A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

by Joseph Campbell

  What is your religion telling you?

  How to be a Jew? A Catholic?

  Or how to be a human being?

  I had a friend, a marvelous young man named John, who became an editor of the Jesuit periodical America about the time that the Catholic church got interested in the ecumenical movement. Everybody was trying to correlate Catholicism with the other religions, but at the same time, they were denigrating them. So, John would always be telling them, for example, “No, you can’t do that with Hinduism. You can’t put it down by misrepresenting it. You’ve got to face up to it.”

  Well, there was a big Roman Catholic conference of the meditation orders—Cistercians, Trappists, and so forth—in Bangkok, and John was there as an observer. By the way, it was while attending this conference that Thomas Merton died. He was electrocuted by a bad fixture in some absurd Thai hotel. John later said that the talk that Merton had given just before his death was one of the most magnificent he’d ever heard.

  When John came back, he said the Christian monks and Buddhist monks had no problem communicating. As anyone who’s 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 the time.”

  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.111

  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.”

  It is through living

  that we experience and communicate

  the spirit.

  It is through life

  that we learn to live in the spirit.

  One in full quest of the spirit

  knows that the goal of life is death.

  I recall a wonderful talk I had with Alan Watts, who was a marvelous man. One of my problems was that Jean was always late. I’d make an appointment to meet her somewhere or other, and there I’d sit waiting for half an hour. I found it’s a normal thing for men to wait for women. They have so many things they have to do before they can walk out of the house that half an hour or more goes by quickly.

  Now, it’s a basic rule in New York that it takes a half-hour to get anywhere, but Jean always thought that the time when she was supposed to be somewhere was the time to leave. So, I had this long wait problem, and I said to Alan, “What can I do about this? I get aggravated, and when she arrives, I’m a little bit nasty.”

  Alan said, “Well, your problem is that you want her to be there, and you’re wishing for a situation that is not the one you are in. Just realize that you are ruining the experience that you could be having there while waiting by thinking it should be otherwise.”

  So then, waiting for Jean became a spiritual exercise. I said to myself, “You should not be thinking that Jean should be here. Look around you and see what is going on.” And, you know, the place where I was be-came so goddamn interesting that I wasn't bored at all. Oftentimes, I hoped that Jean would make me wait a little longer. That would have seemed impossible to me, until Alan suggested shutting out any thought that my situation should have been otherwise.

  That’s an example of what fear and desire do. I de-sired the situation to be the one we planned, and that desire forbade me my immediate experience: “This is it! This is life! Look at it! Isn’t it bubbling?” But now that I could love the situation I was in, the waiting was no longer a bore. The psychological transformation would be that whatever was formerly endured is now known, loved, and served.

  As long as you move

  from a place of fear and desire,

  you are self-excluded

  from immortality.

  The aim of all religious exercises is a psy-chological transformation. You can make up your own meditations and rites based on knowing, loving, and serving the deity in caring for your children, doctoring drunks, or writing books. 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.

  The return

  is seeing the radiance

  everywhere.

  The main problem is changing the location of your mind. The town you come back to is the one you left, otherwise the journey is not complete. You come back to whatever you regard as the place that is your life, to the same career, not necessarily to the same locale. The yoga disciplines are disciplines. They are not the place.

  You give yourself to life

  by leaving temporality behind.

  Desire for mortal gains

  and fear of loss

  hold you back from giving

  yourself to life.

  Fear and desire do not give rise to social duty, society does. Do-gooders come and say, for example, “We have this picket line against nuclear armament. Please get on the line, give up your thinking, and do what we ask you to do.”

  If you’re performing your social duty,

  it is not your act at all.

  Society has put it upon you

  and it will keep you from life.

  Dealing with such demands as compulsory social obligations means you are linked and locked to a given order of life in the phenomenal world. You can involve yourself voluntarily, but there is no compulsion upon you to participate in these actions. Nor are they necessarily the final good of mankind. That’s the whole didactic sphere.

  People put social duty on you. Your neighbors say, “Why this apathetic sitting in meditation? Get up and do something for the world. You owe it to the world.” All that kind of thing. Duty doesn’t rise out of your fear. People put it on you. Duty is dharma; that is to say, dharma understood as social dharma.

  Notice that little icon on the dollar bill, the static eye at the point where the pair of opposites come together. If you’re going to be in the world in action, you have to be down the pyramid on one side or the other. It doesn’t matter whether you are for Democracy or Communism or Fascism, you are still in the field of time, and the radiance shines through no matter which one you’re in. You can also get locked into compulsive participation in any position. It is a matter of relativity. All judgments are transformed as you move from one position to another. Good and evil are not absolute. They are relative to which side you are on.

  The limitation comes

  where your judgment comes.

  A wonderful example is a story I was told about a Buddhist monk whom a friend was following. Now in Tibet, people go to a slaughter-house, buy a lamb that is about to be killed, then give the lamb its freedom, and that is a pious act. Accordingly, this monk, who had a cluster of beautiful girls around him, was going to perform a pious act by freeing five hundred fish.

  And so, with his constellation of beauties, he went from one bait shop to another in Monterey trying to buy five hundred minnows. But bait was in short supply, and the shopkeepers said they were not going to sell him minnows for liberation. Finally, however, he found a shop that would, and he and his entourage, carrying buckets filled with fish, went down to the shore, where they had a ceremony of blessing the fish that were about to be given their freedom. Then they dumped one bucket after another into the ocean. Well, pelicans flocked from every point of the compass, and the little monk ran back and forth, waving his robe, trying to keep the pelicans away.

  Now, what is good for pelicans is bad for fish, and this monk had taken sides. He was not in the middle place. This is to me a very important story. Every now and then, I wake up laughing at that monk and his banquet for the pelicans.

  That is why the story of the lion lying down with the lamb is so silly. Read concretely, yo
u realize that when the lion is eating the lamb, he is lying down with it. That’s how it was meant to be, and “shanti, shanti, shanti”: nothing is happening. That is the perspective of the sublime, which annihilates ego consciousness and its relationship. Without changing the world, there is escape from sorrow just by shifting the perspective.

  Life will always be sorrowful.

  We can’t change it, but we can

  change our attitude toward it.

  There is a story of the Buddha, in a little company of yogis, and he says, “At one time I starved my body to such a degree that, when I touched my stomach, I could grab my backbone. The thought occurred to me that this is not the way to achieve enlightenment. There is not enough strength in the body to absorb the experience or even to achieve it. So it was then that I ate my first meal.”

  There was a lovely little girl around who was the daughter of a cattleherder, and she took the milk of a thousand cows and fed it to a hundred, that of a hundred she fed to ten, and the milk of those ten cows she fed to one. There was such power in that concentrated milk that, when she gave the bowl to the Buddha and he drank of it, his whole body was refreshed. When he was finished, he threw the bowl into the river and said, “If this bowl goes upstream, I shall become a Buddha.” It went upstream. That night the illumination came.

  Fear of your power

  is what commits you

  to the lower system.

  If in me there is the kind of power that can stand against the tide of history, then I can become disengaged from it. Nietzsche says, “Beware of spitting against the wind.” You know what will happen. But if you can spit against the wind and it hits somebody else in the eye, then you’re going to be a Buddha.

  I’ve always looked for signs like that. When I had to register for the drafts, behind the desks there were three men and one woman. I said if the woman calls me, I won’t be drafted. The woman called me, and just when it was time for me to be taken in, they learned that I was thirty-eight, and they could not use people of that antiquity. I think, as do the Buddhists, that what is to be is somehow implicit in what is, and that to look for such signs is a natural and amusing thing to do.

  In our tradition, we do not operate in accordance with those fixed patterns. We believe that the ego, which makes value judgments and decisions for action, brings about change. Freud speaks of the ego as “the reality principle,” that which puts you in touch with “reality,” reality with a small “r”: meaning, the individual circumstances of your life and your relationship to those circumstances. And in our culture, the ego, the evaluating principle, is developed. The mother asks, “What kind of ice cream do you want, Johnny, strawberry or vanilla?” “I want vanilla.” And he gets vanilla.

  In the East, by contrast, where everything you do is what you are told to do, they put something in front of you and you get what you are given. And if everything you do is what you are told to do, your ego is not being developed. Consequently, in the East, people have no concept of the ego. They don’t know what the ego is. It doesn’t play any role. There is no individual evaluation.

  In Freudian psychology, the pleasure principle, the id, the zeal of life for holding on to food, comfort, sex, and life itself—the context I call “health, wealth, and progeny”—is what most people live for. Against the id, Freud posits the superego, the social laws that discipline the individual, so that one does, not what one wants, but what society says one should do. In the East, in psychological terms, the whole conflict is between superego and id. No ego principle is even considered.

  So, without anything that we would call an ego, the Easterner seeking illumination leaves his family, goes to a guru, and brings a little ball or shell, his ego, and he asks the guru to break it. And the guru takes a little mallet, the yoga discipline, and—“bing!”—his ego is gone. But the Westerner going to a guru brings with him a rock-solid ego that’s been the guiding force of his whole life. And when he asks the guru to break his ego, the guru takes the same little mallet and goes “bing! bing! bing!” for forty years and nothing happens. The person just feels increasingly unhappy.

  I submit that if you are a person with an evaluating psyche. who is having thoughts no guru ever had, there must be another way to have illumination. I think what Ramakrishna calls “the monkey way” can, in our culture, turn into the equivalent of the Buddhist “middle way.” That is to say, when you have found the center within yourself that is the counterpart of the sacred space, you do not have to go into the forest. You can have a technique for extracting your own repose from that center. You can live from that center, even while you remain in relation to the world.

  There is a popular Indian fable that Ramakrishna used to like to tell, to illustrate the difficulty of holding in mind the two conscious planes simultaneously, of the multiple and transcendent. It is of a young aspirant whose guru had just brought home to him the realization of himself as identical in essence with the power that supports the universe and which in theological thinking we personify as “God.” The youth, profoundly moved, exalted in the notion of himself as at one with the Lord and Being of the Universe, walked away in a state of profound absorption; and when he had passed in that state through the village and out onto the road beyond it, he beheld, coming in his direction, a great elephant bearing a howdah on its back and with the mahout, the driver, riding—as they do—high on its neck, above its head. And the young candidate for sainthood, meditating on the proposition “I am God; all things are God,” on perceiving that mighty elephant coming toward him, added the obvious corollary, “The elephant also is God.” The animal, with its bells jingling to the majestic rhythm of its stately approach, was steadily coming on, and the mahout above its head began shouting, “Clear the way! Clear the way, you idiot! The youth, in his rapture, was thinking still, “I am God; that elephant is God.” And, hearing the shouts of the mahout, he added, “Should God be afraid of God? Should God get out of the way of God?” The phenomenon came steadily on with driver at its head still shouting at him, and the youth, in undistracted meditation, held both to his place on the road and to his transcendental insight, until the moment of truth arrived and the elephant, simply wrapping its great trunk around the lunatic, tossed him aside, off the road.

  Physically shocked, spiritually stunned, the youth landed all in a heap, not greatly bruised but altogether undone; and rising, not even adjusting his clothes, he returned, disordered, to his guru, to require an explanation. “You told me,” he said, when he had explained himself, “you told me that I was God.” “Yes,” said the guru, “you are God.” “You told me that all things are God.” “Yes,” said the guru again, “all things are God.” “That elephant, then, was God?” “So it was. That elephant was God. But why didn’t you listen to the voice of God, shouting from the elephant’s head, to get out of the way?”112

  Wisdom and foolishness

  are practically the same.

  Both are indifferent

  to the opinions of the world.

  According to legend, when Avalokiteśvara looked down upon this suffering world he was filled with such compassion that his head burst into innumerable heads…while from his body sprang a thousand helping arms and hands, like an aura of dazzling rays, and in the palm of each hand there appeared an eye of unimpeded vision.…

  Every pore of the body of Avalokiteśvara contains and pours forth thousands of Buddhas, saints of all kinds, entire worlds. From his fingers flow rivers of ambrosia that cool the hells and feed the hungry ghosts.…He appears to brahmans as a brahman, to merchants as a merchant, to insects as an insect, to each in the aspect of its kind.…113

  "THE goddess alone knew of the all-moving, secret world energy which had helped the gods to victory; it was the power within them, of which they were unaware. They believed that they were strong in themselves, but without this force, or against it, they could not so much as harm a blade of grass. The goddess knew of the universal force, which the Vedic priests called brahman and which
Hindus call śakti, for śakti, i.e. energy, is the essence and name of the Great Goddess herself, hence she could explain the mysterious being to the gods, she could teach them its secret—for it was her own secret.”—Zimmer114

  In Hinduism, all power, śakti, is female. So, the female represents the totality of the power, and the male is imaged as the agent of the female. In that sense, the power that a female feels from the male—the animus, in Jungian terms—is a specification of the female power, a mode of application of that power.

  Every being has a twofold aspect, reveals a friendly and a menacing face. All gods have a charming and a hideous form, according to how one approaches them; but the Great Goddess is the energy of the world, taking form in all things. All friendly and menacing faces are facets of her essence. What seems a duality in the individual god, is an infinite multiplicity in her total being.…

  She is the mute security of life in itself; from the ashes of burned forests she raises eager fresh flowers whose decay is pregnant with new life, a new life which all around it sees only life in its transitions and transformations with no shadow of death, just as we ourselves, when we sink our teeth into a ripe fruit, or draw a living plant from the garden, are without awareness of death.