A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (29 page)

For women who marry, it requires a hell of an ac-quiescence on the part of the husband, too—I can tell you about that. I know so many young women who were in dance, then married, and the husband could not stand it. And, of course, it is difficult to have a family with an art that requires the kind of discipline dance demands. The thing about dance is that if you are not disciplined, it is damned evident the next time you get on stage.

Jean once said, “The way of the artist and the way of the mystic are similar, but the mystic lacks a craft.” The craft keeps the artist in touch with the phenomenality
of
the world and in a relationship
to
it: a constant evaluation of the uniqueness of each event in the world. The mystic, by contrast, can be so darned abstract that there is no link to life except the begging bowl. Yet, sometimes those begging bowls can be very productive. Some of our gurus are pulling in millions of dollars. But that does not mean they are related to life.

I have seen the training of artists in this country and in Europe. They are trained only in the craft. They are given techniques for rendering something, but they do not know what to do with the techniques. I’ve know many of them who just cracked up. Their art technique becomes a wall they cannot penetrate, so they try to think of anecdotes and narratives to render that show off their technique. They are so loaded with sociology, that they think they do not have an art object if there is not some kind of lesson in there for fixing the world or themselves. But, in fact, an art object by definition is “divinely superfluous beauty.”

Do you see in this the projecting power of
māyā
and the revealing power? As long as the motifs of desire and loathing are moving you, it is the projecting aspect. You are yourself the
māyā
-maker, and you are the one who opens the revealing power when your attitude is that of the Buddha. When I realized this, it was thrilling to me. I think that art and this knowledge of what art is can be the modern Western way to illumination. It will release you from all kinds of linkages. It will not keep you from practicing all those things you hardly believe in, but it will help you in achieving the esthetic before you become linked to the objects of your life.

When you distinguish

between good and evil,

you’ve lost the art.

Art goes beyond morality.

The reach of your compassion

is the reach of your art.

J
OYCE’S
trick was

seeing symbols everywhere.

…Dr. John W. Perry has characterized the living mythological symbol as an “affect image.” It is an image that hits one where it counts. It is not addressed first to the brain, to be there interpreted and appreciated. On the contrary, if that is where it has to be read, the symbol is already dead. An “affect image” talks directly to the feeling system and immediately elicits a response, after which the brain may come along with its interesting comments. There is some kind of throb of resonance within, responding to the image shown without, like the answer of a musical string to another equally tuned. And so it is that when the vital symbols of any given social group evoke in all its members responses of this kind, a sort of magical accord unites them as one spiritual organism, functioning through members who, though separate in space, are yet one in being and belief.
¹⁴³

Once you understand symbolic things,

you, too, will see symbols everywhere.

The wonder is that the characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale—as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a droplet or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a flea. For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undam-aged, the germ power of its source.
¹⁴⁴

The divine manifestation is ubiquitous,

only our eyes are not open to it.

The symbol opens our eyes.

“A true symbol takes us to the center of the circle, not to another point on the circumference. It is by symbolism that man enters effectively and consciously into contact with his own deepest self, with other men, and with God.…”—Thomas Merton
¹⁴⁵

Frequently a symbol doesn’t open

our eyes, but closes them instead.

If we concretize the symbol,

we get stuck with it.

In short, then: just as the buffalo suddenly disappeared from the North American plains, leaving the Indians deprived not only of a central mythic symbol but also of the very manner of life that the symbol once had served, so likewise in our own beautiful world, not only have our public religious symbols lost their claim to authority and passed away, but the ways of life they once supported have also disappeared; and as the Indians then turned inward, so do many in our own baffled world—and frequently with Oriental, not Occidental, guidance in this potentially very dangerous, often ill-advised interior adventure, questing within for the affect images that our secularized social order with its incongruously archaic religious institutions can no longer render.
¹⁴⁶

The world has been desanctified.

T
he chick from the egg

is a symbol of the spirit of Easter.

The image of the cosmic egg is known to many mythologies; it appears in the Greek Orphic, Egyptian, Finnish, Buddhistic, and Japanese. “In the beginning this world was merely nonbeing,” we read in a sacred work of the Hindus; “It was existent. It developed. It turned into an egg. It lay for the period of a year. It was split asunder. One of the two parts became silver, one gold. That which was of silver is the earth. That which is of gold is the sky. What was the outer membrane is the mountains. What was the inner me-brane is cloud and mist. What were the veins are the rivers. What was the fluid within is the ocean. Now, what was born there from is yonder sun.”
¹⁴⁷
The shell of the cosmic egg is the world frame of space, while the fertile seed-power within typifies the inexhaustible life dynamism of nature.
¹⁴⁸

The eggshell is cast off by the chick as the skin is sloughed off by the serpent, or the shadow of the moon is shed by the moon reborn.

Snake and moon both die to the old,

shedding their shadows to be reborn.

Birds in flight and Christ on the cross: both symbolize the spirit released from the bondage of earth. The moon, like Christ, dies and is resurrected. The moon is three nights darkk: Jesus was three nights in the grave with a stone covering the cave entrance—the dark disk over the moon. The dating of Easter according to both lunar and solar calendars suggests that life, like the light reborn in the moon and eternal in the sun, finally
is
one. The whole mystery is right there in Christian symbology.

The moon, furthermore, and the spectacle of the night sky, the stars and the Milky Way, have constituted, certainly from the beginning, a source of wonder and profound impression. But there is actually a physical influence of the moon upon the earth and its creatures, its tides and our own interior tides, which has long been consciously recognized as well as subliminally experienced. The coincidence of the menstrual cycle with that of the moon is a physical actuality structuring human life and a curiosity that has been observed with wonder. It is in fact likely that the fundamental notion of a life-structuring relationship between the heavenly world and that of man was derived from the realization, both in experience and in thought, of the force of the lunar cycle. The mystery, also, of the death and resurrection of the moon, as well as of its influence on dogs, wolves and foxes, jackals and coyotes, which try to sing to it: this immortal silver dish of wonder, cruising among the beautiful stars and racing through the clouds, turning waking life itself into a sort of dream, has been a force and presence even more powerful in the shaping of mythology than the sun, by which its light and its world of stars, night sounds, erotic modes, and the magic of dream, are daily quenched.
¹⁴⁹

Dew is an ambrosia

fallen from the moon.

This lunar symbology is ancient: the moon god in Mesopotamia was named Sin; the mountain that Moses ascended was Mount Sinai. It may have been the moon goddess mountain. When Moses came down from that mountain, he was so luminous from his reception of God’s energy that he wore a veil in front of his face, and emanating from his forehead were horns of light: the horns of the lunar mystery.

”The moon lives twenty-eight days and this is our month. Each of these days represents something sacred to us: two of the days represent the Great Spirit; two are for Mother Earth; four are for the four winds; one is for the Spotted Eagle; one for the sun; and one for the moon; one is for the Morning Star; and four are for the four ages; seven for our seven great rites; one is for the buffalo; one for the fire; one for the water; one for the rock; and finally, one is for the two-legged people. If you add all these days up you will see that they come to twenty-eight. You should know also that the buffalo has twenty-eight ribs, and that in our war bonnets we usually wear twenty-eight feathers. You see, there is a significance for everything, and these are things that are good for men to know and to remember.”—
Black Elk
¹⁵⁰

Awe is what moves us forward.

…in the contemporary world of cross-cultural communication, where the minds of men, leaping the local fences, can recognize common fields of experience and realization under alien forms, what many priests and sociologists regard as eight distinct deities, the comparative mythologist and psychologist can take to be aspects of one and the same.…
¹⁵¹

Myth deities personify energies

that are around us in nature.

The gods and goddesses then are to be understood as e-bodiments and custodians of the elixir of Imperishable Being but not themselves the Ultimate in its primary state. What the hero seeks through his intercourse with them is therefore not finally themselves, but their grace, i.e., the power of their sustaining substance. This miraculous energy-substance and this alone is the Imperishable.…
¹⁵²

Live from your own center.

The key to understanding the problem that’s solved with the symbolic idea of the Trinity is the Tantric saying, “To worship a god, one must become a god.” That is to say, you must hit that level of consciousness within yourself that is equivalent to the deity to whom you are addressing your attention.

In the Trinity, the Father is the deity your attention is addressed to; you are the Son, knower of the Father; and the Holy Spirit represents the relationship between the two.

It seems to me you cannot have the notion of a god without having implicit the notion of a Trinity: a god, the knower of the god, and the relationship between the two, a progressive knowing that brings you closer and closer to the divine.

The divine lives within you.

…there is still one more degree of realization…namely that termed in Japanese “ji ji mu ge”—”thing and thing, no division”: no separation between things: the analogy suggested is of a net of gems: the universe as a great spread-out net with at every joint a gem, and each gem not only reflecting all the others but itself reflected in all. An alternate image is of a wreath of flowers. In a wreath, no flower is the “cause” of any other, yet together, all are the wreath.
¹⁵³

The separateness

apparent in the world

is secondary.

The very great physicist Erwin Schrödinger has made

the same metaphysical point in his startling and sublime little book, My View of the World. “All of us living beings belong together,” he there declares, “in as much as we are all in reality sides or aspects of one single being, which may perhaps in western terminology be called God while in the Upaniṣads its name is
brahman
.”
¹⁵⁴

Beyond the world of opposites

is an unseen (but experienced)

unity and identity in us all.

For we are all, in every particle of our being, precipitations of consciousness; as are, likewise, the animals and plants, metals cleaving to a magnet and waters tiding to the moon.
¹⁵⁵

Today the planet is

the only proper “in group.”

…we are to recognize in this whole universe a reflection magnified of our own most inward nature; so that we are indeed its ears, its eyes, its thinking, and its speech—or, in theological terms, God’s ears, God’s eyes, God’s thinking, and God’s Word; and, by the same token, participants here and now in an act of creation that is continuous in the whole infinitude of that space of our mind through which the planets fly, and our fellows of earth now among them.
¹⁵⁶

P
articipate joyfully

in the sorrows of the world.

The obvious lesson…is that the first step to the knowl-edge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think—and their name is legion—that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, with-out time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think—as do many—“Let me first correct society, then get around to myself” are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.
¹⁵⁷