this type of experience. Nuns wear a wedding ring, because they are brides of Christ. Their relationship is to this invisible spouse, which, on the spiritual level, is good enough.

  Then we come to the highest order of love, the fifth, and that is compulsive, uncontrollable, illicit love, where there is nothing but love and you are totally ripped out of yourself in relation to God. You are le fou, the crazed one who’s gone mad with love.

  In courtly love,

  the man goes crazy, not the woman.

  When the man’s been moved like this,

  he is capable of incredible feats,

  but he’s on a narrow path.

  When you follow your passion,

  society’s help is gone.

  You must be very careful.

  You’re completely on your own.

  In marriage, one is still harmoniously related to society and to the neighborhood, but with this fifth stage of love, everything except love drops away, and there is just a one-pointed attachment to the other. All else is forgotten, and nothing else matters. I am sure some of you have had this experience. If you haven’t, it’s too bad.

  In this little scale that the Hindus give—first servant to master; second, friend to friend; third, parent to child; fourth, spouse to spouse; and then fifth, just this total love—one is always in danger of over-valuing the sheer love experience. You feel that you are losing something if you pull the experience down, but you have got to pull it down. All you have to do, really, is know what the possible relationship can be.

  If you’re already married and this rapturous experience happens, then you’re not going to have a marriage, because you’ve got to have some other kind of relation-ship to the person. The way to pull down the sheer love experience is to take very deep pleasure of some kind in the concrete aspects of the relationship that you are establishing. Sheer rapture has no relationship to life, but there are relationships in life which also have value. Begin to cultivate those, and this total rapture can be pulled down and not lost. It’s not necessarily lost. And this is the trick in marriage.

  There are lots of joyful experiences in marriage that have nothing to do with total rapture, but these experiences absorb that energy system and make it possible for one to stay married and not think it’s only about taking out the garbage. Anyone who gets married is going to have problems with daily chores, because the problem of a household is on you whether you are a male or a female. But you can make wonderful little ritual experiences out of the things that have to be done, and life can ride beautifully on these events. I think it is a failure to accept the tangibilities of two people living together that makes marriages break up.

  Marriage is not a love affair,

  it’s an ordeal.

  It is a religious exercise, a sacrament,

  the grace of participating in another life.

  There is another kind of breakup that takes place late in marriage, and this one just baffles me: people who break up when the kids are out of the house and launched. I have seen this happen in five or six cases to people whom I never would have thought would have had that happen. They are well on in their fifties, they have been living together, they’ve brought up a family together, had life together, and it goes to pot. The only thing holding them together had been the children.

  This is the failure of what I called the alchemical marriage. They have had a biological marriage, but there has been no realization of the interlocking of the psyches and the mutual education that comes out of that acquiescence and relationship. It’s a damned shame that there has been no preliminary notion of what the possibilities are of that second half of life.

  If you go into marriage with a program,

  you will find that it won’t work.

  Successful marriage

  is leading innovative lives together,

  being open, non-programmed.

  It’s a free fall: how you handle

  each new thing as it comes along.

  As a drop of oil on the sea,

  you must float,

  using intellect and compassion

  to ride the waves.

  It seems to me, you have to think of significant things to do together that require both of you. The medieval idea of the gentle heart is very much a part of this. If what you’ve been calling love is really lust, that is a state alright: one that can die. Love doesn’t die.

  For the gentle heart,

  marriage must first be spiritual,

  then comes physical consummation.

  It's hard to talk about anything as sensitive as this, but that term “gentle heart” to me is a clue to what love is. 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. Lust doesn’t, no responsibility there. In marriages that go when the children go, the parents’ sense of responsibility was to the children, not to each other, and when that was gone, the link was gone.

  Before there are any children or even before there is a marriage, the crucial question is: “Is this the gentle heart?” Is the person seeking a possession? Or is the person feeling a responsibility to the one with whom the relationship is taking place? If there is feeling of responsibility, then I think you are in danger.

  What I am saying is, not that responsibility constitutes love, but that love without a sense of responsibility is not love. It’s taking possession. Are you trying to possess somebody? Or are you in a relationship?

  Talking about what one has done in one’s own life, I wouldn’t have thought of marrying anyone unless, in committing myself to the marriage, I understood that I was taking that person’s life in my hands. I can’t under-stand that other feeling of possessing somebody. It is a failure to take responsibility for what the hell you are doing. One can have love affairs and all the weeping that goes on in all that, but that is very different from moving into a marriage.

  In the first place, you have to know what you are doing. I think a lot of people don’t know what they are doing, and they don’t know what they’re doing to that other person. If you don’t have the maturity to control your compulsive passions, it seems to me that you are ineligible for marriage. I think what I am saying probably comes from my Catholic upbringing. In Catholicism, marriage is a destiny decision.

  Beyond that, there was an omen in our marriage. I had a little twenty-dollar-a-year house in Woodstock, on a road called Maverick Road. We were driving up there for our honeym
oon, and as we approached that road, a hearse came from the other side and drove before us. I had never seen a hearse in that neighborhood, and I read the omen as meaning we would be together until death. There it was.

  What I see in marriage, then, is a real identification with that other person as your responsibility, and as the one whom you love. Committing yourself to anyone, turning your destiny over to a dual destiny, is a life commitment. To lose your sense of responsibility to the person who has given you that commitment because something comes along that enables you to think, “I'd like to fly off in this direction and forget that which has already been committed”—this is not marriage. I do not think you are married unless your relationship to your spouse has primary consideration in your life. It’s got to be top.

  Compulsive erotic relationships can break in on this. One is not in perfect control of oneself. I don’t mean that everything outside of the marriage is lust. It can be love also. When you cut off a love that comes to you outside of marriage, you have cut off a part of yourself in the marriage.

  But then you have the problem of relating with responsibility to that love affair and to the marriage that you’ve already got as your prime relationship, and that is not an easy thing to do. You have to develop a number of different ways of relating to people, not just one. Sometimes, if there is a mutual sense of the nature of the relationship and its value, then something can be worked out; but I would understand that, no matter what happened, the marriage would have to come back together again. It’s prime. It’s number one.

  If the marriage is toxic, you have to decide whether there is a possibility of transforming the situation. If you feel that there can be a transformation, then you can go through the ordeal of effecting one. You can exert the necessary energy on the other to effect the transformation. That is to say, you can, as a kind of personal discipline, increase the atmosphere of love and confidence and cooperation. On the other hand, if your life is threatened, or even your love of life, and the situation cannot be transformed or you don’t think it is worth the commitment, then you have got to clear out.

  All of this depends, of course, on the individual case and one’s own judgment. There are no basic rules that can be applied right across the board because the conflict situation differs in intensity and in character from case to case.

  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 śakti, of life. The male must learn to ride on that energy and not dictate the life. I'm certain of that. He is the vehicle of the woman's energy. That’s what he is. When the male won’t disintegrate, you do not have a marriage. You have a living-together, perhaps, for practical or erotic reasons, but a marriage requires the dissolution of the male initiative.

  Marriage can’t work without

  a psychological guiding of both people.

  There must be disintegration of ego

  for the two to combine.

  The uniting process involves

  fermentation, amalgamation, disintegration, and putrefaction

  in their psyches.

  When I married Jean, I felt it was a crucifixion. The bridegroom does go to the bride as to the cross. The bride gives herself equally. It’s a reciprocal crucifixion.

  In marriage

  you are not sacrificing yourself

  to the other person.

  You are sacrificing yourself

  to the relationship.

  That’s the problem with getting married. You must ask yourself, “Can I open myself to compassion?” Not to lust, but to compassion. I don’t mean you have to have unconditional love. Committing yourself to a person unconditionally is very different from having unconditional love for everybody in New York City. I’m not the Dalai Lama, who’s suppose to have unconditional love for everything in the world. Even God doesn’t have unconditional love. He throws people into hell. I personally don’t even think that unconditional love is an ideal. I think you’ve got to have a discriminating faculty and let bastards be bastards and let those that ought to be hit in the jaw get it. In fact, I have a list. If anybody has a working guillotine, I’d be glad to give them my list.

  When I look

  in the faces of my enemies,

  it makes me proud.

  I think perhaps unconditional love is the Grail. The Grail is between God and the Devil, and it does not judge the way God judges. It goes past God—a pretty big picture. Love, which is unconditional in marriage, is specific; it is focused. It is for that person and not for somebody else. Unconditional love goes right through everything, and it’s a breakthrough in spiritual life. Do not look for it outside of yourself. The only place to look for it is inside. If it is going to be unconditional love, what’s out there doesn’t matter.

  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?” —Schopenhauer16

  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.” —Schopenhauer17

  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.

  IT 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