[jamesn.]

Patrick Takaya Solomon has been working on a new project which will coming soon and is described in the short video clip below. Joseph Campbell had some very specific thoughts about this subject which will be explored and fleshed out in this coming discussion; but first I will give him the opportunity to explain what his project is about and what he has in mind:

 

[Mars]

Borrowed from others: Money is debt. That’s what it’s all based upon. So the more you have… (sic)

[jamesn.]

Yes Mars; but this is not what Patrick is addressing as the subject of his project; (at least as I see it). This is about finding and following that: “push from your own inside, your sense of your own destiny, the thing that tells you: (I am that) and I am going to follow it because it informs me about who and what I can be; it’s what I must do because in my heart and gut it represents what my inner truth of existence tells me I must do to be alive.” This is what the “follow your bliss” theme is all about; it’s not about following money.

Yes; we all have to live; so we do things that produce money so we can eat and pay the bills and the rent so we can survive; but survival is not about meaning; survival is about mere existence; life eating life; finding meaning in the way we live is about something else. And Joseph talks about the rapture of being alive; not just getting a job that doesn’t do these kinds things. Yes; work in itself is a noble thing if understood from a certain perspective; you feed and house your family because you love them; but he also suggests that as human beings there is more to living than getting on a tread mill that goes nowhere to earn a paycheck. Every person needs something that helps them to express and fulfill this inner need we all have; and that’s the Bliss Path he is pointing out; not buying a lot of stuff and going into debt because that’s what everybody else does. Consumerism is outer stuff based on consumption and does not give the inner value human beings long for; and this is the theme Patrick is addressing in my view; at least from what I’ve seen so far.

Now saying that; figuring out how to accomplish this task is part of the challenge that the Quest may entail because each life is different; and going into your dark forest to find your journey’s end goal is going to present some hurdles for any person to overcome. So what is this have to do with finance? On page 111; in: “Pathways to Bliss”; Joseph says this:

“In the west you have the liberty and obligation of finding out what your destiny is. You can discover it for yourself. But do you?

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to be blessed with the accident of money, and a certain amount of support, and a margin of free time. But let me say this: people without money very often have the courage to risk a life of their own, and they can do it. Money doesn’t count, it’s not that important in our culture; it really isn’t.

I’ve taught students of all financial strata and the most fortunate are not always the very wealthy ones. In fact they’re very often the least fortunate because there is nothing to drive them. A very common experience is a student who has all kinds of possibilities and talents and essentially limitless money and becomes nothing more than a dilettante. The student is not forced to follow one path, to make a decision: “I’m going to do this.” As soon as what they’re doing gets difficult, as soon as it begins to get to the crunch, he or she moves over into another pursuit, and another, and another. They just splash their lives all over. Very often a youngster without the margin to do that makes the intelligent, courageous decision and follows it through.”

In Diane Osbon’s: “Reflections on the Art of Living – A Joseph Campbell Companion”; on pages; 58-60; Joseph talks specifically about money; and then for the next 22 pages he talks about all kinds of various things related to how one’s life course is a manifestation of this quest and some of the hurdles one is going to run into; (including that of the Grail Adventure); and shares personal examples of how these themes interfaced with his own life experience. So this is not some kind of fantasy fairy tale that is being offered for amusement; it’s life supporting stuff that offers a personal perspective from his own life how this thing can be accomplished. But he warns this path may be dangerous; it may include risks and all kinds of difficult challenges; but it can be done. Why is this important?; it’s important because having a life of one’s own on their own terms instead of following social norms is what it’s all about. It’s not about acquiescing to a: “thou shalt – system”; but living out of your own center and finding that thing that moves you and living it.

I think one of the things that pulls people off course is this stereotype of fame and financial success; that the image instead of the substance behind it gets in the way of seeing and understanding what it’s meaning represents instead of the façade of the mask in front of it that distorts it’s value. Jung warns that persona is not who we are; but I think the point in all of this is to find and live what our heart is calling us to do. Joseph said in: “The Power of Myth” concerning answering this call to adventure: “to go where your heart and soul want to go”; to answer this deep yearning inside that speaks to you in a language that only you understand.

So answering this thing that’s pulling inside you is more than likely going to involve some kind of uphill battle to get to where you want to go involving finances. Now there is one other thing Joseph mentioned within the book and that is money is not the real issue because he knew a lot of wonderful wealthy people whom he really liked; and money was not the problem but often it was what you did with it. And in the overall grand scheme of things there are going to be different aspects of this financial problem that are not going to all line up where the holes all run through; so don’t judge. So I think the real issue in all of this is to look inside to try and find what is calling you; because as he mentions on pages; 58-59; he states:

“If you follow your bliss you will always have your bliss. money or not. If you follow money, you may lose it, and you will have nothing.”

So I don’t know if Patrick’s movie is going in this direction or not; but this is what my understanding of what this financial incentive is dealing with that Joseph is speaking about; and why to me it’s so critically important to know the difference. I think it’s a terrific subject that points out much of what’s wrong with the value system that confuses people into thinking making money is more important than finding the life they yearn to live; and getting off your track just to get money alone will pull you away from that. We all have things that are important that making money supports; but answering that challenge is going to be one of the central concerns in resolving this issue while at the same time following that which informs us about who we are.

[Stephen Gerringer]

James,

We definitely mythologize money, as if it has some sort o value independent of human constructs.

I am intrigued with the concept of gift economies.

In 2012, I was invited, along with JCF President Robert Walter, to deliver presentations at the Voyage of Aloha conference in Hawaii. We had shipped over hundreds of dollars worth of Campbell titles (not cheap to send) to make available for attendees to purchase – but we sold only a couple, and did not relish the thought of packing the books up and paying to ship them all back to the mainland.

Then we heard a presentation on the final morning on gift economies. One example was a local chain of donut shops on the islands that, in indigenous neighborhoods, charged whatever people could afford! Some financially challenged customers paid only a few cents for donuts, ice cream, or coffee, while others actually paid more than the retail value – and the company was actually making a profit!

That triggered a sudden inspiration; I texted Bob, who was seated across the hall, and learned he had the same thought at the very same moment. I then announced to the crowd just before the morning break that JCF, as a result of that presentation, had decided to embrace the gift economy for the last hours of this conference – so all the books in our booth in the lobby were now available for whatever anyone wanted to pay – a function of the value they placed on the books, coupled with what they could or could not afford. We had the retail prices listed – but if someone could only afford to pay $10 instead of $25 for the hardbound revised edition of the Hero With A Thousand Faces – or $1, or zero dollars – that was alright, because we trusted that some who could afford to pay more than the listed retail price would be happy to do so.

The results were astounding. It took only fifteen minutes to completely clear our inventory! Several attendees paid a bit less than retail for a couple of books, and a handful did take a book for free (though none took more than one for free, and they were careful about choosing the title – didn’t want to abuse the opportunity), but many paid full retail plus a dollar or two more, and a few paid double! We not only broke even, but also didn’t have to ship books back to California.

Ironically most people paid full price or more (the same full price that we hadn’t been able to sell any books at the previous two days: the opportunity of helping those less fortunate proved the difference). I wish we had implemented that experiment at the beginning of the conference, though we might have needed to bring more books.

Definitely a learning experience that prompted me to re-think the value we place on money. There are several works that explore this concept, but one that might particularly appeal to Campbellophiles is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World.

(Hyde is the author of one of my favorite post-Campbell works, entitled Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art )

[jamesn.]

I’m sorry it’s taken me awhile to get back to this but I have a couple of things to share that I think might have relevance to what we are discussing concerning money and what might be called a life path freely chosen from one’s own inside.

Making money as Joseph mentioned on several occasions often got in the way of what was driving a person; you may not know what that something is but you were in quest of your own inner call and this might often pull you off course. Society often puts great emphasis on personal wealth or at the very least the things it can help you to buy or accomplish from your efforts. There is also the matter of your life responsibilities whatever they may be; and what will be required of you to support this function. But the question often behind the need is: What is at work? Is it survival or life responsibilities; or is it connected to something else? Where are you trying to go and what is the reason? So we are left with this inner conflict that we must resolve.

One of things that struck me looking back through my own life was how we are influenced by others as reflected within ourselves. In the 1960’s there was a huge movement of social change that evolved around the fact that the children of that generation did not want to grow up and become their parents; or put another way to accept the same patterned imprint of social values and roles that did not express who they were or what they wanted in the living of their lives; and so this social rebellion came about that had been witnessed several times throughout the 20th century. Some might have called it a bohemian revolt; others a Beatnik rejection; and still others a Hippie rebellion movement that led to the later social reform movements of each era. But it’s interesting to note how many that were affected by this call to break free went on a kind of spiritual pilgrimage of sorts to find themselves. There were many interesting people associated within these movements and the below piece recalls some of the background that revolved around some of this social pilgrimage movement the author refers to as the Hippie Trail that lasted a number of years.

My own life also has a personal connection to this call in which in my early youth I took a leap of faith and went out to San Francisco in this search to find myself and came across one such spiritual guru who I was influenced by for several years before I chose to follow my own individual path named Stephen Gaskin. He later lead a group of people to settle on a farm in Tennessee and his life story is one of great compassion and moral integrity who helped a lot of people before he passed several years back in 2014.

The story below came from a different piece that chronicles some of the other notable individuals that reflect this spiritual quest or call to adventure; some of whom you may recognized. But my point has to do with how it is not “money” but what Joseph called the push out of your own existence that is driving you. One of the quotes he used to refer to this insight was: “It is in you; go and find it.”

____________________________________________________________________________________

The Hippie Trail of the 1960’s – The Call to Adventure and Enlightenment and it’s Roots

(From Yahoo’s News Feed): “The Telegraph”
“How the hippies’ Seventies search for enlightenment turned sour”
Mick Brown
Sat, January 2, 2021, 8:18 AM CST

In 1961, the American beat poet Allen Ginsberg, along with his partner Peter Orlovsky, set off for India in search of enlightenment. Travelling to Paris, then Tangier, Israel, and Kenya, they finally set foot in Bombay – Ginsberg having prepared for his arrival by smoking grass scored from a shoeshine boy in Mombasa, and reading A Passage to India, the Ramayana, and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.

From Bombay, the pair set off on a tour of India’s sacred sites: Risikesh, the burning ghats of Varanasi, and Haridwar for the Kumbh Mela festival, the largest human gathering on Earth, where millions of pilgrims go to immerse themselves in the Ganges.
Ginsberg wrote wonderingly to his friend Jack Kerouac, describing how things that would be considered outrageous or strange in uptight, authoritarian America were quite normal in India.

Nobody batted an eyelid at someone walking around the streets in their underwear, or even appeared to notice when a naked sadhu, dusted in ashes from the cremation grounds, and carrying a trident, passed by. Sadhus were to be found smoking hashish in every temple. “It really is another dimension of time history here.”
Ginsberg may not have been the first person to set foot on the hippie trail, but he was certainly one of the first. And his “Oh wow!” vision of India and the exotic East would be a template for what was to come.

Where the antic cheerleader and Pied Piper of hippiedom trod, thousands would shortly follow – by bus, train, coach, and dilapidated VW van. A disillusionment with Western materialism, the new freedoms of drugs and sexuality, and a growing rejection of conventional mores and values would all lead to a “turning to the East”, a symptom of the evolution of “the new consciousness”.

The pilgrimage in 1968 by the Beatles to sit at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his ashram in Rishikesh proved a yet more potent and intoxicating advertisement for the mythical “East”. By the early Seventies, the numbers of travellers on the hippie trail had swollen from a stream to a deluge. It was these travellers who would be the prey of the serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who over a period of three years in the mid-Seventies is believed to have murdered more than a dozen young Westerners in Thailand, India and Nepal, and whose story is told in the new BBC One series, The Serpent.
The hippies were not the first Westerners to travel East in search of enlightenment. The English writer Paul Brunton, arguably the first spiritual tourist, travelled through India encountering swamis and holy men, publishing an account of his experiences, A Search In Secret India, in 1934.

Somerset Maugham made his own genteel pilgrimage around the holy sites of India in 1938, finally arriving at the ashram of the great sage Ramana Maharshi. (Arriving there, Maugham fainted, prompting a wave of excited speculation throughout India that the Maharishi had caused the great Englishman to be “rapt for a while in the infinite”. Maugham was obliged to explain he had been subject to fainting fits all his life and that if he had been in “the infinite” it was a complete blank.)
His experiences in India inspired Maugham to write The Razor’s Edge, about a young man, Larry Darrell, disenchanted with materialism and ambition who sets off in search of a guru. Darrell might be seen as a prototypical hippie – although the term had yet to be invented – but The Razor’s Edge was never a book much read on the hippie trail.
Stiff-necked, fabulously wealthy, and in so many ways a product of Edwardian England, Maugham was highly improbable material for a cult hero. Much more likely were the novels of Herman Hesse, The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Timothy Leary’s hymn to LSD, The Politics of Ecstasy.

The hippie trail wound across Europe, through Istanbul, on to Tehran, Kabul in Afghanistan, through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar and Lahore in Pakistan, and then on to Kashmir, India and Nepal.
It was no coincidence that the route led through the principal hash-producing regions of the world – Afghanistan, Chitral in northern Pakistan, Kashmir, the Kullu valley in India, and Nepal.

In this sense, the hippie trail can be seen as a sort of drug-addled version of the Grand Tour of the 17th and 18th centuries, when members of the aristocracy and the upper classes would journey through the cultural capitals of Europe in search of artistic enlightenment.

On the hippie trail the search was less for an appreciation of Renaissance art than for adventure and enlightenment of a spiritual kind: Paris, Florence and Rome supplanted by the ruined temple complexes of Hampi; Dharamsala to see the Dalai Lama; Bangalore and the ashram of the miracle-working swami Sai Baba, and the beaches of Goa.
There were particular pilgrims’ rests: The Pudding Shop in Istanbul for nourishment, the swapping of information about cheap hotels, dangerous roads and the availability of a ride. The cockroach-infested Sigi’s hotel on Chicken Street in Kabul (actually, most hotels on the hippie trail were cockroach-infested).

In Kathmandu (where Sobhraj was arrested in 2003 in the five-star Yak and Yeti hotel), there was “Freak Street” and the Blue Tibetan café, where in 1967 Richard Alpert, an associate of Timothy Leary, in search of a more lasting high than acid, was approached by a Westerner with shoulder-length hair and dressed only in a dhoti.

This was Kermit Michael Riggs, a 6ft 4in blond surfer from Laguna Beach, California who had followed the hippie trail to India in 1964, taken the name Bhagavan Das and was living the life of a sadhu. Alpert was bowled over. After five days in Alpert’s hotel room, eating peach melbas and getting high on hash and mescaline, Bhagavan Das took Alpert on a prolonged tour of spiritual sites, eventually leading him to a remote mountaintop ashram, where he was introduced to a little man in his 60s wrapped in a blanket named Neem Karoli Baba. Alpert became Baba’s disciple, changed his name to Ram Dass, and returning to America wrote a book about his transformation, Be Here Now – which went on to sell more than a million copies, and find its way into countless rucksacks on the hippie trail.

Bhagavan Das was by no means unique; dozens of Westerners adopted the sadhu life and simply never went home. (At the Kumbh Mela festival in Haridwar some 30 years ago I encountered a half-naked middle-aged sadhu from Kettering.)
Ginsberg spent more than a year in India but never gained the spiritual realisation he sought. “I wanted to be a saint,” he wrote in his Indian Journals. “But suffer for what? Illusions?” Many on the hippie trail would come to feel the same way. Illness, poverty, exhaustion, a lack of Western comforts – a cold water shower of reality and a sense that the party was over, would lead most back home. The Iranian Revolution in 1978 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a year later would effectively seal the hippie trail for good.

You could say that in a sense the trail was reopened 30 years later, renamed as “the gap year”, with full moon parties on the beaches of Goa and bungee-jumping in Nepal, all financed by the bank of mum and dad – and with the added security of a bargain flight home. But where’s the adventure in that?

 

 

[jamesn.]

I’m also adding a second link to another piece on Stephen Gaskin that shows the evolution over time how his thought and the spiritual commune he and the people that followed him evolved. This link concerning the 1960’s ideaology will add some extra context to the idea of a spiritual quest that should compliment the topic of money and it’s relationship to following one’s bliss.

 

[jamesn.]

Also much has been written about the period in Paris when Joseph Campbell was there and completely changed his ideas about art and myth and the trajectory of his life course. So I’m going to recommend something that covers many of these various individuals who made up this incredible artistic community in a particular item which in my humble opinion is a “must view”: “Paris The Luminous Years – The Making of the Modern“; which is a DVD put together by: Perry Miller Adato; which covers (all) the various disciplines during that 30 year period which changed the art world forever. It is a “follow your bliss” cornucopia for those who are looking to understand what Joseph experienced during those years there that influenced him so profoundly.

One example covered in the film that is that of Sylvia Beach and her bookstore Shakespeare and Co. where she takes on publishing James Joyce’s: Ulysses and who also later helped Joseph understand how interpret Joyce’s writing which became such a large focus of some in some his own work. There is much covered like the writer’s relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein who helped mentor him in his early efforts to get published. The story of Pablo Picasso whose work Joseph loved and the relationships with other painters and the poet: Guillaume Apollinaire whose late night gatherings with other artists called: “the friends” helped to inspire each other’s work; Serge Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe and the music of Igor Stravinsky and other new composers which had such a huge influence on much of classical dance and music.

This constant beehive of activity went on and on until the Wall Street crash of 1929 when Joseph had already returned home and wanted to change the focus of his dissertation which was rejected; so he left school and as he put it: retired to the woods and read for 5 years. He then went on to teach at Sarah Lawrence where he met Jean and pursued his writing career from then on. So this film will help to give some background on how the art scene that influenced Joseph so much was created by individuals who left everything behind to pursue their bliss. (This is why I’m recommending this film so strongly.)

But my point with all this background is to emphasize this understanding of how money is not the central focus that Joseph was communicating. And that by following one’s inner instincts of what is calling to them a path or track is created that points in the direction the heart wants to go. And by listening to this inner calling it will take you in the direction of where these various examples are directing. This was Joseph’s central theme he constantly stressed that by following your bliss  if you are listening and not thinking about money; this was the call of your heart’s yearning to be fulfilled. You are the one who gets to decide what your destination journey is going to be; not the call of finance of paying the bills or the accumulation of personal wealth; but what the human heart is asking for. Are these decisions difficult? For many people I would think so since any decisions that are made with this in mind may actually be part of the journey or quest process. But the end goal is finding and doing what the heart is asking for; and you may not be sure what it’s asking; so there may be tests along the way to help you figure this out. I think Joseph would call this aspect: “the path that is no path”. So this implies you are making your path up as you go along.

[R³]

Hello James,

Love this period in history. The Lost Generation !!! “Surely this generation shall not pass”. Before the coming of the Son of Man ???  For we all can relate and participate in the spirit of this generation to one extent or another during this period of constant change and sorrow …

Lost Generation Lost Generation

 

 

[jamesn.]

The “Lost Generation” writers is a fascinating topic to explore within this topic as an example. The term was coined by Gertrude Stein who called all these writers a: “Lost Generation”; but the situation that many of them came from after the 1st World War was what helped to create such a creative community of like minded individuals. This creative force or pull that drew them together held a common bond and thread of something they all shared.

Many of them came from repressed social and religious environments where the conservative value systems were not welcoming to their new artistic visions; and so they left and came to Paris which was the world’s artistic center. Food and rent were cheap after the devastation of the war and they could exchange ideas with people of like mind who understood what they were doing creatively. A poet could express what a painter was trying to say as one example. And as the different styles evolved there were different social platforms that were being expressed; often in opposition to what the society usually accepted; so there was conflict as well as incredible new art.

Dada as a movement was one example that came out of a rejection of those value systems that helped to create the conflict of the war; (a form of protest you might say); but what developed out of much of this conflict was new art forms; such as the idea of how art was defined was up to the artist; not the public; in other words; how much of what we now define as: “Modern Art” that changed the boundaries of how any art was previously defined.

This little window that lasted between 1905 to 1930 changed the world in ways that are still being felt; and Campbell saw this and understood what was happening. This was the period he became exposed to the writings of Carl Jung and he began understanding how mythological themes were being expressed in this work that he had seen in the Native American Indian cultures; so this was a huge wakeup call to him that changed his life. His professors at Columbia would not let him switch topics to this new focus he wanted to follow so he quit and moved to Woodstock and rented a little cabin and read for 5 years until a new opportunity might present itself; which later it did with his teaching offer at Sarah Lawrence.

But it was in Paris where he was exposed to these lost generation writers like James Joyce; and it was Sylvia Beech who owned the most important bookstore where all these new writers went; like Ernest Hemingway. Gertrude Stein helped Hemingway with his writing so he could get published; and her Saturday evening Salons were where many of these writers and painters would gather to talk and exchange ideas. So all of this creative activity changed the course of much of the creative thought and expression in the modern world that we have now. That’s why part of the title of the film is called: “toward the making of the modern”; and the influence of these writers went on to influence other literary movements as well.

There was cross pollination between succeeding generations such as Beat poets and novelists; and then the Hippie and counter-culture political movements as well. People like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and so many others came out of these artistic movements that produced new ways of looking at the world instead of the more traditional and confined ways that art had previously been expressed. And although by this time these counter-cultural movements had spread out in many different directions Joseph Campbell witnessed the beginning of all this creative activity and in his own work exemplified the best of this creative spirit as one of the world’s great scholars whose influence is still being felt today.

Speaking of which I’m leaving a clip to a very indepth documentary on them that will help clarify this connection here.

[R³]

Jamesn,

Yes !!!

R³

[jamesn.]

Robert; although there have been a lot of separate documentaries and books covering these authors this particular documentary done by News Journalist: Harry Smith; is exceptionally well done as it goes deeply into the personal backgrounds, inter-relationships and times in Paris that launched their careers. Few things I have seen have covered these people as comprehensively as Smith. The other documentary done by Perry covers Paris and the total overview of most of the various arts as seen from this perspective. Smith deals mainly with the writers exclusively and covers some things more in depth than Perry such as: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s drinking and the effect it had on his career and some of the other writers she was not able to cover. Perry ‘s work is more of an overview because the subject would have been too overwhelming to do more than she did. Smith’s approach was more specific and focused on the writers alone; and even that was a huge subject to tackle by itself.

Not to diverge from the subject of “money” as the main focus of this topic; my aim with highlighting these writers and others from different periods was to show how what they saw and attempted to reveal was a window into human nature and how to better understand the human experience which Joseph’s work in mythology accomplishes far beyond the normal range most often employed by the academic community; (especially concerning the work of Carl Jung); along with the insights of many others from separate fields.

[R³]

Jamesn

“But let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’ be ‘No. … Whatever is more than these is of theevil one. -Matthew 5:37

 

Often, binary data is used to represent one of two conceptually opposed values, e.g: the outcome of an experiment (“success” or “failure”) the response to a yes-no question (“yes” or “no”) presence or absence of some feature (“is present” or “is not present”) The 0 & 1 don’t mean anything by themselves. They have to be assigned a meaning by someone. Zero might mean “no”, or it might mean “yes”, or “off” or “on”. Or more likely it’s part of a set of bits that encode to something else, say using ASCII or Unicode (or BCD or EBCDIC or …).

 

Molly Bloom: “yes I said yes I will Yes”

the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). Usually, Fitzgeraldis quoted as saying: “The rich are different from you and me.” And, Hemingway is quoted as responding: “Yes, they have more money.”

“What doth it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

When will the prophet motive be the coin of the realm ? And wisdom reign down supreme ?

All hail the prophets of fiction whom follow their bliss and write that their fiction might become the reality … of a brave new world 🌎

 

R³

[jamesn.]

(Yes; after rereading your post I’ve modified my answer to what I thought you were saying.) I think the opposites you mention: (conflict; us vs them); and so on can be seen in many examples that art expresses. Financial inequality is a major problem often depicted in the literature of human life; as the works of these writers often portray; at least if that is what you are referring to with the metaphoric differences between rich and poor as a backdrop to their novels. If you are talking about providing meaning to something; then yes I totally agree on that. If not perhaps you can explain it another way or someone else can see what I missed.

Picking up on your James Joyce quote Joseph Campbell loved Joyce; but his writing was impossible to decipher at first so he went to Sylvia Beach for help because he could not understand it. She provided him with clues necessary as to how to deal with this. As an example noted in both the bio done on him called: “The Hero’s Journey” and also Bill Moyers: “Power of Myth”his: “Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake” was something he worked on for quite awhile because many people considered it the most difficult book to read in the English language. (Having said this I tried my hand at Ulysses back 30 years ago and never finished it out of frustration.) Perhaps you’ve read either or both and if so that’s great. But I doubt most people on the street have read Ulysses since it was banned in the US because some found it offensive when it first came out; I was never really completely clear about that; (As you’ll see in a clip I provided below Joyce had to go to Beach to ask her to publish it which she did because nobody else would touch it); and Joseph mentioned he still had a few of those first original copies. Stephen or David or Michael could probably provide better background on this than I can.
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Speaking of which as an aside another interesting thing worth mentioning about these writers is an upcoming work by noted documentary film maker Ken Burns is a new project he is finishing up on “Ernest Hemingway” due to be released in the coming weeks; most likely to be shown on Public Television as they are his main sponsor.

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Addendum: I found a short clip from Perry’s documentary where Sylvia Beach talks about her shop called: “Shakespeare and Co.”; and the people who came in it along with her relationship with James Joyce and the publishing of: “Ulysses” here.

[jamesn.]

Also; I found a reference to Joyce that Joseph uses concerning thoughts about (money) and following your bliss which is found on page 73; in Diane Osbon’s: “Reflections on the Art of Living”.

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Joseph:
“I find working for money to be the wasteland—doing something that somebody else wants instead of the thing that is my next step. I have been guided all along by a strong revulsion from any sort of action that does not correspond to the impulse of my own wish.”

“The person of noble heart acts spontaneously and will avoid the wasteland, the world of thou shalt.”

(Joyce):
“I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself  my home, my fatherland, or my church…. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.” —-Stephen Dedalus

Joseph:
“The crucial thing to live for is the sense of life in what you are doing, and if that is not there, then you are living according to other peoples’ notions of how life should be lived.

The opposite to doing what you think you ought to do is compassion. The one who finds the Grail is symbolic of the one who has come to that place and whose life is of compassion. The one who finds as his motivation the dynamism of his compassion has found the Grail. That means spontaneous recognition of the identity of I and Thou. This is the Grail center.

To become—in Jung’s terms—individuated, to live as a released individual, one has to know how and when to put on and to put off the masks of one’s various life roles….The aim of individuation requires that one should find and then live out of one’s own center, in control of one’s for and against. And this cannot be achieved by enacting and responding to any general masquerade of fixed roles.”

[R³]

Jamesn,

Thank you for your thought provoking posts. I have read Freud , Jung , Hillman , Joyce , Campbell , et al , for personal edification. My first love is science and Sci-fi.  My “Yes !!!” Post was pregnant with associations. My post after it expanded on my internal streams of consciousness associated with “Yes”.

As far as the meaning of money is concerned from a mythic metaphoric perspective I think a study of the use of the word treasure would be fruitful. ““The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek”” . “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.”

“ In Jung’s view, the alchemical attempt to transmute base metals into gold (the philosopher’s stone) was actually a psychological process”.

“So they brought it, and He asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?” “Caesar’s,” they answered. Then Jesus told them, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” And they marveled at Him.”

where will cryptocurrency and Bitcoin fit into our dialog ? Human resource development? Humans quantified labeled and valued as assets ?

R³

[Author]

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