A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

by Joseph Campbell

  You come then to the final experience of discovering and making your own that which was lacking in the place from which you departed. This experience can be rendered in four different ways.

  One rendition is the Sacred Marriage, the meeting with the beloved which brings the birth of your own spiritual life, with the bride being whatever the life is that your relating to: male/female, I/Thou, this/that.

  Another rendering is Atonement with the Father. The son has been separated from the father, meaning he has been living a life that’s inappropriate to his real heritage. The son is the temporal aspect, and the father is the eternal aspect of the same being. The father represents the natural order from which you have been removed. You are trying to find your character, which you inherit from your father. Atonement is bringing your own personal and contemporary program into accord with the life momentum out of which you have come.

  Then there is Apotheosis, the realization that “I am that which all these other beings are.” The hero knows that he is It, the Buddha image, the knower of the truth. “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.” That’s the illumination that comes with Apotheosis. You are not allowed that realization in Christianity, except in Gnostic Christianity. You can’t say, “The Christhood is in me.”

  Finally there’s the Elixir Theft, an entirely different sort of realization. Instead of a slow progress through the mysteries with the good will of the powers, there is a violent pressure through and a seizing—the fire theft by Prometheus or the use of LSD in the 60s—and you flee from the powers that you did not appease on the way. This is the transformation flight, where the hero, with the powers after him, carries his goods back to the light world as fast as he can. Or one can have a schizophrenic crack up and stay down there.

  The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other—different as life and death, as day and night. The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there he accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone. Nevertheless—and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol—the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know.38

  An image of the return that amuses me is that of a young man who comes from Wisconsin to New York to study art. He’s gone into Greenwich Village, the underworld of Manhattan. He has a number of nymphs to help him and a master with whom he is studying. He finally achieves an art style. Then, having achieved his style, he comes to 57th Street with his paintings, and he meets the cold eye of the dealer.

  The great problem is bringing life

  back into the wasteland,

  where people live inauthentically.

  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 are three possible reactions.

  One answer is to say, “To hell with them, I’m going back to the woods.” You buy yourself a dog and a pipe and let the weeds grow in the gate. You have come back to the world with your gift, and people look at you with glassy eyes, call you “a kook,” and so you retreat. This is refusal of the return.

  The second way is to say, “What do they want?” You have a skill. You can give them what they want, the commercial way. Then you have created a whole pitch for your expressivity, and what you had before gets lost. You have a public career, and you have renounced the jewel.

  The third possibility is to try to find some aspect of the domain into which you have come that can receive a little portion of what you have to give. You try to find a means to deliver what you have found as the life boon in terms and in proportions that are proper to the world’s ability to receive. It requires a good deal of compassion and patience. Look for cracks in the wall and give only to those who are ready for your jewel.

  If all else fails, you can get a job teaching and introduce your message to the people who are studying with you. If you can get one little hook into the given society, you will find presently that you are able to deliver your message. Artists who teach are an example of this: they are doing their creative work, but they are being sustained by something that is secondary to their primary job. They are receiving adequate income and gradually build up a following.

  You do not have a complete adventure unless you do get back. 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’ve been in the woods.

  Those are modes of having this realization, and the final thing is knowing, loving, and serving life in a way in which you are eternally at rest. That point of rest has got to be in all of it. Even though you are active out there in the world, within you there’s a point of complete composure and rest. When that’s not there, then you are in agony.

  When the world

  seems to be falling apart,

  the rule is to hang onto your own bliss.

  It’s that life that survives.

  Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division …is the talent of the master. The Cosmic Dancer, declares Nietzsche, does not rest heavily in a single spot, but gaily, lightly, turns and leaps from one position to another.39

  THERE is a Japanese saying I recall once having heard, of the five stages of a man’s growth: “At ten, an animal; at twenty, a lunatic; at thirty, a failure; at forty, a fraud; at fifty, a criminal." And at sixty, I would add (since by that time one will have gone through all this), one begins advising one’s friends; and at seventy (realizing that everything said has been misunderstood) one keeps quiet and is taken for a sage. “At eighty,” then said Confucius, “I knew my ground and stood firm.”40

  Jung speaks of the curve of a lifetime being divided in half: the first half is the time of relationships, and the second half is the time of finding the sense of life within; or, as the Hindus say, “following the marga”—the path, the footsteps of the human experience you’ve had—to your own inward life. And then, total disengagement. going through the last passage without anxiety, with-out fear.

  You go to your death singing.

  “As a physician I am convinced that it is hygienic…to discover in death a goal toward which one can strive; and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.”—Jung41

  It is important to know how old you are in spiritual development, where you are on this path. The function of initiations is to commit one’s whole psychological pitch to the requirements of a particular stage in life. The big initiation is when one has to leave the psychology of childhood behind: the death of the infantile ego, which is dependant and obedient, and the birth of the self-reliant adult participating in the society.

  The first quarter of life is that of student, and the ideal there is obedience—“comeliness of appearance and sweetness of conduct,” according to Dante—and this would mean conforming generally to the patterns required by the society. This interval is what Nietzsche calls the period of the camel, for the camel gets down on his knees and asks to have a load put on him.

  The second quarter is that of householder; that is to say, you have moved into the responsibilities of adult life. In the Indian system, your responsibilities are dictated in terms of the dharma, the law of your social order. In our society, you voluntarily choose your responsibilities, and it is through the assumption of those responsibilities, whatever they may be, that you achieve your position, name, and fame in the world. Making such choices involves a development of the ego function, the function of independent evaluation, and your assumption of tasks a
nd positions is relevant to your own value determinations. This period is the age of the dragon on whose every scale are emblazoned the words “Thou Shalt.”

  Midlife is typically the period, not of achievement, but of realization, and it should be the period of fulfillment. In Nietzsche’s stages, when the camel is well-loaded, it gets to its feet and goes out into the desert and turns into a lion. The lion’s job is to kill the dragon named Thou Shalt. When it has been killed by the lion of self-discovery, all the energy that had been caught up in the dragon is now yours. People in mid-life who are still expecting benefits from being good, or punishment from being bad, are delayed. Their infantile egos are still operating in midlife, and this is not appropriate.

  When you come into Jung’s second stage, the last half of life, the quest is for the import of the OM that you’ve heard in the heart cakra, so that it will become the forming and structuring energy of your life, without care for achievement, without care for prestige.

  Almost anyone making a transition would have an experience of shedding the old skin. Suppose you have shed the serpent’s skin but want to leave some tagged on the end. This is a major problem. It is an anxiety that has to do with what’s back there. You have to know enough to cut it off. You have to know what it is that’s hanging on: the old skin that is being peeled away gradually, bit by bit, like taking off a bandage without pulling all the hair.

  Sri Ramakrishna, talking about this fundamental stage of renunciation—“going into the forest,” in the Indian system—speaks of three kinds of renunciation.

  The first is gradual renunciation. That’s where you know the time is coming, you take advice from your guru or chaplain or whatever, you think it out, make arrangements for the place you’re going, and so on. If you are a man, you transfer your dharma to your son. He is the one that now has to carry on the dharma of the family, and you are released from that. Then you are nobody, no longer in caste. It’s a real, real quittance.

  The second is sudden renunciation is. Ramakrishna gives the example of a man who is on his way down to the stream to wash one morning, when he has an argument with his wife. The man says to her, “Now you shut up, or I will go into the forest, become a yogi, and you’ll never see me again.” She says, “Oh, you would never do that.” And he says, “I wouldn’t? Watch.” And he walks into the forest with his towel on his shoulder. That’s sudden renunciation.

  Then there is what he calls “monkey renunciation,” when a man who has gone away into the forest finds a nice comfortable ashram. He writes back to his family that he has gone to the ashram, and it’s going fine. That is not renunciation.

  The recommended one is gradual renunciation. That means getting quit of what you can in a decent, organic way. You can even take with you a few little responsibilities, with the understanding that they are terminal—you’re not going to add to them. The responsibilities that you add will be those of your own new condition, whatever that may be.

  Now in my case, I leave for the forest, as it were—actually, for Hawaii—with three volumes of a book to do, but it’s still renunciation: I’ve cut off my lecturing, and I’m settling in out there with my library and my notes, and I’m just digging in. Renunciation is literally a death and a resurrection. It wasn’t easy writing letters to people I’m fond of, people I like working with, and saying I wouldn’t be able to go on these lecture trips.

  I like Hawaii. It’s nice to be in a place where every-body’s having a good time. No children are allowed in the building, so all around us are people of about our own age, all still married. It is so nice to be with people still in love with each other after all the rough water of the years past. It’s like ships that have come into harbor and are now just floating with all kinds of sea stories.

  I work out on a veranda—they call it a “lanai” out there—with my back to the ocean and to what’s going on. What’s going on is usually a startling bikini walking past. I couldn’t write about anything but the Goddess if I were looking in the other direction. So mine is a nice sort of forest to retire to.

  “In primitive tribes, we observe that the old people are almost always the guardians of the mysteries and the laws, and it is in these that the cultural heritage of the tribe is expressed.”—Jung 42

  In old age, your only relationship to the world is your begging bowl, which in our culture is your bank account. That’s what you’ve already earned, and it has to support this relatively carefree last stage of life. Since I am myself in that stage now, I can tell you that it is the best part of life. It’s properly called, in this wonder-ful language that we have, the “Golden Years.” It is a period when everything is coming up and flowering. It is very, very sweet.

  …the old in many societies spend a considerable part of their time playing with and taking care of the youngsters, while the parents delve and spin: so that the old are returned to the sphere of eternal things not only within but without. And we may take it also, I should think, that the consider-able mutual attraction of the very young and the very old may derive something from their common, secret knowledge that it is they, and not the busy generation between, who are concerned with a poetic play that is eternal and truly wise.43

  The image of decline in old age is a bit deceptive, because even though your energies are not those of early youth—that was the time of moving into the field. of making all the big drives—now you are in the field, and this is the time of the opening flower, the real fulfillment, the bringing forth of what you have prepared yourself to bring forth. It is a wonderful moment. It is not a loss situation, as if you’re throwing off some-thing to go down. Not at all. It is a blooming.

  “When he comes to weakness—whether he come to weakness through old age or through disease—this person frees himself from these limbs just as a mango, or a fig, or a berry releases itself from its bond; and he hastens again, according to the entrance and place of origin, back to life. As noblemen, policemen, chariot-drivers, village-heads wait with food, drink, and lodgings for a king who is coming, and cry: ‘Here he comes! Here he comes!’ so indeed do all things wait for him who has this knowledge and cry: ‘Here is the Imperishable coming! Here is the Imperishable coming!’” —Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad, 4.3.36–3744

  PEOPLE ask me, “What can we have for rituals?” Well, what do you want to have a ritual for? You should have a ritual for your life. All a ritual does is concentrate your mind on the implications of what you are doing. For instance, the marriage ritual is a meditation on the step you are taking in learning to become a member of a duad, instead of one individual all alone. The ritual enables you to make the transit.

  Ritual introduces you

  to the meaning of what’s going on.

  Saying grace before meals

  lets you know that you’re about to eat

  something that once was alive.

  When eating a meal, realize what you are doing. Hunting peoples thank the animal for having given itself. They feel real gratitude. The main rituals of mature hunting tribes, like those of the Americas, were addressed to the animal. On the Northwest Coast, the principle rites were when the first wave of salmon came in, and they were intended to thank the salmon.

  The life of the animal that you’ve taken

  is given back when you recognize

  what you’ve done.

  And so, sitting down to eat, realize what you are doing: you are eating a life that has been given so that you might live.

  …man, like no other animal, not only knows that he is killing when he kills but also knows that he too will die; and the length of his old age, furthermore, is—like his infancy—a lifetime in itself, as long as the entire span of many a beast.45

  When I was working on the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, I had a lot of meals with the monks. Their grace before meals is the most beautiful invocation. It goes like this: “brahman is the cosmic, universal, life consciousness energy of which we are all manifestations. brahman is the sacrifice. brahman is the food that we ar
e eating. brahman is the consumer of the sacrifice. brahman is the ladle that carries the sacrifice to the fire. brahman is the process of the sacrifice. He who recognizes that all things are brahman is on the way to realizing brahman in himself.”

  The meaning of this grace is that taking food into your system is like putting a libation into a sacrificial fire: the fire of your digestive apparatus consumes what you eat, so eating is the counterpart of a sacrifice.

  The communion ritual is an extension of this idea, a motif that came into the world with the dawn of agriculture: “If the seed does not die, there is no plant.” It dies as seed and yields to the sprout. Now, since we are composed of spirit and matter—the two substances are what live in us—we need two types of food. The food that nourishes our material part—vegetables, animals, whatever it is we eat—is earthly food, but we must also have spiritual food, nourishment for our spiritual part. And communion, the eating of Christ, is a symbolization of the imbibing of that spiritual nourishment, a concretization of the idea of meditation, But in order to eat anything, it has to be killed, so again we have this notion of the sacrifice.

  You should be willing

  to be eaten also.

  You are food body.

  Every ritual is of that order, properly putting your mind in touch with what you really are doing. And so, we should realize that this event here and now: our coming together to help each other in the realization is a beautiful, beautiful ritual.

  You can ritualize your entire life that way, and it’s extremely helpful to do so. The whole thing of compassion comes in there. What helped me was waking up and thinking of my penny catechism: “to know, to love, to serve God.” I don’t think of God as up there. I think of God as right here in whatever I’m knowing and loving and serving. “To be happy with Him forever in heaven” means to recognize your own compassion, your own participation in that creature or person you’re with. That seems to be the goal of the journey.