A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

by Joseph Campbell

  The poor chap who gets himself in a job and goes down that groove all his life.… A friend gave me a list of things that let you know you are old. Some of them are silly, others are serious. One is “…when you sink your teeth into a juicy steak and they stay there.” Another is “…when your back goes out more often than you do.” “…When you see a pretty girl, the garage door flies open responding to your pacemaker.” The really serious one is “…when you’ve gotten to the top of the ladder and find it’s against the wrong wall.” And that’s where so many people are. It’s dreadful. And then, Jesus, to descend the whole ladder and start up another… Forget the ladder and just wander, bump around.

  I spent eight months rambling. I studied Russian for no reason except that it was the next language to learn after I’d learned Spanish, French, and German. I read War and Peace in Russian. I can’t read two words in Russian now, but it got me into the Russian community in Los Angeles, where there were lots of people who’d come here after the revolution. It was wonderful Then I got into my car and went somewhere else.

  After a year in California, I returned to New York to take a job in a prep school. I was paid nine-hundred dollars for teaching the boys corrective German and French, Ancient History, and English. Meanwhile, I was their nursemaid: I put them to bed at night, got them up in the morning, made them obey, and then took them out on the athletic field. I’ll tell you, that was another kind of life, and I couldn’t take it. I was in a beautiful school, a beautiful job, but I knew I was off the rails. I went right back on the Depression.

  Oh, those were grand experiences. I was just flop-ping around, sniffing out what I would do and what I wouldn’t do. I only wanted to do what made sense to my interior. I don’t see how one can live otherwise. And nothing is better than reading when there is nothing else to do.

  When you wander, think of what you want to do that day, not what you told yourself you were going to want to do. And there are two things you must not worry about when you have no responsibilities: one is being hungry, and the other is what people will think of you. Wandering time is positive. Don’t think of new things, don’t think of achievement, don’t think of any-thing of the kind. Just think, “Where do I feel good? What is giving me joy?”

  I mean it. This is simply basic. Get those pressure ideas out of your system, and then you can find, like a ball on a roulette wheel, where you are going to land. The roulette ball doesn’t say, “Well, people will think better of me over there than over there.” Take what comes and be where you like. What counts is being where you feel you’re in your place. What people think is their problem.

  “What will they think of me?”

  —must be put aside for bliss.

  My parents never pushed me around. I had special luck there. By the time I was invited to teach at Sarah Lawrence, I had decided that I didn't need a job and did not want one. It would interrupt my reading. But when I saw that school full of gorgeous girls, I thought, “Well this is alright.” When I finally got that job, I was thirty years old, and Dad said, “Joe, I thought you were going to be a literary bum.” But until I got the job, he never said a word. He was a good father. When The Hero with a Thousand Faces came out, he said, “I prophesy this is going to be a wonderful book.” He hadn’t read a word of it, but he knew his boy had done it.

  I know that wandering might seem a strange form of life to someone with a science background, which tends to give you a prospect out ahead of what you’re doing, but while wandering, you experience a kind of mysteriously organic process. It’s like a tree growing. It doesn’t know where it’s growing next. A branch may grow out this way, then that way, and then another way. If you let it be that way and don’t have pressures from outside, when you look back, you’ll see that this will have been an organic development. Just remember: Parzival blew the job when he did what people expected him to do.

  THE Grail Hero—particularly in the person of Perceval or Parzival, the “Great Fool”—is the forthright, simple, uncorrupted, noble son of nature, without guile, strong in the purity of the yearning of his heart. In the words of the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach…describing his Grail Hero’s childhood in the forest: “Of sorrow he knew nothing, unless it was the birdsong above him; for the sweet-ness of it pierced his heart and made his little bosom swell: His nature and his yearning so compelled him.”24 His widowed, noble mother, in their forest retreat had told him of God and Satan, “distinguished for him dark and light.”25 However, in his own deeds light and dark were mixed. He was not an angel or a saint, but a living, questing man of deeds, gifted with paired virtues of courage and compassion, to which was added loyalty. And it was through his steadfast-ness in these—not supernatural grace—that he won, at last, to the Grail.26

  Parzival makes two visits to the Grail Castle. The first is a failure. The Grail King is a wounded man, whose nature has been broken by castration in a battle. Parzival spontaneously wishes to ask him, “What is wrong?" But then, he has been told that a knight does not ask questions, and so, in order to preserve the image of himself as a noble knight, he restrains his natural impulse of compassion, and the Grail quest fails.

  …in the end, as in the case of Parzival, the guide within will be his own noble heart alone, and the guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of divinity, that wakes in his heart amor: the deepest, inmost seed of his nature, consubstantial with the process of the All, “thus come.” And in this life-creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be…the courage to let go the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of “meaning,” and its gifts: to die to the world and come to birth from within.27

  The twelfth century

  is the follow-your-bliss time.

  What the Holy Grail symbolizes is the highest spiritual fulfillment of a human life. Each life has some kind of high fulfillment, and each has its own gift from the Grail. The theme of compassion is part of the clue about how to get there and where it is. It has to do with overcoming the same temptations that the Buddha overcame: of attachment to this, that, or the other life detail that has pulled you off course.

  What pulls you off from spiritual fulfillment? I know when my life is not in the center. I get desirously involved with my relation to some achievement or system that is tangential to the real centering of my life. And I know when I’m on track—that is, when every-thing is in a harmonious relationship to what I regard as the best I’ve got in me.

  In the Grail legends, the land of people doing what they think they ought to do or have to do is the wasteland. What is the wasteland to you? I know damned well what the wasteland would be to me: the academic approach to my material; or a marriage to someone who had no thoughts or feelings for me or my work. Living with such a person would be the wasteland.

  I find working for money to be the wasteland—doing something that somebody else wants instead of the thing that is my next step. I have been guided all along by a strong revulsion from any sort of action that does not correspond to the impulse of my own wish.

  The person of noble heart

  acts spontaneously

  and will avoid the wasteland,

  the world of “Thou Shalt.”

  “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church.…And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.” —Stephen Dedalus28

  The crucial thing to live for is the sense of life in what you are doing, and if that is not there, then you are living according to other peoples’ notions of how life should be lived.

  The opposite to doing what you think you ought to do is compassion. The one who finds the Grail is symbolic of the one who has come to that place and whose life is of compassion. The one who finds as his motivation the dynamism of his compassion has found the Grail. That means spontaneous recognition of the identity of I and Thou. This is the Grail center.

  To become—in Jung’s terms—ind
ividuated, to live as a released individual, one has to know how and when to put on and to put off the masks of one's various life roles.…The aim of individuation requires that one should find and then learn to live out of one’s own center, in control of one’s for and against. And this cannot be achieved by enacting and responding to any general masquerade of fixed roles.29

  Parzival achieves the Grail Castle, and Galahad beholds the Grail. These are two totally different Grail traditions. Parzival is the fulfilled, secular man. Galahad is the monastic, chaste knight, who has insulated himself from life.

  In the story of Sir Galahad, the knights agree to go on a quest, but thinking it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group, each “entered into the forest, at one point or another, there where they saw it to be thickest, all in those places where they found no way or path.”30 Where there is a way or a path, it’s someone else's way. Each knight enters the forest at the most mysterious point and follows his own intuition. What each brings forth is what never before was on land or sea: the fulfillment of his unique potentialities, which are different from anybody else’s. All you get on your life way are little clues.

  In that wonderful story, when any knight sees the trail of another, thinks he’s getting there, and starts to follow the other’s track, he goes astray entirely.

  “In the last analysis, every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can be called ‘individuation.’ All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of this alone makes sense of life.”—Jung31

  In all traditional systems, whether of the Orient or of the Occident, the authorized mythological forms are presented in rites to which the individual is expected to respond with an experience of commitment and belief. But suppose he fails to do so? Suppose the entire inheritance of mythological, theological, and philosophical forms fails to wake in him any authentic response of this kind? How then is he to behave? The normal way is to fake it, to feel oneself to be inadequate, to pretend to believe, to strive to believe, and to live, in the imitation of others, an inauthentic life. The authentic creative way, on the other hand, which I would term the way of art as opposed to religion, is, rather, to reverse this authoritative order.32

  As in the novels of Joyce, so in those of Mann, the key to the progression lies in the stress on what is inward.…In the words of Joyce’s hero: “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”33

  For what to the soul are nets, “flung at it to hold it back from flight," can become for the one who has found his own center the garment, freely chosen, of his further adventure.34

  What kind of action and life experience would be appropriate for one who has had this fulfilling moment of the Grail experience? There are no rules for what you do. Buddha came back and taught for fifty years. To answer such a question, one would have to predict the circumstances of the life that one would enter.

  Once you’ve achieved the experience, you have to achieve it the next second and the next second also. The process of achievement comes in translating the experiences of life into that eternal elixir, which is the “happy with Him forever in Heaven” part of the answer to the penny catechism question: “Why did God make you?” The answer I learned was: “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in Heaven.” Translating that into metaphor: Heaven is the symbol of the eternal life that is within you. It’s a basic aspect of yourself for-ever. That’s the rapture. And then, temporal life asks for “knowing, loving, and serving… God,” the generating energy of the life that is within you and all things.

  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 cock-tail party. That’s my idea of not being there at all.

  My sense of it is that you have to keep working to get there. It may take a little while. Even when you have gotten there, it’s easy to get flipped out, because the world has things it wants you to do and you have decided not to do what the world wants. The problem is to find a field of action to give you that inner satisfaction so that you’re not thrown out.

  …not all, even today, are of that supine sort that must have their life values given them, cried at them from the pulpits and other mass media of the day. For there is, in fact, in quiet places, a great deal of deep spiritual quest and finding now in progress in this world, outside the sanctified social centers, beyond their purview and control: in small groups, here and there, and more often, more typically (as anyone who looks around may learn), by ones and twos, there entering the forest at those points which they themselves have chosen, where they see it to be most dark, and there is no beaten way or path.35

  The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, “Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.” And so it starts.

  The herald or announcer of the adventure…is often dark, loathly, or terrifying, judged evil by the world; yet if one could follow, the way would be opened through the walls of day into the dark where the jewels glow.36

  The call is to leave a certain social situation, move into your own loneliness and find the jewel, the center that’s impossible to find when you’re socially engaged. You are thrown off-center, and when you feel off-center, it’s time to go. This is the departure when the hero feels something has been lost and goes to find it. You are to cross the threshold into new life. It’s a dangerous adventure, because you are moving out of the sphere of the knowledge of you and your community.

  The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperations of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. But this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden seeds do not die.37

  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 be coming 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. It’s the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.

  When you cross the threshold, you are passing into the dark forest, taking a plunge into the sea, embarking upon the night sea journey. It involves passing through clashing rocks, narrow gates, or the like, which represent yes and no, the pairs of opposites. There will be a moment when the w
alls of the world seem to open for a second, and you get an insight through. Jump then! Go! The gates will often close so fast that they take off the tail of your horse. You may be dismembered, lose everything you have. This is Christ leaving the Mother, the world, and going to the Father, the Spirit. This is Jonah swallowed by the whale, its jaws being the pairs of opposites.

  What this represents psychologically is the trip from the realm of conscious, rational intentions into the zone of those energies of the body that are moving from another center: the center with which you are trying to get in touch.

  As you now go towards the center, there will come more aids, as well as increasingly difficult trials. You have to give up more and more of what you’re hanging on to. The final thing is a total giving up, a yielding all the way. This is a place directly opposite to your life experiences and all that you’ve been taught in school. Psychologically, it’s a shift into the unconscious; otherwise, it’s a move into a field of action of which you know nothing. Anything can happen, and it may be favorable or unfavorable.

  The deeper you go, and the closer you get to the final realization, the heavier the resistance. You are coming down to those areas that are the ones that are repressed, and it’s that repression system that you have to pass through. And there, of course, is where magical aid is most required. The hero may here discover for the first time that there is everywhere a benign power supporting him in his superhuman passage.