A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living Read online

  A Joseph Campbell Companion:

  Reflections on the Art of Living

  Edited by Robert Walter

  Conceived by Diane K. Osbon

  THE COLLECTED WORKS OF JOSEPH CAMPBELL

  Copyright Notice

  A Joseph Campbell Companion:

  Reflections on the Art of Living

  Copyright 1991, Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF.org)

  This electronic edition, copyright © 2011, Joseph Campbell Foundation

  Published by Joseph Campbell Foundation

  Cover art: Photograph by Joseph Campbell; copyright © 2003, 2011, Joseph Campbell Foundation

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Joseph Campbell Foundation. To quote from or reprint sections of this book, contact JCF at [email protected]

  For information about this edition, see the Foreword.

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  ISBN 978-1-61178-006-2

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  In the Field

  Living in the World

  Coming into Awareness

  Living in the Sacred

  About the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell

  About Joseph Campbell

  About Joseph Campbell Foundation

  Foreword to the Electronic Edition

  WELCOME to the first electronic edition of one of Joseph Campbell's most popular works. A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living has long been one of our favorite Campbell titles, and it is perennially one of this quotable man's most quoted.

  This book was drawn from transcripts of a month-long series of workshops that Joseph Campbell gave at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California in March, 1984—the year of his eightieth birthday. The idea for the book was conceived by workshop attendee Diane K. Osbon in 1990, some three years after Campbell died. The text was edited into its present form by longtime Campbell editor and JCF president Robert Walter.

  Filmed segments from this same month-long celebration of Campbell and his work are available in The Hero's Journey, which is available as part of the Collected Works of Joseph Cambpell series in both video and print formats.

  A Joseph Campbell Companion was originally published by HarperCollins in 1991. In addition to this edition, the book is currently available in a paperback edition published by HarperPerennial.

  This electronic edition was published in August, 2011. It contains the complete text of the original print edition, with some minor changes in style and spelling, except for an introduction to the print edition, which has been omitted.

  The photograph used in the cover art of a yamabushi conducting a Shintō fire ceremony was taken by Joseph Campbell in Kyōto, Japan in 1956.

  Campbell intended that his essays spark thought and discussion. To comment or discuss this book locally, we encourage you to find one of our local Mythological RoundTable® groups, meeting regularly in small towns and big cities around the globe. To discuss mythology, psychology, religion, art, and just about everything else under the sun (or over it) with readers from around the world, visit the Conversations of a Higher Order, the on-line forums for Joseph Campbell Foundation. The [Discuss] links at the end of each chapter lead directly to a forum dedicated to the discussion of this book.

  We want to take this opportunity to thank you for maintaining this ebook for your personal use.

  If you have received this ebook gratis, we hope that you found it inspiring and thought-provoking. We invite you join our associates in supporting our on-going efforts to bring out new, exciting editions such as this by making a donation at JCF.org.

  If you have had problems viewing the text in this book—if, for example, you are seeing odd ?s or boxes scatterred among the characters—try changing the font preferences in your ereader. The best fonts are Unicode fonts such as Times or Palatino. If you have feedback about other aspects of the book, please contact us at [email protected].

  David Kudler, Managing Editor

  Mill Valley, California

  August 1, 2011

  In the Field

  THE privilege of a lifetime

  is being who you are.

  What you have to do,

  you do with play.

  Life is without meaning.

  You bring the meaning to it.

  The meaning of life is

  whatever you ascribe it to be.

  Being alive is the meaning.

  The warrior’s approach

  is to say “yes” to life:

  “yea” to it all.

  Participate joyfully

  in the sorrows of the world.

  We cannot cure the world of sorrows,

  but we can choose to live in joy.

  When we talk about

  settling the world’s problems,

  we’re barking up the wrong tree.

  The world is perfect. It’s a mess.

  It has always been a mess.

  We are not going to change it.

  Our job is to straighten out

  our own lives.

  We must be willing to get rid of

  the life we’ve planned, so as to have

  the life that is waiting for us.

  The old skin has to be shed

  before the new one can come.

  If we fix on the old, we get stuck.

  When we hang onto any form,

  we are in danger of putrefaction.

  Hell is life drying up.

  The Hoarder,

  the one in us that wants to keep,

  to hold on, must be killed.

  If we are hanging onto the form now,

  we’re not going to have the form next.

  You can’t make an omelet

  without breaking eggs.

  Destruction before creation.

  Out of perfection

  nothing can be made.

  Every process involves

  breaking something up.

  The earth must be broken

  to bring forth life.

  If the seed does not die,

  there is no plant.

  Bread results

  from the death of wheat.

  Life lives on lives.

  Our own life

  lives on the acts

  of other people.

  If you are lifeworthy,

  you can take it.

  What we are really living for

  is the experience of life,

  both the pain and the pleasure.

  The world is a match for us.

  We are a match for the world.

  Opportunities

  to find deeper powers

  within ourselves

  come when life

  seems most challenging.

  Nega
tivism

  to the pain and ferocity of life

  is negativism to life.

  We are not there

  until we can say

  “yea” to it all.

  To take a righteous attitude

  toward anything is to denigrate it.

  Awe is what moves us forward.

  As you proceed through life,

  following your own path,

  birds will shit on you.

  Don’t bother to brush it off.

  Getting a comedic view

  of your situation

  gives you spiritual distance.

  Having a sense of humor saves you.

  Follow your bliss.

  The heroic life is living the individual adventure.

  There is no security

  in following the call to adventure.

  Nothing is exciting

  if you know

  what the outcome is going to be.

  To refuse the call

  means stagnation.

  What you don’t experience positively

  you will experience negatively.

  You enter the forest

  at the darkest point,

  where there is no path.

  Where there is a way or path,

  it is someone else’s path.

  You are not on your own path.

  If you follow someone else’s way,

  you are not going to realize

  your potential.

  Eternity

  is a dimension

  of here and now.

  The divine lives within you.

  Live from your own center.

  Your real duty

  is to go away from the community

  to find your bliss.

  The society is the enemy

  when it imposes its structures

  on the individual.

  On the dragon there are many scales.

  Everyone of them says “Thou Shalt.”

  Kill the dragon “Thou Shalt.”

  When one has killed that dragon,

  one has become The Child.

  Breaking out

  is following your bliss pattern,

  quitting the old place,

  starting your hero journey,

  following your bliss.

  You throw off yesterday

  as the snake sheds its skin.

  The goal of the hero trip

  down to the jewel point

  is to find those levels in the psyche

  that open, open, open,

  and finally open to the mystery

  of your Self being

  Buddha consciousness

  or the Christ.

  That’s the journey.

  It is all about finding

  that still point in your mind

  where commitment drops away.

  It is by going down into the abyss

  that we recover the treasures of life.

  Where you stumble,

  there lies your treasure.

  The very cave you are afraid to enter

  turns out to be the source of

  what you are looking for.

  The damned thing in the cave

  that was so dreaded

  has become the center.

  You find the jewel,

  and it draws you off.

  In loving the spiritual,

  you cannot despise the earthly.

  The purpose of the journey

  is compassion.

  When you have come past

  the pairs of opposites,

  you have reached compassion.

  The goal is to bring the jewel

  back to the world,

  to join the two things together.

  The separateness

  apparent in the world

  is secondary.

  Beyond that world of opposites

  is an unseen (but experienced)

  unity and identity in us all.

  Today, the planet is

  the only proper “in group.”

  You must return

  with the bliss

  and integrate it.

  The return is seeing

  the radiance everywhere.

  Sri Ramakrishna said:

  “Do not seek illumination

  unless you seek it

  as a man whose hair is on fire

  seeks a pond.”

  If you want the whole thing,

  the gods will give it to you.

  But you must be ready for it.

  The goal is to live

  with godlike composure

  on the full rush of energy,

  like Dionysus riding the leopard,

  without being torn to pieces.

  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.”

  [Discuss]

  Living in the World

  GOD had a garden, and he needed a gardener, so he created Adam. Adam was bored. He was doing the job, but it was no fun. God saw that he needed entertainment, and so he created the animals to entertain him. All Adam could think of to do with the animals was to give them names.

  Then God said, “Well, here goes.” So he put Adam to sleep and pulled Eve out of his rib—as Joyce said, she was “the cutletsized consort.” Then the trouble started and we were in the game.

  Male and female, life and death,

  good and evil: problems of opposites.

  The trouble that began was the discovery of duality. That was the Fall. There was no real recognition of duality before this. How did duality take place in this garden? There were two trees that were forbidden trees. “You can eat the fruit of any tree in the place but not of this or of that one.” Tree number one was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, of duality. Tree number two was the tree of the knowledge of eternal life.

  The serpent—who represents lunar consciousness and life in the field of time, where there are pairs of opposites—saw Eve and thought she must be bored, as most wives are when their husbands are working all the time. When that happens, there’s always a friend that appears, and this one was a little serpent.

  The serpent said: “Look there’s an interesting thing about this tree. Don't mind that old buzzard—have a taste and you will really know something.” Well, she had a taste, and when Adam came along, she said, “Look, this is okay.”

  So, he had a taste, and then God, who walked in the cool of the evening in the Garden, saw the pair of them wearing fig leaves, and he said, “What’s this? You’ve got leaves on.”

  The female activates the male;

  then he is the action,

  and she has to take the results.

  They told God what happened, and that ran the usual way: the man blamed the woman, and the woman blamed the snake. God then cursed the lot of them in increasing degrees. Man got it fairly easy: all he had to do was to work and sweat. The woman had to bring forth children in pain, and the serpent had to crawl on his belly for the rest of his life. God kicked them out of the Garden and put at the gate two cherubim, door guardians, with a flaming sword between them. And that’s the explanation of why we’re out here in the cold and not in the Garden.

  Christianity and Judaism

  are religions of exile:

  Man was thrown out of the Garden.

  It seems impossible today, but people actually believed all that until as recently as half a century or so ago: clergymen, philosophers, government officers and all. Today we know—and know right well—that there never was anything of the kind: no Garden of Eden anywhere on this earth, no time when the serpent could talk, no prehistoric “Fall,” no excl-sion from the Garden, no universal Flood, no Noah’s Ark. The entire history on which our leading Occidental religions have been founded is an anthology of fictions.
But these are fictions of a type that have had—curiously enough—a universal vogue as the founding legends of other religions, too. Their counterparts have turned up everywhere—and yet, there never was such a garden, serpent, tree, or deluge.7

  The serpent

  was the wise one in the Garden.

  Adam and Eve

  got thrown into the field of time.

  “…in the beginning this universe was but the Self in the form of a man. He looked around and saw nothing but himself.…

  “He was just as large as a man and a woman embracing. This Self then divided himself in two parts; and with that, there were a master and mistress.—Therefore this body, by itself, as the sage Yajnavalkya declares, is like half of a split pea. And that is why, indeed, this space is filled by a woman.—He united with her, and from that mankind arose.…