A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (3 page)

So that’s what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialities of the energies in your own system. The energies are committed in a certain way, and that commitment out there is coming toward you.

The projection-making factor [in the male] is the anima, or rather the unconscious as represented by the anima. When-ever she appears, in dreams, visions, and fantasies, she takes on personified form, thus demonstrating that the factor she embodies possesses all the outstanding characteristics of a feminine being. She is not an invention of the conscious, but a spontaneous product of the unconscious. Nor is she a substitute figure for the mother. On the contrary, there is every likelihood that the numinous qualities which make the mother-image so dangerously powerful derive from the collective archetype of the anima, which is incarnated anew in every male child.
—Jung
¹⁰

The woman’s body

is the first world to the newborn.

The child’s projections of
anima

will be of her from then on.

Just as the mother seems to be the first carrier of the projection-making factor for the son, so is the father for the daughter.…Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint. This results in a considerable psychological difference between men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus, which means mind or spirit.…when anima and animus meet, the animus draws his sword of power, and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight).
—Jung
¹¹

You know about your anima or animus

by your response to the opposite sex.

There’s a fundamental image in the old Babylonian mythology of the God Marduk, the great sun god, the shaper and creator of the world. What does he create the world out of? His grandmother, Tiamat, who comes as a monster, and he carves her up.

She would have cut herself up anyhow, but she lets him become the agent of this deed, because one has to have that kind of confidence in action out there in order that the world can live. So, this is a generous woman, who lets the little boy think he is doing the job, when she could have done it herself.

That’s the way the animus is: it is a projection of something the female could do but instead allows the male to do for her. Though not half so vital a presence, he is a machine with a body that’s specialized, so he can do these things. The realization that the power is within you is one thing; but to realize that the action implied by that power is more adequately rendered by the male than by you as a female is to recognize relationship.

When a woman realizes that the power is within her, then the man emerges as an individual, rather than just being an example of what she thinks she needs. On the male side, when a man looks at a woman and sees only somebody to go to bed with, he is seeing her in relation to a fulfillment of some need of his own and not as a woman at all. It’s like looking at cows and thinking only of roast beef.

Falling in love is nature coming in.

It starts with being carried off

by the opposite sex.

I
t
is amazing, but our theologians still are writing of
agape
and
eros
and their radical opposition, as though these two were the final terms of the principle of “love”: the former, “charity,” godly and spiritual, being “of men toward each other in a community,” and the latter, “lust,” natural and fleshly, being “the urge, desire and delight of sex.”
¹²
Nobody in a pulpit seems ever to have heard of
amor
as a third, selective, discriminating principle in contrast to the other two. For
amor
is neither of the right-hand path (the sublimating spirit, the mind and the comm-nity of man), nor of the indiscriminate left (the spontaneity of nature, the mutual incitement of the phallus and the womb), but is the path directly before one, of the eyes and their message to the heart.

There is a poem to this point by a great troubadour (perhaps the greatest of all), Guiraut de Borneilh:

Troubadour love was born

with the meeting of the eyes.

The eyes are the scouts of love.

If it is a gentle heart, love is born.

At the moment of the wakening to love, an object, apparently without, “passes [in the words of Joyce] into the soul forever.…And the soul leaps at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!”
¹⁴

Love is not only a life experience,

but also a mystical experience.

In courtly love, the pain of love,

the impossibility of fulfillment,

was considered the essence of life.

For when a heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass.
¹⁵

The distance of your love

is the distance of your life.

Love is exactly as strong as life.

T
he
loss of a love and the pain of a broken relationship is an overload of projection. That’s all it is. In youth, your whole life is this wonderful dream that
“This is It”
: this relationship is the fulfillment of my fantasy and I can’t imagine life otherwise. No argument can quell this feeling of total projection, of everything in the other one. I guess we can all recall an episode of an adolescent relationship that seemed to be the all-in-all and then went to pieces for some reason.

When a relationship breaks off, it takes a person a little while to settle and find a new commitment. It’s after the breakoff, when there is no new commitment and life has been divested of all of its potentials, that this painful reaction takes place. For some people this is a dangerous period.

The psyche knows how to heal, but it hurts. Some-times the healing hurts more than the initial injury, but if you can survive it, you’ll be stronger, because you’ve found a larger base. Every commit-ment is a narrowing, and when that commitment fails, you have to get back to a larger base and have the strength to hold to it.

Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life,the idea came to him of what he called “the love of your fate.” Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say,
“This is what I need.”
It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment—not discouragement—you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.

The dark night of the soul

comes just before revelation.

When everything is lost,

and all seems darkness,

then comes the new life

and all that is needed.

J
ean
and I have been married for forty-six years, and we have a kind of back and forth of feelings and intelligences, so that we’ve experienced “the one that is two and the two that are one.” We do not have to theorize about it, we know what the hell it means. It’s what Goethe calls the “Golden Wedding,” and it is beautiful when that feeling becomes a fact in your life.

Mythology helps you to identify

the mysteries of the energies

pouring through you.

Therein lies your eternity.

It is nice to know enough about mythology to realize how beautiful such an experience can be. A lot of people could have the experience and not know they had it. One of the wonderful things about these age-old realizations that are constellated in the mythic images is that they let you know what it is you are experiencing.

Mythology is an organization of images

metaphoric of potentials of experience, action, and fulfillment of the human spirit

in the field of a given culture at a given time.

The goal of the Golden Wedding is implicit in the first moment of a relationship. Old age is implicit in the generation of a child: the child’s old age is there waiting. Similarly, the older you get, the more you realize that you are still a kid, and your early experiences are the ones that are now just opening out. It is one system all the time.

This is one of the big themes in James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
. He has this image of the heroine, Anna Livia Plurabelle, as being the personification of the River Liffey that flows through Dublin.

The River Liffey rises in the hills south of Dublin as a little girl, those dancing little rivulets that are going to form the river. Then it flows north to a lovely suburban area, where you have the mother with her family: the mid-point of life. The river is the same river. Then it turns and runs through Dublin and becomes an old, dirty, city river, carrying all the rubbish of the city back to the ocean, the Father Ocean. The sun then brings the vapor up to the cloud, and it’s now a little cloud in the Mother Womb of the blue sky. It floats over the hill and discharges the rain on the mountains.

The first half of life

we serve society—engagement.

The second half of life

we turn inward—disengagement.

She is the same person, the same river, all the time. Joyce makes it so you can feel the old woman in the little girl and the little girl in the old woman. It's marvelous. And it’s the way you actually feel as you get older, if you are paying attention to the experiences you’re having inside.

You know, they say that old people can’t remember what happened yesterday, but they can remember with great vividness what happened fifty years ago. This is really true. In old age, you are relaxed from the immediate occasion of the day’s summons, and you’re sinking down into your memory system, which is as alive as can be. Moments with your parents that were crisis moments are right there with you. They become important. They’re determinate moments that help illuminate what the relationship was.

Sometimes when I look back, I think, “Son of a gun, you missed everything.” It’s funny how, at a certain age, all I could see were the negatives in the way I lived: I missed it that time, or another time I was a stupid boob. Now, I try not to think about it. I’m wanting to get to heaven, where they tell me that you don’t remember all those things.

In the age of decrepitude,

you look back over your life

with gratitude,

and forward to death

as a return home.

When Dante passed out of Purgatory, he drank at the river where all of his sins were wiped out of his memory. The first river from which he’d drunk forgave all of his sins, but that wasn’t good enough, because then he still had to forget them.

I
n
Hinduism, the religion of the god Viṣṇu is that of love. In the Viṣṇu way of analyzing love, there are five degrees of love and a model that represents each of these different stages. The whole discipline of seeking and achieving illumination can be conducted from the energy of this channel.

The first degree of love, that of servant to master, is a low degree of love: “Oh Lord, you are the master. I am the servant. Tell me what I am to do, and I shall do it.” This is the way of the religion of law, where there are a lot of commands—ten commandments, a thousand commandments, a hundred and ten thousand commandments. It is a religion of fear. You have not awakened to the divine presence. It’s out there, and you are here. This way is principally for people who have not had much time to devote themselves either to religious thinking or to love.

The model that represents this first stage is that of the little monkey king, Hanumān, who is the servant of Rāma. I don't know whether there is a specific example of this stage in the Christian tradition, but there doesn’t have to be, because the Christian tradition is nothing else for most people: obeying ten commandments here, ten commandments there.

Degree number two, the relationship of friend to friend, is the awakening of what
we
would call love. Here, one thinks of one's friend more than in the first situation. The model of this second stage of love, friend for friend, would be that of the apostles to Jesus, or of anyone who really is a lover of anything or anybody.