A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (15 page)

If you fix

on yourself and your tradition,

believing you alone have got “It,”

you’ve removed yourself

from the rest of mankind.

S
ome say Communism is a social system without a religion; but you can’t say that Communism is not religious, for the laws of a Communist society have all the qualities of a religion because Communism has become the religion.

In terms of the ritual side of it, Communism has all the character of a religion, and it has the characteristics of one that is a biblical descendent. There is a good and there is a bad, and we’re fighting for the good, and there will be a day, come the Revolution, when all will be Communist and right. Part of the argument between Russia and China is about who is interpreting Marx properly, which is sheer scholasticism.

So, actually, most of the world’s societies are being ruled by post-biblical traditions, in which anybody who is anything else is out. Besides the Communist brother-hood, there is the Jewish community, the Christian community, and the Islamic, the Muslim community. Judaism doesn’t have a missionizing impulse, but the other three—Islam, Christianity, and Communism—are murderous traditions. The aim of each is total world conquest. That’s a beautiful show. Makes a mess of the world though.

The goal of life

is to make your heartbeat

match the beat of the universe,

to match your nature with Nature.

In Buddhism the goal of life is the repose of the nirvāṇic experience of life: “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world,” and soon. In a credo religion, the goal of life tends to get formulated. In Islam, it’s in the very name of the religion:
islām
means “submission,” to bow in acquiescence and reverence to the will of God. This credo gives warriors enormous courage and power: whether they’re going to get killed or not get killed, they move in with submission to the fate. In fact, that’s what a warrior has to do anyhow.

The warrior’s approach

is to say “yes” to life:

“yea” to it all.

In terms of historical action, Christianity and Islam have the same character. They’re going to remake the world for their God. I find this repulsive, but it’s what makes history, so you have to say “yes” to it. If you say “no” to one little detail of your life, you’ve unraveled the whole thing. You have to say “yes” to the whole thing, including its extinction. That’s what’s known as “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.” It’s my little theme song.

Love informs the whole universe

right down into the abyss of hell.

D
ante in his Divine Comedy unfolded a vision of the universe that perfectly satisfied both the approved religious and the accepted scientific notions of his time. When Satan had been flung out of heaven for his pride and disobedience, he was supposed to have fallen like a flaming comet and, when he struck the earth, to have plowed right through to its center. The prodigious crater that he opened thereupon became the fiery pit of Hell; and the great mass of displaced earth pushed forth at the opposite pole became the Mountain of Purgatory, which is represented by Dante as lifting heavenward exactly at the South Pole.
⁸⁷

Dante saw even the fires of hell

as a manifestation of God’s love.

You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created the angels, he commanded them to pay worship to no one but himself; but then, creating man, he commanded them to bow in reverence to this most noble of his works, and Lucifer refused—because, we are told, of his pride. However, according to the Moslem reading of his case, it was rather because he loved and adored god so deeply and intensely that he could not bring himself to bow before anything else. And it was for that that he was flung into Hell, condemned to exist there forever, apart form his love.
⁸⁸

Satan is the epitome of infractible ego.

The Persian poets have asked, “By what power is Satan sustained?” And the answer that they have found is this: “By his memory of the sound of God’s voice when he said, ‘Be gone!’” What an image of that exquisite spiritual agony which is at once the rapture and the anguish of love!
⁸⁹

“The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider or some lothsome Insect over the Fire, ab-hors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as Worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the Fire; he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in his Sight; you are Ten Thousand Times so abominable in his Eyes as the most hateful venomous Serpent is in ours.…you are thus in the Hands of an angry god; ‘tis nothing but his mere Pleasure that keeps you from being at this Moment swallowed up in everlasting Destruction.”
—Pastor Jonathan Edwards
⁹⁰

”God’s mere pleasure,” which defends the sinner from the arrow, the flood, and the flames, is termed in the traditional vocabulary of Christianity God’s ”mercy”; and ”the mighty power of the spirit of God,” by which the heart is changed, that is God’s “grace.” In most mythologies, the images of mercy and grace are rendered as vividly as those of justice and wrath, so that a balance is maintained, and the heart is buoyed rather than scourged along its way. “Fear not!” says the hand gesture of the god Śiva, as he dances before his devotee the dance of the universal destruction.

“Fear not, for all rests well in God. The forms that come

and go—and of which your body is but one—are the flashes of my dancing limbs. Know Me in all, and of what shall you be afraid?”
⁹¹

Hell is the concretization of your life experiences, a place where you’re stuck, the wasteland. In hell, you are so bound to yourself that grace cannot enter.

The problem with hell

is that the fire
doesn’t
consume you.

The fires of transformation
do
.

Fire is symbolic of the night sea journey, the upcoming of shadow—repressed biography, history, and traumas—and the burning out of the imps of malice. Purgatory is a place where that fire is turned into a purging fire that burns out the fear system, burns out the blockage so that it will open.

If hell is the wasteland, then purgatory would be the journey where you leave the place of pain. You are still in pain, but you’re in quest with a sense of possible realization. There is no longer despair. You really do not have a sacred place, a rescue land, until you can find some little field of action, or place to be, where it’s not a wasteland, where there is a little spring of ambrosia. It’s a joy that comes from inside. It is not something that puts the joy in you, but a place that lets you so experience your own will, your own intention, and your own wish that, in small, the joy is there. The sin against the Holy Ghost, I think, is despair. The Holy Ghost is that which inspires you to realization., and despair is the feeling that nothing can come. That is absolute hell.

Find a place where there’s joy,

and the joy will burn out the pain.

I
had an interesting experience when I was lecturing at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington D.C. to groups of officers about to go on assignment to the Orient or Southeast Asia. In one group there was this very smart black man, who’d just come from three years in Vienna and was going to India. The gentlemen in these groups would always invite me to have lunch at a very nice restaurant at the Watergate Hotel, and this time they asked this chap to drive me over there.

He had a zoom-zoom sports car, and he was quite the guy. When he and I were at the table, the first thing he started talking to me about was being black and the things that were against him. I thought, “Well, I’m going to let him have it. I’m sick of this kind of stuff.” I said, “In terms of the people I know, you are way up there. You’ve got a good life. Everybody has something against him. Some people are unattractive, and that’s against them. Some people are Protestants in a Catholic country; some are Catholic in a Protestant environment. If you go on blaming everything that is negative in your life on the fact that you’re black, you deny yourself the privilege of becoming human. You’re just a black man. You are not a man yet.” Then the crowd came in, and he sat quietly the rest of the time.

When I arrived the next month for my session, I went up to report in, and the officer on duty said, “Say, Joe, what did you tell that guy last time?” I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Why?” He said, “Well, he’s bought all your books, and he’s downstairs and wants you to sign them. When I asked him why he was doing that, he said, ‘Professor Campbell has made a man out of me.’”

Now that was a big lesson to me, and it runs against all this bleeding-heart stuff. I was proud of that. So, he’d been stuck in his hell: he hadn’t been able to see past his own notion of what his limitation was. Anyway, I went downstairs, and he had all the books, and as I was signing them, I said, “Well, this’ll help you remember me.” He said, “Oh, I’ll never forget you.”

Everytime you do something like that you find it was the right thing to do, provided that you furnish the person with something to jump to. If you’re really not interested in the person, you can just agree with them, “Ah, you poor chap, I understand. It’s real tough.”

Don’t think of what’s being said,

but of what’s talking.

Malice? Ignorance? Pride? Love?

The goal of the hero’s journey

is yourself, finding yourself.

W
hen we are one place in our lives and want to be in another place, there’s an obstacle to be overcome, a threshold to be passed. The six-pointed star, which in Judaism is the Star of David, is a symbol that appears in India as the sign of Cakra IV.

In the double triangle, the upward-pointed triangle—you might use the word “aspiration” for that—is symbolic of the movement principle. The downward-pointed triangle is inertia, and it represents what the obstacle would be. The downward-pointing triangle can be experienced either as an impediment or as the door that is opened. When you recognize its psychological significance and effect a mental transformation, then you see the obstacle as an opening.

So you can experience the downward-pointed triangle two ways: one, as an obstacle; and the other, as the means by which you are going to make the ascent. So, everything in your life that seems to be obstructive can be transformed by your recognizing that it is the means for your transition.

That’s the whole sense of the Tantra philosophy in India. Tantric exercises, which are occult and hidden, go so far as to propose precisely the most destructive, or seductive practices, as the rung of a ladder of ascent. So, for example, sexual union, which is usually one of the chief distractions from the way, is taken to be the way. Also you have—and this is extreme—necrophagia, the eating of dead bodies.

In certain American Indian cultures of the Southwest, one of the initiations to the clown category—and their black and white costume motif is a good symbol of the clown—involves actually eating dog shit. The most repulsive has to be accepted as also
brahman
. People like that are beyond all pairs of opposites. You can go to quite an extreme in eliminating your resistance to some of the things that life proposes. But you don’t have to go that far.

In the Gnostic
Gospel According to Thomas
, Jesus says, “Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift up the stone and you will find me there.”
⁹²
The historical Jesus has identified himself with the Christ. That is Buddha consciousness. He is living in terms, not of his ego, but of the Christ: the ubiquity in everything of the radiance of that which is the deepest center within you.

So, when this downward-pointed triangle becomes the means, instead of the obstruction, to your break-through, you’ve achieved the passage of the threshold.

There is always danger

at the threshold.

Leave the temporal body,

and let the spirit enter.

What is the obstruction in your life, and how do you transform it into the radiance? Ask yourself, “What is the main obstruction to my path?” In India, demons are really obstructions to the expansion of conscious-ness. A demon or devil is a power in you to which you have not given expression, an unrecognized or suppressed god. Anyone who is unable to understand a god sees it as a devil.

“Devil” is a word we use

for another peoples’ god.

All anyone is really trying to do is have an expansion of consciousness, so that the knowing and loving are on greater and greater horizons. That’s what happens when the
kuṇḍalinī
comes up: more and more of the body is informed with radiance and consciousness.

The goal of the journey

is to discover yourself

as consciousness.

Joyce says in
Ulysses
, “If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door.”
⁹³
The difficulties one encounters may be looked at as having the possibility of transformation into opening gates rather than closed doors.

When you find yourself blocked by a concretized symbol from your childhood, meditation is a systematic discipline that will solve your problem. The function of meditation, ideally, would be to transcend the concretized response and deliver the message.

The first thing I’d do would be to think, “What are, specifically, the symbols that are still active, still touching me this way?” What are the symbols? There’s a great context of symbols in the world. Not all of them are the ones that afflict you. When you do find the symbol that is blocking you, find some mode of thinking and experience that matches in its importance for you what the symbol meant. You cannot get rid of a sym-bol if you haven’t found that to which it refers.

If you find in your own heart a center of experience for which the symbol has been substituted, the symbol will dissolve. Think, “Of what is it the metaphor?” When you find that, the symbol will lose its blocking force, or it will become a guide.