A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (30 page)

We cannot cure the world of sorrows,

but we can choose to live in joy.

Flying down from Boston to New York at night, the plane goes over highly populated areas and you can see rivers of automobile lights, like blood molecules going through the veins. You really get a sense of this whole thing as a strange organism. The life of the planet depends on certain areas in the swamplands and so forth that are being violated now. People who don’t have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things in neighborhood development.

“If those who lead you say to you: ‘See, the Kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of the heaven will precede you. If they say to you: ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. But the Kingdom is within you and it is without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty and you are poverty.”—
Jesus Christ
¹⁵⁸

You must return

with the bliss

and integrate it.

Every now and then, while I’m walking along Fifth Avenue, everything just breaks up into subatomic particles and I think, “Well, Jesus Christ, that
is
what it is. This is the experience of
māyā
, an illusion of the senses if there ever was one.” It’s a fantastic thought.

His disciples said to Him: “When will the Kingdom come?” Jesus said: “It will not come by expectation; they will not say: ‘See, here’ or: ‘See there.’ But the Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.”
¹⁵⁹

The return is seeing

the radiance everywhere.

“The president in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

“Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every single pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people.

“We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family.

“The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred. Each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water’s murmur is the voice of my father’s father.

“The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give to the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

“If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.

“Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

“This we know: The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood which unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

“One thing we know: our god is also your god. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

“Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is it to say goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.

“When the last Red Man has vanished with his wilderness and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left?

“We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Pre-serve the land for all children and love it, as God loves us all.

“As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you. One thing we know: There is only one God. No man, be he Red Man or White Man can be apart. We are brothers after all.”—
Chief Seattle
¹⁶⁰

T
he world is a match for us.

We are a match for the world.

Having soared beyond thought into boundless space, circled many times the arid moon, and begun their long return: how welcome a sight, [the astronauts] said, was the beauty of their goal, this planet Earth, “like an oasis in the desert of infinite space!” Now there is a telling image: this earth—the one oasis in all space, an extraordinary kind of sacred grove, as it were, set apart for the rituals of life; and not simply one part or section of this earth, but the entire globe now a sanctuary, a set-apart Blessed Place. Moreover, we have all now seen for ourselves how very small is our heaven-born earth, and how perilous our position on the surface of its whirling, luminously beautiful orb.
¹⁶¹

…we are the children of this beautiful planet that we have lately seen photographed from the moon. We were not delivered into it by some god, but have come forth from it.
¹⁶²

The spirit is the bouquet of nature.

We may think of ourselves, then, as the functioning ears and eyes and minds of this earth, exactly as our own ears and eyes and minds are of our bodies. Our bodies are one with this earth, this wonderful “oasis in the desert of infinite space”; and the mathematics of that infinite space, which are the same as of Newton’s mind—our mind, the earth’s mind, the mind of the universe—come to flower and fruit in this beautiful oasis through ourselves.
¹⁶³

The first function of mythology

is to sanctify the place you are in.

“The world,” wrote the poet Rilke, “is large, but in us it is deep as the sea.” We carry the laws within us by which it is held in order. And we ourselves are no less mysterious. In searching out its wonders, we are learning simultaneously the wonder of ourselves. That moon flight as an outward journey was outward into ourselves. And I do not mean this poetically, but factually, historically. I mean that the actual fact of the making and the visual broadcasting of that trip has transformed, deepened, and extended human consciousness to a degree and in a manner that amounts to the opening of a new spiritual era.

…that lovely satellite has been out there circling our earth for some four billion years like a beautiful but lone-some woman trying to catch earth’s eye. She has now at last caught it, and has caught thereby ourselves. And as always happens when a temptation of that kind has been responded to, a new life has opened, richer, more exciting and fulfilling, for both of us than was known, or even thought of or imagined, before. There are youngsters among us, even now, who will be living on that moon; others who will visit Mars. And their sons? What voyages are to be theirs?
¹⁶⁴

Follow your bliss.

What is, or what is to be, the new mythology? Since myth is of the order of poetry, let us ask first a poet: Walt Whitman, for example, in his Leaves of Grass (1855):

These lines of Whitman echo marvelously the sentiments of the earliest of the Upaniṣads, the “Great Forest Book” (Bṛhadāranyaka) of about the eighth century
B.C.

“This that people say, ‘Worship this god! Worship that god!’—one god after another! All this is his creation indeed! And he himself is all the gods.…He is entered in the universe even to our fingernail-tips, like a razor in a razor case, or fire in firewood. Him those people see not, for as seen he is incomplete. When breathing, he becomes ‘breath’ by name; when speaking, ‘voice’; when seeing, ‘the eye’; when hearing, ‘the ear’; when thinking, ‘mind’: these are but the names of his acts.…

“One should worship with the thought that he is one’s self, for therein all these become one. This self is the footprint of that All, for by it one knows the All—just as, verily, by following a footprint one finds cattle that have been lost.… One should reverence the Self alone as dear. And he who reverences the Self alone as dear—what he holds dear, verily, will not perish.…

So whosoever worships another divinity than his self, thinking, ‘He is one, I am another,’ knows not. He is like a sacrificial animal for the gods.…”
¹⁶⁶

Indeed, do we not hear the same from Christ himself, as reported in the early Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas?

“Whoever drinks from my mouth shall become as I am and I myself will become he, and the hidden things shall be revealed to him.…I am the All, the All came forth from me and the All attained to me. Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift up the stone and you will find me there.”
¹⁶⁷

I
f you want the whole thing,

the gods will give it to you.

But you must be ready for it.

There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together.…That is just what we are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of mankind—to which no one anywhere alive today can say that he has the key, the answer, the prophecy, to its dawn. Nor is there anyone to condemn here…What is occurring is completely natural, as are its pains, confusions, and mistakes.
¹⁶⁸

The goal is to live

with godlike composure

on the full rush of energy,

like Dionysus riding the leopard,

without being torn to pieces.

Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a “presence” or “eternity” that is whole and entire in each. In this function all mythologies, all great poetries, and all mystic traditions are in accord; and where any such inspiriting vision remains effective in a civilization, everything and every creature within its range is alive. The first condition, therefore, that any mythology must fulfill if it is to render life to modern lives is that of cleansing the doors of perception to the wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of ourselves and of the universe of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind.
¹⁶⁹

A bit of advice

given to a young Native American

at the time of his initiation:

“As you go the way of life,

you will see a great chasm.

Jump.

It is not as wide as you think.”

And so, to return to our opening question: What is—or what is to be—the new mythology?

It is—and will forever be, as long as our human race exists—the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its “subjective sense,” poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor of a projected future, but of now: addressed, that is to say, not to the flattery of “peoples,” but to the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves, not simply as egos fighting for place on the surface of this beautiful planet, but equally as centers of Mind at Large—each in his own way at one with all…
¹⁷⁰

[Discuss]

At his death in 1987, Joseph Campbell left a significant body of published work that explored his lifelong passion, the complex of universal myths and symbols that he called “Mankind’s one great story.” He also left, however, a large volume of unreleased work: uncollected articles, notes, letters, and diaries, as well as audio- and videotape-recorded lectures.